Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  As for this Bretagne, now that the lad had gotten what he wanted? Ecch! Get lost!

  In her frosty way, Mme. Rimbaud, meanwhile, is ecstatic about the boy’s stroke of good fortune. Gladly, she pays his third-class ticket. Indeed, in a gesture of unparalleled generosity, the Vampire coughs up another hundred francs—to stay in Paris.

  Shockingly, the boy cleans up for his big moment, and he cleans up well in the new clothes that Mme. Skinflint has bought for him. High-water pants, stingy tie. New bowler hat—then known as le chapeau melon—even a haircut and clean nails. Baby-faced and “cherubesque,” he is both a chicken hawk’s dream and a Trojan horse: a cuddly-cute, sixteen-looking-thirteen menace.

  And even as he makes ready, Verlaine—à la P. T. Barnum—is hyping the lad all over Paris. The Ardennais Annunciation! Poetry’s Prince! The Uncrowned King!

  Oh, and one more thing the lad’s packing: a hundred-line, just-written yawp the likes of which poetry has never seen, “Le Bateau Ivre.” “The Drunken Boat.”

  “The Drunken Boat” is a blast as from the Jules Verne moon gun, a flat-out brawling masterpiece rocketing clear to the twentieth century. In fact, the most blindingly new and strange poem the kid has yet conceived—him or anyone else at that time. And all written at incredible speed. Essentially in just two days’ time.

  No clowning this time. Slick as a new puppy, the kid’s got his train ticket and his grievances and a very big chip on his shoulder. And this time he is packing the goods.

  27 Early Service

  “Please,” said Rimbaud as gently as he could to Mr. MacDonald the next morning in the early red cool, the very pleasant cool, before the heat. His guest was then on his knees. Stabbing the ground with an iron tent stake, he was endeavoring to bury the boy, now half covered with a fraying coffee burlap.

  After the eruptions and ugly accusations of the night before, the furies had fled—leaving what? Dawn red sky and redder earth, a whisper of breeze. Rimbaud felt both shame and boyish anticipation. Something was poised to happen—something immense, even a baffled form of hope. Still, there was the reality of MacDonald digging and the dead boy now returned to innocence, or at least to human scale. How small the boy was in daylight. No terror, just dead. Thin black legs and two human feet.

  “Honestly, better just to leave him,” continued Rimbaud. “This is what he would want. As a warrior. For us to bury him, this will only antagonize them.”

  Lowered by two of the porters, Rimbaud settled himself on the ground, then painfully wrested himself up, supported like a very resolute crab on three of his four appendages. Down: a new sort of normal. At a gesture from him, the porters withdrew. That left three of them, MacDonald, Rimbaud, and the dead boy. Eye to eye with him, Rimbaud noticed in particular his fat black feet. Permanently white on the bottom from pounding the road. Cracked and much enlarged with calluses that had grown like coral over his heels and toes, immune to stone or thorn.

  Otherwise, it was morning, all the party knackered, aching, stiff, and dirty. Camel hooves, horse hooves, human feet. Pollen puffs of yellowish dust in the sun as sullen, sleepless men loaded beasts and cinched ropes, the camels groaning, eer-oowww. As for Mr. MacDonald, thus warned he did not quibble this time; he seemed, in fact, relieved, for the grave was unsatisfactory, hard-crusted sand, like cement. Pebbly, Rimbaud noted. Pebbly with black bits, and white bits of what looked like crushed seashells, at the bottom of the world, below even the sea. Everywhere now his eyes moved; his sight sniffed at everything, moments and particulars, whoofing up life like an anteater’s snout. MacDonald’s Bible. Black cover. Leather, worn like an old harness. Red-edged pages. Sunburned MacDonald, who, even at this hour, had already sweated through his appalling shirt.

  “If you say so,” said MacDonald, with a breath. Momentarily he paused. Wiped his brow with dirty hand and dirtier sleeve.

  “They—” began Rimbaud, and he, too, sighed. The effort involved. He felt like he was budging stone, a very large mental stone covering an old mental crypt. Enough. He wanted to be freed, manumitted—to any fate whatsoever. Anything but this. And they were getting closer to their objective, four, five days away; he could smell it almost—the ripe, the rushing ever-vastness of the sea. Far clouds, towering clouds over foamy blue slicks. He was desperate, he was relieved; he was on pins, pent up, then thrilled—fit to burst, like a schoolboy aching to be released for the holidays. And yet even his pain, this cannonball-like dread he dragged, even this was now dulled by the anesthesia of a still greater pain.

  Corked. That was the word for how he felt, he thought, corked. Commanded to shut up—to listen and await further instructions. What? To be told what? Lord, what would you have me do? Who do you want me to be? Who?

  “There is,” Rimbaud continued after some unaccounted-for seconds of this zooming state, “no way to put it right. They will take it as a disrespect. If we bury him. Or pray over him.”

  Rimbaud gestured toward the uncooperative distance—being vast. “Those beehivelike formations of rock that you see—the waidellas, surely you have seen them.” Clearly, Mr. MacDonald had not. “Well, there he shall be buried. Tombs,” he emphasized. “Always on some elevation. Up on—”

  When he jumped! They both did—at a rifle blast.

  And look: in a plume of shot and smoke, not thirty feet away, a horse fell. On buckling forelegs, the colossus crumpled. Collapsed in a pile of hooves, neck, and trunk, as in a sweep of robes, squinting from the acrid smoke, the shooter lowered the rifle, stepped away, then reloaded, not even bothering to look at this heap he had made, or the pressured blood spurting from the small hole below the horse’s quivering ear. A used-up horse was all. Finish him off. First chore of a long day.

  Thirsty sand. How quickly the blood clabbered. Black pudding. Flies feeding. In seconds, the red black puddle was thick with flies, iridescent and dancing. Innocent, Rimbaud looked around as if at some imagined and very sympathetic audience. Didn’t they yet see the point? After too many pounding days and nights, as expected, the horse was done, even as his replacement was being bridled and saddled. This was the bush. Quick. Efficient.

  But the matter still was not finished—no.

  For well in sight of this before-breakfast debacle—even as the poor beast subsided—here, across the camp, stood the two children with Mrs. MacDonald beside them, newly stupefied. Ready again to erupt. As for the children, after days on the road, they, at least, were remarkably unsurprised.

  These people! fumed Rimbaud, now trapped. Doing their slaughtering in the camp! And here when he had specifically told the man—twice—not to do it in the camp. Do it a distance away, he told him. As was his controlling practice in this part of the world, he then asked the stolid killer to repeat his instructions. What did I just say? Repeat it. Look me in the eyes. Tell me exactly what you are going to do.

  The host faced his two agog guests.

  “The horse could not continue,” he offered almost urbanely. Then, more haplessly, pointing at the shooter, “He was told, specifically told, not to do it here. Not now.”

  It was, one supposed, an answer. Mrs. MacDonald stood thick in shock. “Fresh meat,” he offered. He gestured toward the malign hills. “Feeding the whole village, Madam.” Again, he paused, that gratitude might take effect, applause perhaps. “Instead of coming at us.”

  “Quite.” Briskly, Mrs. MacDonald drew in a breath. “Right.”

  It was, in short, the horridly ordinary beginning of another dreadful day.

  They saw buzzards flying, shiny wings tilting in the strong desert currents.

  They saw a walking stone—a giant tortoise. Toad in a shell. Yellow eyes. Grinning, the boy straddled him, giddy-up! Then was told, Come along.

  They saw dik-diks, rabbit-sized antelopes. Darling creatures—duly shot for supper.

  They saw on a hill, in a rare, large tree with horizontal vegetation, what looked like two ragged black sacks—two witches. No, shiftas, their supine guide explained. Highwaymen. Examples,
hung until they fell like rotten apples.

  They saw—and Rimbaud made it a point to point out to Mr. MacDonald—those grave formations the waidellas, which he had been so kind to mention, flat rocks piled not very high on a low hill. Mesas, almost. Slits skimming the distance, like eyes. Indeed, the skinny men, the watching men, unafraid, they stood on the same low hills, easy shots against the sky. Daring the frangis. Men hard as fire sticks carrying long, gut-stirring spears. Spears that wobbled ever so slightly as the men moved.

  Later, they saw the night, the undersea, the gloom, when all changed and advantage shifted. Look, human, as an animal looks into the night when he winds the predator. Open wide your mouth and nostrils. Let the darkness fill your throat like water. Sieve and taste the oyster taste of darkness, salty and brined with fear.

  Listen. Really listen.

  Lions letting out roars. Hyenas yipping. Obstreperous frogs both deep and shrill. Shadows weaving shadows, in moonlit shoals—admit finally your utter irrelevance and superfluousness, for you are bait. Feed the fire. Stare at the flames. Check and recheck the guns—hope.

  And the feud was on. Here was a relay race of tribes, warriors whose abomination of one another was second only to their sacred duty to kill the frangi, that godless affront. Every night now shots were heard. Rimbaud’s hired killers, meanwhile, tried in their awkward way to quell fraying frangi nerves—to show, for lack of a better word, some etiquette. Two more kills were brought, not into camp but to the edge of camp—just visible, as proof. Praise the cat who drops the mouse. Coyly dribble more coins. Done.

  Then, on the ninth night, six went out to patrol. One heard something, then rode off to look when, up from the deeps, like a shark, suddenly a shadow arose. Became a man who drove his spear clear through his leg—mortally gored the horse, too—as with his spear another hooked him through the back and unhorsed him. Rimbaud’s other killers heard his cries as the two skinners went to work, took from between his legs their slickly warm prize, then happily left the job screaming and deliberately unfinished. And so, as was customary and agreed—promised in fact—there was another muffled shot, a mercy truly, when his comrades found him.

  Returning, the leader looked at Rimbaud with a mixture of rage and shame; the others looked not at all, briefly eating and drinking before they inserted more cartridges in bandoliers, checked guns, then rode out again to exact their revenge. As for the dead man, this would be costly, Rimbaud knew, with much wrangling. Truly, when a frangi was involved, what normally just happened, what fell like a crumb before God’s feet, suddenly it soared in tragedy, became cosmic in its consequences and hence in price. The price! Beau-ti-ful was the price.

  Otherwise, no one spoke of the man—ever. It was, what was. Back there. Vanished into the whirlwind, inshallah. Who could count upon his next breath or second? For here there was only here, only now, and now there was only on. Onward. On under Allah’s wing, on to the end.

  They were, Rimbaud estimated, now two-thirds of the way, perhaps more. Close enough that, in his mind, almost gravitationally, like an undertow, he could almost hear the roar. Could feel the fabulous pull of the sloshing, the propulsive, the shiningly endless gray blue sea—the Gulf of Aden, then the Red Sea, then the cobalt blue Mediterranean and the quay of Marseille. Of France itself and what his mother and Isabelle would say, and then, as in a play, what he would say, and how rich and resonant it would be. A compact of implicit forgiveness all guided by the evident fact that people change. Have to. Change, as the play of life itself changes. Act, then. Stand over there. Walk differently. Smile. Try this.

  Yes, in life it was very good to have a play, with distinct parts and well-defined words. A script—that way everyone would know what to say, and how to behave, and so how to act. And instinctively, in this much-revised play, Rimbaud knew he had to prepare, to learn his lines and act so as not to react. Or rather, not to overreact, sparking, as he feared, some kind of fracas. Yes, this time it would be different at home, he thought, as different as he, as she, as they were different. Really, a different family. Fifteen years different.

  As for Mrs. MacDonald, even after her host’s sort-of epiphany—and even with his awkward feints at a sort-of pre-probationary holiness—still she was cool to him. Cool if not cold, even as she brusquely cared for him, but only as a duty, much as a lady with an overabundance of cats might reluctantly feed some knee-slinking stray. His stomach had shrunk to nothing but his soul’s hunger was alarming, voracious. When she brought him something, anything, he would look at her, openly like a flower, as if by looks or silence, by his evident suffering or sorrow, she might revise her now bludgeoned opinion of him. Right.

  He, it, that, was a walking amnesia. Vanquished thinking. Confess, said a voice, Confess to God.

  For his confession would be epic; why, it might spark a world epidemic. Once loosed, it would never stop, and then—as if out of a dream—he looked at Mr. MacDonald, the father packhorse, first carrying the girl, then herding the boy. Omnipresent, like his love. Attempting, however absurdly under the circumstances, to be of good cheer. Offering his wife his arm, he helped her across a field of giant boulders. A pack animal—a mule. God’s fool. Lord, thought Rimbaud, just look at the sheer brute health of the man, the force! Before him Rimbaud now felt near-boundless wonder, such as can only be seen through the eyes of failure.

  But what about his family, the Rimbauds, waiting on the rock of Roche?

  Fervently, Rimbaud tried; he tried to imagine, to patiently reconstruct, his sister Isabelle as a woman with lines on her face, settled bones, drooping chin. He tried to imagine his mother now old and changed—old age changed people, did it not? Mellowed them. Exclamation points became question marks. Bodies shrank and turned to shrugs. Why, some few of the old, he had noticed, once shedding the sheer labor of life (and true, after loud complaints), mercifully, they forgot who they had been and whom they had harmed—it gave one hope, these late-charming, suddenly mild antiquarians. Fists became hands, and vituperation, once the anger has been boiled out of it, really, it was a form of fear. Good heavens, all these angry, bitter old people, what on earth had they been so exercised about all these years? God knows, but he had—changed, that is. New life, new identity. Trader, linguist, ethnographer, explorer: this was what he was really bringing home to his mother. Like a boy clutching a pulsing, just-caught frog, he was bringing home a new heart. Presenting, or rather representing, himself. Look, Maman, I am a man now; I’m a success, not a mooch. I have money, too—pots of it. Home would do it. At home he would change in a way impossible in Abyssinia. Calm down. Settle down. Worry less.

  And the leg? So be it. Off. Weasel it off. Chew it off if need be. Anything to be sprung and forgiven—anything to be freed from the jaws of this trap. Lose a leg, gain a soul. But who, then? Who will he be?

  So Rimbaud ruminated as he bounced and rolled, holding himself against the canvas until his forearms were rubbed raw. So he dreamed as thoughts rolled by, caroming on like swells of sea. See him now, a sunburned body carried on eight thin black legs. Carried such that, from a distance, this vast organism that had formed around him resembled a great bumbling millipede scuttling across the floor of a dried-up sea. To the sea, he thinks, the blue sea. When a curious phrase presents itself: The sea as in pictures.

  Picture, sea, he thinks. Da-dum.

  Sea as in pictures. Hadn’t he written something like that? Dreamt something like that once? But this memory lasts but a moment, before he thinks, Oh, rot …

  28 The Blank Page

  But when would he arrive, this mysterious prodigy about whom Verlaine has alerted literary Paris and now bestirred his young wife and new in-laws? Only God knew.

  Discussing this very matter, Verlaine, his wife, Mathilde, and his mother-in-law, Mme. Mauté de Fleurville—petty nobility, actually—were taking tea in the salon of the Mautés’ home on the rue Nicolet, a narrow but imposing street in Montmartre lined with tall, stone-faced manses, thoroughly snooty residences with p
ince-nez-like windows and long, dismissive stairs that no tradesman would have dared to climb.

  Mathilde, his bride of thirteen months, was seventeen and almost eight months pregnant, a bubbly, buxom, now plump girl—a beauty, really—with dark hair, dark eyes, clear fair skin and a love for her husband still so young and fresh that it verged on adoration. Her mother, Mme. Mauté, to whom she bore a strong resemblance, was herself a darkly handsome but now maternally imposing woman, perched on a high-backed gilt chair with bowed legs and a royal blue coverlet. Mme. Mauté very much liked this chair, and she liked especially where it stood at the head of the room, rather like a portrait with a fireplace of ornately carved marble to her left, a grand piano to her right, and, behind her, visible through a bay of mullioned windows, a walled garden with pea gravel paths—paths such as one saw at Versailles, noted the Madame, thrilled at her creation.

  Her throne room, Verlaine called it, and with evident feeling now that he was Mme. Mauté’s unhappy subject. This demotion in Verlaine’s status as a husband—this steep descent—had begun two months before. It was then, owing to reverses—tavern debts, a ridiculous altercation, a poem not yet realized, and even the tides of history—but principally on account of his being fired—that the twenty-five-year-old Verlaine and his adolescent bride were forced to give up their Paris flat and move back home. Mathilde had some money from her grandmother’s estate—let him stay home, she said, liberated from the work he hated and now freed to write.

  That is, when he was not twiddling, said Mme. Mauté—hours twiddling and hours more at the cafés he frequented, before returning home late and weaving drunk. Beyond the irregular hours and chaotic lifestyle, however, her wayward son-in-law had presumed, said Mme. Mauté. Indeed! To invite this Rimbaud to stay in their home, quite as if it were his home. And still more unforgivably, so late in her daughter’s pregnancy!