Disaster Was My God (33 page)

Fearing a trap, the rescuers knew better than to give chase. Now what? Thrashing slick with blood, the horse was down, and the wounded man was in worse shape. True, his leg could be tied off with a leather strip, then, once in camp, amputated and the stump cauterized, vein by vein, with a red-hot dagger. Tomorrow he might be tied on a horse, but what then? The cut was high; he would be no one, a woman, and likely would die anyway. Assuming, of course, they could even reach camp without being overrun.

No time to puzzle. Correct behavior in such situations had long been agreed on, and the wounded man, Audou Sakina, although drifting, readily understood their decision as they pulled him around, east to face Mecca and the blessed sun that, come morning, would shine upon his face. Indeed, Audou Sakina thanked them, then shouted to God as, with two blasts, they first finished him, then the horse. Leave nothing. Quickly, they stripped Audou Sakina of all valuables and weapons, laid his hands upon his stomach, and patted his cheek tenderly—left to God. Then, remounting, hotly they kicked ribs and off they rode, long spears pointing back over their shoulders as they launched into the night sky.

I
n fury, Audou Sakina’s two rescuers looked at Rimbaud, mutinous and surly as they rode into camp and dismounted, heavily stained with their friend’s blood. It wasn’t just the death of Audou Sakina that enraged them. As five then returned as four, they had lost face, surrendering one of their own to the enraged villagers—unworthy men, amateurs in their eyes. And all because of Rimbaud’s sentimental stunt. Over what? A half-dead donkey?

Honestly, why they didn’t kill him and seize the lot right there,
Rimbaud had no idea. Perhaps it was their blood oath to the chief whom Rimbaud had paid so handsomely and armed so magnificently. Or inertia. Or that begrudged but still almost hatefully inestimable power of the
frangi
, he who brought the rain. In any case, Rimbaud paid them. Later, with much haggling, he paid them dearly for Audou Sakina, a believer, as well as the hundreds, obviously, who depended upon the proceeds from Audou Sakina’s unswerving sword and prolific gun.

36
Child of the Sun

The day before, upon fleeing the Mautés, they had had their hasty preliminaries, the elder and the putative understudy—the confessions, the whispered dreams, the lapel-grabbing excitement. And late that night, by which point Verlaine was far too drunk to heed fully Rimbaud’s words (much as, the night before Christ’s crucifixion, his disciples dozed during his Agony in the Garden), he failed to grasp the full implications of the kid’s fanatical creed about a “rational derangement of all the senses.”

Not rash
—rational
.

Not subjective—
objective
.

Not parlor-trained
—monstrous
.

Not personal
—egoless
.

Not
my
language
—une langue universelle … of ecstasies!

And, above all, not
love
, that lying negation:
it did not exist
, posited Mme. Rimbaud’s prodigal—yet. No, love, love in the old sense, was a lie. Love, thus, would have to be wholly reinvented, resulting in nothing less than revolution of the soul. As for language, it would be a language
of
the soul,
for
the soul, a universal language inaccessible to the mere versifiers who infested Paris. Rather, this new language would be accessible to the one, the
true
poet,
le voyant
, the visionary, the great scholar and criminal, the one accused! The one who, swallowing black poisons, produces, like a milk cow, blond quintessences.

Banished, then, the compromises of mediocrity. Cleansed, the
contagions of the Church. Love reborn. Hope reborn—new faith, new zones, new skies. And on the shores of this new world, armed with new love and infused with
true
hope, he would run with limbs of gold. A child again. Reborn again into strength and beauty—Child of the Sun! Deathless as the sun and immense as the sea.

The fallen world, however, the real world, is gaslit, ill-lit—fog.

At 1:00 a.m. as they emerge from Le Voltaire, it is a shadowy stumble-world of small, stooped men, absinthe addicts most of them, in long swallowtailed coats and domed top hats. Down the center of the street, in a shallow channel, a residue of water gleams like the blood gutter on the blade of a knife. And beyond, framed in fantastical ruins, lo, the tarts! Four old trollops, the desperate fishing for the dregs from closing time. Clothed—
clothed
is the thrill in these figures of obscene fascination, whom Baudelaire, syphilitic hysteric that he was, had once referred to as “latrines.” Clad head to toe in black, they resemble mortuary figures, queens in death’s chess set. Like small Gibraltars, their bustles. Tatty hats and wedge toes to sniff and lick and obey, if that is your particular kink. And
—attention
—in the prim purses you can be sure they are secreting hat pins and razors, even sleeping drams for those ladies who specialize in drugging, then robbing the old rapers. They are an army. In Paris, a city of almost two million, they easily number in the thousands, these angels of ease—
they are everywhere
. Desire is fear and fear is desire, for syphilis is rampant, hideously ravaging, and incurable—
dare you
. Ask the syphilitic ghost of Baudelaire, the flaneur and dandy. Gamely tapping his cane, lured by the very horror of his own fascination, in death the great shade forever trolls the gutters in his white spats, kid gloves, and yellow top hat.

“Pas
si vite,
” calls Verlaine, “not so far ahead.”

Dk dk dkk
, sounds Verlaine’s sword stick, testing with each wobbling step the irregular loaf-sized cobbles. Zigzagging, the medieval street ever ascends, trapping, like dew in a spider’s web, the violet fog.

“Monsieur Rimbaud, wait,” Verlaine protests, for by then the young dog is half a block ahead—too far for Verlaine to see if the lad fancies
women. Tomorrow, or in a few days in any case, the corruption will begin; he will offer to buy the lad his first piece of tail—a test, to see if or
what
he likes or, heh, if a good stiff cock might be his fancy!

When, with a loud bark, the visionary youth pitches over, vomits—O! Then, fresh from this swilling ode, he whips up again, laughing!

Cries Verlaine, stumbling to his aid, “Are you quite all right?”

The kid lurches back. Points at the moon coring through the fog.

“Don’t you see?” he cries.

“What?” Crouching, Verlaine is now trying to draw a sight along the lad’s wavering finger. “What?”

“Suddenly it all makes sense!”

“What?”

But, jerking erect, the boy just stumbles on, laughing.

S
o much, then, for the preliminaries. The next day, in relative sobriety, over café and cassis, the two poets do that anxious, loaded thing—exchange work. And straightaway, Verlaine loses, for of course he has no new work—nothing but the prissy
La Bonne Chanson
, verses lacking only the lute and the tights. What a spot. Here was a place he no longer was, with no clue, as yet,
where
he is or wants to go.

The boy is brutal. There is no pause.

“These are too … 
artistic.
” To him the ultimate shame: the clever, the arty, the smug—traits ultimately self-regarding and thus … sentimental.

And frankly, what the kid was up against was what might be called French little-
r
romanticism. Or rather what might be described in its bald grandiosity as
unfeelingism
, an overreaction by the French against the gales loosed by
English
Big-R Romanticism in the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century: Wordsworth & Coleridge & Keats & Company.

Seventy years later, in France, in the main, things had not changed much. Safe, since it was not political and censorable, the Parnassian
movement had, in those nervous times, given rise to the
ultra nouveau
and very smart-sounding but ultimately bankrupt notion of art for art’s sake. Pure artifice. Roughly what Oscar Wilde championed before—bankrupt and publicly ruined in his mad love for a beautiful but worthless boy—he experienced the soul-scouring insides of Reading Gaol. So much for art for art’s sake.

But what of Rimbaud? As a kid and a newly sexual being, he was forced to disguise his own disguises, the cooties of feeling, such that he had to hide or distort them—to throw them like a ventriloquist’s voice or impute them to others. Other characters and alter egos. To anyone but him, whoever
he
was.

“I know you have great things in you,” offers the boy at last. “Deeper things, certainly—I know this. But I am obliged to tell you: this is shit—shit. You must never again write in this way. Or really,
live
in this way. Great as he was, this was Baudelaire’s chief failing, you know. He lived in too artistic a milieu—Paris. And here it turns rancid. Pure, putrid
style
. Rather like a man who loves the aroma of his own farts.”

Stabbed, Verlaine feels a tremor pass through him.
Son of a bitch, he’s right
.

“But, Arthur, please,” he stammers, “listen to me. And I am not, I hope you know, merely pulling the rank of my age and experience.

But—”

“Nonsense. Of course you are—”

“But you are but sixteen. You haven’t been through this phase of life. Marriage. Love. Family.”

The kid’s balled fists hit the table.

“Haven’t experienced
what
? Knocking up some dewy-eyed pubescent girl? Sponging off her parents? Is
that
what I am missing? Wake up, Verlaine! Why are your phony feelings important? Because
you
felt them?
Your
logs melting on the fire.
Your
love’s soft arm. Is that all poetry is to you? I, I, I and me, me, me? Idiotic salons and dinner invitations? The empty mirror of fame?
What?
”

All this would have been enough, but once back from the toilet, with a swipe Rimbaud withdraws, sweaty moist from his back pocket,
that new poem at whose peculiar title Mme. Mauté had so recoiled—“The Drunken Boat.”

Insolent brat. Taking the nasty sheets, the bruised Verlaine sorely wants to return the favor. Yet, within the first four stanzas, his ears are ringing. The paper trembles in his fingers; his breathing stutters and his flitting eye—his eye cannot stop looking.

At what? Experience says it is wrong. Rude. Jejune. Chaotic and violent. At points even absurd.

The Drunken Boat

And his diction! he thinks. Crude, brawling words like “yelping,” “stupid,” “hubbub,” not to mention the vile “vomit”—this, mind you, from a man who, only a week before, could be seen grappling the lard-white legs of an old strumpet, helplessly licking, like salvation itself, the darkened peach pit of her arsehole.
Vile?
Was that the word?

Then frightened—actually disoriented—Verlaine races ahead:

It was like a public beating, this dismantling. And yet much as part of him would have liked to savage the kid, Verlaine was an unfailingly honest critic. Even if he didn’t yet understand, he knew what he knew. Knew physically. Knew from the heat, the shock, the pure animal strangeness. And—all honor to him—Verlaine never let jealousy cloud his opinion, nor did he shrink from admitting what he knew.