Disaster Was My God (3 page)

Stuck—this was Vitalie Cuif’s other great theme. Stuck she was, stuck since the age of five, when her mother died. And since her father never remarried, stuck with taking care of him and her two useless brothers. Cooking, cleaning, milking, chopping, emptying, then washing the chamber pots—all this and more Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Cuif did. Even as a girl, she was effectively a wife for her father, not only a demanding man but also a quite thirsty and, frankly, physical man. Every night at the tavern he drank too much ale, and so every night, once he had stumbled home, he always had a terrible thirst, calling out,
Daughter, I’m thirsty
.

Her brothers slept far downstairs, muffled. But to be ready, she slept upstairs, at hand, in the next room. Where in the middle of the night she would hear,
Vitalie, bring me water
. Cold, cold water brimming fresh from the pump, this was her father’s wish. Good girl. There’s a good girl. After all, it was water, just water, and it was dark and all so long ago. Her brothers, with their private boy language, they might as well have been deaf and blind—they heard and saw nothing. And why would they with a father who was merely thirsty and demanding, as was his paternal right, to be served quickly—and with no sass—by his women.
Woman
, rather.

It almost goes without saying that nobody ever saw anything or
remembered anything because, of course, nothing had happened or could happen. Forget it. The girl had to forget it. Even in the confessional there was nothing to say about it, not when there was a male sitting on the other side. For after all, was not the father thirsty? Was the girl not his daughter and was he not her father to obey in all things? Girls needed to be quiet and kept busy, with their foolish wagging tongues, and so they were. There was church. There was needlework and crocheting, ironing, and chicken plucking—plenty for a girl to do. And for those spoiled girls that couldn’t be happy, the malcontents and hysterics, there were options. There were nunneries. Asylums, too. And Alphonse Cuif’s daughter, as he warned her repeatedly, was on the cusp, for she had a nasty disposition—
un sale caractère
—and, with almost no time to call her own, virtually no friends, save God, of course. Talking to herself, the girl was always talking to herself, desperately clutching herself as she wandered the fields, hair blowing, truly a peculiar and disagreeable girl, everybody said so. In short, even among the gossips there was nothing to think. It was blank; it was null; nobody in those days ever wondered, or would have wondered, why the girl was so. Weeping so. Upset so. Don’t be foolish. Think what? There was nothing to think.

Well, finally, inevitably, the father kicked out her useless brothers, true, both drunks like him, but sissies with no heads for business, no instinct for the jugular. Alone with her father—this was what did it for Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Cuif. Alone, she felt completely trapped, exposed for the first time and shamed before God. And so for the first time she said no—no to what she couldn’t remember, but
no
. No more water. No more nursely visits. No.

Vengeance was swift.

“Petite salope,”
cried her father, pounding on her door. “Find a man or I’ll find you one—blind, or crippled, or crazy. Or even ninety years old. Be a nun for all I care, but get out! I want you
out.
”

It was hopeless. She was far too old. She knew no men and had no women friends to invent the clever pretexts and make the necessary introductions. But then in the tavern one night, deep in his cups, her
father looked up to see, through the swirling blue pipe smoke, an officer, a captain in the chasseurs.

“Captain,” said Cuif
père
, red of face, raising his tankard of ale, “I drink to our brave defenders! Sit, captain. Allow me to buy you a glass!”

Hooking his thumb on his upper teeth, or what remained of them, the old sharp had sold his share of cows and horses, but never one that came with a farm and a dowry of 15,000 francs. Why, the little bitch sold herself.

And so, about every year, the captain would return on leave, just long enough to force upon her the same old feelings of panic and suffocation. Jammed himself in, bucked a while, shuddered, then promptly rolled off. Wiped himself on the sheet, then fell to snoring. And so each visit, Vitalie Cuif Rimbaud was stuck and bucked, then stuck again … Frédéric in ’53, Arthur in ’54, Vitalie in ’58. And finally, in ’60, Isabelle—the baby.

And of course, once the money was spent, adieu, the captain was gone, too. Slamming the door, he narrowly missed being brained by the heavy brass jug that she hurled at his head. It rang. Ricocheted. Spun like a top on the floor. The two boys stood frozen. It was the size of a head,
his
head. She picked it up, started smashing it on the table, weeping and shrieking. Stuck again—stuck with three and, soon, four.

“Here,” she said, showing the battered jug to the two small boys. “See what your father leaves you?” She pointed to the two dents. “There, do you see?” Two holes, like the Man in the Moon. “Do you not see his face?”

And so atop the mantel stood the smashed jug with the two dents for eyes and the jug handle for a nose. Warning from the queen that, in her hive, men were drones, utterly expendable and easily banished.

T
hen, down the road, the farm dogs are barking. It’s the gravedigger’s boy, a blubbery, freckled, red-faced youth riding bareback a sideways-trotting plough horse heaving his great neck and flapping his tail against the flies.

“
Bonsoir
, Madame.” Wondrous the lad’s unsurprise at the old sphinx. Does she not realize she is pointing an open clasp knife at him?

“Whoa, boy,” she says. She holds up the old clasp knife with which she is peeling an apple, white like a doll’s head, trailing a spiraling ribbon of peel. How tiny she looks before the enormous plough horse. “First, boy, it’s
Veuve
Rimbaud. Second, I know all about you young jackasses, flapping your jaws. And you did not blabber? You swear?”

“Nothing, Veuve Rimbaud.” Placidly, he slaps a fly. “I do not swear.”

“And you were not followed?”

The gravedigger pops up.

“Ah, Georges,” he says with relief, “right on time.” But then as quickly his tone changes. “Veuve Rimbaud, they are present now.”

“Who?” She feels a chill.

“Your two children. Please, I say this to prepare you.”

“I
am
prepared.”

Then, to distract her, the gravedigger pays her—he thinks—a compliment.

“I hear they are giving Arthur his own statue. In the town square.”

“Ridiculous. Give the money to the poor.”

How she hates it when the townspeople call him
Arthur
, as if he were theirs, the friendly village ghost. One leg. Of course she has heard the awful joke. That, against his terrible mother, he had only one leg to stand on after they amputated his other in Marseille. It was an emergency operation, when he returned from Africa with his right knee swollen the size of a beehive with a carcinoma. Twelve hellish days being carried on a litter across the desert, followed by hostiles. Sixteen litter bearers, fifteen camels, six drivers and a dozen hired gunmen—all that and a family of four, two of them young children. Thirty-eight souls, they had crossed the Abyssinian desert, a capsized land of blue mountains, red mud, volcanic washes, and dried-up riverbeds that might have been ploughed by whales. For those twelve days, sunburned and thirsty and losing two men, the party pushed on to the Gulf of Aden, below the Red Sea. Even then Rimbaud’s ordeal was not over. He was fifteen days more, steaming to France, half out of his mind, terrified he would lose
the gold that it had taken him years to amass—a pittance, he thought, compared with what had been devoured by thievery and murder, extortion and fictitious taxes. From first to last, his was a life of antipodes, veering from visionary idealism to the guttering twilight of capitalism, the only constants being restlessness, grandiosity, and the sand-blind tyranny of dreams.

At his death Rimbaud was only thirty-seven but, after a decade in the desert, looked at least a decade older. His once blond hair was gray, and he had grown a small razor mustache. In his kepi, he looked, in fact, like a Muslim, and on his chest, in a special vest, he carried some four kilos of gold, a .32 pistol, and, in case of capture, a double-shot derringer: one shot under the chin. Better that than castration, the rule in the Danakil Desert, preferably while the victim was alive to watch. In this state, Rimbaud arrived. That is, before the ether-soaked gauze was laid over his face and night, blessed night, filled the globes of his eyes.

“Oh, of course,” said his mother as she and Isabelle rode the train to the hospital in Marseille to see their prodigal. “Only when there is trouble—or he needs money—only then does he come home.”

“Mother,” corrected Isabelle, ever his apologist. “Whatever else, he needs no money from you. Not now.”

“But he
needs
. He
needs
and he
feeds
, and here I am. What am I, a cow with four teats? And when does he return? But of course, when he is going to die.”

“But why should he die?” yelped Isabelle. The amputation had been successful. In no way, then, was his death apparent—to her. Hatefully, however, her mother, with her sudden fears and premonitions, was rarely, if ever, wrong about such things, especially when it came to death.

W
hen deep in the hole, a boom is heard: deep, wooden,
inhabited
.

“That’s him,” cries the undertaker. “Arthur’s coffin. Perfect. Why, almost new.”

Go
, says the voice and her hands tremble as she pulls off the veil. But
no sooner has she climbed down from the gig than the gravedigger calls to his Buddha-sized boy, locks arms with him, then up—out of the hole—he flies. Arms upraised. To stop her.

“Madame”—blocking her—“Veuve Rimbaud, please. Please, no further. For your daughter, believe me, an undertaker is required.”

“Nonsense. Stand aside.”

And look, as Mme. Rimbaud peers down, below the lip of turf, deep in the late sun, there it shines—hair. A shock of reddish blond hair. Like yesterday. Exposed to air and life, in the late rays of the sun, as if through some mighty, subterranean phosphorescence, even after twenty-five years, the girl’s red hair ignites, as her mother stands above, clawing her elbows, then grasping her trembling knees.

Snow, it snowed that day twenty-five years ago, then turned bitterly cold—cold and dry, she remembers. Sitting with Vitalie in her boatlike coffin, rocking and crying, she felt almost pregnant with grief, her eyes swollen like two boiled eggs. The wood stove was pulsing hot and the wintry air, it itched her nose it was so dry. So dry that, behold, the dead girl’s red hair—electrified by the mother’s helpless stroking—it rose, almost living … 
right to her palm
. Only hair, she thought. Just hair. The hair but not the girl.

And Arthur, that albatross, then twenty-one, once again he was home, and again “around her neck,” this after a two-year rampage through Paris and London and Brussels with his lover, Paul Verlaine, a poet ten years older. That it had been the most creative period of either poet’s life—much less that her son had written poems in a language never before heard—naturally, of this the Widow Rimbaud knew nothing and cared even less. All she knew were the horrifying reports from Verlaine’s mother and Verlaine’s teenage wife—of crimes so foul that her son most certainly was damned. Nevertheless, she had come to his aid, visiting him in London, where he and Verlaine were living, openly cohabiting, when they came home drunk or high from the opium dens by the wharves, foul rookeries in which cadaverous men lay on benches, as long pipes—pipes stuffed with burbling black goo—were served up by Chinamen with quill-like nails and longer beards. For the kid, by then,
pretty much everything had collapsed or was collapsing, dying like the dreams of childhood. His great boast, for example, that he knew all forms of magic and would revolutionize love. Or the still more ridiculous claim that he and Verlaine would live as children of the sun, baptized in the new faith, in new loves and new hopes, surging like the sea. Rot, thought Rimbaud, all rot. As he wrote then in his own dark night of the soul:

His blindness! His arrogance! he thought. In his four years as a committed poet, had he changed anything or improved anyone, least of all a moral toad like Verlaine? Had he written a word that wasn’t a lie and self-delusion? Had he, who said that charity was the key, had he not been a demon of pride and selfishness, perhaps even
the
devil, leading Verlaine to destroy his marriage, desert his infant son, and squander his inheritance? And even then he could profess, abracadabra-like, with no apparent hypocrisy, that he had absolutely no interest in money. He was the rain without the wet. The crime with no consequences. The rhyme that rhymed with everything.

All this was bad enough, but then the kid (and it was he who called the shots in their relationship), he told the older man that he was leaving for good,
really
leaving this time. It was for the best, he said, the good, the kind, the logical thing, a mercy, really. Sentimental as ever in such matters, uselessly burdened as adults are, the elder poet, Verlaine, was weeping. Uch, bawling, and at that moment Rimbaud, as clear and cold as a star, had the sensation of drowning him—of smothering the very love that he had sworn to reinvent. Outwardly, the kid was completely calm, explaining everything matter-of-factly as one can only from the unassailable and unknowing bluffs of youth. That accomplished, the kid went to buy a rail ticket, leaving Verlaine to sob himself to sleep. Two
hours later, however, it was a different story. Returning, he found Verlaine swaying drunk and enraged, aiming at his chest a small-caliber pawnshop pistol that he had just purchased.