Disaster Was My God (42 page)

He is outraged.
Robbed! I demand an explanation. Why was this not discussed?

He is argumentative.
Intolerable! Where is the surgeon? The civil authorities?

He is French again.
Is this not France? Am I not a French citizen with rights?

He is wildly irrational.
Draft evader, you’ll be caught and conscripted!

Sssh. It’s the nuns again, whispering,
Do it, coward. Raise the sheet
.

Now his hands, his whole body, are trembling as he strains forward, pressing the spot. Flat
—gone, it’s all gone, everything
. He rips up the sheet, then stares at it. No knee and almost no thighbone. Nothing but a roast-sized stump bound in blood-brown gauze. Gauze with a bloom of bright blood in the center.

His eyes blurt; they burst like fat grapes. Lashes of rain, torrents of grief, awful to see, a man bawling and rocking in a blinding heart storm. This is not crying, it is the heart’s nausea; it is the greasy, burning accumulation of twenty dry years of willful starvation pouring blindly down his face. Who is he now? His hair, peppery only a month ago, is now almost white. The man once so vigorous, so headlong and heedless, he is now a dying glutton exhausting his last fat reserves of hope. Shuddering and sucking, slurping and spitting, almost catatonic, he stares through the pounding rain as hot tears, salt tears fat as spits soak his nightshirt, then run burning down his belly, to the already evident pool between the legs. When:

“Hrrr-re,” says a quavering voice. “Hhh—here.”

A hand shoves a metal pan in his lap. He jumps. It’s a young man
not more than twenty, lanky, with blue eyes, an eruption of dark brown hair, and a patchy, stubbly beard. What’s wrong with the kid? he thinks. Leaning in, the kid jerks, he trembles, his shoulders twitch.

“HEEhrre,” he insists, shoving a metal pan under his chin.

“What?” Agog, still weeping, Rimbaud looks up at this impostor. “
You’re
not the doctor—”

“I’m—the—the—h-or-der-ly.” The young man smiles after a fashion. “M-iiiiii-chel.” He grimaces, assembling the next statement, “I—I clean h-up.”

“What?” At that moment, Rimbaud scarcely knows what he’s saying, but the boy takes this literally, as if he is asking
what
he cleans up.

“Ev
-ev
-ever-ry—thing. I-I cl-lean it up. Before, d-durring, and-and—haf-ter.” Again, he stops and smiles a twisted smile, spittle, a little, at the edge of his lip. “Seeee, I t-talk sl-looow. But I-I-I’m not sl-ooow. H-hee-re. Go on.” His mouth tightens. “Vommm—it. If—if you have to.”

At this time, of course, nobody really understands what afflicts this young man; it just is, and what is there to know? He’s a stutterer, palsied and slow. In any case, let us not belabor Michel’s stutter in prose—assume it and read pure and clean what he means to say. Note, rather, Rimbaud’s shock at the young man’s lack of horror or disgust. For a person in Rimbaud’s state, this is immensely consoling—calming. Lying back down, he feels Michel’s puffy eyes guiding him, cuing him in that almost hypnotic way young children are lured to listen to a story, calmed by the voice and trusting there is an end to the story, not good or bad but just
an
end. It is
a story
. It is the story of his missing leg, and Rimbaud’s mind is so slowed, so primitive and unmoored, that he is floating in that hypnotic state of two boys conversing, oblivious to the outer world.

“So what do others do?” asks Rimbaud, still sobbing.
When people are first amputated
, he means.

“Huh? Everything. Anything. Lots still feel it—the leg. The pain. Even without the leg.” Michel shakes the basin under Rimbaud’s chin dripping tears. “Go on if you have to. Spit up—”

“Do you not see?” demands Rimbaud, not at all tracking this
suggestion. “Look what they left me,
look
. Who could fit a wooden leg on
that
?”

“Don’t think about that—don’t. Don’t think. Here, let me clean you up.”

“And where is my mother? Did they not summon her? Are they not all idiots?”

“Think I heard something about your sister.”

“But I don’t
want
my sister.” He is now ranting. “I want my mother, do you hear me?
My mother.
”

The tears, the mess, the misdirected rage—none of this fazes Michel in the least. He rolls the patient over on his back, helpless as a tortoise.

“Uh. Hold still.” Trembling, Michel withdraws from his lips, before Rimbaud’s pain-blinded eyes, a tiny, shining object. A safety pin. “Hold still so I don’t stick you.”

48
Find Rimbaud

That same day, Félicien Champsaur, literary journalist from the Left Bank
Revue Noire
, was on the hunt for Rimbaud, and an erratic path it was, for first he had to secure an interview with Paul Verlaine—via Verlaine’s various flunkies and messengers. And so the very au courant Champsaur, broad-shouldered and strikingly handsome, with a bracing mustache and an open book of thick, dark hair, he found himself facing—for the third time in two days—Verlaine’s man. Agent, factotum, manservant, flunky, this was Champsaur’s polar opposite, the odiferous and effusive Bibi-la-Purée.

Boho king that he was, Verlaine had surrounded himself with a sort of street court, of whom the chancellor was this Bibi-la-Purée. Bootblack, street barber, stool pigeon, messenger, and lackey, Bibi was a gaunt, pinched-faced man of forty or so with long hair, dirty long chuffs of mustache, and a broad-brimmed hat pinned up in front with a greasy turkey quill. As for the state of his unvarying black suit, it was breathtaking,
so layered with filth that it bore the purplish, iridescent hue of a pigeon’s throat. Bibi’s bladelike nose was large and bent, his knees were bowed, and always in hand, like a rapier, was his battered umbrella. No stranger to the courts, Verlaine’s man was, he loudly insisted,
“Bibi-la-Purée, Seigneur de Salis et autres lieux. Et rentier!”
That is, the Lord of Salis and other places. And, to correct the record, no creature of the streets but rather a man of independent means!

Imagine, then, these antipodes, Bibi and Champsaur, staring across vast chasms of ambition, grooming, and hygiene. At Bibi’s insistence, here they were in one of the city’s most squalid arrondissements, tussling over the master’s fee and even more noxious terms. Adding to the odium, the overweening Champsaur was quite powerless in the matter.

With Champsaur having savaged, only months before, Verlaine’s latest book of verse, Verlaine was using his grievance to chisel, through this ferret La-Purée, every last centime.

“As I told you, Monsieur,” insisted Champsaur, parting his dark locks in irritation, “your demands are outrageous. Out of the question. No reputable publication
pays
its sources.”

Bibi raised one dirty nail. “Spare me, Monsieur, your dubious professional pieties. If you want the master—quite besides my own fee as his agent—he will require, in his hand, through mine, two ten-franc notes shaking hands, if you understand me. And you will, of course, pay for supper and such liquid refreshments as are required to free his tongue.”

“I’ll what?”

“Including—I am not yet finished—those of the master’s nurse-consort, Eugénie Krantz.”

“Nurse?”

“Bodyguard, too. Oh yes, Monsieur, Mademoiselle Eugénie, she is
formidable
with the blackjack and straight razor. And, where the master is concerned, quick to take offense. Oh, and by the way,” added the grimy blackmailer, “your quarterly will purchase, in addition, fifty copies of Rimbaud’s new opus.” The scrounger grinned. “To promote its commercial success.”

“Will I now?” sneered Champsaur. “And where will the royalties for Rimbaud’s efforts go, I wonder? Into Verlaine’s right pocket? Or in his left?”

Bibi disregarded this insult; he knew a mark and he knew, for the Rimbaud fetishist, the value of his client’s testimonial—only Verlaine had been present at the birth. In any case, as one richly unemployed, time was on Bibi’s side.

Tra-la. Without another word and, of course, leaving the tab, the malodorous messenger rose from the table. Turning, he produced from a pocket tin a bent and blackened smoke, a choice bit fished earlier from the gutter. A match flicked to life under his grimy thumbnail. His whisker-tacked cheeks balled with thick smoke. Then, with all the insouciance of a skunk, the flaneur walked out, down the kinked street, past knife grinders and rag pickers pushing their stinking, broken-down carts heaped with the city’s largesse. Paying the tab, Champsaur, meantime, thought to just leave. But then, with a snort of rage, he hurried down the street, red of face, before presenting, in legal tender to this skunk, his surrender.

“Are you quite sure?” mocked Bibi, fanning banknotes with a black thumb. “I can tell from the cut of your trousers, Monsieur, that you are a man of solid principle.”

“Café Procope,”
snapped Verlaine’s soon-to-be interrogator. “Tomorrow, 6:00 p.m. sharp!
Produce
Verlaine—sober.” Blowing out his cheeks, he corrected himself. “Well, relatively.”

V
erlaine, to be sure, had ample reason to be angry about Champsaur’s recent savaging of his verse, as much for what it said about his current efforts as for what it opened up in him, sorrows and anxieties about Rimbaud that had lain buried for years.

No telling why this occurs, but as with any luridly bad review, others saw it first.
Did you see it?
All who alerted Verlaine to the review bore the same look of alarm, just as all professed not to have actually read it. Normally Verlaine tended to slough off such worries—fools
write many things—but suddenly, after the tenth such inquiry, he bolted up from his table at the Café Procope and took off down the wintry street, desperate to see what the wolves had left of his literary corpse.

Bound for the booksellers on the rue de Seine, he wore, as usual for winter, in a woolly-mammoth-like heap, most of his wardrobe, this topped off with two mufflers and, just creasing his eyes, a lumpy woolen hat. Plumes of breath spouted from his nose, forming, on the frozen tines of his graying red mustache, two small tusks. Mufflers flapping, cane stabbing the ice, the poet rounded the corner, then stopped dead. For there gazing in the shop window, noses in the air, three well-appointed gentlemen were having a good snort and,
he knew
, at his expense. On the streets of the Latin Quarter and Montmartre, and indeed in most of Paris, the abominable immortal was a well-known figure, so the shock of these gentlemen can be imagined when they saw the object of their mirth rapping his cane indignantly and pressing his face into theirs.

And there it was,
in the window
, the review with his name on the cover in red, twiglike letters, curled Art Nouveau style, with bright green apples and sinisterly twisted vines. Lovely, until one noticed the worms in the apples, then the chortling title, “Horse Apples: The Late Work of Paul Verlaine.”

Old Man Winter trod in, grabbed one from the stack at the front. Then with a glare at the proprietor, turned to page 10 and read:

Then came the kind of accusation that sears itself upon the author’s brain:

As Verlaine closed the review, his hands were trembling; his face was hot, his ears were ringing, and now tears welled in his eyes, tears of rage and humiliation—wild grief as he flung down the review and stormed out.
Sagesse
, his latest effort, was at best a middling book—of course. Naturally, his best work was long behind him—he knew that. Why, then, did this young turd have to make invidious comparisons to Rimbaud? To call his whole artistic life, even his very impulse, into question? Did any artist deserve such treatment?

That night, wedged in the corner of a bucket house on the rue de Fourcy, Verlaine might well have been mistaken for a mortuary figure. Grief—it was the heart gripped in a winepress. Failure—asphyxiation. Death—one last gasp after the peerless skater crashes through winter’s ice. And yet, at bottom, this was a deeper form of paralysis, a relapse, really.
“Mon grand péché radieux,”
Verlaine had once called Rimbaud, “my great radiant sin.” Banished by love, Verlaine was doing at long last the very thing that for years he never permitted himself—truly grieving for Rimbaud and the dreams that had died in Brussels seventeen years before, when he, Verlaine, had shot his muse. Shot him to prevent him
from leaving just as suddenly and willfully as he had appeared twenty-two months before.