Disaster Was My God (21 page)

But of course, even these innocent whispers pierced her nightcap, and so there came the dreaded broom handle, pounding the ceiling. What sickened him, though, was how he bounded back up the stairs,
you tit-sucker, you baby
. Throwing himself on his bed, he was now defenseless, crushed between his two brains. There was the spasmodically happy, powerfully instinctive, but too easily quashed child brain. And, for better or worse, there was his adult brain, steely and critical, cutting and cynical. Just as the Germans were crushing France, so his adult brain now pounced upon his cowardice, his puerile and pathetic dependency. And, between these two, hammer and anvil, came a poetry so often distanced from the facts of his life or personal feelings, that is, beyond mockery and rage. Had ever a fifteen-year-old been less prone to “poor me” or personal heartache? All was objective—outer. All was observed—mimicked. There was no mask, or need for one, no conscience, no baggage. None of these things that only blind adults. In fact, only one thing still stuck to him—her.

L
ying there, in the womb of himself, the kid was sobbing—imprisoned like the Count of Monte Cristo.

A freak, he thought, that’s who you are, a helpless, stupid freak. Like the Monster Boy, he thought suddenly. This was the carnival freak he’d seen earlier that summer at a circus sideshow. Piss-smelling straw,
the licking torches, wild-looking gypsies banging drums—it was a scene irresistible to men and boys. No females allowed.

Come! Dare! See the Monster Boy! challenged the man in the bowler hat strutting the boards, beneath the licking torches. For here, high above him, flapping in the wind, heraldlike, were lurid, crudely drawn canvas backdrops. Towering images old as the Middle Ages, picturing—around the Monster Boy—the Worm Man, the Human Bat, and a geek who bit the heads off live chickens.

“
Alors, alors
, I warn you, gentlemen, this show is not for the weak of heart!”

The drums picked up the beat. Swilling from a bottle, the barker blew real fire, and the wind picked up, causing the great placard-sized canvases to inflate in horror like flabby cheeks. So the boy did it, bought a ticket, then entered the torch-lit darkness, where, squinting, he saw this skinny apparition, chained to the floor. Stooped, the size of a small ape.
Quelle farce!
cried the man behind him, a heckler demanding his money back.
A fake?
thought the boy.
As mangled as the poor kid was?

Deflated dark angel. Disfigured as he was, it was hard to imagine he’d ever been born or been a child or had a mother. Curled long nails. Flayed nose. Hideous curled-up lips. And worst of all, the flapping gills cut deep into his neck—gills! And his acute, trembling terror—this seemed real. With his jagged hair and his teeth filed to points, he hissed and spat to keep people away, and just as freely the audience, men and soldiers, gibbered and raged back at him.
“Connard,”
asshole! cried one—and out it shot, a long, brown whip of chewing tobacco that snagged the kid, then ran down his face to loud guffaws. Acid. The Monster Boy shrieked and jerked at the chain. Howls of laughter. Another shower of stinging nuts.

Connard! Connard!

Nobody stopped it. The barker laughed, too, laughed even as he sold them the nuts bulleting across the room. But look, thought the kid. The bloody iron collar around the kid’s neck, it was paint, not blood; it was just red paint. Fake, absolutely it was fake, and yet even as the
muscleman threw out the heckler, the man yelled back that the Monster Boy was just a
comprachico
, just a child mutilated,
purposely
mutilated. “Mutilated?” asked the kid, as the muscleman hauled the heckler up by the belt. “But who did that?”

Was he stupid? “By his parents, of course,” said the heckler. “They mutilated him, then sold him like a pig.”

Sold!
At this word, the kid burned with rage and embarrassment, to think of parents mutilating their own child. Selling him to be exhibited along with the pickled cock of Alphonse le Géant. Probably off a stallion, before which the woman with the quivering breasts now moaned and shimmied. A freak show, he thought. Why, this was the biggest veal pen going. Grab a torch! Set fire to the place, burn it down. But then what? What would Monster Boy do in life? Trapped between childhood and adulthood, the Monster Boy was now so lost, so terrorized, that all he was,
was
the role.

Well, innocence wasn’t going to save anybody—not that night. Realizing this, the boy shot up, bolted through the crowd, then dove into the greasy summer darkness—late, desperately late. Running down the road, he could think only of escape, that when it got really bad, he’d run away, then if
that
got bad, he’d run away from
that
, and then from the
that
of that—until here’s Roche. When right in front of the house, flat on his back, to trip over, here’s Frédéric. Dead drunk. Right where his friends dumped him as a joke, grass and bits of vomit on his lips. But then, as he tries to haul Frédéric up—blackout. Down he goes with a rabbit chop to the neck.

“Leave him.” On his back, dazed, he sees her peering down at him in her billowing nightgown, her long gray hair blowing free and scentless for no man.

“Leave it,” she says. “Drink with the devil, lie with the devil.”

“Maman, stop!
Stop it.
” He takes his brother by the arm. “Frédéric, up—”

“
Inside
. Leave it.”

“
It?
Are you crazy? That’s your
son.
”

“
That
is no son of mine. Now in! In before I brain you again.”

He didn’t argue. To his everlasting rage and shame, he let her, and he saved no one that night. Not the Monster Boy or Frédéric, lying in the cold dew among the slugs and crickets.

21
The Sleeper

The Monster Boy: It was he whom Rimbaud remembered that glorious night as the German guns played their lullaby of
whuu-ump ump-ump
. For that was the night, late in the war, when he, Arthur Rimbaud,
Poet
, finally broke out! Like war!

Conveniently forgetting his sisters, he crept down the stairs, then down the darkened hall, past the room where the ogress slumbered. The kitchen door was unlocked, so leave it open, he thought—wide open. Let the Huns pry open her cold thighs.

Two thin franc notes. No blanket, no food, no coat. In fact, besides the two hands stuffed in his pockets, the only thing the kid had was one fat wad of paper, two stubby pencils, and the little penknife he used to whittle them to points. No matter. In ecstasy he splashed through the bouncing, slapping rye, diving into what he came to call
free freedom
, thinking, This will be forever. Yet even then his more adult brain, the heckler, snarled back, You dope, you know you’ll only come crawling back.

River flashing. Water rushing. Cold moonlit stones as he crossed it, swamping through cold black, knee-high depths. Then, heading for the guns, the excitement, after some three or four kilometers, look, over the hill—long, throbbing flames. Big guns with explosions so loud and low his ears popped. Wonderful! He whooped. He swung his arms. It was like dancing in the rain. And through the fog, farther on, here it was, the real show, boy: soldiers hunched over long-bayoneted rifles, rows of tents and campfires winking far into the distance. But God, the stink! Probably a thousand men, he guessed. It wasn’t an army, it was a beast, shucking fields and ripping down forests. And dumping its crap. Stinking crap piles. Crap everywhere.

When, stumbling down the embankment, he jumped back, his heart blurting into his neck. It was
a boy
, a sprawled, twisted, open-mouthed, upside-down boy soldier under his upside-down rifle. Two angry black stains on his blue coat. Gray clouded-over eyes.
Hoo
, the kid snorted. Drew in sharply his loosening guts—farted. Then, not knowing what better to do, he pulled out, like bandages, his sweaty-soggy wad of writing paper, white and blowing in the wind.

When,
whump
, he lost his footing, then slid down the muddy embankment as the poem flooded up into his eyes. That’s sick, he thought, you can’t just
write
about this kid lying here dead. But then through this same dialectic, with new practicality, he stood up, legs spraddled, harvesting the kid’s pockets. Nasty buzzard. Especially since the kid was French. Sharply, he pulled the corpse up by the lapels, then patted the boy down, lard cold. Then, as he dropped him, he felt the empty lungs expiring, that and the twisted, frightening way the agate-eyed boy turned away, almost shrugged, as if now he just wanted to stay dead.

Crap. Two franc notes, a broken clay pipe, and a little rosary that hadn’t exactly served him. But wait, he found a plug of cheap tobacco, sniffed it, then stuffed it in his back pocket. But finally, after he’d taken everything, a voice told him he had to do
something
for the poor son of a bitch. So, with a shudder, he closed forever the clouded-over eyes.

“Night, brother.”

And although the very next day he would be caught ticketless on the Paris-bound train—beaten freely by the conductor, then the gendarmes—despite the black eye and cut-up mouth, he didn’t return home empty-handed. Clear as newspaper dispatch and cold beyond pity, here’s the record—mostly true, save for the improved scenery and night turned to day:

The Sleeper in the Valley

22
Destroy

“
Dehors, bon sang
—out! When will you get out? I’ll not support a lazy, nasty, drunken brute!”

Witness Mme. Rimbaud, mezzo-soprano, on the stairs, singing—to the upper boxes of heaven—her heir-banishing “Marseillaise.”

How quickly times change. Fully one year has passed, and for the kid, as with any other adolescent, it has been a year of rapid costume changes, of renounced ideas and dizzyingly brief phases. Yet one thing has not changed: despite a string of three- and four-day breakouts, his sixteen-year-old teeth still retain their death lock on the Original Tit.

But it wasn’t merely Mme. Rimbaud upon whom the little brute had spat. Now, in Charleville, people began to see scrawled on the village walls—in infernally backward letters, as if written by the devil—
MERDE A DIEU
. Shit be to God. And so
les Carolopolitains
, as the denizens of Charleville were called (and even as they experienced that
buttery French form of schadenfreude at the widow’s rude comeuppance), now they, too, wanted the little prick gone.

There was also the matter of his deranged appearance. Hair: greasy, long, and stringy. Manners: nasty to nonexistent. Clothes: stinky sheeny. Add to that the now unrecognizable bowler hat, the floor-dragging coat (swiped), and (swiped too) the clay pipe—
le brûle-gueule
, the mouth burner—that he smoked upside down, dribbling ashes. A loiterer, a vandal and teller of lewd tales. A mooch and a swiper of drinks. So
les Carolopolitains
now saw their fallen star.

And yet he was not merely a disgrace; he was a
willed
disgrace. For even as he demolished the old effigy of Prince Perfect, by the week, if not the day, he was molting, forgetting, shedding, disowning, even while remembering, as it were, new forms. Reckless expression and irrationality. Obscenity. Obscurantism. The scatological. Really, childishness combating the stupefying effects of what might be called
adultishness
.