Disaster Was My God (20 page)

Then he hears the girls shrieking, “Arthur! Arthur, do something! Frédéric has gone mad again.”

The boy throws open his window. Pigeons diving. Wind exploding, and look! It’s Frédéric on the attack, waving the chicken axe as storms of Roman arrows rain down. And, seeing their great leader, out of the brakes and thickets, up from the hills, raising swords and blowing horns, up rise the Gallic hordes, wild men with buttered hair and broadaxes,
thwock!

Old bitch!

Thwock! Thwock! Thwock! Thwock!
Attacking the great craggy black oak, Frédéric Rimbaud is hacking her apart, when over the fields a voice can be heard, a voice almost singing, as if she were Demeter or the Virgin Mary:

“Frédéric Rimbaud. God sees you, Frédéric Rimbaud. Do you think that God does not weep—weep—to see you hurting his poor old oak tree? Frédéric Rimbaud, who would dare to raise a hand to his poor old mother? Return to your work!”

And so it ends as it always ends. How drunkenly Frédéric stumbles around, axe limp at his side. How, beaten, he stares at the stupefying sun, then at her, bathed in holy victory. Wiping his face on a muddy sleeve, Frédéric Rimbaud then slogs down into the undergloom of the barn, where
le veau
can be heard,
Eee-yaHHHHH
.

And from this attic roost, Arthur Rimbaud, poet inviolate, utterly removed, he watches all this happen, helplessly happen, quite
as if he had written it
. And look, the last fraying gusts of spring snow—a sugaring that blew so briefly over the ice-glazed puddles—all vaporized in a blast of sun, leaving only the torn black loam and the blacker woods. Woods where, if you were Frédéric Rimbaud, you could scream and hear only … wind. Where you could raise your axe and hit only … trees.

Or you could count the trees, then the fence posts, as his sister
Isabelle often does, walking alone, up and down the road. Or, like Vitalie Rimbaud, you could write in your diary. Or, as in Arthur’s case, you could gaze at your own reflected brilliance and waste stamps on unanswered letters—you and
le veau
, both still licking the bloody nail.

19
Prayers Answered—It’s War!

But, O Holy Day, several months later—on July 19, 1870, to be exact—the Rimbaud children are delivered. War breaks out!

Had only they known what to pray for.

For although the French emperor, Napoleon III, is indeed the nephew of the diminutive scourge who once terrorized Europe, it must be said that this sickly, opiate-addicted second-generation heir has none of his uncle’s martial bearing or tactical brilliance. But Napoleon III heeds his generals, just as he points to the reflected glory of his ideas in the jingo press, parroted by the same feuilletonists and writers whom he pays to whip up the French public and give him a casus belli. In the thrall of Darwin and Wagner and Ranke, these writers concoct a whole stew of theories—perverted in the case of Darwin and magnified in the case of Wagner and Ranke—all supporting national destiny and the clash of nations. Necessitating the racial hygiene of periodic bloodlettings waged on a continental scale.

I
t is high August, harvest season. Dry roads, long days, splendid time for marching, and so the emperor has declared war not only on Prussia but—Mme. Rimbaud is almost convinced—on her, Mme. Vitalie Rimbaud de Charleville! Only miles from the Belgian border, Roche, like Charleville, is right on the Hun invasion route to Paris. Dead center, in fact.

Les sales Boches!
cries the French press. Hah!

This time, promises the French press, this time they will go through the meat grinder, these sausage snappers. And just look at them in their
ridiculous spiked helmets and brown uniforms
—brown
in a continental army, well, really! No color! No horsehair flourishes! No plumery! No sartorial sense whatever.

In the lull before the first glorious battle, there is great ferment and excitement in Charleville. On the parade grounds of Mézières, Charleville’s sister city, can be heard swelling bands and, far in the distance, the
whu-ump
of the French artillery tuning up. As for the kid, wading streets filled with soldiers, why, to hear him carrying on, one might think that this vast human spectacle had been undertaken entirely for his amusement. And at fifteen perhaps this is true, as Charleville’s armed yokelry muscles past him, fat grocers and beery butchers of Charleville’s ferocious home guard, their jowls puffed out in their itchy old woolen uniforms. Now on holiday, many are already packing picnic baskets, eager to see the Huns get a good hiding. And so the young Ezekiel can be seen fomenting in the bars, all but taking bets on his country’s defeat, just as he can be found rabblerousing in the park, sneering at the laboring military band and his fool contemporaries, all racing to sign up. Not him!

“Christ, this is
France
. Are you out of your minds? You’ll only get walloped!”

“You oughtn’t to talk like that!” cries an old man. Garlanded with medals, he rises indignantly from the bench where he sits with two other old gentlemen. “You, Monsieur, you could find yourself under arrest if you continue with such seditious, cowardly talk!”

“Ah, tu m’emmerdes, pauvre pépé.”

“What!” cries the old hero, medals atremble, “What do you dare to say to me?” Abruptly, his rage turns to a leering smile. “Wait. I know you, you little turd. You’re one of the Cuifs. Boilers of entrails! I know of your mother, too, the old horror. And you know what, boy? I think you’re a
chicken.
”

How can he answer this? Already a crowd is gathering, so he has to bolt, and not just out of fear of arrest. Chicken! The man has struck him where he lives, and as he melts through the throngs, the young egotist
burns with shame—shame both for who he is and for being stuck with the Bouche d’Ombre, the Mouth of Darkness. A mama’s boy. A chicken. That’s all he is. Enlisting, at least the other kids will get away.

N
ot that the kid is wrong about France’s recklessness declaring war on the nation with continental Europe’s most formidable army. Indeed, he is not daunted in the least by news of the first meaningless skirmish, when
les Boches
, outnumbered three to one, are repulsed. With trains snarled and the tracks blown up to slow their invasion, the first Prussian units are nowhere near full strength, but now Charleville, like the rest of France, knows with moral certainty that God stands with the French.

“To Berlin! To Berlin! All the way!”

And indeed at Saarbrücken, as the French generals review their forces, they are satisfied, more than satisfied, to see their crack marching infantry, their glorious horse cavalry, their frightful artillery, and a wondrous new contrivance, the lead-spitting, multi-barreled Gatling gun, hand-cranked like a meat grinder, and to much the same effect. In great excitement, these and other strategic advantages are conveyed to His Munificence, astride his magnificent high-tailed black stallion, the same upon which he had been hoisted that morning hors de combat. Alas, His Eminence is a bit under the weather. It’s not just the usual constipation from the opiates to which he is addicted. It’s also the camp trots running through his army, a result of the now overflowing latrines.

And so, three hours later, with what growing outrage, with what dismay do the emperor and his leaders watch the swirling, mounting confusion as yet another adjutant on another sweaty mount gallops back with yet more bad news. Then rout and panic: the Germans punch through, and His Royal Highness escapes—by a whisker—the gleaming sabers of the crack German cavalry. Worse the frightful rumors, too true, that the ignoble emperor had escaped—escaped through pure ruse, riding out under the white flag while hidden in a medical wagon.

In little more than three weeks, it all collapses, humiliation upon
humiliation … in Wissembourg, Spicheren, Reichshoffen, and others. Until finally, in Sedan, utter collapse, followed, within hours, by the emperor’s surrender and abdication
—raus
.

Kaput, then, for the emperor. But victory for the seditious young Arthur Rimbaud. One of the people, he is now a nonlaboring, capital
W
Worker—indeed, a nonrevolting revolutionary still hiding in his room and jumping each time his mother barks. Yet, without knowing it, under this relentless pressure, the boy is turning coal to diamond. All with two of the most powerful forces known: rage and humiliation.

20
Monster Boy

But back to the days just before France’s defeat. Days when, feeling herself losing control, Mme. Rimbaud is wearing out the floors. Rape! Ruin!
Men
 … Hun men in hobnailed boots would soon be stomping her glorious fields of rye. The Huns are close, too. One can hear the field guns, the howitzers, and great siege mortars:

Whu-ump. Whu-ump-ump
.

“Get inside! Stay inside!”

For here in the blue night sky—red blooms reverberating off the clouds—it’s raining down, the promised eighty-seven trainloads of Hun retribution. The Rimbaud children, however, see a very different picture.

War! Change! Anything!

Why, in France’s last crushing weeks, even the girls are thrilled, ready to flee like horses from a burning stable. As for the chief saboteur, the unlikely Frédéric Rimbaud, he is now known as the Viper. At supper, brazenly swilling beer from a take-home bucket, he is openly defiant, the swine, upending the beer bucket, braying like a bullfrog, then wiping his unshaven chin with the back of his hand. And when the mother attempts, finally, to slap sense into him, this time he seizes her hand, bends it back, then grins as she drops to her knees in pain. “Viper! Hateful sinner!” she sobs, then rages out. For even as she drives her sons
away, here, paradoxically, is her greatest terror: being left. Knowing this on some level, later that same night, drunk, the Viper steals money, then takes off. So what if the ship of France is going down? The next morning, following in his father’s footsteps—and then, so drunk he can scarcely stand or sign his name—the Viper enlists.

W
huuuuu-ump. Whuu-ump-ump-ump.

The next night, as Arthur watched from his room, the red flashes of the siege guns could be seen in the rain-swollen thunderheads, a death system rolling over the eastern rump of France. Was he scared or thrilled? Truly was there any difference? Well, his stiff peter,
it
sure knew how it felt as it rose, his big asparagus, then thickened in his coaxing hand. Thus began his stropping strophe, his bed going
ump-ump-ump-ump-ump
as his head sang the Angelus,
Marie, Marie—Marie with the big-big-big-tits
. But once done, once the rocking subsided, in that twinkling after-daze, he thought, Tonight’s the night.

To Paris, that’s where he’d go, he who had never been more than twenty kilometers from Roche. To Paris, where there were street barricades and pretty girls and poets wearing red kerchiefs—poets with guns! But how? He was just what his mother said he was, a born tit-sucker. Why even stupid, spineless Frédéric, even
he
had the courage to leave.

“Look at the sky!” howled his sisters in their room directly beneath his. “Maman, don’t you see? We need to go!”

“And do what?” she cried. “Hand Roche over to the Huns?”

“But we’ll be blown up!”

“Pipe down. Have you no faith in the Lord?”

“But, Maman, look—look at all the wagons. Everybody’s getting out of here.”

“Timid people! Faithless! They’re not even close,
sales Boches.
”

Then he heard Vitalie hissing up the stairs, “Arthur,
Arthur—
”

Hissing, because of course their mother did not want him ruining them, influencing them, doing you don’t want to know what. So finally,
screwing up his mangled courage, the boy snuck down and found the two girls rolled in a ball on the bed, so scared even their hair was snarled together. So he freed their hair. Then he got their brush and did the forbidden: sat on their bed, beside their packed valise and the dolls all dressed to go. Sitting down, he did what he’d seen only the girls or his mother do: brush hair, girl hair, in long, soft strokes. “It’s all right,” he whispered, happy for once to be a brother and not his mother’s dog. “Ha!” he bluffed. Snuggling down with them in their little blanket, he felt cozy, normal for once, a real brother. “Who’s afraid of the Huns?” he said. “Maman will attack them with her rug beater! They’ll run for their lives!”