Disaster Was My God (47 page)

Not that Isabelle’s brother was aware of this—any of this—yet. But he would be soon enough, thought Isabelle. His healthy recovery and religious legacy, indeed his reintegration into polite French society, it was all in her capable hands.

F
ools rush in, thought the old woman, aghast at Isabelle’s shameless theatrics. How could she top a show like this? And why ever
would
she? added Mme. Shade.
Having
to feel.
What
to feel? she sighed to Mme. Shade. Quite as if the old mother must have a special milk gland for these fool males, disappearing only to reappear on their last gasp with all these pent-up
feelings
.

Still, she was a mother and, stupid or not, the world had its expectations. She couldn’t give her son
nothing
.

“Look at you,” the mother offered after some blank seconds, then thought,
Look at you what?
Then, seeing the vanished leg, the old woman felt a more familiar and comforting feeling—rage. Idiot! Dismissing it all as varicose veins!

Say something
.

“Son,” she said, “this is a very hard thing.” Again she stopped—quite blank. Then, prompted by the inventive Mme. Shade, she fibbed, “How much you have been in my prayers.”

And came forward. Patted him tentatively, once, on the shoulder, followed by one more, last, eloquent pat—all you get. But in her son’s ravaged state, even this was too much.

“Moth—” he croaked, coughing up all the sand in the desert.

“Mother—”

And broke down, vomiting his grief. “Come come, son,” she said—some earlier, dream self said—“such antics will not do.”

Antics?

Rimbaud stared at her in disbelief. Did she not realize that he was crying
for
her—that now he
could
love her? That now he
wanted
to care for her?

“Daughter,” said the mother abruptly, plucking at Isabelle’s sleeve. “Daughter, let us step outside until your brother is—until he is feeling better.”

But this was the new Isabelle. She leapt up, red-faced.

“You step out, Maman. Leave—leave if you must, you’re excused. But I will remain here.
With
my brother.”

But then, as these things go, as Mme. Rimbaud was heading for the door, naturally the ebullient Dr. Delpech appeared with Michel. Pop eyes darting, Michel immediately sensed the tension.

“Ah, Monsieur Rimbaud,” said the doctor, “your family is here.” He obliged the old woman with an abbreviated bow. “Madame Rimbaud, so very—”

“
—Widow
Rimbaud,” she corrected.

“Oh, dear,” he replied, “I’m very sorry. Was your loss recent?”

Isabelle smirked. Even Rimbaud betrayed a smile.

“Is this pertinent?” sputtered the matriarch, now feeling preyed upon. She then seized upon Michel with his mulish expression and knobby wrists. “And who,” she asked imperiously, “who are you?”

“I’m Michel, Mad—Madame—I mean,
Veu-ve
Rimbaud.
Michel
. The orderly.” Then with typical solicitude, he asked her, “Are you all right?”

“All right?” she snapped. “Don’t be impertinent. Of course I am all right. The question is, is my
son
all right. Well, Doctor?”

Dr. Delpech was unfazed by this attack of maternal nerves. On the contrary. The doctor thrived on such “educative moments.”

“Well, Madame,” he replied, “considering where your son was four days ago, I would say he is doing marvelously. Right where he should be.”

“Doctor,”
s
he said, cupping one ear, “did I hear you say
marvelously
? My son has no leg and you say he is doing marvelously?” Muttering, the Widow fished her hankie from her sleeve. Blew her nose. Then, red-eyed, promptly exited the room.

T
wo days later, they were in the sun-filled aerie, Rimbaud, Isabelle, and Michel. Opposite them Mme. Rimbaud sat knitting. For the recently disabled, it was here, in the aerie—“the circus,” Rimbaud called it nervously—that simple life tasks became small feats.

Across the room, for example, a red-faced, one-armed man was practicing putting on a shirt. He knelt. Gently, with his open shirt facing him, he inserted the left arm in the left sleeve and the right stump in the right. Then, flipping the shirt like a cape, commenced to button it with one hand and even his teeth. Rimbaud found it deeply absorbing, even moving, to see the various
cripples
here overcoming such daily trials. But the idea that he might befriend someone in his situation—that he might share his struggles or help another—this was unthinkable, as if he, too, were a cripple. Nonetheless, Rimbaud was now in the center ring—a man with one leg endeavoring to manage, simultaneously, two crutches.

“Steady,” said Isabelle, bracing his left arm while Michel took the right. “Go on. You can do this …”

But with no leg, no ballast, Rimbaud’s unpracticed body was woefully off-kilter. He lurched. He twirled. Then, with the next step, he almost toppled over, before Michel and Isabelle caught him.

“God help me,” he fumed. “What am I, a bloody ballerina?”

“Don’t make fun of yourself,” scolded Michel. “Only makes it worse.”

“But my arm. It feels like it’s being sawn off.” Ominously, it was the right arm, on the same side as the missing leg. “Why should it be bothering me—why? Doesn’t it make you wonder?”

“Arthur,” scolded Isabelle, now echoing Dr. Delpech, “you’re always so negative.”

“Why negative? Because I accurately report how I feel?” Rimbaud turned to the old woman. “Mother, am I any better today? Any?”

She kept to her knitting. “Well, don’t ask me.” She brought the yarn around. “Ask Dr. Don’t Worry.
He
claims you’re doing splendidly.”

“I know, but what do
you
think?”

“Don’t,” she warned, drawing in her chin, “don’t ask me what I think. You do not want to know what I think.”

“
What?
Tell me.”

“Very well, then.” Pushing up her glasses, she said flatly, “Not good.” Then added in exasperation, “Well,
you asked.
”

He blurted out: “My life is over!”

And again, he was weeping, blindly, helplessly weeping, he who led caravans. It was too much for the old woman. Moments later, when he looked up, she was gone.

B
ad as his days could be, the nights were worse. Once in bed, flat on his back, he might as well have been shackled. It was then that his past swept back over him, in particular the period in his late adolescence when he had renounced poetry—his first amputation, as it were.

Certainly it had required eerie discipline, sawing off his talent,
drowning his angel. And after poetry, then what? Doing what? Living for what? Why?

Actually, it was very much like being crippled, that period when he first gave up poetry. It was not his life anymore. All the locks had been changed, the doors, too. Almost everything had to be rebuilt and relearned; unlearned, too—like French. First, he had to confuse his mother tongue, steal her primacy. And so for several years, in a quiet frenzy, he buried himself in the memorization of foreign languages: German, Italian, Spanish, Russian—anything to keep his spinning mind occupied. Certainly he had inherited his father’s talents as a linguist. Except for Russian, which he found extremely difficult, he could learn almost any language. All in a matter of weeks. Merely by walking. Literally, he would tear his phrase books into chunks, then off he would go, walking for hours, gorging himself on new words and tongues. Good heavens, thought his mother, he was exactly like his father, filling whole notebooks with galactic webs of words and yet more words. Words in any language. All part of one vast universal puzzle, if only he could find the key.

The son knew little about his father, almost nothing, and yet in its utter unknowingness, the dream was all the more powerful. In Hamburg, in a horse cab, he was beaten unconscious. Then on the Adriatic, in a place of olive trees and glowing dust—magnificent dust like carbonized sun—he was felled by a bolt. Sunstroke, a rabbit punch from God. Later, a roustabout in a circus, feeding the lions stinking raw horsemeat, he almost had his arm taken off. Off because the lion could, and in those coiled eyes laced with golden wires, truly, Rimbaud saw the meaning of life in all its unfathomable meaninglessness.

And the dream took new forms, violent forms, proof of his manhood. In Greece, a foreman, he struck a man because he was lazy and mendacious. The man and the crew attacked him, beat him without mercy, then left him for dead. This was only the first of several instances in which Rimbaud made the potentially fatal mistake of striking a man in a shame-drenched, revenge-focused male culture. No matter. He was upholding principle, justice, civilization itself. And so part of him was
beaten, while, as before, the other part, the one condemned to watch, walked away in disgust. Still looking for a new creed. A new world. Better men.

Lying in bed, now almost halved, the older man, the survivor, couldn’t stop thinking about this lost period, wandering the world, then the Abyssinian deserts, looking for any refuge, any livelihood, anything that fit.
What now, what now, what now?
Even at this late date, he hadn’t given up on the idea of marriage. Perhaps he could return to Abyssinia, find an educated Abyssinian woman, this time a Christian woman, perhaps even a beauty like Tigist. Children? Well, they could “try.” Imagine that—a father. He might even attend church. Take the sacraments. Arise. So thought Lazarus, still hoping for a miracle.

A
s for the young Rimbaud, the Rimbaud of twenty, in those last months before Verlaine shot him, about poetry he was consumed by the three D’s—doubt, dread, and disgust. He had his integrity, and he was increasingly horrified by the cynicism, the selfishness, and the rampant irresponsibility of writing, of creating these vain word creatures, these scoops of Adam dust given demonic breath—to do what? To what end? Why, when the world was no better and never would be? Paradoxically, he was at his artistic zenith, and this, too, fed his crisis, that the poems came so easily, almost unbidden, and then almost perfect, like sorcery, as if he were God.

In this he was not deluded. His arrogance, his doubleness, his duplicity—they were stupendous. Not to mention frightening, his believing, and not without evidence, that his genius verged on the supernatural. And then, of course, Verlaine shot him.

Lying in his hospital bed in Marseille, the older Rimbaud kept thinking about those terrible days just after the shooting. It was the great crisis of his life. Once the Belgian coppers were through with him, broken and bandaged he fled to Roche, and there in a four-month period, from April to August 1873, he wrote his great adieu and mea culpa to literature,
A Season in Hell:

A Season in Hell
was his signed confession. It was not, as he saw it, a literary work per se—it was salvation itself. Incredibly for him, he wished to publish it, and still more incredibly his by-then-very-frightened mother had agreed to pay for it, at least originally. When the bill arrived, however, the old woman denied everything; she said it was too much and refused to pay, just as he in his ambivalence, in his anomie and drift, failed to hold her to her promise. And so it wound up like virtually every other poem—ditched.

T
en days in the hospital in Marseille was all the old woman could stomach. Even as Rimbaud begged her to stay, she packed her black bag, then tied on her coal-bucket bonnet.

“I’ve got livestock to tend to,” she insisted. “If I don’t it will be dead stock.”

Fortunately, by then Rimbaud was a trifle more optimistic, or at least more resigned to his condition. Unlikely as it seemed, in his desperation Rimbaud believed Dr. Delpech when he promised that if he stuck it out, in six months’ time, his life would look very different. “Worlds different, if you give yourself half a chance.”

At the same time, the patient felt more sanguine about seeing his mother again, but this time on her home ground. There he felt sure she would be in much better spirits, more open, more prepared to reconcile. Such was his hope three weeks later, when he and Isabelle boarded the train for the first leg of their journey to Charleville.

The trip to the train station was Rimbaud’s first real introduction to this new world, really, to the world of the next century, and a fearsome place it was, lit not with gas but increasingly with electric lights that blinked and bleeped and formed actual words. Here were billboard-sized
advertisements for products he’d never heard of, things like tooth powder and vanishing cream and safety razors. Never had he seen so much gimmickry for sale. Equally alarming was the state of haberdashery and millinery—all changed. Gone, during the day at least, was the top hat. Men’s hats were now minuscule, like gumdrops, while women’s hats had grown to extraordinary size—small Saturns of swirling chiffon and chenille.

As for Rimbaud himself, who would have recognized him? White-haired, with two shawls draping his shoulder, the kufi on his head, and the Muslim mustache, the past and future of French poetry sat quite anonymous in the last seat in the car, freezing cold even in the summer. Isabelle couldn’t do enough for him now. She fetched him water. She plumped his pillows. Then, thinking he might be bored, later that afternoon she offered to read to him. He was a writer. Surely he would enjoy hearing something nouveau and creative.

“Arthur, I’m reading a new book by Xavier de Montépin,
La Porteuse de pain
—The Bearer of Bread. Have you heard of de Montépin? A novel, very touching. May I read you some?”

“Read me what?” he scowled.
“Fiction?”

“Yes, fiction—very artistic. Creative. That is what you like, is it not?”

“No, if you will pardon me. That is not what I like.”