Disaster Was My God (2 page)

His abandonment of art, poetry, style, vocation, belief—all of it—fell like a curtain on his life, a total eclipse, deliberate and irrevocable. As he had calculated so brilliantly, it was deeply disturbing to art’s believers, the hero-rebel turned traitor. A self-defrocked priest. A willed disgrace, if not an artistic suicide. And worst of all, a man who, some time later, after years of drifting, went on to sell guns in Africa, on the edges of the slave trade. Most preferred to forget
this
Rimbaud, the cynical gunrunner, in favor of the young genius, the bad boy Rimbaud. For what on earth had happened to him? Had he turned yellow? Lost his mind? Who could square the two images? After all, writers may stop writing for a while or find themselves blocked, but where is the poet or writer, or artist of any type, who renounces his or her craft as folly and fakery—a lie? Who then refuses even to
read
poetry or novels? Who wants none of it. Any of it, or France or Europe, either.

N
o
matter: now, in death, Rimbaud, in Charleville at least, is utterly redeemed—arisen, in fact. Once the town pariah, he is now Charleville’s
chief claim to fame. Why, soon to have his own statue! A monster made cherub. Actually
cute
!

Morons, thought the Widow. Needless to say, she wanted nothing to do with their little charade. And yet, note the site the Widow has picked to nest her small brood, the old social climber. Why, there it lies even before the graves of Charleville’s former bigwigs, at the vertex of the cemetery’s two diverging gravel paths—the first grave a visitor will see. Trip over, in fact. Here the brother and sister will rest under two baroquely ornate markers, even as the old mother lies almost prostrate before them, beneath a great icelike slab of Carrara, the marble of Michelangelo. Night! And stone! And at this one thought, of this bull of rock crushing her bones, the Widow Rimbaud will feel a shiver, then a fatal tingle. To think! That at the summit of this packed necropolis her son’s idolators, the loose-tongued, the easily led, and the snoops, that they will see these seven letters beetling back at them in warning, evoking the dignity of the noble, the God-fearing and now never-to-be forgotten name:

Stop, then. Look down upon this name, once so blighted. Feel lucky. Hug your life like a child and be of good cheer. For perhaps in this life you will be wiser or better or more fortunate than this man and his small troubled family. Or failing that, blessed with better children, or at least better
balanced
children.
Dominus vobiscum! Et cum spiritu tuo
.

B
ack, then, to Roche, ancestral farm of the
famille
Rimbaud. Back to this disinterring, to this Pietà scene where the mother, Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Rimbaud, sits perched in the antique black gig with two dented, now cross-eyed brass lamps.

As for this cloaking veil draped over her, this is against the
gnats
—gnats
, she will tell you—not an attempt to hide the face of some old shoe weeping on virtually the worst day in all her life. For what can you—any of you—know of the sufferings of an old woman who has been called by God? Spoken to in days of dark, silent, overflowing ecstasy, like those bald-pated saints you see in illuminated manuscripts, robed men with tiny flames over their heads, blessed by the Holy Spirit. Many, many times as a girl and young woman she, too, was so blessed, only to have God utterly and summarily ignore her. Suddenly deaf to her. Punishing her for what crime she does not know! As she would read in her missal, from the Psalms:

But imagine: God was silent to her not for one year or two or even a string of years but for forty-five years, three months, and now thirteen days, a lifetime of darkness and privation. Why? she wondered, weeping as she prayed through this blear darkness. How could God be so cruel?
Why?
To test her faith? Was that it, as a priest told her once? But still, for
forty-five years
? To yearn but feel nothing of Your Holy Presence? To pray and hear nothing? To give—to give endlessly, like a fool—all to receive Your Holy Contempt? Paralyzed, then enraged, then despairing, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud’s suffering old mother, she would think it was her, her unworthiness, her mothering, her ignorance, her two terrible sons. There was, there had to be, a reason.

When lo, two months before this time, early one morning, Mme. Rimbaud’s forty-five-year drought finally broke. The old woman was just waking up, dawn breaking, golden still and cool, when suddenly she heard Him—
Him!—
a surging river of force so strong her jaws clenched in ecstatic ache:

LIFT THESE BONES. THEN BRING THEM TO ME. YOU, THEIR MOTHER.

You, their mother
. She knew exactly what God meant by this
utterance. She—she personally would have to shoulder their untombing, and not merely with hirelings, gravediggers, undertakers, and other such riffraff—no! And so against all argument she refused the services of an undertaker, without whom two gravediggers flatly refused to take her money. Never when the mother insisted on being present, and especially not with the daughter, also called Vitalie, in the ground for twenty-five years. Please, Madame, they reasoned, this was surgeon’s work, carried out, often, with small spades and even teaspoons. But certainly not with the departed’s mother present! Never! Unheard of! Madness!

In her stubbornness, the Widow likewise refused the offices of a priest, believing, in a kind of ecstasy, that God was moving through
her
, not through his various earthbound flunkies, these
priests
, sanctified know-nothings for whom, as men, she had no high regard. The blow, however, was when her other daughter, her forty-year-old daughter, Isabelle, the scatterbrain, refused to accompany her, willful girl—and never you mind about Rimbaud’s brother, just one year older, banished years before as an idiot no-good and a bum. Much to her vexation, this is not the same Isabelle whom she had bullied and ordered around for years when the two worked the farm together. Now married, freed, Isabelle is no longer so pliant or scatterbrained. Now she is like a nun who has left the order, talking back to Mother Superior.

“Mother, why are you doing this? It’s ghoulish. Ridiculous. Leave them be.”

“Because God
told
me, daughter,” insisted the old woman. “Have I ever told you that God told me to do anything? Well, then. Did Noah hear God’s voice, then ask
hirelings
to build his Ark? Did Noah ever do such a thing?”

“The Ark, Mother, wasn’t
morbid.
”

“Morbid! When here you two”—meaning Isabelle and her husband and literary collaborator of five years, Paterne Berrichon—“when here you two are both writing Arthur’s, what do you call it, biography? Stirring up gossip! To stir this pot of this stinking?”

“To
correct
his memory, Mother. To stop the gossip, the lies!”

“What—so your ridiculous brother becomes even
more
famous?”

Fame: for the old woman this was the true plague, his would-be acolytes and the curious now descending on her with their impertinent questions. Scruffy littérateurs and journalists. Threadbare poets. Pince-nez professors and similar busybodies from Paris, Bordeaux, London, Brussels. All knocking on her door. Accosting her on her street. Shocked that
he
, their god, could have sprung from such as
her
. And all with the same idiotic questions:

But why did he stop writing?

Did he stop?

But how could he just …
stop
writing?

And why to Africa?

And did he not return with manuscripts?

And you are quite sure, Madame, there are no other manuscripts? Hmmm?

Add to this the many rumors heaped on her. That just before his death, when he returned from Africa, he brought back a great final outpouring of poems, indeed, the future of poetry, which she then burned like witches in a great bonfire upon a wintry hill.
Whoof
.

T
he Widow, then, is the only Rimbaud present at the disinterring, and not merely to observe, for this is her land, beautiful rolling country, green pastures, oak and aspen and silvery river birches—hers, all hers.

There, to the east, peering out in four directions—vigilant like her—is the craggy, mansard-roofed farmhouse in which she raised her four children, then lived for years more, running the dairy farm with her daughter, Isabelle, the dizzy one, as she thought of her. That is, until four years ago, when, surely on the last train out of spinsterhood, Isabelle was married and the old woman was forced to give up the farm. Renting to a serflike tenant, the feckless Mercier, the Widow then took a small flat in town. Ah, but see it now, below, Roche, in all its sweep. Surrounded by trees and deep hedgerows, her whole world can be seen, the house and the two once-spotless barns that her tenant farmer, the aforementioned Mercier—
crétin—
has left to choke with manure.

And see down there, see that brown horse, the gelding, now staked to a chain, eating a circle in the grass,
c’est la vie
since he can do nothing else. And who staked him today after she drove out from Charleville? Who dragged, by her own shoulder, seventy-six years old, the heavy chain? And who then banged the stake with a great mallet, this as bald Mercier the tenant (hoping she would not raise his rent!) begged her:

“
Veuve Rimbaud
, please, in this heat! You should not be doing this!”

“Ce n’est rien.” She whacked the stake harder, with steam.

“Madame—Veuve Rimbaud, please.”

“Away—”

Whack and whack
—victoire
. Pleasure immense, to show these two males how an old woman can toil like the stallion, like a
fiend
, never helpless.

But then, once back in the gig, as suddenly, the fear returns. Clouds blot out the sun. She feels a shudder, then a mounting panic at this long-dreaded resurrection. When
clang
. Blessed distraction. The gravedigger—his back now a sopping tortoise shell of sweat—strikes another large stone.

“Monsieur Loupot!” she erupts. “Deny it no more. It was
you
who buried my son nine years ago.”

The gravedigger stares at the sky.

“Veuve Rimbaud, please,” he says, “look at my face. I am not yet forty. Ten years ago I was still in the army. As God is my witness. Back then I was not even
in
this miserable trade.”

“Eh,” she retorts, “so then it was your father, perhaps blinded by his great beard, who left these stones? Eh? Is that how you evade the truth? Blame your father?”

The black gig rocks as the old fury climbs down. Then, throwing back her black veil, she faces him, her glasses two fiery ovals as the sun bursts once more through the clouds. “It is all right,” she soothes. “We know your story. You are of the people of troubles. A lost, gypsylike people thrown off their land, lost and wandering with their shovels.” Her twisty eyebrows rise. “What? Do you deny this? That you are a
Jew
—is this not true?”

“We Loupots,” he thunders, “we are
Catholics
. Dwelling here for generations!”

Hmmph. Does he think he frightens her, standing on his hind legs like a circus bear? Frightened? She who must unearth her two children today? With a shrug, she returns to her gig. Climbs up, spreads the black veil, loudly blows her nose, then resumes her lonely vigil. Crouched over herself, she is like a lone fisherman, sick, soul-sick and now trembling before the storm.

B
ut was the Widow indeed a widow? Only God knew. Certain only was her husband’s desertion, not his decease. Abandonment—this was her widowhood. A life’s vocation, a profession in fact.

The deserter in question was Captain Frédéric Rimbaud, an army chasseur who in the winter of 1852 arrived in Charleville in a splendid blue uniform with golden epaulettes and splendid black boots. A handsome, compact man, the captain was blond and swarthy from the equatorial sun, with the regulation long mustache and goatee that drove to a point, like a spade. Expert in fencing and riflery. And, as befit an officer, expert in the equally vital skills of whoring, dueling, horse racing, and gambling. A veteran, too. As a captain in the artillery, he had served in the Crimea and before that had fought the bedouin in Algeria, one of the myrmidons of the imperial and resurgent France of Napoleon III, an empire then bent, as all the European powers were, on building colonies and spreading Christian civilization. That is, once they could put down the dark peoples, the Arabs and the
noirs
, fanatics, most of them.

Indeed, in the great cause of subjugating the Mussulmans and the
noirs
, Captain Rimbaud was particularly useful owing to his great love of languages: Latin, Greek, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, and Swahili. Bush dialects, too. The man was a sponge. Why, in a matter of weeks, Captain Rimbaud could pick up virtually any language.
Smart
was his problem, the young Mme. Rimbaud used to say, for at first she was in awe of him, an educated man. But then tapping her index finger
against her temple, with sly conceit the new bride would add, “But, as you can see, God blesses the slow and the stupid.”

After all, her family, the Cuifs, peasants, lard heads perhaps—well, they knew what they knew: money and timber, land and beasts. But what the Cuifs really knew was how to spit on nothing, rub it up into something, then sell it for a tidy profit to the next fool. And of all the Cuifs, the slickest by far was her father, Alphonse Cuif. Bald and broad, with wads of hair in his ears, Alphonse Cuif was the master when it came to selling the nearly dry cow or the kicking horse. If he could do that, he said, surely he could find a man for his then twenty-seven-year-old daughter, in those days a Methuselah age, connubially speaking.