Disaster Was My God (27 page)

A
s for Mrs. MacDonald, even after her host’s sort-of epiphany—and even with his awkward feints at a sort-of pre-probationary holiness—still she was cool to him. Cool if not cold, even as she brusquely cared for him, but only as a duty, much as a lady with an overabundance of cats might reluctantly feed some knee-slinking stray. His stomach had shrunk to nothing but his soul’s hunger was alarming, voracious. When she brought him something, anything, he would look at her, openly like a flower, as if by looks or silence, by his evident suffering or sorrow, she might revise her now bludgeoned opinion of him.
Right
.

He, it,
that
, was a walking amnesia. Vanquished thinking.
Confess
, said a voice,
Confess to God
.

F
or his confession would be epic; why, it might spark a world epidemic. Once loosed, it would never stop, and then—as if out of a dream—he looked at Mr. MacDonald, the father packhorse, first carrying the girl, then herding the boy. Omnipresent, like his love. Attempting, however absurdly under the circumstances, to be of good cheer. Offering his wife his arm, he helped her across a field of giant boulders. A pack animal—a mule. God’s fool. Lord, thought Rimbaud, just look at the sheer brute
health
of the man, the force! Before him Rimbaud now felt near-boundless wonder, such as can only be seen through the eyes of failure.

But what about
his
family, the Rimbauds, waiting on the rock of Roche?

Fervently, Rimbaud tried; he tried to imagine, to patiently reconstruct, his sister Isabelle as a woman with lines on her face, settled bones, drooping chin. He tried to imagine his mother now old and changed—old age changed people, did it not? Mellowed them. Exclamation points became question marks. Bodies shrank and turned to shrugs. Why, some few of the old, he had noticed, once shedding the sheer labor of life (and true, after loud complaints), mercifully, they forgot who they had been and whom they had harmed—it gave one hope, these late-charming, suddenly
mild antiquarians. Fists became hands, and vituperation, once the anger has been boiled out of it, really, it was a form of fear. Good heavens, all these angry, bitter old people, what on earth had they been so exercised about all these years? God knows, but he had—changed, that is. New life, new identity. Trader, linguist, ethnographer, explorer: this was what he was really bringing home to his mother. Like a boy clutching a pulsing, just-caught frog, he was bringing home a new heart. Presenting, or rather
re
presenting, himself. Look, Maman, I am a man now; I’m a success, not a mooch. I have money, too—pots of it. Home would do it. At home he would change in a way impossible in Abyssinia. Calm down. Settle down. Worry less.

And the leg? So be it. Off. Weasel it off. Chew it off if need be. Anything to be sprung and forgiven—anything to be freed from the jaws of this trap. Lose a leg, gain a soul. But who, then? Who will he be?

So Rimbaud ruminated as he bounced and rolled, holding himself against the canvas until his forearms were rubbed raw. So he dreamed as thoughts rolled by, caroming on like swells of sea. See him now, a sunburned body carried on eight thin black legs. Carried such that, from a distance, this vast organism that had formed around him resembled a great bumbling millipede scuttling across the floor of a dried-up sea. To the sea, he thinks, the blue sea. When a curious phrase presents itself:
The sea as in pictures
.

Picture, sea, he thinks. Da-dum.

Sea as in pictures
. Hadn’t he written something like that? Dreamt something like that once? But this memory lasts but a moment, before he thinks,
Oh, rot
 …

28
The Blank Page

But when would he arrive, this mysterious prodigy about whom Verlaine has alerted literary Paris and now bestirred his young wife and new in-laws? Only God knew.

Discussing this very matter, Verlaine, his wife, Mathilde, and his mother-in-law, Mme. Mauté de Fleurville—petty nobility, actually—were taking tea in the salon of the Mautés’ home on the rue Nicolet, a narrow but imposing street in Montmartre lined with tall, stone-faced manses, thoroughly snooty residences with pince-nez-like windows and long, dismissive stairs that no tradesman would have dared to climb.

Mathilde, his bride of thirteen months, was seventeen and almost eight months pregnant, a bubbly, buxom, now plump girl—a beauty, really—with dark hair, dark eyes, clear fair skin and a love for her husband still so young and fresh that it verged on adoration. Her mother, Mme. Mauté, to whom she bore a strong resemblance, was herself a darkly handsome but now maternally imposing woman, perched on a high-backed gilt chair with bowed legs and a royal blue coverlet. Mme. Mauté very much liked this chair, and she liked especially where it stood at the head of the room, rather like a portrait with a fireplace of ornately carved marble to her left, a grand piano to her right, and, behind her, visible through a bay of mullioned windows, a walled garden with pea gravel paths—paths such as one saw at Versailles, noted the Madame, thrilled at her creation.

Her throne room, Verlaine called it, and with evident feeling now that he was Mme. Mauté’s unhappy subject. This demotion in Verlaine’s status as a husband—this steep descent—had begun two months before. It was then, owing to reverses—tavern debts, a ridiculous altercation, a poem not yet realized,
and even the tides of history
—but principally on account of his being fired—that the twenty-five-year-old Verlaine and his adolescent bride were forced to give up their Paris flat and move back home. Mathilde had some money from her grandmother’s estate—let him stay home, she said, liberated from the work he hated and now freed to write.

That is, when he was not twiddling, said Mme. Mauté—hours twiddling and hours more at the cafés he frequented, before returning home late and weaving drunk. Beyond the irregular hours and chaotic
lifestyle, however, her wayward son-in-law had
presumed
, said Mme. Mauté. Indeed! To invite this Rimbaud to stay in their home, quite as if it were
his
home. And still more unforgivably, so late in her daughter’s pregnancy!

“And he is days late,” protested Mme. Mauté, who, like her husband, now knew a little something about idler
artistes
and their shenanigans. “Your young friend from the village”—hayseed, she means—“he cannot wire you of his plans?”

“This happens,” replied Verlaine carefully, if dismissively, as he stirred the cup of tea the maid had just now handed him. This, to be clear, was not the frowsy Brahmin bard-bum of 1891, dividing his time between the brothels, absinthe dens, and the various charity hospitals. No, this was the slender, young, socially ambitious, exceedingly bourgeois, and—when sober—nimbly charming Verlaine of 1871. And, thanks to his wife, who picked the fabrics and hired the tailor, the sartorially correct and even dapper Verlaine in his stovepipe trousers, proper frock coat, and earnest tie. The face, it is true, remained problematic. Pug ugly, to be frank, the moonlike forehead, pasty white skin and patchy red beard like some hirsute form of creeper. And, as if God hadn’t already singled him out, the batlike snout with a habit of cultivating alarming red carbuncles.

Remarkably, though, Mathilde insisted she no longer noticed this unfortunate aspect of her husband. Indeed, she even saw some advantage in it. This, as she privately admitted to her mother (and with the greatest unease, lest her mother think her vain), was her considered belief: that a man of such unfortunate looks would feel so very lucky to have a woman such as herself—and so sure that he would never again enjoy such good fortune—that he would never stray. An interesting theory, to say the least.

Attentively, Mathilde’s husband (for she now saw him as
hers)
stirred his tea in slow curlicues, with a fluid, faraway air perfected in the finest literary salons of Paris, a sure sign that he was either bored or irritated or both. For sure enough, much as a sedentary cat will switch its tail when ready to swat, an irritability had swept over him … impudent
old trollop, sitting on her pile of money and simple self-regard! Coldly, Verlaine regarded his mother-in-law:

“Well, Mother”—here he paused to indicate his weariness with her tedious inquiries—“he is a
poet
, not a rail conductor on some
schedule.
”

“Ah,” said Mme. Mauté overpleasantly as she returned the favor, “then is he, too, unemployed?”

“Maman!” protested Mathilde. “Paul, stay here, please—sit.”

But, eyes burning, her sensitive husband was already up. “
If
you will excuse me—Mother.”

“But
of course
I shall excuse you,” purred the queen cat. “Just as people all your life have indulged and excused you—your dear mother particularly.”

Note his rage—his very pure rage—as he exited through the room, for he was two and he was twinned, two poles always divided and always at disequilibrium. But when Verlaine was angry—and worse, when he was both angry and drunk—these two sides of him would converge, and hard, like the blade of an axe.

B
ut how could Verlaine’s relations with his in-laws have come to such an unfortunate impasse, and so rapidly? And how when, during Mathilde and his courtship and leading up to their marriage, he had written poems so high-flown, idealized, and chivalrous that at times they verged on the ridiculous, seducing him himself even as he seduced Mathilde—a girl so naïve that, for some time, she believed the ardor of his kiss might impregnate her!

Nor was Verlaine a fool. By then he knew too well that he needed the chastity belt of marriage to protect himself against his various … inclinations. Strange, indeed, how even a dog of a man, in a dog-whistle way, will suddenly feel his ears prick up and think, Marry. Absent yourself from the green bitch Absinthe—abstain. Whore no more. Give up, as if for some interminable Lent, the knee trembler with a sailor or some blacksmith’s apprentice with pythonlike biceps, before whom Verlaine would kneel in Holy Communion, his agile wrist whisk-whisking
the young man, bringing him fully engorged, into his grateful mouth. Good God, he thought in that too brief moment of post-suck
tristesse
. You’re a poet and a husband. Have some dignity.
Finis!

He had, after all, a budding poetic reputation. Why, as a Parnassian, he swam with a school known for classic order, for flawless craft and carefully balanced emotions—
embody that aesthetic
. He was invited, increasingly, to the best salons—
stay sober, keep it up
. He was a superb technician, and it was the springtime of bourgeoisiedom
—let them experience Art
. For example:

Home

Then there was Verlaine’s prospective father-in-law. Although not conspicuously wealthy or influential or aristocratic in the grand sense, M. Mauté de Fleurville was, notwithstanding, a noble gentleman of comfortably independent means who naturally adored, and also greatly indulged, his daughter. Nevertheless, it was only with the greatest possible reluctance—and then after months of her tears and entreaties—that he allowed her to marry this very dubious fellow whose face reminded him, he said, of a fresh truffle.

And a man of what stripe? M. Mauté didn’t give a hang for poetry; he liked to stalk and shoot and mount on his trophy wall, with ironic expressions, tiny horned deer, roe deer, some scarcely larger than hares, of which he then had twelve—ah, yes, he liked to joke to visitors when he showed them his wall of horned gophers, “like the twelve apostles.” As for this Verlaine, true, M. Mauté’s inquiries revealed this so-called poet to be a young man of some poetic reputation and attainment. Son of a middling, now deceased army officer, he was more or less of adequate
status and potential means once his mother died, but otherwise, well, really, what did this unfortunate man offer socially or professionally? Copying documents? Fetching coffee? Sorting mail? Not to mention the fact that he was almost ten years older than Mathilde.

Indeed, it seemed to M. Mauté that M. Verlaine was taking unfair advantage, writing the dewy-eyed girl these gooey
poems
 … these faux-gallant, vaguely
obscene
poems, fixating (foot man that Verlaine was) on the foot of his beloved:

Wary that Verlaine was merely an adventurer after her money, M. Mauté insisted there would be no dowry, ever. Pure bluster. Together with Verlaine’s widowed and equally overindulgent mother, the Mautés not only matched the 30,000 francs she gave the newlyweds but then set them up in a handsomely furnished apartment on the corner of the quai de la Tournelle, an address where, from the balcony, in one sweep, the lovebirds could take in the Seine and Notre Dame and Montmartre in the distance. Here, too, Verlaine had his own study with a fine view, a padded leather chair, and a sturdy desk that his adoring wife (as if leaving straw and water for an animal in captivity) had provisioned with ink, paper, expensive pens, and tobacco.
Voilà
 … create.