Disaster Was My God (45 page)

Then he heard Michel. Good grief. Had they been conversing?

“I
said,
” said Michel with some exasperation, “do you like her?”

“Her?” said Rimbaud, craning around. “Do I like
whom
?”

“Your mother.”

Like her? he thought. She’s my mother.

“Well,” said Michel, continuing this line of inquiry, “you were gone a long time in Africa, no?” He scratched his little goatee. “A long,
long
time, huh?”

“I was working.”

As always when Michel became particularly excited or exasperated, a snail trail of spittle issued down one side of his mouth. Working his lips: “But Rimbaud, to never go home? In ten whole years?”

“Of course not. Do you think I was on holiday? I was far away,
weeks
away. I had a business to run.”

“But didn’t the other fellows go home? And didn’t you miss her?”

“Miss whom?”

“Your mother.”

Rimbaud slapped the armrests. “Excuse me,
excuse
me! Face me around.”

Michel stepped in front of him. “Look, I won’t tell nobody.”

“Tell them
what
?”

“About your mother. How you feel about her. I won’t.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.
Take me back now
. Inside—please.”

Upset, Michel turned the wheelchair around. Then started pushing, hard. Too hard. Hitting a rut, the chair gave a jolt. Fire shot down Rimbaud’s leg. But when he grabbed the pain, he found himself holding only air. Empty air from the part now separated from him, the ghost.

“Owwwww! Shit, watch it!”

His bulbous knee, he could feel it, a fireball of pain, clenched in his hands. Paralyzed, he could feel every gram of it. Pure absence, pure pain.

“That’s the phantom pain,” said Michel. “Leg’s gone, but it still pains you. Right? We call it the Phantom.”

Beauty, safety, and happiness—why, thought Rimbaud, why would life show him these things, these now useless things, at the curtain? When again, without warning, Rimbaud burst into tears.

Doubled over, helplessly weeping, Rimbaud sat with his Phantom and this baffling, fervent young man who had so upset him. And all by merely asking him if he liked his mother.

51
Chilly Companions

Meantime, on a train not fifty kilometers away, Rimbaud’s mother and sister were, in their separate ways, experiencing very different reactions to the hot, flagrant beauty of the French Mediterranean.

Having attained that august and self-sufficient age where she never again needed to see anything, Mme. Rimbaud, needless to say, was repelled by this lazy, olive oily, obviously
degraded
region, filled, as she saw it, with philandering Italians, siestaing Spaniards, whoring sailors, and similar grinning scoundrels. Adding to her pique was the crowded train that compelled her to be disagreeably close to her daughter, why, almost knee to knee. Indeed, with virtually every seat taken, mother and daughter were forced into a grouping of four seats, two seats facing forward, two facing back. Which made it complicated, for of course Mme. Rimbaud did not want to sit side by side with her daughter. Nor, heaven forbid, did she want to sit directly across from Isabelle’s hunted, prowling stare. No, no, as Madame directed Isabelle with a flick of her nail, they would sit diagonally, like strangers. And so the old woman faced back, ever back, staring at the boiling smoke from the locomotive, fleeing like the past, while Isabelle faced forward, thrilled by this sunny, gigantically new cosmorama, in furious sweep, rushing toward her starving eyes. Red terracotta. Climbing vines. Running children. Blowing
wash. Pleasure—she could smell it, hot and vivid, looking at
that
, then
that
, then
that
. Anything so as not to think of that frightening word
amputation
.

But this was just the start of Isabelle’s life awakening. For after some hours, as the train pulled around the mountain, for the first time in her life she saw it in the distance—the
sea
, the blue, the blinking, the effervescent sea! Her gloves pressed the glass. Before the water’s vast expanse, she all but bounced in her seat.
The sea, the sea, the sea!

“Good grief, have some dignity,” scolded the old woman. “Can you not contain yourself?”

Isabelle reddened. As did the two gentlemen nearby who ducked into their celluloid collars, embarrassed to see a grown woman treated like a child by the old scold. And why? For expressing happiness? For socially isolated Isabelle, this was a slap awake, seeing in their reactions not only how brittle and daft her mother could be but how, day after day, like a fool, she took it.

And Isabelle saw something else that day. As they drew closer to the hospital, Isabelle could see in her mother’s eyes a terror that she had not seen in twenty years, not since the war of 1871, when in their spiked helmets the Germans had swept down, brown locusts trampling to dust the rye fields of Roche. Look at her, thought Isabelle. An old woman paralyzed—paralyzed as only the proud can be—before the skidding, brakeless train of ruin.

R
idiculous girl!

After this cuffing, the old woman could see her daughter angling for sympathy, doing her “hurt lip,” as she called it. Oh, go on with you, she thought, disturbing people with your childish antics!

But it wasn’t just Isabelle, it was the whole exercise, summoned against her will to see her son. Her selfish son. In trouble, of course, for what else would bring him home! His way, it was always his way, or no way. And imagine if
I
were in trouble, thought the old women. Would he lift a finger?
Obviously not
.

So you see? Do you see what I must carry?

I do, I do
.

So replied Mme. Rimbaud’s lady companion, the ghostly but, to the Madame, quite corporeal lady who prayed with her so valiantly, under the worst conditions. An unfailing lady. A lady who could pray through fogs, rugged as a statue and clear as a beacon. Never tiring or despairing, she understood, this indomitable woman, the inexplicable durations of God’s silences, the long seasick periods—even these fleeting glimpses of the mere
possibility
of rescue. In any case, admitted Mme. Rimbaud to her cherished companion—let us call her Mme. Shade. Well, confiding to that revered personage of sterling reputation and unfailing good sense, Mme. Rimbaud felt terribly guilty to say this, but the truth was it was quite useless, this pilgrimage to Marseille to see her son. Oh, granted, these charlatan doctors, wanting to prolong Arthur’s life and run up their bills,
they
claimed to know that his life was not under threat, but
she
knew. She knew with utter certainty that her son would die. But the shame of her knowing this, his own mother. Even to her it felt traitorous, as if she were betting on the worst.

Stalwart Mme. Shade. So bleakly reassuring.

Now, now, my good Madame, you cannot be blamed for what you know. Rather, blame them, the men, for being so blind
.

But dear friend, replied Mme. Rimbaud, you know how it works. Trapped with all I know and see, soon enough I know something that, believe me, I do not
want
to know. But if I tell these ignoramuses what I know—spit it out—then they, the blind, think I am being
morbid
. Negative.
Me!
When I
know
!

And so, as Mme. Rimbaud explained for the hundredth time how, when a grown-up child dies, the poor old mother, if she is unlucky enough to be kicking and still has all her marbles—well, she cleans up everything. The whole mess. Especially with these thumb-sucking males. Grown babies. Babies with
teeth
, every last one of them.

Wahh!
cries the eminent doctor.

Wahh! Wahh!
cries the powerful general.

Wahh! Wahh! WAHH!
cries even the pope.

Dear one, Mme. Rimbaud explained to Mme. Shade, I don’t care what the age—twenty, fifty, or eighty—if he’s a male, either he’s seeking tit or he’s whining about it, greedy as a day-old calf. And of course the less milk the poor old mother has to give, the more these blabberpusses want.

A wolf’s appetite, I quite agree
.

Exhausting, groaned Mme. Rimbaud. And my son is now years thirsty!

Oh! My poor dear!

L
ook at her scowling, thought Isabelle, sneering even at the sea. And then it tumbled out, an anger buried some seventeen years, clear back to Isabelle’s fourteenth summer.

It was then that her mother announced, quite shockingly, that she would be journeying to London. You heard me, London, she said. Probably for three weeks, to rescue Arthur, she said—never you mind why. Then scarcely had the girls absorbed this thrilling news than their mother made a still more shocking announcement:

“Now listen to me. We cannot all afford to go, and I cannot stand all the nonsense. So, Vitalie, as the eldest, you will go. And you, Isabelle,” she sighed, “you, dear, will remain at home.”

Isabelle’s howls were immediate.

“Stop it!” cried the mother, covering her ears. “There, do you see? Do you not see how disgracefully you are behaving? How immature you are? You only prove my point!”

“Mother,” she sobbed, “I’m
fourteen
and she’s only three years older. What’s three years?”

“And, Mother,” offered Vitalie, “this way I’ll have company.”

“N-n-no!” sputtered the mother, “absolutely not! I will not have the two of you around my neck! Not when I have your crazy brother to contend with.”

Apparently, Verlaine was the source of this particular problem. Still tortured about his marriage (and as usual in need of funds), the lachrymose,
grandiose Verlaine had decided, yet again, to return to Paris—to
duty
, wife, and son.

Jobless, without funds, and on the verge of being evicted, Arthur, meanwhile, was sending daily, ever more desperate letters pitched to excite his mother’s already simmering anxieties. Feeling tough (and really wanting to brain him), Mme. Rimbaud would think, Let him sink! Let him have his full comeuppance! But then, with a chill, she would think: But what if he does something desperate—even fatal? Good heavens, Mme. Rimbaud would think, if only one knew with children that it all would turn out in the end, then one would not worry so. Trouble was, with Arthur one was never sure.

Fortunately, this once, Mme. Rimbaud was not alone, for surrounding the two poet reprobates there were four women, all now in regular correspondence with one other. This female quorum consisted of Verlaine’s mother, Mme. Verlaine; the mother-in-law, Mme. Mauté; Verlaine’s wife, Mathilde; and, of course, Mme. Rimbaud herself. And so, almost weekly, letters flew back and forth, filled with the latest rumors or outrage. For let us be honest here. It is immensely reassuring when demonstrably cuckoo people behave badly; why, it’s as if they’re supporting the whole moral order. Moreover, Mme. Rimbaud (secretly) found it quite flattering to have, as confidantes, three ladies of another class—indeed, women whose missives arrived in thick, weighty envelopes fastened with bright sealing wax, into which the sender had pressed with her initials, incised with the almost molar-like indenture of her family crest. The news, though, was always sordid. So flagrant were Rimbaud and Verlaine that in Paris myths were springing up. For example, how Verlaine’s wife had seen them together at the opera, where, even over the coloratura and the orchestra, she was heard to scream:

“Look at them both, covered with blood and semen!”

Indeed, by that point even the city’s most notorious voluptuaries, sodomites, and demimondaines had been outdone, utterly outclassed by the filthy, now full-grown bruiser, leading the red-bearded sot who followed him as if he were a conquering angel. For, after all, in Paris one could lead the “irregular” life, that is, so long as one took some basic
precautions. A fictitious mistress, a few cheap pieties, a transparent lie and a wink—a fig leaf was more than enough. But to be odiously, crudely obvious—to cram it down society’s throat, as they were—this was madness.

Of many outrages, we shall omit the merely crude, obnoxious, idiotic, sacrilegious, or scatological—all but two of the more troubling and revealing. For example, the night at a table of poets when Rimbaud proposed an experiment. “Put out your arm.” So he said to Verlaine, who no sooner extended his arm than Rimbaud pulled a knife from under the table and stabbed him deeply in the wrist. The wound, though, was the least of it. What none would ever forget was how Rimbaud watched with a malignant smile, much as a boy might stick a frog, just to see it twitch. Verlaine howled. He looked at his love in rage and horror, at which point the kid just … 
laughed
.

Not long after this, and not even particularly drunk, the young man of science repeated this vicious experiment on another apparent ectoplasm, the photographer of poets Etienne Carjat, the same who had famously photographed Baudelaire. This time, the self-styled surgeon of the soul was mobbed, punched, throttled, then dragged out into the alleyway. Yet even as they beat him bloody, Rimbaud laughed and jeered them.
Poets!
Did these pansies not understand the pain required? The willed defilement? The viciousness and sorcery involved?