Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  “So what do others do?” asks Rimbaud, still sobbing. When people are first amputated, he means.

  “Huh? Everything. Anything. Lots still feel it—the leg. The pain. Even without the leg.” Michel shakes the basin under Rimbaud’s chin dripping tears. “Go on if you have to. Spit up—”

  “Do you not see?” demands Rimbaud, not at all tracking this suggestion. “Look what they left me, look. Who could fit a wooden leg on that?”

  “Don’t think about that—don’t. Don’t think. Here, let me clean you up.”

  “And where is my mother? Did they not summon her? Are they not all idiots?”

  “Think I heard something about your sister.”

  “But I don’t want my sister.” He is now ranting. “I want my mother, do you hear me? My mother.”

  The tears, the mess, the misdirected rage—none of this fazes Michel in the least. He rolls the patient over on his back, helpless as a tortoise.

  “Uh. Hold still.” Trembling, Michel withdraws from his lips, before Rimbaud’s pain-blinded eyes, a tiny, shining object. A safety pin. “Hold still so I don’t stick you.”

  48 Find Rimbaud

  That same day, Félicien Champsaur, literary journalist from the Left Bank Revue Noire, was on the hunt for Rimbaud, and an erratic path it was, for first he had to secure an interview with Paul Verlaine—via Verlaine’s various flunkies and messengers. And so the very au courant Champsaur, broad-shouldered and strikingly handsome, with a bracing mustache and an open book of thick, dark hair, he found himself facing—for the third time in two days—Verlaine’s man. Agent, factotum, manservant, flunky, this was Champsaur’s polar opposite, the odiferous and effusive Bibi-la-Purée.

  Boho king that he was, Verlaine had surrounded himself with a sort of street court, of whom the chancellor was this Bibi-la-Purée. Bootblack, street barber, stool pigeon, messenger, and lackey, Bibi was a gaunt, pinched-faced man of forty or so with long hair, dirty long chuffs of mustache, and a broad-brimmed hat pinned up in front with a greasy turkey quill. As for the state of his unvarying black suit, it was breathtaking, so layered with filth that it bore the purplish, iridescent hue of a pigeon’s throat. Bibi’s bladelike nose was large and bent, his knees were bowed, and always in hand, like a rapier, was his battered umbrella. No stranger to the courts, Verlaine’s man was, he loudly insisted, “Bibi-la-Purée, Seigneur de Salis et autres lieux. Et rentier!” That is, the Lord of Salis and other places. And, to correct the record, no creature of the streets but rather a man of independent means!

  Imagine, then, these antipodes, Bibi and Champsaur, staring across vast chasms of ambition, grooming, and hygiene. At Bibi’s insistence, here they were in one of the city’s most squalid arrondissements, tussling over the master’s fee and even more noxious terms. Adding to the odium, the overweening Champsaur was quite powerless in the matter.

  With Champsaur having savaged, only months before, Verlaine’s latest book of verse, Verlaine was using his grievance to chisel, through this ferret La-Purée, every last centime.

  “As I told you, Monsieur,” insisted Champsaur, parting his dark locks in irritation, “your demands are outrageous. Out of the question. No reputable publication pays its sources.”

  Bibi raised one dirty nail. “Spare me, Monsieur, your dubious professional pieties. If you want the master—quite besides my own fee as his agent—he will require, in his hand, through mine, two ten-franc notes shaking hands, if you understand me. And you will, of course, pay for supper and such liquid refreshments as are required to free his tongue.”

  “I’ll what?”

  “Including—I am not yet finished—those of the master’s nurse-consort, Eugénie Krantz.”

  “Nurse?”

  “Bodyguard, too. Oh yes, Monsieur, Mademoiselle Eugénie, she is formidable with the blackjack and straight razor. And, where the master is concerned, quick to take offense. Oh, and by the way,” added the grimy blackmailer, “your quarterly will purchase, in addition, fifty copies of Rimbaud’s new opus.” The scrounger grinned. “To promote its commercial success.”

  “Will I now?” sneered Champsaur. “And where will the royalties for Rimbaud’s efforts go, I wonder? Into Verlaine’s right pocket? Or in his left?”

  Bibi disregarded this insult; he knew a mark and he knew, for the Rimbaud fetishist, the value of his client’s testimonial—only Verlaine had been present at the birth. In any case, as one richly unemployed, time was on Bibi’s side.

  Tra-la. Without another word and, of course, leaving the tab, the malodorous messenger rose from the table. Turning, he produced from a pocket tin a bent and blackened smoke, a choice bit fished earlier from the gutter. A match flicked to life under his grimy thumbnail. His whisker-tacked cheeks balled with thick smoke. Then, with all the insouciance of a skunk, the flaneur walked out, down the kinked street, past knife grinders and rag pickers pushing their stinking, broken-down carts heaped with the city’s largesse. Paying the tab, Champsaur, meantime, thought to just leave. But then, with a snort of rage, he hurried down the street, red of face, before presenting, in legal tender to this skunk, his surrender.

  “Are you quite sure?” mocked Bibi, fanning banknotes with a black thumb. “I can tell from the cut of your trousers, Monsieur, that you are a man of solid principle.”

  “Café Procope,” snapped Verlaine’s soon-to-be interrogator. “Tomorrow, 6:00 p.m. sharp! Produce Verlaine—sober.” Blowing out his cheeks, he corrected himself. “Well, relatively.”

  Verlaine, to be sure, had ample reason to be angry about Champsaur’s recent savaging of his verse, as much for what it said about his current efforts as for what it opened up in him, sorrows and anxieties about Rimbaud that had lain buried for years.

  No telling why this occurs, but as with any luridly bad review, others saw it first. Did you see it? All who alerted Verlaine to the review bore the same look of alarm, just as all professed not to have actually read it. Normally Verlaine tended to slough off such worries—fools write many things—but suddenly, after the tenth such inquiry, he bolted up from his table at the Café Procope and took off down the wintry street, desperate to see what the wolves had left of his literary corpse.

  Bound for the booksellers on the rue de Seine, he wore, as usual for winter, in a woolly-mammoth-like heap, most of his wardrobe, this topped off with two mufflers and, just creasing his eyes, a lumpy woolen hat. Plumes of breath spouted from his nose, forming, on the frozen tines of his graying red mustache, two small tusks. Mufflers flapping, cane stabbing the ice, the poet rounded the corner, then stopped dead. For there gazing in the shop window, noses in the air, three well-appointed gentlemen were having a good snort and, he knew, at his expense. On the streets of the Latin Quarter and Montmartre, and indeed in most of Paris, the abominable immortal was a well-known figure, so the shock of these gentlemen can be imagined when they saw the object of their mirth rapping his cane indignantly and pressing his face into theirs.

  And there it was, in the window, the review with his name on the cover in red, twiglike letters, curled Art Nouveau style, with bright green apples and sinisterly twisted vines. Lovely, until one noticed the worms in the apples, then the chortling title, “Horse Apples: The Late Work of Paul Verlaine.”

  Old Man Winter trod in, grabbed one from the stack at the front. Then with a glare at the proprietor, turned to page 10 and read:

  There is no denying the greatness and musicality of the Verlaine of 1873—or the source of his inspiration, orbiting, as Verlaine was in those days, around the great Arthur Rimbaud, then at the zenith of his powers. That was, of course, before the crowning scandal—one of many—in which, amid allegedly unsavory living arrangements and other rumors, Verlaine shot and wounded Rimbaud, went to prison, found God, and (notwithstanding his late acceptance by the Académie) now continues, with stunning single-mindedness, his lifelong slide from grace. It is a siege that continues even to this day, where this habitué of the night divides his time (so we are told) between
the city’s charity hospitals, its various night pantries, and those dim warrens in which dazed figures imbibe chartreuse drinks.

  Then came the kind of accusation that sears itself upon the author’s brain:

  Can it be that Verlaine now seeks redemption by publishing, without his knowledge, and perhaps without recompense, the work of the disappeared Rimbaud, last seen in the wastes of Africa? In the meantime, bereft of his muse, Verlaine writes and writes, and it must be said that rarely does he write an overtly bad or unmusical line. But, we might ask—of what? Despite promising moments and the occasionally striking line, these poems emerge like the efforts of an old dray horse, horse apples pummeling the cobbles as onward he plods.

  As Verlaine closed the review, his hands were trembling; his face was hot, his ears were ringing, and now tears welled in his eyes, tears of rage and humiliation—wild grief as he flung down the review and stormed out. Sagesse, his latest effort, was at best a middling book—of course. Naturally, his best work was long behind him—he knew that. Why, then, did this young turd have to make invidious comparisons to Rimbaud? To call his whole artistic life, even his very impulse, into question? Did any artist deserve such treatment?

  That night, wedged in the corner of a bucket house on the rue de Fourcy, Verlaine might well have been mistaken for a mortuary figure. Grief—it was the heart gripped in a winepress. Failure—asphyxiation. Death—one last gasp after the peerless skater crashes through winter’s ice. And yet, at bottom, this was a deeper form of paralysis, a relapse, really. “Mon grand péché radieux,” Verlaine had once called Rimbaud, “my great radiant sin.” Banished by love, Verlaine was doing at long last the very thing that for years he never permitted himself—truly grieving for Rimbaud and the dreams that had died in Brussels seventeen years before, when he, Verlaine, had shot his muse. Shot him to prevent him from leaving just as suddenly and willfully as he had appeared twenty-two months before.

  Seventeen years earlier, not only was Rimbaud wrapped in gleaming youth and genius but he was perched upon the heartless redoubt of twenty—of course he held all the power. He was not, like his lover, a fool in a foreign country who—thanks to him—had bankrupted himself, lost his wife and child, and destroyed his career. Nor was he the grown man who had followed, almost without question, this kid now resolved to leave him in Belgium. To leave him cold without a second thought.

  This was the same mesmeric kid who, little more than a year before, had promised Verlaine that their love was forever, destiny, historic, even. Who told Verlaine apropos his wife, Choose: either her or me. As for little Georges, screw the brat—die a bourgeois or come with me, now, to change life.

  Ever the ditherer and compromiser, Verlaine didn’t want to leave Mathilde and his child or, heaven forbid, Mathilde’s money and creature comforts. Yet here he was, in Belgium, after Paris, after London, after Charleville and God knows where, a man now penniless and facing catastrophe, having followed a cyclone into the land of whirlwinds. Still more humiliatingly for Verlaine, it was Rimbaud—by default, the “realist” in this couple—who had to tell the grown man that their fugitive, hand-to-mouth existence was now pointless, ridiculous and unsustainable. Worse, said Rimbaud, it was repetitive, and repetition, needless to say, was death. Death, the stupid drunken rows and run-ins with the law. Death, the sleeping in barns and under bridges, the running out on rents.

  “But look,” said Rimbaud on that terrible night, in the five minutes it took him to stuff his things, like trash, into a dirty canvas sack. “Look,” he told Verlaine, “you’ve got poems in your pockets, great poems beyond anything you’ve ever done. There it is, mate—your reputation.” He smiled. “Go on now, no long face. Admit it. You got what you wanted, right?”

  “Wanted!” cried Verlaine. “What is wrong with you! I love you. That is what I wanted, your love, your caresses, your thoughts. Can you be this stupid and unfeeling, you with your beguiling nonsense about reinventing love? Creating an alphabet for feelings? God! What an idiot I have been! What an arsehole!”

  “Can you possibly be this naïve?” countered the former idealist who, in those two years, had grown into a large, big-handed hooligan, as rough and crude in real life as he was peerless on the page. He had certainly inherited his mother’s flare for belligerent ridicule. “Good Christ, enough of your whining. I told you at the outset this road would bring suffering.”

  “But you were never this vicious,” said Verlaine.

  “And you were never so clueless. So much of a baby.”

  For two days it had gone like this, but now, when Rimbaud finally reached for the door, swaying, drunk, Verlaine pulled out—or snagged rather, from his coat pocket—the cheap, ridiculous little pistol that he’d purchased only that morning in a pawnshop. It was an insult, a toy. But here it was, pointed at Rimbaud’s chest, a little black finger, drifting from side to side.

  “Oh, of course,” sneered Rimbaud, “now for the real theatrics! Connard! Goddamnit, Verlaine, give me that limp dick. You’re completely pissed!”

  “Don’t,” said Verlaine, trembling. “Don’t go out that door! And don’t you dare laugh at me, you miserable little prick!”

  “And do you think,” threatened Rimbaud, taking a step forward to grab the thing, “do you think, bitch—do you actually think you can scare me with this?”

  “Stop! Back! Stop—”

  Bap. Puff of smoke, a small dog’s cough—nothing. Confused, Verlaine looked at the gun, then lurched around and saw Rimbaud now white and dripping blood, fat red beads, splattering the floor. It was amazing, Arthur Rimbaud bereft of words, without comeback, sneer, or answer. When, whump, the kid crumpled, like a fallen child. Cheap gun, thought Verlaine, it just went off. Slipping on the blood, Verlaine shimmied down on his knees, weeping and shrieking, clutching Rimbaud around the neck, peering into his guttering eyes. Then, afraid he might be dead, Verlaine ran bloody and stumbling down the hallway, bellowing quite as if he were the victim, “Help! Help!”

  49 Rocky Redemption

  Shooting Rimbaud, his muse, the very Sun—this for Verlaine had been the first blow. The second, in jail hours later, was to learn that, with barely a squeeze from the coppers, the squealing little Judas had given him up. Told them everything. There it was, lying before him on the police sergeant’s desk, signed, in Rimbaud’s own hand. “Here is your guarantee,” said the sergeant, triumphantly shaking this denunciation. “With this, sodomite, you will know well the inside of our jail. Your insides will know it too, eh?”

  Then came the third blow—delirium tremens, teeth-gritting spasms so sudden, so violent, that Verlaine felt as if he were being clubbed about the ribs. And yet even as he was in extremis, with even greater enthusiasm the cops pressed him, demanding, in lurid detail, the legally irrelevant facts of their relationship.

  Maniacs! thought Verlaine as he lay in his bunk, teeth chattering, gripping his hemorrhaging sides. By then he had confessed, wept, groveled—to no avail. For on the third day the gray police ferrets produced two telegrams, one from Mathilde and another from the Paris police—vile accusations and all quite true, unfortunately. Then an hour later came the final blow. This was the arrival of the jail doctor, Victor Vleminckx, a thick-backed, no-necked, mustached little man who got right to work, pulling gleaming, worrisome articles from his black doctor’s bag.

  “Strip,” he said. “Everything.” The doctor looked first at the coppers, then at Verlaine. “And, prisoner, do not mistake me for Hippocrates. When I examine you, you will not move or speak. Or look at me. Excrement! This is what you are to me, do you understand?”

  Naked and craggy-eyed, the prisoner stood dazed on the cold concrete, bloated and lard white, covered with whorls of thick red hair.

  “I said, uncover,” ordered the doctor, when Verlaine attempted, wrongly, to conceal his privates. “Hands at your sides! Your sides!”

  Verlaine watched—the three policemen, too—as Dr. Victor Vleminckx, bending close, took the flaccid tip of his penis, pu
lled it taut, then, taking out his ruler, measured it for edification of the court: precisely 9.25 centimeters. Alas, not overlarge.

  “Hands at your side! Stand up!”

  The doctor now had a pad out. Blew his nose. Readjusted his glasses, tiny, light-leaking lozenges. Furiously, he sketched, for some time actually, his nose whistling. Finally, reversing the pad, he presented Verlaine with the hairy, bestial-looking result.

  “Prisoner, is this … your penis?”

  Verlaine was agog.

  “I said, is this your penis? Good. Then sign and date it, and I warn you, prisoner, do not tremble the pen for sympathy. Then, listen to me, you will pass it to the officers for their signatures.”

  “Doctor,” protested the sergeant, “we cannot sign this likeness.” The three cops burst into laughter. “This is far too large!”

  “Enough! E-nough!”

  Dr. Victor Vleminckx now had in his tiny hands some kind of long, grooved mechanical contraption, some kind of telescope or speculum, that the doctor might scowl into the foul, black recesses of the prisoner’s soul. “You, Monsieur, will bend over. Over. Over the table—relax. Wider. Sergeant, note—you see, do you not, how distended it is. Red. Revolting. Do you not see? 3.4 centimeters of incessant buggery, you will attest—”

  Dripping was heard. Black liquid …

  “Ucch,” said the doctor, wiping the fouled tool. “Wretched pig.” The door slammed.

  Gone, all of them gone, and Verlaine was just as they had left him—sprawled on the desk, naked and defeated, smashed to bits. Wheezing and sobbing, gasping, he couldn’t defend himself; at that moment, he was powerless even to dress or clean himself, and so Verlaine wept for his weakness and helplessness, anything to vomit out this demon, this darkness that stabbed him to his soul. Guttural it emerged, a deep, room-inhabiting groan of horror, a birthing sound that grew to a wail as he broke into hysterical confession, a dithyramb of frantic, heartsick collapse: