Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  Arthur, though, was exceedingly pleasant, Vitalie reported, much kinder and more interested than usual—why, almost like a brother. He took great pleasure in showing them the sights of London, planned things, escorted them everywhere, often for hours at a time. Still more incredible, their mother was spending fantastic sums. Eating in restaurants. Riding in horse cabs. All this was impossible enough. But then came the most extraordinary expenditure of all.

  On their second week, walking in Regent’s Park, Arthur led them through a chestnut grove, into a wide, rolling green. And, gazing up, they saw it, a great globe taller than the trees and almost bigger than a house. Five stories high, it was a great air balloon painted with a face, a clown’s face, covered with a net of heavy ropes suspending a wicker basket in which stood a portly, red-faced man dressed in a swallowtailed coat and peeling top hat. Arthur wandered over, fascinated.

  Good heavens, thought Mme. Rimbaud, was Arthur interested in air balloons now? God only knew. Yet here he was, peppering the balloonist with questions.

  “Arthur, tell the man,” broke in his mother suddenly in French. “Arthur, tell him we wish to take a turn.” The boy stared at her in shock. “Oui, oui,” she prodded, “go on, ask him.”

  “But, Maman,” he replied, thinking she did not understand. “He’s saying two guineas for half an hour.” Quite a sum.

  “Fine, then, two guineas.” Mme. Rimbaud turned to her eldest daughter. “Vitalie, we’ll all ride in the balloon. The three of us. Won’t that be amusing?”

  Amusing? Under her flat straw hat, Vitalie was as spooked by her mother’s sudden agreeableness and largesse as by this balloon with the clown face—a horrid, leering English clown, she wrote, practically all lips.

  Mme. Rimbaud had no such reservations. As Arthur and the balloonist each took an elbow, Mme. Rimbaud, heaping up her skirts, climbed into the great wicker basket. Two men began cranking the greasy black winch. Slowly, the gasbag bobbed and swayed. Ropes creaked, and up they went, up over the trees and over the fairway, bobbing and swaying in the strong currents, all three holding their hats, especially Vitalie, squinting and peering up, ribbons twirling.

  “Hold on, Madame,” said the balloonist, gesturing so she would understand. “There’s some wind about today.”

  Manfully, Arthur held a rope, and his mother clutched his arm, actually touched him, unprecedented, as up they rose, to the point they could see clear across London, over the harbor forested with the last wooden-masted ships and a myriad of iron steamers. And look, said the mother, pointing, for if you looked hard, curving over the horizon, under the gray clouds, wasn’t that the snowlike sheen of the sea? It was not, as Arthur endeavored to explain, rather professorially. Couldn’t be, the sea was too far. No, insisted his mother, look, it was the sea, the sea, and her face appeared so animated, so momentarily young, that he thought how charming that she thought so, quite as if she were a normal person, a woman clapping her bosom, say, thrilled by some soaring song.

  Look, look! Freely Mme. Rimbaud walked from side to side, and brightly, for those thirty minutes suspended over London, there existed between her and her son a kind of truce, quite as if she were another mother and he, another son.

  Years later, on the train to Marseille, recalling this old story about the balloon, Isabelle looked at the old woman and thought, Where? Where, in God’s name, was that lady now? Trapped, she thought, and this made Isabelle feel deeply sad. Cheated, that for even one glimpse of happiness, her mother had had to cross the sea, then take her wounded son up into the sky.

  “Marseeeeeille!” cried the conductor. Isabelle froze; the old woman did, too. “Marseeeeeeeeeille! Marseeille in fifteen minutes!”

  52 Family Reunion

  “Monsieur!” In the doorway, Michel bore a look of alarm. “They’re here.”

  “Who?”

  Rimbaud knew, of course. Straightaway, Michel sat him up.

  “Oww—” His missing leg, the phantom, was radiating pain, blue red in color and sizzling like a just-struck gong. Rimbaud then felt slapping motions. Michel was combing his hair.

  “Enough.” Rimbaud ducked. “Makes me feel like a horse.”

  Ignoring him, Michel finished. Handed him his kufi skullcap.

  “She looks scared.” He eyed Rimbaud. “Your mother does.”

  “I doubt that. Rarely is she scared.”

  “Well, she is.” Again, he pushed the kufi at him.

  “No, no.”

  Rimbaud shook his head. “Mother will find this alarming—Muslim.”

  “Like I said. Scared.”

  Rimbaud, too. For him now, it wasn’t just the missing leg or being crippled. It was the idea, minus the leg, of weighing less and even being less, and not just in weight of flesh but in life and force. My life doesn’t weigh enough. If only, he thought, his mother could have seen his big life in Africa, beasts and men in a caravan under his command. If only Djami were with him, Djami, his son, splendid in his white robes. Or Tigist—that he could shock her, not merely with Tigist’s youth and shocking beauty but with his daring even to “be” with a native woman. Then, when these wishes ran dry, the patient thought if only she could see the floridly engraved bank draft now sitting in the hospital safe. Over forty thousand francs—the proof. No more mooching. Not for him.

  “Enough.” Rimbaud gripped his sides. “Fetch them, please.”

  “And no kufi?”

  “No kufi.”

  Yet no sooner had Michel left the room than Rimbaud changed his mind—grabbed the kufi and was endeavoring to center it when, to his embarrassment, his mother entered.

  “Arthur.” Mme. Rimbaud froze at the sight of this Muslim with the unsanitary mustache, so thin and clipped. Vile thing, it made her nose itch. “Dear God,” she gasped, “it’s you. It’s really you.” Briefly, she misted up. But then, instead of going to him, the old woman spun around. Reinforcements were needed. Veering for the door, she called down the hall, “Isabelle!”

  Horsey girl. Skirt swinging, Isabelle no sooner arrived than she burst into tears, swallowing him in her hot, sticky embrace. It wasn’t just her brother’s safe return or the amputated leg that triggered such an abundance of emotion. At last Isabelle Rimbaud had a mission in life—him.

  Away, Roche, manure pile! Meddlesome, complaining old woman—go to hell! Ever since the news of his return, and then the revelation of his literary fame, Isabelle Rimbaud had been plotting her new life as her brother’s secretary, confidante, and eventual biographer. Isabelle Rimbaud, witness to genius! Nurse. Adviser. Amanuensis.

  Nor was that all. What with the inevitable travel, the various fetes, awards, and ceremonies, Isabelle Rimbaud, long given up for dead as wife material, she knew she would meet her future husband and that he would be no village bonehead but rather, an educated man, a literary man. A good Catholic man, too. Odious as Catholicism had seemed for so many years, under her mother’s almost galvanic influence, Isabelle was now quite religious, especially in her devotion to the Lord Jesus. How inspired her eventual husband would be by her example, she thought, a woman showing fealty not only to the Lord but to her brother, who was not only a great French poet, but—she was convinced—a great Christian poet and lay missionary. Truly a modern saint helping to raise up the noirs of Abyssinia. She even had a working title: Arthur Rimbaud: Saint parmi les sauvages.

  Not that Isabelle’s brother was aware of this—any of this—yet. But he would be soon enough, thought Isabelle. His healthy recovery and religious legacy, indeed his reintegration into polite French society, it was all in her capable hands.

  Fools rush in, thought the old woman, aghast at Isabelle’s shameless theatrics. How could she top a show like this? And why ever would she? added Mme. Shade. Having to feel. What to feel? she sighed to Mme. Shade. Quite as if the old mother must have a special milk gland for these fool males, disappearing only to reappear on their last gasp with all these pent-up feelings.

  Still, she was a mother and, stupid or not, the wor
ld had its expectations. She couldn’t give her son nothing.

  “Look at you,” the mother offered after some blank seconds, then thought, Look at you what? Then, seeing the vanished leg, the old woman felt a more familiar and comforting feeling—rage. Idiot! Dismissing it all as varicose veins!

  Say something.

  “Son,” she said, “this is a very hard thing.” Again she stopped—quite blank. Then, prompted by the inventive Mme. Shade, she fibbed, “How much you have been in my prayers.”

  And came forward. Patted him tentatively, once, on the shoulder, followed by one more, last, eloquent pat—all you get. But in her son’s ravaged state, even this was too much.

  “Moth—” he croaked, coughing up all the sand in the desert.

  “Mother—”

  And broke down, vomiting his grief. “Come come, son,” she said—some earlier, dream self said—“such antics will not do.”

  Antics?

  Rimbaud stared at her in disbelief. Did she not realize that he was crying for her—that now he could love her? That now he wanted to care for her?

  “Daughter,” said the mother abruptly, plucking at Isabelle’s sleeve. “Daughter, let us step outside until your brother is—until he is feeling better.”

  But this was the new Isabelle. She leapt up, red-faced.

  “You step out, Maman. Leave—leave if you must, you’re excused. But I will remain here. With my brother.”

  But then, as these things go, as Mme. Rimbaud was heading for the door, naturally the ebullient Dr. Delpech appeared with Michel. Pop eyes darting, Michel immediately sensed the tension.

  “Ah, Monsieur Rimbaud,” said the doctor, “your family is here.” He obliged the old woman with an abbreviated bow. “Madame Rimbaud, so very—”

  “—Widow Rimbaud,” she corrected.

  “Oh, dear,” he replied, “I’m very sorry. Was your loss recent?”

  Isabelle smirked. Even Rimbaud betrayed a smile.

  “Is this pertinent?” sputtered the matriarch, now feeling preyed upon. She then seized upon Michel with his mulish expression and knobby wrists. “And who,” she asked imperiously, “who are you?”

  “I’m Michel, Mad—Madame—I mean, Veu-ve Rimbaud. Michel. The orderly.” Then with typical solicitude, he asked her, “Are you all right?”

  “All right?” she snapped. “Don’t be impertinent. Of course I am all right. The question is, is my son all right. Well, Doctor?”

  Dr. Delpech was unfazed by this attack of maternal nerves. On the contrary. The doctor thrived on such “educative moments.”

  “Well, Madame,” he replied, “considering where your son was four days ago, I would say he is doing marvelously. Right where he should be.”

  “Doctor,” she said, cupping one ear, “did I hear you say marvelously? My son has no leg and you say he is doing marvelously?” Muttering, the Widow fished her hankie from her sleeve. Blew her nose. Then, red-eyed, promptly exited the room.

  Two days later, they were in the sun-filled aerie, Rimbaud, Isabelle, and Michel. Opposite them Mme. Rimbaud sat knitting. For the recently disabled, it was here, in the aerie—“the circus,” Rimbaud called it nervously—that simple life tasks became small feats.

  Across the room, for example, a red-faced, one-armed man was practicing putting on a shirt. He knelt. Gently, with his open shirt facing him, he inserted the left arm in the left sleeve and the right stump in the right. Then, flipping the shirt like a cape, commenced to button it with one hand and even his teeth. Rimbaud found it deeply absorbing, even moving, to see the various cripples here overcoming such daily trials. But the idea that he might befriend someone in his situation—that he might share his struggles or help another—this was unthinkable, as if he, too, were a cripple. Nonetheless, Rimbaud was now in the center ring—a man with one leg endeavoring to manage, simultaneously, two crutches.

  “Steady,” said Isabelle, bracing his left arm while Michel took the right. “Go on. You can do this …”

  But with no leg, no ballast, Rimbaud’s unpracticed body was woefully off-kilter. He lurched. He twirled. Then, with the next step, he almost toppled over, before Michel and Isabelle caught him.

  “God help me,” he fumed. “What am I, a bloody ballerina?”

  “Don’t make fun of yourself,” scolded Michel. “Only makes it worse.”

  “But my arm. It feels like it’s being sawn off.” Ominously, it was the right arm, on the same side as the missing leg. “Why should it be bothering me—why? Doesn’t it make you wonder?”

  “Arthur,” scolded Isabelle, now echoing Dr. Delpech, “you’re always so negative.”

  “Why negative? Because I accurately report how I feel?” Rimbaud turned to the old woman. “Mother, am I any better today? Any?”

  She kept to her knitting. “Well, don’t ask me.” She brought the yarn around. “Ask Dr. Don’t Worry. He claims you’re doing splendidly.”

  “I know, but what do you think?”

  “Don’t,” she warned, drawing in her chin, “don’t ask me what I think. You do not want to know what I think.”

  “What? Tell me.”

  “Very well, then.” Pushing up her glasses, she said flatly, “Not good.” Then added in exasperation, “Well, you asked.”

  He blurted out: “My life is over!”

  And again, he was weeping, blindly, helplessly weeping, he who led caravans. It was too much for the old woman. Moments later, when he looked up, she was gone.

  Bad as his days could be, the nights were worse. Once in bed, flat on his back, he might as well have been shackled. It was then that his past swept back over him, in particular the period in his late adolescence when he had renounced poetry—his first amputation, as it were.

  Certainly it had required eerie discipline, sawing off his talent, drowning his angel. And after poetry, then what? Doing what? Living for what? Why?

  Actually, it was very much like being crippled, that period when he first gave up poetry. It was not his life anymore. All the locks had been changed, the doors, too. Almost everything had to be rebuilt and relearned; unlearned, too—like French. First, he had to confuse his mother tongue, steal her primacy. And so for several years, in a quiet frenzy, he buried himself in the memorization of foreign languages: German, Italian, Spanish, Russian—anything to keep his spinning mind occupied. Certainly he had inherited his father’s talents as a linguist. Except for Russian, which he found extremely difficult, he could learn almost any language. All in a matter of weeks. Merely by walking. Literally, he would tear his phrase books into chunks, then off he would go, walking for hours, gorging himself on new words and tongues. Good heavens, thought his mother, he was exactly like his father, filling whole notebooks with galactic webs of words and yet more words. Words in any language. All part of one vast universal puzzle, if only he could find the key.

  The son knew little about his father, almost nothing, and yet in its utter unknowingness, the dream was all the more powerful. In Hamburg, in a horse cab, he was beaten unconscious. Then on the Adriatic, in a place of olive trees and glowing dust—magnificent dust like carbonized sun—he was felled by a bolt. Sunstroke, a rabbit punch from God. Later, a roustabout in a circus, feeding the lions stinking raw horsemeat, he almost had his arm taken off. Off because the lion could, and in those coiled eyes laced with golden wires, truly, Rimbaud saw the meaning of life in all its unfathomable meaninglessness.

  And the dream took new forms, violent forms, proof of his manhood. In Greece, a foreman, he struck a man because he was lazy and mendacious. The man and the crew attacked him, beat him without mercy, then left him for dead. This was only the first of several instances in which Rimbaud made the potentially fatal mistake of striking a man in a shame-drenched, revenge-focused male culture. No matter. He was upholding principle, justice, civilization itself. And so part of him was beaten, while, as before, the other part, the one condemned to watch, walked away in disgust. Still looking for a new creed. A new world. Better men
.

  Lying in bed, now almost halved, the older man, the survivor, couldn’t stop thinking about this lost period, wandering the world, then the Abyssinian deserts, looking for any refuge, any livelihood, anything that fit. What now, what now, what now? Even at this late date, he hadn’t given up on the idea of marriage. Perhaps he could return to Abyssinia, find an educated Abyssinian woman, this time a Christian woman, perhaps even a beauty like Tigist. Children? Well, they could “try.” Imagine that—a father. He might even attend church. Take the sacraments. Arise. So thought Lazarus, still hoping for a miracle.

  As for the young Rimbaud, the Rimbaud of twenty, in those last months before Verlaine shot him, about poetry he was consumed by the three D’s—doubt, dread, and disgust. He had his integrity, and he was increasingly horrified by the cynicism, the selfishness, and the rampant irresponsibility of writing, of creating these vain word creatures, these scoops of Adam dust given demonic breath—to do what? To what end? Why, when the world was no better and never would be? Paradoxically, he was at his artistic zenith, and this, too, fed his crisis, that the poems came so easily, almost unbidden, and then almost perfect, like sorcery, as if he were God.

  In this he was not deluded. His arrogance, his doubleness, his duplicity—they were stupendous. Not to mention frightening, his believing, and not without evidence, that his genius verged on the supernatural. And then, of course, Verlaine shot him.

  Lying in his hospital bed in Marseille, the older Rimbaud kept thinking about those terrible days just after the shooting. It was the great crisis of his life. Once the Belgian coppers were through with him, broken and bandaged he fled to Roche, and there in a four-month period, from April to August 1873, he wrote his great adieu and mea culpa to literature, A Season in Hell:

  My health was threatened. Terror came. I used to fall into a sleep of several days, and when up, I continued the saddest dreams. I was ripe for death, and along a road of dangers my weakness led me to the edge of the world and Cimmeria, a land of darkness and whirlwinds.