Disaster Was My God (19 page)

But the trouble is, it’s so unpredictable. How It—because it’s an It—can be so scarily, twitchingly
present
. And as suddenly
gone
. And as terrible as his fear of It’s taking over, there’s the fear, once gone, that this angel-devil, this demon, this power or deceiver might never return, and what then?
Then
who would he be? A prize what? For just as this new
double being, this nasty, ravenous caterpillar, is gnawing out his insides, so he also feels the buried child within him dying. He
stinks
. Everything about him stinks. And however wicked he is, what no adult will ever understand, once it was pure innocence that drove him. Joy, even.

Joy
. Can an adult even imagine such an Edenic state? How in school early on, when he answered a question, unraveled a line, made a leap, how he felt such joy that he would bounce, actually bounce, as if from the baby still coiled inside him.

He wonders why he feels so abominably—cold.

That’s it. So cold, so
high
, so criminally arrogant, looking down upon all creation. Peering backwards through life’s telescope at these—these ants of people. Even his hands. Insect feelers that write.

Then what happens? At a word, a sound, the strum of light, flicker of leaves—as suddenly, he is God peering down on life, in all its helplessness and ridiculousness. For look: one miserable Sunday, after another boring sermon, as the boy exits the church,
there it is
.

See it, glistening in the sun, where the wagons wait and the hitched horses slumber with one rear hoof raised. Look!
Cow droppings on perfect ripe blackberries
.

Shit on fat, black blackberries!

Biting his lip, insanely he squeezes himself. It’s their own private joke, him and God—the last thing any of his bowdlerizing contemporaries would ever notice, or think, much less write, in their stupid nosegay poems larded with these rarefied, artified
feelings
. About
them
, the poets, having feelings! Or, deeper still, with so many of his French contemporaries artfully
resisting
feelings.

But what about the counterargument, thinks the boy, plain nasty unfeeling, without all the phony, putrid, arty language? In a flash, he can see it, a new poem entitled “First Communions,” one of the first productions of what might charitably be called his angry, bratty, scatological stage. And yet a strong, clear light shines through with an unfussy style and a sense of reality that only a country boy would have:

Blasphemy! All in the voice of a young girl, a feminine alter ego who, extending her tongue in Communion, feels an overpowering nausea—nausea at the putrid kiss of Jesus.

And it’s all written, thinks the boy, written all across the sky. Written even before it
is
written.

Look up, poets! From the ass of heaven, down it falls, a heavy brown mass of pure feeling.
Thump
.

17
Bad Apple

This same Arthur Rimbaud is now a brain for hire, forging, for the school’s dolts—those who can pay—essays that mix Attic mastery with the most deliberately boneheaded mistakes. Which, being dolts, they copy word for word. And so the class is roaring-laughing, as, like a pistol shot, Master Delporte’s supple cane smacks the miscreant’s desk. Dark hair splattering, the master is now shaking Rimbaud’s work for hire in the fat, freckled face of the woeful Jacques Sorel, whose ample cheeks are painted with two livid red handprints—slap, slap!

Again, the cane smacks Sorel’s desk, inches from his quivering nose.

“Abominable plagiarist! Do you presume to insult my intelligence by claiming—liar!—that it was
you
, imbecile, and not
he
who wrote this?” Indeed, he is pointing his cane, that rapier of pain, at the pure puzzlement of the wrongly accused Arthur Rimbaud.
“Moi?”

Beginning to make trouble in school, to goof off, the prize boy has now morphed into the rebel hero. A Byzantine. A brigantine. Lurid strange.

Delahaye, Gorgeon, Doinel, sometimes Lalande, like a pack of dogs, they all follow Rimbaud after school. Circumscribing vast circles around Charleville, they talk, his followers, about poems and particularly stupid, grotesque, or simply ridiculous people—and, of course, girls, although this goes nowhere; why, in Charleville, the girls are so locked up, so stuck up, that it’s thrilling just to have a girl turn up her nose at you!

As they walk, sometimes the boys make up serial poems, each taking a line, then trying to top the other. Round the town they troop, one rolling-gaited, orangutanlike organism with ten feet. The so-called Poet’s Circle.

“And there, in a long and lovely space.”

“She forced him to see, without a trace.”

“That’s a stupid line!”

“Two stupid lines,” cries Delahaye, the drum major. “Arthur! Give us a line.”

Squinting, the kid looks like a grasshopper working up a spit. “Delahaye,” he says very slowly, “I am not thinking of merely
a
line. I am thinking of a
poem
. Complete.”

“Called what?” Delahaye plants his feet in the road. He is a fleshy, well-loved, well-fed boy whose prosperous family keeps a store. And, much to Arthur’s chagrin, Delahaye’s blue-eyed mother, so pretty and well dressed, she utterly adores her son. Imagine that.

Arthur is still squinting, pondering.

“The title of the poem?” he says. “A trifling point as yet—who knows and who cares? I told you, it’s already written—”

“Listen to him,” challenges Delahaye. “Then
what
, prithee, is it
about
?”

“About?” The kid stares two holes through him. “What an idiotic question. Do you think a poem is merely ‘about’ what it’s about?”

But Delahaye, unlike the others, does not kowtow to him. “Oh, bullshit. If it is
written
, Rimbaud, then what is it
about
?”

The hands jiggle, ever the marionetteer. “Well, I suppose”—goggling for effect—“I suppose, Delahaye, that it is
about
two children. Two orphans.”

“And?”

“Well, they’re poor. Miserably poor, with no father—”

“Ah,” cries Delahaye to the other boys. “So you see, it begins just like every Rimbaud poem, ‘Once upon a miserable time …’ ”

“And their mother dies. And they’re so horribly poor—”

“The nose. Watch his nose! Sure sign that he’s lying—”

“And they are so poor and so shut-up, the children think the funeral wreaths are”—now he has them—“New Year’s decorations!”

“New Year’s decorations!” cries Doinel. “From a funeral? That’s dreadful!”

“And stupid,” seconds Delahaye. Who two beats later says, “Write it down.”

“Not yet.” The kid walks on. “I’m waiting.”

“Rimbaud, you’ll lose it! You’ll just think of something else.”

“Quite the contrary. Write it too soon and you
will
lose it.”

“Then you
have
written it.”

“No, but I can see all the words. The rest is mechanical. As I say, I just haven’t written it down:

Delahaye snorts. “Sure, Rimbaud. Bare like your house at Christmas. No decorations and no presents. And you insisting your poems are the expressions of a new
objective
poetry! Objective, my ass!”

18
Life in the Veal Pen

But after these interludes, back he went to the veal pen, as he thought of it. And little wonder. For even now, in the fetid depths of the barn,
le veau
, the spring veal, can he heard bleating.

No,
le veau
, superfluous male, you were not born to run and graze—to grow muscles, sprout balls, then go wild, chasing small children across the meadow. No,
le veau
was not to be red-blooded but delicately pink-fleshed—was to be kept bloodlessly anemic and weak in his reeking pen, where only a few stray splinters of light can pierce the fetid gloom. Separated from mother and herd, for five or six months—eight at most—
le veau
was a subterranean albino, a mushroom in the dark.

Le veau
, however, was anything but starved, or not for milk. Pails and pails of milk he had, but not from the delicious speckled teats of his mama, whoever
she
was. Spoiled milk, watery cheese, and butter slop, all
was ravenously licked up in the same pen in which his neck remained pinioned between two posts worn smooth and stuck with bits of hair and flesh.
NaaaaHH—
kicking.
NaaaaHHH
—so batty the calf licked even the bent nail in the wall until his tongue bled. Anything to feel
anything
.

But
le veau
hadn’t entirely given up. The battle was on when his hole was mucked out and not least when he made his first and last transit, drooling pink foam, as three farmhands dragged him out into the sun’s blinding white terror. All this the boy felt in his own veal pen, in the gabled apex of the house with its lone, ogre-eyed window, the same through which he stared for days, writing poems. Letters, too, dreaming of what
le veau
dreamt of—escape. And he was cagey.

Hearing the dreaded
bam bam bam
up the stairs, quickly Scheherazade would hide away what he was writing—
really
writing. For now his ready nib was scratching many messages. All masks. Pretending on foolscap to be seventeen when for a fact he was naïve fifteen. Pretending, above all, to be breezy and worldly-wise when he was anything but. Charm ’em. Baffle and bamboozle ’em. But be delivered! Here is part of what he wrote to Théodore de Banville, leader of the Parnassian poets and a man said to be sympathetic to the young and aspiring: