Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  Two weeks passed, then a third, by which point Rimbaud was like a flower blooming in reverse. His arm spavined and his hand twisted like a withered leaf. Even the tingles went numb, until one morning, with a start, he told Isabelle:

  “I want to return to Marseille. Tomorrow, and no arguing.”

  So they left the next morning, and as the carriage was being made ready, Mme. Rimbaud, in her guilt and paralysis, announced the incredible:

  “I told them to hitch up Countess”—this was her own mare, the dappled silver. So the old mother said to the cobwebs, as her son, who might have been a chair, stared with great fixity out the window, then said to the door:

  “It’s time to go.”

  “We have time,” said Isabelle. “Come, come, you two. Surely you have things to say to each other.”

  “Everything has been said,” replied the mother, fixing on a lint speck on the sideboard.

  “Indeed so,” said the son to the wall clock. “Time to go.”

  Certainly this would be the last time, in life, that mother and son would see each other. Nothing had been said, of course, but it was clear she would not be going to Marseille for the end. And yet, as the mother and son stood at that precipice, the strangest thing was how, latent in their pride and hatred, there was love of a kind, a duality trapped in time, frozen for all eternity, like two bees in a lump of amber.

  “Au revoir, mon enfant.”

  “Au revoir, Maman.”

  “Monsieur Rimbaud,” said one of the hands as they wheeled him outside. With his hat the man gestured to the clouds, darkening rather ominously. “You’re sure, Monsieur?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” he said irritably. Humped over in his chair, he might have been a doubled-over rug. “Isabelle, come on.”

  Isabelle shook the reins. Recalcitrant horse. Barely had Isabelle coaxed Countess out into the road than the old beast, missing the Madame, stopped dead, her ears twitching. Isabelle shook the reins. She tried sweet, then stern. All her life she’d struggled with horses.

  “Isabelle,” fumed Rimbaud. “Don’t tickle her. Give her some whip!”

  The Voncq station was only some five kilometers away, not far, but it started to rain and blow, then thunder. There came a sharp crack. The sky went white. Spooked, the old horse reared, then backed up.

  “Give her the whip,” said Rimbaud.

  “She’s too frightened. We should wait.”

  “Then give me the whip!”

  Water was pouring off the gig’s black bonnet, spewing down his back. It was a ghost Rimbaud saw, that of his old self, the caravan boss, the sea captain of the desert. He took the whip in his one, not very good, arm. He whipped at the old horse—he tried and tried—but the whip end didn’t crack. Rather, it danced like a fly, until he collapsed in a ball of shivering, wet exhaustion. How they got to the station he had no idea. The next thing he knew, he felt wriggling hands, people’s hands, lifting him down. Bloody hopeless. The train was long gone.

  “No!” he said, shaking, when Isabelle proposed hiring a horse ambulance to take them home. “I am not going back. Ever, do you hear me? Not even if we stay here all night.”

  “Arthur, look, look,” said Isabelle pointing out the train window.

  The next day, nearing sunset, there it lay in the distance, under a mist of violet smoke. Paris, world metropolis, gleaming like a mass of old treasure—steeples, bridges, cupolas of gold. Not for Rimbaud, however. For him now Paris was like poetry, a thing now vacant of interest and void of memories. The dying man never even bothered to look.

  Vagabond hope. At last in Marseille, Rimbaud was reunited with young Michel, with the hollow cheeks, thin, stubbly beard, and brush of dark hair. Staring in that telltale way, on the verge of tears, Rimbaud gripped Michel’s palsied hand as the young man stared back, shocked at how swiftly his patient had deteriorated. Moments later, Dr. Delpech arrived. No quips this time. Leaning down, the doctor felt Rimbaud’s paralyzed side and blooming, malignant bones.

  “What,” asked Rimbaud, trying to be jocular, “no joke for me?”

  “Oh, Monsieur Rimbaud,” sighed the doctor, “the joke is on me, I’m afraid.”

  Stepping back, much like Dr. Colin before him, Dr. Delpech searched the patient’s eyes, then the sister’s. Did they not know? Was it possible? Clearly, they did not, and could not. Even now, they were waiting, as if for news of some patent cure. Some revolutionary treatment.

  “Monsieur Rimbaud, Mademoiselle,” ventured Dr. Delpech, “I was wrong in my diagnosis, very, very wrong, and I am most sorry to have to tell you this—”

  “What?” cried Isabelle “What?”

  Already she was weeping, arms draped around her brother’s neck. As for him, the Great Criminal, the One Accused, he didn’t feel frightened. He just felt angry. Embarrassed. Furious at himself for having been so desperate and stupid—so blind, swallowing the greasy elixir of hope.

  “I only hope it is soon.”

  But this, of course, was not Rimbaud’s final word on the matter. Later, when he was calmer, Isabelle wheeled him around the gravel path in his wheelchair. Otherworldly, the twisted, almost tonsorial cypresses, the pale blue air, and, beyond, the blue, blue sea. In the sun, fat bees bobbed over trumpets of pink and red hibiscus. The rubber tires crackled in the cinders, and the dying man watched how his long, maundering shadow saturated, with his own life seepage, the gravel and blades of grass. In shock. Rimbaud looked back at his sister, so healthy, so beautiful, so alive. Then said not so much in anger or envy as in utter wonderment:

  “And now I shall go down under the ground, while you will walk in the sun.”

  58 Last Rites

  With any long death, there is the long and really long version. Or, in this case, the serviceably short version, for the end was not long.

  Within a few weeks, as death pressed in, Rimbaud was not only snowbound with his malady but besieged with God and priests and Isabelle. This was the even more pious Isabelle preparing her brother for heaven. In this respect, her mother had made a deep imprint.

  “Arthur,” she said for the hundredth time, “you cannot die out of grace! Quit being so pigheaded! You must reconcile with God, you must. Do you want to perish in hell? That thought is unbearable to me. Terrifying, for then I shall never see you!”

  “And what has my life stood for?” he replied. “Freedom, not fear and muttering superstition. What, crawling back to God? No! For the last time, no!”

  “Arthur, stop it, you’re being hateful, hateful.” Isabelle had toughened up these last weeks. “Do you want to die like this? Like her? Stubborn and mean and vengeful? Is this what you want?”

  Entreaties went only so far, however. Two priests formed the second wave—eminent priests, too, the Canon Chaulier and Abbé Suche. Isabelle told them about her brother’s wicked and colorful past, his stubbornness and fame. The priests listened with deep attention. Pastorally speaking, the poet was quite a catch.

  “Let the Inquisition begin,” said Rimbaud weakly when the two priests entered in their ankle-length black cassocks and white collars. This was Isabelle’s cue to leave—God’s dragoons had arrived. Canon Chaulier, in particular, a man of sixty, bald, with tufted gray sideburns, the canon was not one for small talk.

  “Monsieur Rimbaud,” he said, “you know, of course, of Pascal’s wager.”

  The patient rolled his eyes.

  “Yes, yes,” hastened the canon, “of course you do, but please bear with me. To refresh your memory, Pascal says that God’s existence cannot be proven through reason. Perhaps. But the smart gambler would wager that God does exist. For after all, if the gambler bets wrong and there is no God, well, so what? But if his bet proves correct and he stays true, he avoids hell and gains the fruits of heaven. So tell me, then. What do you have to lose by embracing God? By confessing and taking Holy Communion? What?”

  “I’ve always disliked that argument,” interjected the abbé, seeing too clearly that this particular appeal was not gettin
g through. The abbé was a harder and more common man of peasant stock, broad-backed, with a pinched face and strong hands. “Canon, excuse me, but the idea of God and dice—well, clever certainly. But I’ve always found it a bit distasteful.”

  “A trifle old-fashioned,” added Rimbaud, grateful for an ally.

  But then the abbé seized the moment—got down close to the patient. “You see, Monsieur, in my way of thinking, and from how your sister describes it, it is really very simple in your case. Your life, your sins, your state of mind, if I were a betting man, I would wager that all your difficulties stem from one thing. Ah,” he said, catching Rimbaud’s now worried eye, “and what is that one thing, you ask? You, Monsieur, you are arrogant. Towering in your arrogance. Everybody sees it. Forgive me, but you reek of arrogance. Why, I saw it just now. The moment I laid eyes on you. And, believe me, Monsieur, not because I am so very perceptive.”

  Rimbaud seemed utterly shocked at this accusation. “At one time,” he admitted, “once, yes, when I was very young, but not now. Not as I am today. Not really.”

  “At one time!” mocked the priest, now almost nose to nose. “Please, do not insult me or your own intelligence. You are arrogant, still arrogant. Filled with arrogance. Ruled and blinded by arrogance. Just look at yourself. You are being arrogant right now. And for what? You, of all people, have nothing to be arrogant about—not now. Money, earthly attainments—meaningless now. Your body—already leaving you. As for your intelligence—no longer of value, an impediment, in fact. Leave all that, I say. Arrogance is not strength. Arrogance is just another mask for fear, a form of it. No, your arrogance cannot help you. Face it. You are going to die imminently, and I say to you, I ask of you like a brother”—his voice fell to a whisper—“put it down. Your arrogance is poison. Drain the pus from your soul. Let it out. Your arrogance is a mask. Tear it off. Look at you. Here you are in God’s pantry, in a room filled with good things to eat, yet here you are, in your shameful arrogance, your ridiculous pride, starving yourself.”

  It was too much. In misery, Rimbaud turned his head away. “I’m sorry,” he gasped, now playing the invalid card. “I’m very—sorry. Tomorrow, perhaps. Too—too tired now. Please. Too tired …”

  He fell asleep, the dying man, then sank swiftly, fathoms and fathoms, into the bent land of dreams. Primordial dreams. Child dreams, before poetry and all the disappointments and manic departures of his life. Before childhood died and the sun, too. Before Abyssinia further blackened his heart. In his dream now he is shin level with life, a small child just opening life’s bright, wide door.

  Tall rye. Insects singing. Young, green rye heads swaying in the breeze. And sun, splashes of sun, sun everywhere. Age two or three, he is chasing his mother in the whiskery tall grass at the edge of the rye field. Tricks, she is playing tricks, and he, tiny boy, is squealing with excitement because of the grasshoppers. Scratchy, fat-bellied grasshoppers. Grasshoppers filled with gacky brown grasshopper spit—the grasshoppers now whirring before him, dozens, flying like woodchips from an axe. It is his mother who makes them fly. Causing them, just as she causes the water of the stream, her stream, to ripple and burble and come to her. A small boy twirling and squealing. Grasshoppers! Catch them! Chase them!

  Whirring grasshoppers with wings of light. Grasshoppers that cling to Maman’s skirt, his maman, because she called them, the grasshoppers, and Maman’s skirt has folds to grab, a mother mountain that feels soft and warm on his face. Please, Mother, please, please pick me up. Up into that sweet, pure sundrop of once, before everybody changed and everything fell apart.

  And when he awoke from this dream, feebly, he called for Isabelle, then wept and hugged her. Trembling, eyes drooling, anything but arrogant, he held his sister’s hand, waiting for the immense thing about to come. And although Isabelle, in her well-meaning way, went on to fabricate many things, she did not exaggerate the sincerity of her heathen brother’s deathbed conversion. In all meekness, before Canon Chaulier and Abbé Suche, Arthur Rimbaud sincerely made his confession and was given the last rites. He tried to take Communion. He tried—repeatedly—but like a boy trying to whistle could not coax out his tongue.

  Was it God, then? Did God do it? Did God change his heart?

  Because that next day, somehow, Arthur Rimbaud was not angry, not haughty, but just a self-surrendering human, waiting almost open-mouthed for death like a baby for his first spoonful of food. Truly, he was, as they say—or so it seemed—in the hands of God, a man unencumbered and now at peace with where he was going.

  In fact, the day before he died, Rimbaud dictated to Isabelle a letter to the Aphinar Line, a ship company never heard of, or not in this life. In that letter, addressed to M. le Directeur, Rimbaud declared that he, a poor cripple, intended to book passage to Africa, passing east over the equator into the rising sun. God knew the azimuth.

  He died the next morning around ten o’clock.

  Epilogue

  “MY DEAR VITALIE TO MY RIGHT, AND

  MY POOR ARTHUR TO MY LEFT …”

  —MME. RIMBAUD’S BURIAL WISHES, JUNE 1, 1900

  Blazing Constellation

  As for Widow Rimbaud, having waited a month for her news, and having a full month to plan, she was well prepared when Arthur’s mahogany casket finally arrived in Charleville. Indeed, she had a whole troupe of mourners prepared. And in a display commensurate with her guilt, for the first time since their balloon ride in London, the Widow did not stint.

  Through the streets of Charleville, her son was borne in a black hearse of wood and glass and polished silver, a sort of mortuary music box drawn by four coal black horses with polished silver harnesses and, over their ears, tall black festoons that caused the poor blinkered beasts, much like dogs in costume, to snort and bounce their heads. As for the mourning party, mother and daughter and Mme. Shade, they rode in a sleek black coach with squinty windows through which they could peer, or peck, as necessary, at the town’s queer inhabitants. Mercifully, without the public sordidness of being seen.

  Officiating, there was Abbé Gillet from Rimbaud’s old collège, followed by a drum beater and four robed cantors. Nor was that all. For after them came a cotillion of black-robed choirboys, then a frocked beadle in a cocked hat bearing his silver-globed staff, then a bell ringer, an undertaker, and, of course, the bibulous gravedigger, presumably the same who left all those rocks, for he was already quite festive.

  Oh yes, and twenty somber orphan girls clutching candles.

  “Sad, do you hear me?” insisted the Widow when she hired them. “I want dour girls, unstained, no older than twelve. No stinkers or nose borers. And you will make sure they are all duly confessed and have not drunk or eaten or done anything that will preclude all twenty from taking Communion. All of them. And no sneaking off to the toilets …”

  This, then, was the bell-ringing, tom-tomming retinue that marched grimly all through the town, then to the Church of Saint-Rémy, where they were met by a thunderous pipe organ and a full choir. All rosy-cheeked prepubescent boys.

  In all, there were some forty-seven people, all hired—with, of course, the three mourners, the Widow and Isabelle and Mme. Shade. Only them. Naturally, the Widow had put no notice in the paper, and as there was no one to invite, this made it clean, thought the Widow, very clean. No boo-hooing, no snoops, and no shiftless relatives with their hands out.

  Indeed, except for the two little orphan girls who wet themselves and three others who fainted from standing—well, it all went tolerably well.

  Ironically, the day Rimbaud died his collected poems, entitled Reliquaire, appeared, only to be the subject of a dispute between the two editors, who then had the book withdrawn from public circulation.

  Some weeks later, though, soon after the news of Rimbaud’s death had swept literary Paris, the very charmed Champsaur saw to it that Verlaine’s interview came out—naturally, at the very peak of the public frisson.

  Actually, Champsaur’s interview was for the most part an
exceedingly fair and faithful record of their discussion. Not that this pleased Verlaine, but then how could it? How could it feel to recall, publicly, those days of love, glory, and abandon, only to lose everything—wife, son, reputation, inheritance? And, cruelest of all, to lose the boy who had brought him glory and damnation, both.

  In the afternoon sun, strolling down the boulevard Saint-Michel, Verlaine tapped his cane, tock, tock, tock. Red beard shining, his bowler hat pulled down just over his eyes, ambling, he might have been mistaken for a burlap-covered cotton bale, the bum lord greeting his public. But, whatever else, the great man was not alone, for there at his arm was Eugénie, the very picture of a tart. Naughty plaid skirt. Saucy hat. And, of course, the gleaming, rapier-like black boots over which many a naked gentleman on his knees had spat and worked the rag to a fare-thee-well.

  “I sound like a selfish monster,” complained Verlaine, still ranting about Champsaur’s interview. “And a fool—a patsy. Are you listening to me? It’s embarrassing.”

  “Come now.” Eugénie hated it when adults played pretend. “Rimbaud led you by the nose, and like an ass you admitted it to Champsaur. I told you not to drink so much.”

  “But, God knows,” he fumed, “look what Rimbaud gained from me. My tutelage. My many friends and contacts. Not to mention my money.”

  Eugénie stopped short.

  “Paul! You’re a bloody goddamned Immortal—enough of your whining. I thought what Champsaur wrote was fair. More than fair.” Then, like a cat flexing her claws, her mien turned mischievous. “And I must say he was beautiful, that Félicien Champsaur. Gorgeous.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” said Verlaine, detecting a sybaritic flicker in her eye. In his horror at that moment, his face suggested a freshly shucked oyster. “The way he looked at you! Now I see! Some assignation, was it? Was that it?”

  “So what if I did?” she replied. “You threw me over. These pretty boys, they love a nasty treat!”