Disaster Was My God (18 page)

Back, then, to 1870. Back to the time when Rimbaud is fifteen and a half, just before war breaks out. Back to that cold, drafty house with the mansard roof, where the floorboards creak and churn—like the boy’s
bowels—beneath the crushing weight of Mme. Rimbaud’s near-constant agitation.

Bam bam bam
. Down the stairs.

Bam bam bam
. Up again.

Again and again—and a night prowler she was, too.

God! The boy would think, nervously biting his thumb while hunched over Cicero’s
De divinatione
, doesn’t the old witch ever get tired?

Never. For hearing something, anything, with her freak ears, once again she’s bellowing up the stairs:

“Arthur, are you hard at it?”

Observe the boy now in the relatively sunny
before
—before things explode—when his life is as normal, relatively speaking, as it ever will be. Perfect eyes. Perfect hearing. Perfect skin. Hair still cut, nails clean: studious, well dressed, polite. Perhaps most amazing under the circumstances is that fact that behind those angelic blue eyes burns a soul remarkably intact, million-leaved like a great oak lifting its branches, aroused, in the evening wind. And yet, to some, this largeness of soul, this
whatever it is
, is intimidating, and even threatening. Leaving his mother with just one way to control him: keep him employed.

“Arthur, I said hard at it. Hammer and tongs!”

Look at him running to the landing. Blond, pale, and sturdy, he is a psyche awaiting further instructions. Heart beating, he hollers down the narrow, crooked stairs built by the drunken hands of his maternal grandfather, a collector of beef fat and intestines, offals then laboriously boiled to produce nitrates for the manufacture of the munitions used to cut down, by the hundreds, the mutinous masses who rose up in 1848.
Je m’y mets
, he hollers—I’m at it. And so, historically speaking, the Cuifs, say what you will, are profiteer guardians of the public order, solid, crafty, and taxpaying—even while drunk, in the case of Mme. Rimbaud’s father, whose ear holes could have housed a family of warblers. Cuif
père
had never failed to profit from any investment. Nor would his daughter—not with this kid into whom she had sunk tutors, suits, and
books. Why, into whom she had sunk everything, even as she felt him slipping. Yelling again:

“I don’t hear anything up there!”

“Hear
what,
” he says, “the sound of me
thinking
? Calm down, I’m working.”

“None of your cheek, boy! Don’t make me come up there.”

Worse is the increasingly hidden and unknown nature of his “work.” Which for her, of course, is not work at all. And so Mme. Rimbaud has many choice names for her son.

Big shot!

Genius boy.

Prince Milksop!

The Spoiled Prince.

Never mind that studying is his job. At any time on any given day, if only to wake him up—or because a cow has miscarried, or because her piles are throbbing, or because she’s had more bad dreams, or just because—here she comes, rumbling up the narrow attic stairs,
bam bam bam
. When
BAM
, every time, he jumps as the door batters back. Jumps, you see, because he has to wait. Because if he turns and peers around, even in the slightest, she will accuse him of dawdling and daydreaming while here
they
toiled, and all so he, Genius Boy, could think his great thoughts and sit on his royal fanny! And so, to wake him up, she’d give him a shove or whack. Wake up. Grow up, mooch, and never forget: you’re going to make us a pile of money someday.

Worse, she had two lumps: the genius-idiot to study, and the idiot-idiot—this would be Arthur’s brother, Frédéric—to be the genius-idiot’s whipping boy. Frankly, to do what, to her mind, Frédéric was born for, to muck and haul and chop. Why, Frédéric’s
maman
even had a shining vision for her elder son—that of a Paris sewer man in gum boots, rain hat, and oilskins. Picture him, in his small boat, a gondolier poling through Hades of
merde
, using a specially developed shovel-cum-paddle,
un rabot
, both to propel himself and to unclog the converging headwaters of the city’s stupendous waste streams. This subterranean Seine, it needed men with long soup-strainer mustaches and strong
stomachs, indomitable men who could break the blockages caused by logs, murder victims, parasols, butcher slops, and so forth. And don’t overlook the wine corks of Paris, thousands and thousands of corks that, once cleansed of that in which they had been stewed, could be cut down for perfume bottles, then sold to the unsuspecting—yet more revenue! A pension, too! And, of course, steady money for her in her old age. Such were her maternal dreams for Frédéric.

Never mind that Frédéric, but a year older, is of normal, if not above normal, intelligence. Because Frédéric is not Arthur-grade, he is, for her,
l’ours de la famille
—the family bear. Whose labors allow Genius Boy hours of study undisturbed in his Olympian aerie.

Alas, like his long-departed papa, Frédéric is also a drunk-in-training, subject to frightening violent fits. Blackouts, too. Meaning that Frédéric must be kept busy, always, while Arthur studies and the Rimbaud sisters, “the two mice,” mostly hide in their room, whispering with the sound of crackling paper. As one might expect, except for supper, minor chores, and prayers, the girls are never seen, just as they never question, sass, or rock the boat. In short, each child has a favored mode of
egress
against the mother’s near-constant
ingress
. A way to magically disappear.

B
ut what of Madame, now gripped with the terrifying night sweats of menopause? Clammy blankets. Fevered dreams. Rape, pursuit. Thick, gruesome cocks held in much-aggrieved fists … and that
smell
.

Then there is her fear of the all too real, as that morning years ago when her father no sooner pulled out than he spat,
“Merde!”
And, looking down, she thought, I’m bleeding to death! “See, Papa,” she cried, “see what you did! God has seen and now I’m going to die!” “Stupid bitch,” he replied, “you’ve started your monthly.” Squatting, he wiped himself on the bloody sheet. “Now clean it up!”

Such is Madame’s mental proscenium circa 1870. Two teenage males. Males in rut, making horrid sounds and leaving these
stains
. For which—beyond confession, Communion, and abstinence—there is but one remedy: hard work. Work like good lye soap. Work is the way. It is
The Farm Way, and The Farm Way is The Hard Way. And so, to show them, every spring, up from the depths of the barn she would emerge with a swarming basket and a bucket brimming with water. Time for that dreaded annual chore, which, being as there were no real men present, naturally fell to her. And so on her watery knees—as her daughters wailed—one by one, hard by the elbow, she plunged them into the cold, clear water. Spring: time to drown the barn’s gush of kittens, some scarcely the size of mice.

A
nd so it begins again. Every day
again
.

Again, the boy is up in his attic roost, reading for a lark the puerile Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
, possibly the dullest, most megalomaniacal book ever conceived.
Veni, vidi, vici
, I came, I saw, I conquered. Yet another French humiliation: horn-helmeted wild men crushed under the massed shields of Caesar’s legions. Corpses piled in smoking heaps. Vultures feasting. Golden armbands raised to the sky—
Hail Caesar!
When again, downstairs, the Caesarina can be heard bellowing.

“Arthur! Working?”

“Working!”

“No tricks!”

“Working! Working!” He smacks the book.
Goddamn!

Then deep from the bowels of the house, he hears:

“No, Frédéric, you will do it.
You
, I said! Arthur is at his work.”

“But it’s
always
my turn.”

“Because I
said
it is your turn! Now out with you! Out!”

Then,
bam bam bam
. It’s Frédéric, shoving him in the back.

“
Merdeux!
Leaving
me
to shovel your shit! Tell her, you bastard. Stick up for me! Just once!”

“And say what?
What?
”

Bam!

Here she is, flying across the room, slapping Frédéric with both hands. Hysterical, like a bird trapped in a window, she is sputtering, raging, erratic. “Get down! Get down those stairs, you!”

And look at Frédéric, frightened of this woman whom he could crush. Stammering, “If he—if he—if he—”

“Maman—” intercedes Arthur.

“Shut your mouth!”

Without even looking, she backhands him—knocks his head back, such that he feels drenched in hot vomit, the vomit of shame. His shuddering, ear-ringing shock. Clutching his throat, in panic he thinks,
I’ve swallowed my Adam’s apple
. But for her, this is comical, his girly histrionics. Guffawing back at him:

“You’re not hurt! Lord in heaven!
Two
babies I have—”

“You’ll see!” rails Frédéric, raising his fist. This is her biggest fear—
them
, turning on her like two curs.

“I’ll get the chicken axe!” hollers Frédéric. “
You’ll
see, you old bitch!”

“You,”
she sneers. “And I’ll have
you
thrown in the asylum! In chains.”

He kicks the door. “I’ll cut my own throat! In the village square! With the axe!”

“—In chains! Drooling on yourself, do you hear me?
Drooling—
”

“—With a sign around my neck! Blaming
you
, you bitch!”

A
nd so it is spring again. Blooming, blowing spring again. The crushing weight of
spring again
. O, the earth having to resurrect itself again.

Again, the thick-armed, anvil-footed ploughman.

Again, singing the same stupid plough songs.

Again, ripping open the dead ground. Crushed rye heads. Dead seasons. Bones.

And yet, for Arthur Rimbaud, from the black muck erupt pale green stitches, the first true lines of a new voice—his:

Flesh? Blood? Sap?
Embryos!
His diction is scandalous. Disgusting. At this time, no one ever would have used such runny, prurient words. Reading this, the boy feels happy and stunned—freed. But as suddenly, hearing her yelling again, he peers out the window. And look, down in the black muck, clad in leather slop apron, here is Frédéric stumbling along in his enormous wooden barn clogs, which resemble two foul potatoes. See him now, wrestling down the hill, wobbling in a wheelbarrow, a green and steaming heap of cow slops.

Or rather, Frédéric is racing behind the violently jerking handles of the now ominously wobbling honey barrow bouncing its gelatinous contents. Which—being Frédéric—upends its liquid contents, straw and manure,
rr-araugh
, as if a giant had retched.

Again, Frédéric’s screams of rage.

Again, his sisters peeping out their window.

Again, Arthur lowering his quarto edition filled with obscene comments by the many valiant lads before him who died of boredom reading Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
, on the subjugation of his ur-French precursors. Who, in battle, might have sounded much as Frédéric does right now:

“
Merde!
Goddamnit! God damn you, God!”

A window flies up. Rrr-augg
hhhhhh
. Wrath pours down:

“Blasphemer! Get up, idiot! Blame yourself, not the Lord!”

“I’ll cut my throat!!”

“I said, finish it!”

“I’ll finish it, you bitch! I’ll finish
myself!
”

Finish it? thinks Arthur. It’s unfinishable, this tarry slop pit
Frédéric is filling at the foot of the barn. And look. Floating in the family cesspit, before his eyes, he can see his forebears, the Gauls, bellies bobbing, gazing at their twisty black toes. And staring down at his brother, Arthur can
feel
them, a line of hairy-backed idiots going back to the Middle Ages. Why, clear back to the days of consul Julius Caesar, grandmas and grandpas and aunts and uncles and half-wit cousins. Folks roaring, gamboling drunk on the feast of Saint Michel, if they were lucky. Otherwise, people half starved, snoring away the winter in snow-whomped, manure-banked, beast-packed huts. And the horror is, Arthur
feels
them.
Smells
them under the ground, coughing and slapping and picking at themselves. Peasants! And all he can think is, How? How
he
can be of
them
?

When, from the room below, Arthur hears his little sister Vitalie—all feeling—exclaim, “Poor Frédéric.”

And what does
he
feel for his brother? Anything? But does one need to feel to write a poem? he wonders. And who, then, would be
doing
the feeling? He or the so-called poet? Was
not
feeling actually a
form
of feeling? he wonders. Peculiar boy. These were some of the strange questions then churning through his mind.

For the problem is—the boy’s worry is—that he does not feel sufficiently.

Or rather, that he feels insufficiently.

Or rather, that he does not feel
in the same place or with the same heart
as other people do—normal people.

For suddenly, he can’t take Communion without wanting to spit it out—Christianity, like a bad tooth.

But these are just early symptoms. Lately, spooked, he wonders why he feels this
thing
fluttering inside him, this newly risen angel all but breaking his ribs as his mighty wings unfold.