Disaster Was My God (41 page)

Her prayers and complaints, her murmurs, up they went like smoke up a flue—to what? God did not answer. Of course God did not answer, but by then, after this decades-long drought, the old woman had begun to think that His not answering was, in itself, almost a form of answer. Of course her faith was dry as sticks. Of course she felt famished and abandoned, but by then this fig leaf
was
her faith, a thing so familiar that she did not feel abandoned. In fact (and here was the oddest thing), she often felt the presence of
another
presence praying beside her. A ghostly presence.

For here beside her was another lady on her knees, another supplicant and not some saint or divinity—no, this august personage was, like her, another cow of faith, longing to be milked of her equally great thirst. Who, apropos of God’s filibuster of silence, would say to Mme. Rimbaud, Don’t stop. You mustn’t stop. Never, Madame, for never has a woman outlasted God’s silence as you have. This is why He loves you. Because you will never give up hope! That is why He gives you the cold shoulder on these long, terrible nights of being old and lonely and deserted. Because you, Madame, are like that cow, the Charolais, good for milk or meat or draft—a cow of purest white who can both feed and pull out stumps! Do not despair. When all others have collapsed, it is
you
upon whom He depends.

T
he murmuring, the head bumping, the muffled sobs—all this Isabelle could hear as she knelt against the wall that adjoined her mother’s room. But finally, mercifully, the commotion fell to snoring, then silence. With that, Isabelle lit her candle lantern. Then, slowly opening her door, a little scared, as always, she followed the glowing lantern down the hall, to the front door entrance, there to see her old friend, the blackened, time-frosted mirror. In the darkness, she studied her dazed image. There it danced before her, a little crackled, like a loose stone in a broken ring.

Double thing drizzling silver. As she pored over the mirror’s surface, here the draining silver was like lace, there like skeletal leaves rotting on the surface of a frozen pond. Falling silver, failing silver, the black absorbed and the silver reflected, a wintry oblivion of whispers and secrets, as luxuriously warm as a fur coat. Leaning forward, close enough to fog her breath, Isabelle Rimbaud told her old friend the mirror:

But she never told me.

Of course she never told you. Why on earth would she?

But no one did! Or Arthur! Or people in the town! Or my girlfriends, well, at least before they all married. Do you know how stupid this makes me feel?

Never mind that, dear. You’ve got a horse. You’ve got a buggy—go
.

Go where?

To Paris, even for three days. Anywhere. Go. Just to show her
.

But how? I’d have to ask her for money. She has all the money.

Just take the money. You earned it
.

But what if Arthur arrives and I’m not home? I’d never forgive myself.

Poor dear. Just look at you. Go
.

But how? A train? And with what? Isabelle knew nothing about her mother’s money, much less her own money. What money, when of her meager stipend one-quarter went to the church and half was saved but
where, only her mother knew. As for the other quarter, a pittance, the old woman just gave it to the girl. Let her spend it on her sweets and fripperies—wasteful, thought the mother, but otherwise the girl became blue. “Then how much do I have?” Isabelle would demand in one of her not infrequent spells of sadness. “More than you need.” “Fine, then I shall go to Paris.” “And stay where?” cried the old woman. “In a hotel? With
those
sorts of women, breeding disease like pigeons? Do you know
why
in France more than five unrelated women cannot be legally domiciled together? Do you know what the police assume about such unsavory
arrangements
?”

It was a frightening world.

Why, only a few months ago, to prove that not only was Isabelle not going to Paris but would not
want
to go, Mme. Rimbaud had “bought” for her (part of a block auction) a rattling old gig and a swaybacked old mare. That shut her up, for never once had the old mare left the property, proof the girl was pure bluff. But then what in those parts did they call a spinster like her, now beyond thirty? Rabbit fricassee. A hopeless case. Never would she marry.

But this changed the following day. While her mother was out, Isabelle did it. Sneak that she was, she caught the horse with carrots. Harnessed her, then, with unaccustomed swats as the old nag bounced her head, Isabelle left to find some answers about her brother the writer. And where else but from the booksellers of Charleville. Or even Charleville’s sister city, Mézières, if necessary.

On its coiled spring, the doorbell tinkled. Isabelle Rimbaud drew up her shawl as the bookseller rattled the lock. Naturally, she did not identify herself. It was frightening enough to ask a man anything, let alone to ask a stranger if he had heard of Arthur Rimbaud or had one of his works.

“Yes, of course,” said the first, an old, old man with a gold watch chain that he fiddled with nervously. “He grew up here. Don’t know if he amounted to much, or what became of him. But, Madame—Mademoiselle—if I may inquire, why do you ask?”

“Ah,” said the second bookseller, younger, dark-haired, and scaly-skinned,
after Isabelle had fled the premises of the first. “Then you heard,” he said, clearly excited. “Yes, I thought he’d come to nothing, but now I hear that some of Rimbaud’s poems were published. Fairly recently in Paris—to some acclaim, I understand.”

“Indeed so,” mused the third, his pipe popping as he hungrily lit it, then waved out the match. “And I have a copy—yes, I’m quite sure I do of … of”—laying hands on his stool—“
La Revue Noire
—if I can find it—I have an essay on Rimbaud by a very noted critic, Félicien Champsaur, who pronounced him the greatest French poet since Baudelaire. Oh, indeed, a strange, strange talent, he averred. And so young when he wrote—shocking. Eighteen or nineteen. A wild man, I heard, but great. Yes, Champsaur used that word, ‘great,’ and I can tell you he uses it only very parsimoniously, if ever. Moreover, I have heard there are young poets of some stripe—some school—who have formed, after Rimbaud, a Socratic
following
. Heaven knows, Mademoiselle. And where is this poet now? Africa, did I hear?” The bookseller disappeared behind various piles and shelves. “Wait, wait … I have a publication with many of his poems,
Les Poètes Maudits.
” The cursed poets.

How her face burned as he put into her hands the chapbook with her brother’s poems—that and the review, in which, with a slip of paper, he had carefully marked Champsaur’s essay. Dazed, she paid him. Cheeks burning, pretending she didn’t hear the flirting of his at-the-door question, Isabelle felt like a shoplifter, ready to explode as she burst through the door. Ears twitching, the old mare pulled her head around and looked at her. She looked at the mare. Then, with the leather traces trembling in her hands, she drove out of town, rumbling over cobbles, past the last homes, then down a long curving road lined with birches, silver birches following, like stitches, the flashing-green, clear-flowing brook.

No one was around, so she stopped. Preparing herself, she opened the book, feeling the sharp pages and incised type, the strange irregular shapes of poems—the almost human shapes. A blur of words of which, at that moment, she could read not a line.

The book, this fetish of the book, it had weight. It was a
fact
. And
look: here, forever captured in time, was her brother’s name,
Arthur Rimbaud Arthur Rimbaud Arthur Rimbaud Arthur Rimbaud Arthur Rimbaud
.

It was here, freed from her mother for all of two hours, and then with a rapture almost religious, that Isabelle Rimbaud burst into joyous, uncomprehending tears, swearing before God that no matter what her mother or anybody else said, she would tell the true story, the touching and surely holy story of her great brother
—their
story, once he returned home. Never would her brother have to fend for himself or beg their mother. No, she would care for him—him and only him, and for once in his life her brother the esteemed poet, he would have whatever he wanted, when he wanted it, and as he wanted it, without his mother to thwart him.

So in soft early May swore Rimbaud’s younger sister and future biographer. No confusion now. Adrift in the gig in the sun, as the old horse walked circles, nibbling the sweet green grass, for the first time in ages it was clear to Isabelle Rimbaud what she would do, just as it was clear how much her mother would revile it as a blow to decency. A revolt against family secrecy. Why, a betrayal of the first order.

Tant pis
. Mousy no more. With a pleasure almost obscene, Isabelle Rimbaud resolved that day to be her brother’s biographer—a writer after all.

47
Empty Crèche

Pay attention, thinks Rimbaud, now floating and trying to collect himself—to reassert command.

Situation: He is in Marseille, alone in a white room in a white bed at the Hôpital de la Conception, warm, blooms of morphine and ether wearing off, and—he thinks—his mother and sister have been summoned. By telegram? But are they then in transit?

Alone
, he knows that much.
Don’t ask. Don’t beg. Don’t break down
.

But they know. Everybody knows—what?

His gold. His two pistols. His pain—where?

Escape—but how?

Outside, he can see Jesus’ brides, the assembled Sisters of Providence, five in number. Whispering, of course, always whispering, nuns in heavy black habits and starched white headpieces so tight they cause their cheeks to plump, like warm muffins. Shhhh, one says, pointing. Pain has long ears. He can hear them talking. Good, they say, the patient is awake and now alone with his grievous wound, now waiting to be embraced, like a newborn.
Très bien
, Monsieur Rimbaud. Behold, Jesus above, flying over all, like a great robed kite. Offer the Lord Jesus your suffering, offer it up! But, as for receiving comfort and mercy at this terrible moment, even vocation has its limits—the sisters flee.

And it is here, lying in bed with him—the beast, the same that stalked him across the desert, then watched him almost die on the airless ship, its iron bulkhead beaten like an anvil by the equatorial sun. White sun, white sheet. Before this expanse of white sheet, Rimbaud feels as he did leaving Harar that last day, when he looked across the white desert, blazing like freedom,
free freedom
, if only he could reach the warm, the blue, the amniotic sea, warm and sloshing like a good mother. Sun mother, mother sun, golden sun—red dial of sun, where did you go with your piercing eye of gold? Why did you leave my life, a puddle of molten gold vanishing into the sea’s shining lips?

Am I crazy?

Don’t do anything, he thinks now, paralyzed, and not entirely without logic, imagining that if he does not raise the sheet—if he lies perfectly still
—it will not be
. Then when this fails, he reverts to the stratagems of his youth, destitute on the Paris streets or on the road, free to be robbed, raped, or killed. About which he had written,
A voice clenched my frozen heart: “Weakness or strength: you are there, it is strength. You do not know where you are going, or why you are going. Go in anywhere. Answer everything. They will not kill you any more than if you were a dead body.”
So he had written in
Season in Hell
, but what now? What, teller, is his tale now?

Upon finding a source of nectar, a bee returns to the hive, there to
sip only as much sweet liquor as it needs to return to the source, then back to the hive—just enough and not one drop more. Like that bee, a human soul has only so much bravery and denial, only so much energy, only so much resilience and hope—just that much and not one drop more. And so like that bee, Rimbaud plummets, empty from the emptier air.

He is a child.
Where is my mother? Why have they not summoned my mother?