Disaster Was My God (46 page)

Of course they didn’t. And not merely for want of talent or commitment. Let’s face it: beguiling as Rimbaud’s myths might have been as poems or boasts, no adult in his right mind, not even Verlaine, would have been fool enough to act them out. The willfulness, recklessness, and literal-mindedness required—the sheer negativity—this called for the dope of all dopes,
l’adolescent je-m’en-foutiste
, the hooligan adolescent.

W
ell, if at this time Mme. Rimbaud did not know the full and lurid particulars about
le jeune Arthur
, she certainly knew the gist. And without going into the unsavory details for her two young daughters, she knew a life lesson when she saw one. And so, just before embarking for
Britain, Mme. Rimbaud told her daughters just enough, but of course not nearly enough, to pitch them into a state of boiling anxiety.

“
Now
he wants my help,” cackled the mother, vindicated that all Arthur’s chickens had come home to roost. “Oh yes, when his belly is empty,
then
he sees. And why? Because we, the
women
, we have cut off their money!”

“But, Mother,” begged Isabelle, trying to pump her for more, “how serious is it?”

“Desperate, eh? Desperate enough that your lazy, useless brother who has never in his life lifted one finger—that now he
wants
to work!”

How serious? So serious that, late that night, after checking on the girls in bed, Mme. Rimbaud lit the oil lantern, then got her shovel. As for the girls, having only feigned sleep, they snuck to the window—aghast, to see their mother pacing. Arms outstretched, she looked as if she were doing a queer dance, veering back and forth across the lawn, when she pounced. The spot. She started shoveling, then dropped the shovel, fell to her knees. Reaching down the hole, rocking and grunting, at last she wrenched it free. A bottle. One of her tallow-smoked money bottles. Cradling it tenderly in her arms, she glanced about suspiciously, then carried it into the house.

I
sabelle had another surprise the day before her mother and Vitalie departed for London.

As it would be their last day together for several weeks, Mme. Rimbaud told Isabelle that she wanted her, and only her, to accompany her to church. Time alone together, thought the girl. But on the way, inexplicably, Mme. Rimbaud turned the carriage into the stone courtyard of the strangely dairylike nunnery. Looking up, Isabelle counted a dozen windows, each shuttered and bolted. All that was missing was the hay and the milk-cans.

“Stay here. I’ll be only a minute.”

The mother got out. Righted her skirt and centered her hat. Then went down the long stone path and knocked, bold soul, on the burly
oaken door. The vault of darkness opened. Were they expecting her? Two large, rosy-cheeked nuns came out, smiled, surely thrilled to feel the sun’s benediction, then followed Mme. Rimbaud down the ivied path, past the gazeless eyes of the alabaster Virgin. Wait, thought Isabelle, balling her hand between her legs as the two dark figures approached. What do they want with me? In the sun, the nuns’ white cowls looked, in their recesses, like enormous white calla lilies with faces squeezed inside them.

“And how are you this fine day, my child?” asked the plumper of the two, smiling, as she patted Isabelle on the shoulder. “I am Sister Geneviève, and this is Sister Thérèse. Sister, say good morning to our young friend—”

“Good morning, dear.”

And like that, they had her, screeching and writhing and kicking.

“I
hate
you!” screamed the girl to her mother.

Honestly, the mother was shocked by the extremity of Isabelle’s reaction.

“Stop it!” she cried. “Stop your kicking! And where else would you, a girl your age, stay? What, with some relative? The run-amuck sons? The drunken husband? Ungrateful child! I am
protecting
you.”

“Protecting me? You
lied
! Lied, lied, lied!”

“There, do you see?” cried the mother, holding her palms up to the sky like the stigmata. “Do you
see
how you are behaving? This is exactly why I cannot take you!”

V
espers and vile food. Dark, unventilated rooms partitioned into stalls, heavily saturated with the musk of cooped-up, pent-up females. And sticky hot slaps when Isabelle Rimbaud got fresh or refused to comply. The Donkey Girl. So Christ’s thirty-seven brides christened their stubborn guest.

Meanwhile, as described in her dreary, long, homesick letters, Vitalie saw Paris and London and the Ostend-Dover ferry, saw for the first time, as her brother had seen, the blue, the harrowed sea. In the
massiveness of London, the world’s largest city, she also saw the future, well into the next century: horse carts and omnibuses and railways that arched, on crystalline bridges of cast iron, over the prismatic London smog.

On Regent Street, with utter shock, she and her mother absorbed their first black people. They ate ices and watched street acrobats. They saw Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, Hyde Park, and the Tower of London, then proceeded on to the British Museum, where virtually every day her brother spent hours, such that his English, albeit accented, was almost perfect. Still, Vitalie had no idea her brother was a writer, or anything, really, except a very brilliant problem. She would never have dreamt he was writing poems in prose, revolutionary poems, some inspired by the dreamscapes of London:

They went to the English seaside, saw the zoos, palaces, and museums, and ate warm taffy—in short, did almost everything that a young girl could ever hope to do. And in her homesickness, Vitalie Rimbaud hated almost every minute of it.
Hated it
.

Arthur, though, was exceedingly pleasant, Vitalie reported, much kinder and more interested than usual—why, almost like a brother. He took great pleasure in showing them the sights of London, planned things, escorted them everywhere, often for hours at a time. Still more incredible, their mother was spending fantastic sums. Eating in restaurants. Riding in horse cabs. All this was impossible enough. But then came the most extraordinary expenditure of all.

On their second week, walking in Regent’s Park, Arthur led them
through a chestnut grove, into a wide, rolling green. And, gazing up, they saw it, a great globe taller than the trees and almost bigger than a house. Five stories high, it was a great air balloon painted with a face, a clown’s face, covered with a net of heavy ropes suspending a wicker basket in which stood a portly, red-faced man dressed in a swallowtailed coat and peeling top hat. Arthur wandered over, fascinated.

Good heavens, thought Mme. Rimbaud, was Arthur interested in air balloons now? God only knew. Yet here he was, peppering the balloonist with questions.

“Arthur, tell the man,” broke in his mother suddenly in French. “Arthur, tell him we wish to take a turn.” The boy stared at her in shock.
“Oui, oui,”
she prodded, “go on, ask him.”

“But, Maman,” he replied, thinking she did not understand. “He’s saying two guineas for half an hour.” Quite a sum.

“Fine, then, two guineas.” Mme. Rimbaud turned to her eldest daughter. “Vitalie, we’ll all ride in the balloon. The three of us. Won’t that be amusing?”

Amusing?
Under her flat straw hat, Vitalie was as spooked by her mother’s sudden agreeableness and largesse as by this balloon with the clown face—a horrid, leering
English
clown, she wrote, practically all lips.

Mme. Rimbaud had no such reservations. As Arthur and the balloonist each took an elbow, Mme. Rimbaud, heaping up her skirts, climbed into the great wicker basket. Two men began cranking the greasy black winch. Slowly, the gasbag bobbed and swayed. Ropes creaked, and up they went, up over the trees and over the fairway, bobbing and swaying in the strong currents, all three holding their hats, especially Vitalie, squinting and peering up, ribbons twirling.

“Hold on, Madame,” said the balloonist, gesturing so she would understand. “There’s some wind about today.”

Manfully, Arthur held a rope, and his mother clutched his arm, actually
touched
him, unprecedented, as up they rose, to the point they could see clear across London, over the harbor forested with the last wooden-masted ships and a myriad of iron steamers. And look, said the
mother, pointing, for if you looked hard, curving over the horizon, under the gray clouds, wasn’t that the snowlike sheen of the sea? It was
not
, as Arthur endeavored to explain, rather professorially. Couldn’t be, the sea was too far. No, insisted his mother, look, it was
the sea, the sea
, and her face appeared so animated, so momentarily young, that he thought how charming that
she
thought so, quite as if she were a normal person, a woman clapping her bosom, say, thrilled by some soaring song.

Look, look! Freely Mme. Rimbaud walked from side to side, and brightly, for those thirty minutes suspended over London, there existed between her and her son a kind of truce, quite as if she were another mother and he, another son.

Y
ears later, on the train to Marseille, recalling this old story about the balloon, Isabelle looked at the old woman and thought,
Where?
Where, in God’s name, was that lady now? Trapped, she thought, and this made Isabelle feel deeply sad. Cheated, that for even one glimpse of happiness, her mother had had to cross the sea, then take her wounded son up into the sky.

“Mar
seeeeeille!
” cried the conductor. Isabelle froze; the old woman did, too. “
Marseeeeeeeeeille! Marseeille
in fifteen minutes!”

52
Family Reunion

“Monsieur!” In the doorway, Michel bore a look of alarm. “They’re here.”

“Who?”

Rimbaud knew, of course. Straightaway, Michel sat him up.

“Oww—” His missing leg, the phantom, was radiating pain, blue red in color and sizzling like a just-struck gong. Rimbaud then felt slapping motions. Michel was combing his hair.

“Enough.” Rimbaud ducked. “Makes me feel like a horse.”

Ignoring him, Michel finished. Handed him his kufi skullcap.

“She looks scared.” He eyed Rimbaud. “Your mother does.”

“I doubt that. Rarely is she scared.”

“Well, she is.” Again, he pushed the kufi at him.

“No, no.”

Rimbaud shook his head. “Mother will find this alarming—Muslim.”

“Like I said. Scared.”

Rimbaud, too. For him now, it wasn’t just the missing leg or being crippled. It was the idea, minus the leg, of weighing less and even
being
less, and not just in weight of flesh but in life and force.
My life doesn’t weigh enough
. If only, he thought, his mother could have seen his big life in Africa, beasts and men in a caravan under his command. If only Djami were with him, Djami, his son, splendid in his white robes. Or Tigist—that he could shock her, not merely with Tigist’s youth and shocking beauty but with his daring even to “be” with a native woman. Then, when these wishes ran dry, the patient thought if only she could see the floridly engraved bank draft now sitting in the hospital safe. Over forty thousand francs—the proof. No more mooching. Not for him.

“Enough.” Rimbaud gripped his sides. “Fetch them, please.”

“And no kufi?”

“No kufi.”

Yet no sooner had Michel left the room than Rimbaud changed his mind—grabbed the kufi and was endeavoring to center it when, to his embarrassment, his mother entered.

“Arthur.” Mme. Rimbaud froze at the sight of this
Muslim
with the unsanitary mustache, so thin and clipped. Vile thing, it made her nose itch. “Dear God,” she gasped, “it’s you. It’s really you.” Briefly, she misted up. But then, instead of going to him, the old woman spun around. Reinforcements were needed. Veering for the door, she called down the hall, “Isabelle!”

Horsey girl. Skirt swinging, Isabelle no sooner arrived than she burst into tears, swallowing him in her hot, sticky embrace. It wasn’t just her brother’s safe return or the amputated leg that triggered such an
abundance of emotion. At last Isabelle Rimbaud had a mission in life—him.

Away, Roche, manure pile! Meddlesome, complaining old woman—go to hell! Ever since the news of his return, and then the revelation of his literary fame, Isabelle Rimbaud had been plotting her new life as her brother’s secretary, confidante, and eventual biographer. Isabelle Rimbaud, witness to genius! Nurse. Adviser. Amanuensis.

Nor was that all. What with the inevitable travel, the various fetes, awards, and ceremonies, Isabelle Rimbaud, long given up for dead as wife material, she
knew
she would meet her future husband and that he would be no village bonehead but rather, an educated man, a literary man. A good Catholic man, too. Odious as Catholicism had seemed for so many years, under her mother’s almost galvanic influence, Isabelle was now quite religious, especially in her devotion to the Lord Jesus. How inspired her eventual husband would be by her example, she thought, a woman showing fealty not only to the Lord but to her brother, who was not only a great French poet, but—she was convinced—a great Christian poet and lay missionary. Truly a modern saint helping to raise up the
noirs
of Abyssinia. She even had a working title:
Arthur Rimbaud: Saint parmi les sauvages
.