Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  “Do you really think so?” asked the pregnant Mathilde, by then so desperate to deliver, and so vexed with her husband’s erratic behavior, that she needed almost any diversion. Especially if it might divert the boy and return her husband. And like her mother, she harbored vague hopes, Christian hopes, of rehabilitating this lad clearly so abominably raised.

  “Well,” sighed her mother later, now entertaining this novel, if absurd, idea. “Perhaps—if he bathes. If he had—oh, I don’t know—money. Meaningful prospects. Or, dare I say, a career.”

  “Well,” he stammered, nervous at the j-word, as in job.

  “Well, what?” demanded the Dragoness. “Which comes first? The girl or the job?”

  “The girl, the girl,” he agreed—anything so long as they were diverted.

  “Well, now, I’m wondering,” said Mathilde, whose younger friends, after all, were still girls, but of course proper girls, not to mention Parisian. Still, this was appealing, especially if she and Paul could play the settled married couple charting the lad’s fate. But the class issue—not to mention his frightful manners. Might their baker have a daughter? Or, mmmm, perhaps a shop girl somewhere?

  “Well,” said Verlaine, taking her hand, “a girl is precisely what he needs. As I myself did, my dear.”

  “Well, my dear,” challenged Mathilde, giving him a close look, “once the child comes, many things will need to change.”

  “And,” added the Dragoness, “a certain young lad will need to find other circumstances.”

  “Well, of course,” he fibbed. “A child changes everything. Everything.” However implausibly at that moment, Verlaine actually believed he could have both the child and the boy. “In fact, ladies,” he added with some provocation, “I welcome that change.”

  Then the second week of his visit, even as other lodgings were being discussed—and even as the siege in Mathilde’s womb continued—a carriage rolled up. Metal reinforced boxes were unloaded. Dogs barked, the maids ran down, the front door resounded, and there he was, the master, M. Mauté, a heavyset man of martial air dressed in riding boots, a belted tweed shooting jacket, and stylish breeches that ill concealed his girth. He dropped his rifle cases to the floor. He called the women and admonished with his trigger finger the two white muff balls barking at what they now smelled. Then, as the women dutifully assembled—the maids, too—he opened, for their evident amazement, a wicker creel.

  “La récolte de la chasse.” It was indeed the harvest of the hunt.

  “Ucch,” said his wife, standing well back.

  For inside the creel, in a bed of cool leaves, lay the dried and sightless eyes of No. 13 in his collection of dwarf deer heads. Teeth, tongue, two stubs of horn.

  “Horrid!” she cried. “Get that vile, dead thing out of here.”

  For M. Mauté, this, perhaps, was the summit of these subalpine hunts: when he could horrify the weaker sex with the mortuary proof of his male prowess. But zut, thought M. Mauté, to come home and find that, after more than a fortnight away, his daughter still had not delivered! That he had to endure still more female theatrics.

  Worse for Monsieur was this houseguest, this rank wheel of Camembert, of whom he had heard disquieting squibs in the several terse cables he and his wife had exchanged during his sojourn. No, Monsieur was not pleased, not at all, when Verlaine introduced his sullen, unfragrant friend. The creel! Here M. Mauté thought he would show the ill-mannered lad with whom he was dealing.

  “See here,” said Monsieur, raising the wicker. “See what I have brought back.”

  “What’s that?” the boy asked, coolly peering in. Come on, what was this compared with birthing calves and the slaughtering knife?

  “That,” replied M. Mauté, “is a roe deer, mon ami. A nice buck, as you can see. Taken at a hundred and fifty meters.” With a faint smile, he waited for this to sink in.

  “But, Monsieur, it is so tiny.”

  The older man reddened. “Mere size, Monsieur, is not the point. This is the male of the species. Ghost of the mountains. Legendarily difficult to stalk.”

  “But a runt, correct?”

  “A large specimen. For this species, large. Very large, I assure you.” That did it.

  “I understand,” said Monsieur, leaning back on his gleaming boots, that the floorboard might creak beneath his now coiled bulk, “I understand you have been here for”—he cleared his throat—“for some days. Well, at 14 rue Nicolet, in this establishment, young Monsieur, we bathe. Yes, we have soap. Hot water, too.”

  Who was this old clown next to his dear mother, la Bouche d’Ombre—the Mouth of Darkness? Let him rant, thought the kid. Verlaine, however, was unnerved. Having grown up essentially fatherless, he was deeply intimidated by aggressive men.

  “And,” hectored on M. Mauté, “I am further given to understand that in this house, my house, certain valuable articles have gone missing.”

  “Father,” blurted Verlaine finally, screwing up his courage, “I am quite sure that Monsieur Rimbaud, that he—”

  “Allow me to finish!” thundered M. Mauté. “And further, my young Monsieur, I will assume, so long as you are here, and now that I am back …”

  Stupid old prick, thought the kid. This will be fun.

  38 Why?

  For all Rimbaud’s skill in evading his own mind, there was no evading Mrs. MacDonald’s mind or her odd pull over him. But just what was that pull, exactly? Even in the space of many accelerated days in the desert, their relationship, such as it was, was difficult to characterize. Husband and wife? Mother and son? Caretaker and patient? Conscience and amnesia?

  Ambos, pressing like a stone on his chest, had yet to be asked or answered, and so the tension between the two was building as they made their final camp, four kilometers, six at most, from Zeila, their destination on the Gulf of Aden, near the mouth of the Red Sea. Close, one knew, owing to the overabundance of flies and the beggars.

  Sprawled against the chest, shotgun across his lap, Rimbaud closely monitored Mrs. MacDonald, even as she stoutly ignored him, chin drawn into her neck. Gone was the prim hair. Crusted in dust, it was now tied like so many sticks in a length of raw cotton. How native, he wanted to say, to get a rise out of her. But, wisely, he kept this observation to himself.

  Then he must have dozed, for suddenly here she was before him—his mother. Above him, there she was, the Mouth of Darkness in her long skirt with two rough boots peeping out. He bolted up.

  “Easy,” she said. “It’s only I.”

  It was of course Mrs. MacDonald. Returned with the children from their ablutions at the river, she was now as he first remembered her, and this made him extraordinarily happy, uncharacteristically so, to see her again in fresh white shirt, her last, and her hair composed as before, drawn up smartly with the hatpin and primly English straw hat. Appraising his clearly deteriorating condition, she regarded him.

  “Look at you, cooked red. Will you never wear your hat?” Picking up the hat, she placed it on his head—pushed it down, then adjusted it, as if for a child.

  “Enough.”

  “Drink.”

  “I did.”

  “More.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Drink.”

  He drank. He knew it was coming, the interrogation, the accusation—something. But then the girl, whatever her name was, was crying again. Your fault, said Mrs. MacDonald’s eyes. And, once more, in a small wind—the wind such as a departing woman makes—she left him, rather upset, on his back. Put back into boy purgatory.

  Several hours later, when he reawakened, he saw a blood red sky. Groggy, he sat up, then saw before him seven pairs of sandals neatly lined up in the sand—fourteen sandals and, before them, the fourteen bare feet of seven Muslim gunmen. Mud-red men in the red red sun. Prostrate men rising suddenly, then bowing east toward the jagged red mountains, smoldering in the distance like enormous scaly crocodiles. Tides of darkness, cloud tails, the first sharp stars. Abruptly, once again the seven me
n rose, then flattened themselves, then rose again, their hands open like cups. It was a scene he had witnessed a thousand times, but now it gored him, he of no faith or tribe. Truly, kaffir, an unbeliever—a nothing wandering a world of darkness and whirlwinds.

  Ordinary pain, physical pain, this was to be expected, but here was a pain he had never let himself feel before—regret. Never, when he had feet. Not when he could leave, change the scene, slip the noose, the curse of being him, losing himself in the next day or the next town. Gone—beyond forgiveness. Cold—beyond clinging. Free—beyond freedom. But what now, with his leg crushed in the jaws of this trap? Who was he? What? Lord God, Allah, wind in the sky, tell me what to do. Just tell me, make me yours.

  “Why don’t you give me that now?”

  It was Mrs. MacDonald, reaching for his shotgun. Surrender the gun.

  “Come, come, dearie. We are now out of imminent danger. Let it go.”

  “No.” He held it fast.

  “Ah,” she said blithely, “are we going to be like that?”

  She took a rag and a small bowl of water—warm, greasy water from the fatty goat skins. Bad boy. Dirty boy. Washing him, the rag was rough and she was rough. Water dribbled down his neck, then, rather embarrassingly, down his trousers, as if he’d wet himself. Embarrassed. Afraid his men might see.

  “Enough, you’re getting me wet.”

  She plopped the rag in the bowl and took a steaming cup from one of the bearers—sweet tea with just-stripped camel’s milk, mother’s milk, buttery thick. Drink. So he drank. Drained it, then had another cup, delicious. Again, Mrs. MacDonald called the men, who now rather miraculously more or less did as she said—motioned—in a voice that was clipped and punctiliously polite. A small candle lantern was brought, lit. It was now just the two of them, two faces in a yellowy globe of light.

  “So why?” she asked brightly, now that the tea had revived him. “Really, now you must tell me. Why, ever, did you write poems, Mr. Rimbaud? A man such as yourself.”

  He stared at her in disbelief.

  “Poems, Mr. Rimbaud,” she said, undeterred. “Now, now, don’t be coy, Monsieur. Surely you can tell me. Purely entre nous.”

  Entre nous, between us. This appealed to his vanity, that they should be, somehow, intimates connected. And, to his very enormous relief, Ambos was not the subject of inquiry. Mrs. MacDonald’s mode was one of challenge, true. But it also was seductive, blackly jocular, almost cynical, thereby raising the conversation—in one balletic leap—to another plane. Metaphorical. Symbolical. Fantastical. Indeed, in its horror, it was almost abstract. Mrs. MacDonald simply had never met such a person, a capitalist, an arguable murderer, and a cynic, why, at this rate perhaps even a secret slave trader, in a poet’s body. She was quite rapt with curiosity, as if she were inquiring of a lion why he ate meat.

  “Come now, just tell me,” she coaxed. “Just me. Why on earth did you once write poems? And then just stop, as you did. Honestly, Monsieur. How could you do that and now this?”

  This, too, appealed to him, for in his inward way he took perverse pride in how he had reinvented his life, or lives, rather. “Well,” he replied rather grandly, if evasively, “I didn’t write those sort of poems.”

  “Antecedent, Mr. Rimbaud,” she chided schoolmarmishly. “Poems of what sort?”

  “Oh”—and he groaned—“those English things of fifty years ago. Gloomy thoughts, like your English drizzle. Wordsworth in the Highlands. Shelley on the beach. Coleridge dreaming his opium dreams. Oh, ‘Ozymandias’—fine. Keats—sublime, I suppose. In any case, Madame, I didn’t do any of that. It was France, and there was other rubbish at the time. French rubbish.”

  “So,” she said, “what, then, did you write, Mr. Rimbaud?”

  “No recollection—rien. Why does a jug pour out its water?” Briefly, he mounted a smile at this aperçu. Then he turned scolding. “Well, if it was Bardey who told you about this—any of them—well, they told you I do not discuss it. At all. Any of it.”

  “But I am told that people quite love your poetry,” she persisted, with a tone now of flagrant flattery. “Positively revere it—well, in Paris they do. I am told that they think it, and you, a great discovery. Hugely important. Genius. Even classic, dare I say.”

  At this he grew agitated.

  “I do not think of it—ever. What do I care who might like my little monsters? These things, these mere artifacts, these youthful slops, they are not me. My poems. This makes no sense to me. Rimbaud who? Not me. I do not own them. There is no ‘author,’ so called. Ridiculous. Pure egotism. Self-delusion.”

  “Ah,” she said, bringing him up short, “and do you then renounce the money, too? You certainly seem to fancy that—money.”

  “Money,” he said with a shrug, “there is no money in poetry—none. And I did not publish them. That was my good friend—of once—the poet Verlaine. Genius, a poète de musique but a drunk and a bum. So like a fool I let Verlaine have my scribblings. It is my fault, my weakness that I did not burn them. Burn them and be done with it, as I should have.”

  “Then you disown them?”

  “No,” he caviled, “because I never owned them to begin with. He, who, it, whoever—it merely wrote them, and I gave the little bastards away. There,” he said firmly, “Enough—”

  “Fine,” she said briskly. “Another topic then—that terrible scene we passed just today in the desert? Who sold the necessary cartridges? I wonder. Who sold the guns? Hmm, Mr. Rimbaud? Any idea? Or are you, once more, not the author?”

  “Yes,” he sighed, “I sell guns. Cookware. Oil. Trinkets. All honorable products.” He glared in the direction of her husband. “Some of us, not yet saints, we must make a living.”

  “Or a killing.”

  “Do you dare accuse me?” He hauled himself more erect. “Others, several, not just Rimbaud, sell the guns. And medicines with which fools poison themselves. And knives with which the clumsy cut themselves. I merely sell the guns, I do not aim the guns.”

  “Slaves?”

  “Never,” he glared, “never slaves, ever. Not in any transaction, and not easy when they are still traded like currency. But I refused—consistently. There I drew the line.”

  “How very principled of you,” she trilled, still not convinced.

  “Madame,” and he fixed her in his eyes in that scary way he had, “it is very much a principle. Here where there is no line, one learns very quickly, believe me, that a line is needed.”

  “Well,” she replied, smarting at his bluff male certainty. “So, guns then, Mr. Rimbaud. So like your poems. Acts of God. Accidents for which you, being you, are to be held blameless. Heavens no! You are not their author. You, pure as the snow. Certainly not—you did not force them to buy your wares. Do I not detect a theme, Mr. Rimbaud?”

  Down came his arms; up came the venom.

  “And who saved you and your children with all your English high-mindedness? I did. And my money. And my guns. But of course, you are Christians. Birds of the air. People of the spirit. So, let others feed you, and pay for you, and kill for you, while you do your high-minded leeching. Am I not getting warm, Madame? No?”

  Imperiously, she rose, smoothing her dirty dress. Rose because she could, then regarded him with a cold stare, a man sitting helpless in the red dirt, in the bits.

  “I thought, Mr. Rimbaud, that I might try—try—to get you to see some truth. A glimmer, perhaps. But clearly I was bound to fail. Good night.”

  But as she turned, he desperately grabbed the hem of her dress. Tugged it uselessly. Once, like a bellrope, then dropped it, staring into his shadow—spent.

  “Wait,” he said, too ashamed to look up. “I am sorry to say such dreadful things to you. Terrible things. I am very, very sorry. Now please, send your husband over. Only him. And I promise it will be a good thing. A very good thing.”

  39 The Nasty Fellows

  “But when will you and Monsieur Rimbaud be home?” the pregnant Mathilde begged her hu
sband, now anxious to leave as she lay red and bloated on the fainting couch, with a maid to daub each eye. Did Verlaine actually think that a few hours of solicitude would erase a week’s utter dereliction? With Mathilde, perhaps, but not with the Dragoness, now at her daughter’s side.

  “Well?” said the Dragoness. “Will you answer your wife?”

  “Not late,” he said. “This is a reading.” Rimbaud’s Paris debut this would be. “Rarely do these things go that late. Unless, of course, there is great éclat.”

  “But, my darling,” said Mathilde, desperate, even then, to be agreeable, “I am about to deliver. I need to deliver.”

  What had come of those lyrics he had once written, overpowering feelings of love and happiness and gratitude? You’ve got a child coming, he kept telling himself.

  Paul, she would say, as they lay in bed, feel him. He’s kicking? Do you feel it?

  Feel something. Anything to shake this growing paralysis. And he had tried to prepare himself for the child, he had; why, manfully one morning for more than an hour he had sat at his desk, numbly endeavoring to write a poem entitled “The Child.” The child, the child—what? Nil. Naught. Nothing. Haze over fog.

  But mainly Paul Verlaine felt torn between his wife and Rimbaud. And this could well be the night, he reminded himself, not altogether sure whether he meant the new arrival or finally something physical with Rimbaud. He was not a cruel or unfeeling man. It was her first child; she was young and frightened and feeling abandoned—too true. But how could he leave Rimbaud, even younger than she, to brave literary Paris alone? And where was Mathilde’s own father, the deserter? At his club, of course, smoking and playing cards.

  “Oh, let him go,” moaned the Dragoness to her daughter as he made ready to leave. “They’re males, they’re going to go—so go.”

  Wringing a pillow, Mathilde called out.

  “Do you even care about this child, Paul Verlaine? Do you?”

  It was then that Rimbaud appeared. Mme. Mauté rose in shock.

  “What, you bathed? Ah,” she said, nodding, “now I see! You bathe for these poets, eh, but not for we who house and feed you?”