Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  The fallen world, however, the real world, is gaslit, ill-lit—fog.

  At 1:00 a.m. as they emerge from Le Voltaire, it is a shadowy stumble-world of small, stooped men, absinthe addicts most of them, in long swallowtailed coats and domed top hats. Down the center of the street, in a shallow channel, a residue of water gleams like the blood gutter on the blade of a knife. And beyond, framed in fantastical ruins, lo, the tarts! Four old trollops, the desperate fishing for the dregs from closing time. Clothed—clothed is the thrill in these figures of obscene fascination, whom Baudelaire, syphilitic hysteric that he was, had once referred to as “latrines.” Clad head to toe in black, they resemble mortuary figures, queens in death’s chess set. Like small Gibraltars, their bustles. Tatty hats and wedge toes to sniff and lick and obey, if that is your particular kink. And—attention—in the prim purses you can be sure they are secreting hat pins and razors, even sleeping drams for those ladies who specialize in drugging, then robbing the old rapers. They are an army. In Paris, a city of almost two million, they easily number in the thousands, these angels of ease—they are everywhere. Desire is fear and fear is desire, for syphilis is rampant, hideously ravaging, and incurable—dare you. Ask the syphilitic ghost of Baudelaire, the flaneur and dandy. Gamely tapping his cane, lured by the very horror of his own fascination, in death the great shade forever trolls the gutters in his white spats, kid gloves, and yellow top hat.

  “Pas si vite,” calls Verlaine, “not so far ahead.”

  Dk dk dkk, sounds Verlaine’s sword stick, testing with each wobbling step the irregular loaf-sized cobbles. Zigzagging, the medieval street ever ascends, trapping, like dew in a spider’s web, the violet fog.

  “Monsieur Rimbaud, wait,” Verlaine protests, for by then the young dog is half a block ahead—too far for Verlaine to see if the lad fancies women. Tomorrow, or in a few days in any case, the corruption will begin; he will offer to buy the lad his first piece of tail—a test, to see if or what he likes or, heh, if a good stiff cock might be his fancy!

  When, with a loud bark, the visionary youth pitches over, vomits—O! Then, fresh from this swilling ode, he whips up again, laughing!

  Cries Verlaine, stumbling to his aid, “Are you quite all right?”

  The kid lurches back. Points at the moon coring through the fog.

  “Don’t you see?” he cries.

  “What?” Crouching, Verlaine is now trying to draw a sight along the lad’s wavering finger. “What?”

  “Suddenly it all makes sense!”

  “What?”

  But, jerking erect, the boy just stumbles on, laughing.

  So much, then, for the preliminaries. The next day, in relative sobriety, over café and cassis, the two poets do that anxious, loaded thing—exchange work. And straightaway, Verlaine loses, for of course he has no new work—nothing but the prissy La Bonne Chanson, verses lacking only the lute and the tights. What a spot. Here was a place he no longer was, with no clue, as yet, where he is or wants to go.

  The boy is brutal. There is no pause.

  “These are too … artistic.” To him the ultimate shame: the clever, the arty, the smug—traits ultimately self-regarding and thus … sentimental.

  And frankly, what the kid was up against was what might be called French little-r romanticism. Or rather what might be described in its bald grandiosity as unfeelingism, an overreaction by the French against the gales loosed by English Big-R Romanticism in the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century: Wordsworth & Coleridge & Keats & Company.

  Seventy years later, in France, in the main, things had not changed much. Safe, since it was not political and censorable, the Parnassian movement had, in those nervous times, given rise to the ultra nouveau and very smart-sounding but ultimately bankrupt notion of art for art’s sake. Pure artifice. Roughly what Oscar Wilde championed before—bankrupt and publicly ruined in his mad love for a beautiful but worthless boy—he experienced the soul-scouring insides of Reading Gaol. So much for art for art’s sake.

  But what of Rimbaud? As a kid and a newly sexual being, he was forced to disguise his own disguises, the cooties of feeling, such that he had to hide or distort them—to throw them like a ventriloquist’s voice or impute them to others. Other characters and alter egos. To anyone but him, whoever he was.

  “I know you have great things in you,” offers the boy at last. “Deeper things, certainly—I know this. But I am obliged to tell you: this is shit—shit. You must never again write in this way. Or really, live in this way. Great as he was, this was Baudelaire’s chief failing, you know. He lived in too artistic a milieu—Paris. And here it turns rancid. Pure, putrid style. Rather like a man who loves the aroma of his own farts.”

  Stabbed, Verlaine feels a tremor pass through him. Son of a bitch, he’s right.

  “But, Arthur, please,” he stammers, “listen to me. And I am not, I hope you know, merely pulling the rank of my age and experience.

  But—”

  “Nonsense. Of course you are—”

  “But you are but sixteen. You haven’t been through this phase of life. Marriage. Love. Family.”

  The kid’s balled fists hit the table.

  “Haven’t experienced what? Knocking up some dewy-eyed pubescent girl? Sponging off her parents? Is that what I am missing? Wake up, Verlaine! Why are your phony feelings important? Because you felt them? Your logs melting on the fire. Your love’s soft arm. Is that all poetry is to you? I, I, I and me, me, me? Idiotic salons and dinner invitations? The empty mirror of fame? What?”

  All this would have been enough, but once back from the toilet, with a swipe Rimbaud withdraws, sweaty moist from his back pocket, that new poem at whose peculiar title Mme. Mauté had so recoiled—“The Drunken Boat.”

  Insolent brat. Taking the nasty sheets, the bruised Verlaine sorely wants to return the favor. Yet, within the first four stanzas, his ears are ringing. The paper trembles in his fingers; his breathing stutters and his flitting eye—his eye cannot stop looking.

  At what? Experience says it is wrong. Rude. Jejune. Chaotic and violent. At points even absurd.

  The Drunken Boat

  As I was going down impassive Rivers,

  I no longer felt myself guided by haulers!

  Yelping redskins had taken them as targets,

  And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.

  I was indifferent to all crews,

  The bearer of Flemish wheat or English cottons,

  When with my haulers this uproar stopped,

  The Rivers let me go where I wanted.

  Into the furious lashing of the tides,

  More heedless than children’s brains, the other winter

  I ran! And loosened peninsulas

  Have not undergone a more triumphant hubbub.

  The storm blessed my sea vigils.

  Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves

  That are called eternal rollers of victims,

  Ten nights, without missing the stupid eye of the lighthouses.

  Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children,

  The green water penetrated my hull of fir

  And washed me of spots of blue wine

  And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook.

  And his diction! he thinks. Crude, brawling words like “yelping,” “stupid,” “hubbub,” not to mention the vile “vomit”—this, mind you, from a man who, only a week before, could be seen grappling the lard-white legs of an old strumpet, helplessly licking, like salvation itself, the darkened peach pit of her arsehole. Vile? Was that the word?

  Then frightened—actually disoriented—Verlaine races ahead:

  I have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors,

  Lighting up, with long violet clots,

  Resembling actors of very ancient dramas,

  The waves rolling far off their quivering of shutters!

  I have dreamed of the green light with dazzled snows,

  A kiss slowly rising t
o the eyes of the sea,

  The circulation of unknown saps,

  And the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorous!

  It was like a public beating, this dismantling. And yet much as part of him would have liked to savage the kid, Verlaine was an unfailingly honest critic. Even if he didn’t yet understand, he knew what he knew. Knew physically. Knew from the heat, the shock, the pure animal strangeness. And—all honor to him—Verlaine never let jealousy cloud his opinion, nor did he shrink from admitting what he knew.

  “C’est fabuleux,” he stammers. “I don’t even know how to explain—account for it, so strange, so distressing at points. But extraordinaire.” Yet at this admission Verlaine trails off, spinning and swept out to sea in his own drunken boat—overwhelmed, as was the kid’s intention.

  Let us now speak of courage, intellectual and artistic courage. Another man might have been envious, competitive, might have run the other way, confronting, in a child, an order of talent and understanding that utterly dwarfed his own.

  Not Verlaine. Whatever else, he was not another of these envious, bitter souls forever shortchanged by the world. No, to Verlaine poets were gladiators of a sort. Brutal entertainers. Drink, wench, die—glory or oblivion, one!

  Fortunately, Verlaine’s mauled pride was soothed to feel himself the discoverer, the impresario and father of this great literary child prodigy, rarer than the white tiger. For whom, Verlaine fancied, he would be as Aristotle was to Alexander the Great. Or as the moon-brained Socrates was to the boys of Athens—a corrupter of youth. Or perhaps, cackled Verlaine, an extender of youth, for he did detect in the lad some deliciously mixed signals!

  The omnivorous Verlaine, then, was not without enterprise. If not plans, exactly, he had certain as yet ill-defined aims for his young bumpkin friend. And here sagely he hedged his bets, aiming high, even as he aimed low.

  37 Poltergeist

  But what was the kid thinking, having fallen into this honey pot at 14 rue Nicolet?

  He had a room, a splendid room—a room in Paris at an enviable address, with a soft bed, an expansive desk and a large, sunny window overlooking the pea-graveled path of Madame’s garden, a small miracle of arboreal geometry with aromatic thickets of rosemary, lavender, and boxwood, together with that staple of the French garden, the beloved red geranium.

  Moreover, for the first time in his tramps, the boy wasn’t a fugitive, sick with hunger and transfixed with the endless schemes of survival. Here, freed from the maternal grip of the Vampire, and with all of his needs taken care of, he could live like a mental prince, in what, for most mortals, would have seemed the ideal artistic environment. Yet, oddly, and without quite recognizing it, he missed the Vampire, for much as he had fought her, she had always contained him, whereas now he felt dangerously uncontained, as if he might explode.

  He jerked off. It was no better.

  He opened Mme. Mauté’s window, then for some time worked down long, supple spits. Agile spits, rapidly sucked in and out like a snake’s tongue, this to see how long spit could stretch before, with a kind of sigh, it broke. Splat, on Madame’s wrought-iron garden table.

  Then things began to go missing. A silver cross. An expensive book. A porcelain figurine. In the material profusion of chez Mauté, these things were as grains of sand on a beach. Nevertheless, the thefts were immediately spotted by Mme. Mauté, second in vigilance only to the maids, terrified they would be sacked, branded forever as cupboard thieves.

  Now, obviously the kid “did” it, yet in his own mind he didn’t do it, and in a purely magical sense he hadn’t. Rather, from on high, he watched another him, not him, do it. The Madame’s silver necklace, for example, a cross with a shriveled Jesus upon it. It was the cross’s fault. Morally, it offended him, this symbolic fetish lying openly on the table. With malice, he picked it up. He stuffed it down his pants, the cold metal tingling on the tip of his penis.

  Then, lured as if by some aroma, like a fly, he took the necklace with the cross and snuck into a room the likes of which he had never seen. Amazing, these rich bastards. They even had a separate room for it.

  For here before him, big as a woman, stood a bathtub, perched on clawed feet with a brass spigot that spurted water. And next door in the water closet—most stupendous of all—here was the toilet, the porcelain throne, famished for your ass, your piss, your shit. Obscene, he thought, fondling the long chain attached to the tank—the tank at the very top of the wall—that held the flush water. Pull it. Down it poured, a roaring, frothing maelstrom worthy of the author of “The Drunken Boat.”

  He waited until it was silent.

  He pulled it again. Whoosh.

  If only the workers knew what these assholes had in Montmartre!

  I will call it the Ass Dragon.

  Why, it made him sick, almost dizzy, how the Ass Dragon gobbled down its morning repast, then roared, Moooooore. Looking at the cross dangling from the chain, he realized the Lord Jesus was similarly intrigued. So, dangling him down, he watched the heavenly argonaut happily hip-hopping along the bottom. Then, being the Lord, His Holiness told the boy that he wanted to see the golden colors of sunset. So, squatting, still dangling his friend, the boy brought forth the golden waters:

  And from then on I bathed on the Poem

  Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,

  Devouring the green azure where, like a pale elated

  Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks …

  Then the kid made an offering. Two, in fact, plopping down upon the waters like bread fed to hungry ducks. Then, again with this vagueness—this impulsiveness that would cover his eyes to what he did—suddenly he pulled the chain and let the necklace go down the chute, oremus, oremus. For just as Church doctrine said that God the Son was always one with God the Father, so miraculously was the Asshole always one with the Poet, crudity in sublimity, ruthlessness in sympathy—impulses forever at war.

  Good grief. Did the kid realize he had extinguished one hour and a quarter in this malign and useless exercise? But if not this, what? Flopping in his lap like two puppets, his big hands fought with each other. For truth be known, he could as easily have hung himself as set the house on fire. That knife’s edge of sixteen, crazy sixteen.

  Still, in the main, his malign efforts were working! To his immense delight, the hounds of 14 rue Nicolet were circling outside the unsavory confines of his bedroom, the very sty in which yellowy-crispy, all but ineradicable stains of an unmentionable origin had been discovered. Starched, as it were, on his bedding—indeed, the very same stains that graced the silken, much-humped arm of Madame’s exquisitely upholstered chair.

  “It has come to my attention,” intoned the high priestess of 14 rue Nicolet, who paused to swallow, that she might quell the tremors coursing through her body. “It has come to my attention that certain articles”—he betrayed no emotion—“certain valuable and, some of them, sacred objects”—with a lifetime of empty hostility he kept staring at her—“and we wondered”—of course she could not say I wondered—“we wondered if you might know”—at which point he was thrilled, knowing that she knew that he knew that she knew. And, best of all, the boy could see she was trapped! Trapped because, in her crippling and self-deluding bourgeois nobility, she hadn’t caught him red-handed like the vicious rat he was.

  “Would—” she started, stopped, shook. “Would you behave—would you dare behave at home in this way? Would you?”

  “Behave?” His vacancy was as utter as it was utterly aggressive. “But, Madame, behave how?”

  “You”—her cheeks gorged—“I think you know how, young man.” She stuffed down a sob. “Arthur Rimbaud, strange as it might seem, I like you. At least, I want to like you. Please, my dear, do not force me to send you elsewhere. For, believe me, I shall!”

  I like you. I want to like you. Precisely because Mme. Mauté’s admission moved him—at least in a way—well, obviously, and for that very reason, he could not let it
move him, to be that sentimental, that dumb. Lie that it was, love was always the problem, especially when it involved females. After all, for all their enmity and confusion, in a certain sense, even he and his mother “loved” each other—much like two bubbling acids, contesting which would consume the other.

  Love: as constituted, it was a base and lying metal against which he was an alchemist and sorcerer, transmuting lead into the solar splendor of gold—of love immortal. These half-digested notions of alchemy and the occult—specifically, of black magic, which he claimed to have studied in great depth—were hastily appropriated from the kaleidoscopic histories of Jules Michelet, notably his work La Sorcière, duly stuffed down his trousers several years back at a Charleville book stall.

  The point was, he was a poet, not a scholar, and as a poet he knew precisely what he needed to know, and often not one whit more than he needed to know, in order to make a poem. And here, like a magnifying glass concentrating a sunbeam, he was studying the very thing he had never really had and thus would never comprehend—love, so called. The great lie that, in his mind, he had been sent to earth to wholly reinvent.

  Verlaine, meanwhile—and naturally with the basest of intentions—was careful to cover his own unsavory tracks with his new toy. Hopped tracks, for in fact, nothing had happened—yet. Still, to throw the women off the scent, some two weeks after the boy’s arrival, the elder poet cunningly raised a possibility irresistible to women: a bit of romance for the lad.

  “Mother,” said Verlaine one afternoon when, once again, Mme. Mauté was beside herself about the brat, “I’ll tell you what I think Arthur needs—a girl.”

  “A girl?” She recoiled. “And who would be the matchmaker—you?”

  Wisely, he let this pass. The hook was now set.