Disaster Was My God (38 page)

“I agree,” he gushed. “In a few days. At most a week.”

“Paul,”
she hissed, “hear me now. Not
days
or even
a
day. Tomorrow by
noon
—noon sharp—Rimbaud is gone. If not, I tell my parents everything.”

42
Boy on the Cusp

As for Rimbaud, even before he got the boot from 14 rue Nicolet, unusual for him, he had been in a visible funk, a detail not overlooked by the perspicacious Mme. Mauté.

Much of it, she knew, was the letdown of his ill-starred debut, but was that all, she wondered. It was then that she recalled the observation that her son-in-law had made some days earlier to throw them off the trail—about Rimbaud’s needing a girl. Ah-ha, thought Mme. Mauté. A girl, was
that
it?

Honestly, it was hard to know. For example, Paulette, the youngest of the three maids, was, she thought, quite pretty, albeit in a déclassé sort of way. Yet whenever Paulette entered the room, stiffly Rimbaud would leave—embarrassed, if that was quite the word. Just what
was
that word, exactly?

Indeed, Mme. Mauté became genuinely curious as to what a
suitable enough
girl might do, or better yet, the effect that
too
suitable a girl might have. For what was required, after all, was not
the
girl but merely
a
girl. A girl not only heartbreakingly pretty but hopelessly unattainable.

It was then she remembered Mme. de Robert’s seventeen-year-old Natalie, who, much to her mother’s dismay, was presently more focused on writing poetry than on finding a husband.
Poetess
, sniffed Mme. de Robert to Mme. Mauté. Bubbling like two doves, the two ladies were having their thrice-weekly tête-à-tête in two facing chairs of blue velveteen. Mauté blue. Indeed, it was the blue of the Mauté family coat of arms, a contrived artifact allegedly last seen when some chain–mail-wearing forebear was hunched over, helping his betters up into their stirrups to go fight the English. “Ah,” said Mme. de Robert, ever
alert for signs of social decline in
her
set.
“Poetess,”
she continued, “this barbarism reminds me of that odious new title
actress
, with which the various tartlettes of the stage and the music halls now cloak their revolting nocturnal escapades.”

They replaced their porcelain teacups on their porcelain saucers—blue, of course. Mme. de Robert, meanwhile, remained discomfited.

“But what if she becomes interested?” asked Mme. de Robert, albeit with great deference. Despite her unfortunate son-in-law, Mme. Mauté was seen as brilliant in the womanly stratagems of matchmaking.

“Ridiculous,” replied Mme. Mauté. “
Un paysan du Danube?
A penniless rube. But of
course
, it will go nowhere. What does a puppet do when one drops the strings?”

N
ever mind the machinations involved: Mme. Mauté’s puffery about Rimbaud’s genius, together with the two poems, two of the more innocent (“The Green Cabaret” and “The Hands of Jeanne-Marie”), that she hand-copied (much bowdlerized) for the impressionable Natalie. Suffice to say that young Natalie arrived enthralled, a lithe, dark-haired girl in braids, buttoned black shoes, and short white gloves crocheted to resemble white nets. More wounding still, unlike most very beautiful girls of means, Mme. de Robert’s daughter was utterly natural, blithe, and unaffected.

“Ah, Monsieur Rimbaud,” said Mme. Mauté as she swept into the garden where he was reading—loutishly, of course, sprawled on the divan in the same foul suit in which he had arrived. “I have long been meaning to introduce you to this young lady who”—she looked at him with a great smile—“who
also
writes poems. Very good poems, actually. May I present …”

Madame’s dart was true. Rigidly he shot up. Colored and grunted, his big hands flopping. Incredibly, he said,
“Bonjour,”
then—unprecedented—“very nice to meet you,” whereupon, dropping his head, Rimbaud blindly fled the house. And not because he didn’t find the girl attractive—quite the contrary. His paralysis and terror before
her, it was all too emblematic of his sexual ambiguity and emotional incoherence—of the stumbling nakedness in life that he could cloak instead in art.

Beyond questions of art or theory, it was shame that propelled him down rue Nicolet, down the boulevard Barbès, onto the rue d’Hauteville, and eventually to the open market of the Halles, sweet with the smell of overripe fruit, then the sharp blood reek of flayed sides of beef and freshly split pork. A butcher whisk-whisking his knife. A woman brushing away flies. And almost dialectically, running through his mind:

Why can’t I think of women?

Because I need a theory, a lie, to justify who I am?

Because, even if it kills me, I always must do the opposite?

Of the opposite?

Because I do hate women?

Or because I secretly hate liking to hate them?

Dazed, he looked up. Fully two hours had passed. He was on the Pont Neuf, suspended over the black waters of the ever-churning, seaward-surging Seine. Golden cupolas in the distance. Swift pigeons. Water and sky. Here was Paris in all its sweep: marble and iron, spires and statues and trees—hot, raw life, spinning him dizzy.

Peer down into those waters. Whirlpools of sex, boiling dark, boiling deep. Two choices, two poles. Here is childhood and here is adulthood. Here is male, and here is female. And here in the middle, staring at the roiling water, here we find an overbrilliant boy, wishing for a rope, for a rock, but most of all wishing he had a choice. Just a choice, when, really, the choice had already been made for him.

43
Out!

But with the usual randomness, of course the kid did not drown himself. Instead, he returned to 14 rue Nicolet confused and humiliated—out of control. And so, summoning all his powers, the next day he got even.

“Monsieur Rimbaud!
Rimbaud!
Down here! Where is he!
Where
?”

It was glorious. It was M. Mauté downstairs, bellowing at the top of his lungs. A moment prior, as was his tedious custom, M. Mauté had been timing, to the second, the chimes of his many disparate clocks—a clearly hopeless task which, for that very reason, occupied large portions of his day.

When he saw it.

It was his trophy wall of tiny stuffed deer heads … 
and everything was wrong
.

The twig horns. The dubious smiles. On those dozen hare-sized heads everything had been altered—everything. The glass eyes. The smiles. Even the diameter of the nostrils. It was diabolical. It must have taken hours, this outrage, hours daubing black paint with a brush of perhaps
three hairs
. Detectable but to one man, now about to have heart failure.

“Monsieur Rimbaud! Now! Get down here!”

But of course, the boy came right away. The whole household was there.

“Look at this!” cried the old man, now armed with a magnifying glass. Rimbaud looked quizzically at his host, with perfect, malevolent innocence.

“Ah, Monsieur, I came right away. Did something happen?”

“YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED!” Fiercely, M. Mauté looked to the women for support. “You see! Of course you see.
Here
!” he pointed. “And
here!
See? See? Do you not see what he did?”

The women looked at one another, puzzled.

“Look!”
cried M. Mauté, now nose to nose with the third specimen from the right. “Notice the smile—almost gone. And that eye—now dull. And that nostril—ruined. As was your foul intention, Monsieur!”

“Intention?” asked the boy.

“Yooou.” He bellowed. “Yoooooou—”

“But, Monsieur,” inquired the boy, now going in for the kill, “I am confused. Is it this one? Or wait—is it this one here that bothers you …?”

A
nd yet, even after his three-week siege, with a new infant in the house—and now with this fiendish assault on his host—the lad was shocked. Actually shocked when Verlaine called him down to the foyer. There, by the door, stood a new valise purchased in advance for this great day, along with several shirts and undergarments. And there, atop it, was a fat envelope containing thirty francs of good riddance.

“What is this?” demanded the kid. He waved the envelope in Verlaine’s face.
“What is this?”

“Severance pay. Come now,” said Verlaine good-naturedly, “you’ve thoroughly abused our hospitality—you’ve been brilliant in every way. Now come say a proper good-bye. I’ve booked you a room.”

“
Judas!
Go screw yourself.” The kid stormed out.

Let it be said: it did look odd, exceedingly, for a grown man with a valise to be chasing a boy clearly not his son. A horse cab clopped by. Verlaine hailed it, then directed the driver to troll beside the still cursing refugee, head down, beating down the street.

“Arthur!” he said, hanging out the window. “Come on now—in. I’ll pay for your room. We’ll eat, then we’ll both get plastered.”

“All right,” he agreed. “But only if you shut up.”

And so in silence, riding through old Paris, they came to a medieval, almost undersea wreck of a hotel on the faubourg Saint-Denis. Truly the end of the line. Buckling timbers, bleary windows, rotting walls plastered with peeling posters. It had about it a kind of horrifying grandeur, snaking up the riverine street.

They got the key. They climbed the creaking, listing stairs, two floors to No. 8, in which they found a cot, a grimy table thick with tallow, and a small window the hue of a stagnant pond.

“Well, well,” joked Verlaine, setting down the valise. “
Comme … chez soi
. Home sweet home.”

Boom. Dazed he lay on the floor—felled with a vicious rabbit punch.

“Asshole! Liar!” Slapping him, Rimbaud had him by the throat. “We’ll see who’s the bitch here!”

Double man and double boy. Slapping and kicking, rolling and wrestling, they were soon laughing, then not laughing at all, as they popped buttons and shucked shoes. White-fleshed youth. Rimbaud stood at full and erect attention. Jutting, pink and bouncing, he was not overlarge but, as only sixteen can manage, most impressively
vertical
.

No question how this was going to go. The elder poet was on his knees, and here, above him, like a young god, fingers locked on his throat, was his muse and master. Joy incarnate as Verlaine opened his bearded lips—well-versed lips that expertly covered his teeth, stroking and tonguing, gumming and humming to a tom-tom beat.

Mamma’s boys together. So it began, really, as only it could have begun, their two-year rampage through Paris, London, and Brussels. Leaving just four people, all women, of course, to pick up the pieces: Mme. Rimbaud, Mme. Verlaine, and Mathilde Mauté Verlaine—dewy-eyed no more. And of course their leader and strategist, the ever resourceful Mme. Mauté.

Le scandale!
Enter police and solicitors, the wronged, the fleeced, the injured. The mad race was on.

44
Off