Disaster Was My God (31 page)

“I assure you,” insisted the boy, for the second time, “I am Arthur Rimbaud.”

“Ah,” she scoffed, “you play a trick on me, boy. Perhaps you are Monsieur Rimbaud’s nephew.” Mme. Mauté peered around the doorway, looking for Paul’s feet under the bushes. Some drunk’s idea of a joke.

“Paul, enough!” she cried. “No more tricks. Produce the real Rimbaud.”

“I
am
the real Rimbaud.”

Whereupon, as evidence, the boy withdrew from his back pocket a sweaty wad of paper. Slapped it to life, then unfolded it, damp and smeary. “There, do you see? My newest poem. Brand-new. ‘The Drunken Boat.’ ”

“What kind of title is that?” she challenged. “Drunken boats! Boats do not get drunk—how old are you?”

He didn’t just blush. His face bloomed in splotchy, adolescent dials of rose. In these hormonal days he embarrassed easily, particularly in the presence of women, and especially with this one of aristocratic bearing.

“Seventeen,” he lied.

“Seventeen! I think fifteen, perhaps. And where is your luggage, young man? Did it fall off the hay wagon?”

“As you see,” he said, with a crimson shrug, “I am wearing it.”

“Look at this,” she said, bustle swaying like the tail of a honeybee, “no clothes, drunken boats—”

Turning, she called back to Mathilde, who just then had emerged. “Do you see this adult child? He insists that
he
is the great Rimbaud.” She hitched her hips, and to his mortification, he cringed—cringed just as he did when, in her palm, his mother held a slap with which to paint his impudent face. But clearly, this was not his mother, nor his class, nor anything even remotely within his experience.

“Very well, then, Monsieur Rimbaud, who arrives in Paris sans valise. Please,” she said, motioning him inside. “I am most sorry that I mistook you. Now do please follow me into the
salon.
”

T
orture
. There he was, sitting upon—or rather, sinking into—a pouf-pillow chair of goose feathers and tufted satin. Worse, he faced not just the mute terror of women but two perfumed, splendidly dressed, haute bourgeois women of a class about which he had heard and railed but which he had never encountered in the flesh, let alone in their priggish, pretentious environs. Who, worse still, were not scolding him but merely making
conversation
. Worse, it was Parisian female conversation, as formally elaborate as it was, at this point in their brief acquaintance, quite deliberately inconsequential.

As for the house, this sturdy manse, never had he seen so many
things
, indeed so very many things that
these
things, breeding like rabbits, seemed to spawn yet more things. Tables with clawed feet. Armchairs dripping tassels. Gloomy paintings. Gold-encrusted clocks. Porcelain figurines. And mechanical maids who, like the figures on a cuckoo clock, appeared every time the old sorceress pulled a velvet rope.
Yes, Madame, no, Madame
. Swish, swish, swish.

Worse, behind the piano, M. Mauté had a trophy wall packed with horned heads, tiny stuffed heads, probably one dozen in number, with twiglike horns. What on earth
were
these poor things he’d shot and had stuffed? thought the boy. Dwarf deer? Runt mountain antelopes? Animal
poets
—murdered. Duly noted, thought the kid. Another bourgeois outrage that would not go unpunished.

“One lump or two, Monsieur Rimbaud?”

“What?” This was his default answer to any question. He stared at her—at the air—at the wall just to her left.

“Lumps,” she prompted. “Sugar.”

“Four.” He’d never seen such a thing—lumps.
Of sugar?

“Four? Are you a bee, Monsieur?”

He looked down. “Four, yes.”

Plunk. Plunk. Plunk. Then, with the clawed tongs, she plucked up a fourth. Eyed him dubiously. Then, decorously, let it fall
—ploop
.

What, he thought, was she trying to embarrass him? Put him in his place? Ominously, the cup rattled. Tea slopped in the saucer and his face flushed crimson, and not merely owing to his natural clumsiness at this age. For here,
talking
to him, and not merely lecturing or yelling but conversing
—socially
conversing—here were actual women, one a young, pregnant, and therefore
sexual
woman and, worse, a
pretty
woman, scarcely older than he.

Women, girls, all that—how did this fit in with his program of derangement, systematic derangement, in his quest to be both seer and thug,
voyant et voyou
—the thief of fire? Anyhow, what girl was going to sign on for this? More to the point, how, in the midst of revolutionizing mankind, well, who had time to think about
that
? Intercourse. Menstruation. Sticky wet darkness smothering you.

Now, true, in the kid’s manifesto about the
voyant
, he had prophesized about the eventual ascendancy of woman—that is, once her sad servitude had been broken, waiting on men, rearing kids, milking cows. But what did he—what
could
he—have known of actual flesh-and-blood women?

Little, obviously. The former prize boy over whom Charleville’s mothers had once fawned was now a public disgrace effectively quarantined from the opposite sex. Then again, who were his models, his authorities? His two sisters, told to shun him? His mother? The odd, claret-gilled bachelors who had versed him at the
collège
?

“But where do you get your ideas?” inquired Mathilde, trying to draw him out.

He sighed. Rolled his eyes, hung his head. He wasn’t saying
Madame
, not even to the old one, let alone to her, another kid,
pregnant
, he thought, with her sloshing bosoms leaking milk.

“Ideas?” she said again, a poet’s girl, he thought. But that black spider between her legs
—uch
.

“Ideas?” He scowled. “I have no ideas.”

“No ideas?” she replied, giving him, she thought, a lovely opening to expound upon his ruminative process, his dreams. “What then do you have, Monsieur Rimbaud?”

“Kittens.”

“Kittens?” she asked, at first thinking (owing to his unfortunate accent) that she had somehow misheard him. When, spastic—unable to stand it—he bolted up. Knocked over his cup, eggshell thin, then watched in a kind of willed dream as it shattered like an orgasm on the floor.

“Mon Dieu!” exclaimed Mme. Mauté. She looked at him in horror. “That was my mother’s finest porcelain.”

See him now, hunkered and picked on—wrongly accused, when it was the porcelain’s fault. Or really, Mme. Mauté’s fault for giving him porcelain in the first place.

“Mother,” said the resourceful Mathilde quietly, as the maids converged. “Mother, I think it is time to show Monsieur Rimbaud to his room.”

33
Torn

Surprise! Returning from his troll through Paris’s nocturnal rookeries, then a failed rendezvous with the kid at the Gare de l’Est, Verlaine was shocked—nay, stupefied—to be presented with this otherworldly
child
. This delicious fawn.

“Cher maître,”
said the boy, brightening, for he could kiss ass, and masterfully when it suited him. “I am so very honored to meet you.”

Master
, ker-humphed Mme. Mauté, still smarting over the broken teacup. And this from a brat who, for his hostess, couldn’t summon a single “Madame” or “thank you.”

“Why, Paul,” she said to her son-in-law, now lizard-eyed and foul-smelling from his evening’s stumble, “what
will
you discover next? An eight-year-old Victor Hugo?”

“Mother,” he replied, “do you think that great wine comes only in old bottles?”

“Bottles,” she said with a low glance at her daughter. “How very apt.”

“Dear,” he said to his wife, ignoring this slur, “how are you feeling?”

Abruptly, she turned, clearly near tears. Uxorious, he followed, as much for her benefit as for the boy’s—that this strange boy should see his gallantry and protectiveness of the female flock, his male command.

“Monsieur Rimbaud, please,” said the elder poet as he withdrew to see to his pregnant spouse, “do make yourself at home. I’ll show you a bit of Paris shortly. Please, I’ll only be a few minutes.”

S
o began Verlaine’s struggles. Torn between two teenagers. Two antipodes.

He followed his wife into the room. Precariously, he laid her down, leaning too close, when he remembered,
perfume
. Any trace of trollop. And so, lest she sniff him out, preemptively he burst into tears. Another talent of our poet’s—the ability to cry at will, much as a skunk, with a flip of the tail, cloaks its escape in malodorous fog.

“I was so
horrid,
” he wept. “I know that—
I know
. But your mother …”

Keep talking
.

No matter how groundless, hopeless, or off point, Verlaine always relied on this stratagem with women. And, it must be said, with often baffling success.

Mathilde knew, of course, about the Green Fairy and her ilk. But being of tender years and so recently wed, she could not have conceived the stamina and cunning—the sheer stupefying
imagination
—of a depravity so insatiable, so enterprising and gargantuan.

Now, granted, a mistress or favorite whore—
bien entendu
, most men
of his class kept one or two, perhaps. But a bestiary? And in Verlaine’s case, of course, the possibilities were doubled, if not trebled. Both sexes. All ages. All classes—the more louche the better, actually. Paris, then, was his amusement park and hunting ground, all the more when the poor fellow was not only bored and blocked but on short rations at home.

And here was the trouble: the omnivorous Verlaine, this sexual Achilles, for a man of his inclinations, he harbored one fatal flaw—he loved. Of course, he loved badly, inconstantly, hopelessly, ridiculously, recklessly, and violently—but loved. However rashly. However inconstantly. However disastrously—loved. And why? His mother, of course. As with any other man’s mother, Mme. Verlaine was the Rosetta stone. It was she who told the story as far as his relations with women went. And while hardly “right” in the usual sense, all was not wrong with Verlaine in his dealings with the fairer sex.
Au contraire
.

Owing to his many years interned with his mother, Paul Verlaine knew women infinitely better than did most, if not all, of his sex, who at the time scarcely knew them at all. Such home training had made our womanizer adaptive, sporting, and
joyeux
. Moreover, in a time of rampant misogyny, remarkably, he actually liked, and often preferred, the company of women, including their loud disapproval—anything so long as he held the
attention
of women, even if it meant crossing rapiers with, say, the formidable Mme. Mauté.

The advantage was huge, and not merely in the cause of his habitual lying and cheating. Storming or sunny, accusing or rationalizing, this selfishly generous temperament equipped Verlaine with the extraordinary ability to absolve himself of everything, just as it gave him scandalous license to blame everyone and everything. Especially when the Green Fairy’s flickering tongue was exploring the recesses of his ear.

What’s more, as a man with the physical charms of a goat, Verlaine had learned—purely as a matter of survival—to be droll and charming. Surprising. Attentive. Even endearing in a maddening way. Another huge advantage over the usual éminence grise walled behind his newspaper.
That is, if Monsieur was even home and not instead poking his mistress.

As yet another indication of his home training, at an early age Verlaine had learned how to cope with the deeper vales of the female psyche, preoccupied with the very topics that men bury or flee: grief, children, sickness, and all the rest—but loss principally. In the face of which, Verlaine had also learned, in the herding and management of women, what seemed to him the greatest lesson of all—to
distract
.

As indeed he now did so brilliantly with Mathilde, in her hormonally charged, weepy
grossesse
. Observe.

Role reversal, for example. That is, when—quite magically
—he
, Verlaine, became the one even more wronged and hurt—the “girl,” that is.

Or when he was the naughty boy, the boy caught, while she, Mathilde, played the stern mother.

Or when he would merely be tiresome and irritating
—distract
.

Or violent, as he was that night not long after their wedding, when, because Mathilde didn’t want to “do” a certain
something
, he grabbed her by the neck and threw her down—but so fast that all she could remember was the swashbuckling afterward of him holding her like a child, arms sprawled, overcome. And not so much because he had throttled her but because, in a way difficult to explain to anyone not inside their marriage, he had saved her.
Saved her
.

“Antics.” “Spasms.” “Fits.” Or that catchall excuse, “artistic.” Mathilde Mauté used the very words for her husband that his own mother did. Still, inside their marriage, this was not, as yet, horrifying. No, no, it was explainable.
Because she understood
. As love understood. As no one else would or could.