Disaster Was My God (50 page)

Dooor​rroww​www
.

Drumm​mmmmm​mmmm
.

Toinn​nnggg​ggggg​ggggg​ggggg​ggggg​ggggg
.

Mon Dieu!
cried the Madame to Mme. Shade. Listen to him! He’s losing his mind!

Patience, advised her vaporous confidante. Savor this time. He has not much left.

Tgggg​hhhhh​rrrrr​tttth​hhhhh​hhhhh​h-owwww
.

Then, as if Madame had not been inconvenienced enough, Isabelle said Arthur needed a larger, more suitable gig, one with more room for his legs—leg, rather. Here, remarkably, the old woman did not stint. Straightaway, she procured a sturdy carriage with a black bonnet, in which Isabelle could be seen erect at the reins, hair tied up and wearing prim new clothes for her new station: long skirt, button shoes, and a wasp-waisted blouse closed at the throat with a cameo of carved white bone on a dial of pale blue.

But who was this apparition beside her, this large hump draped—even in July—with innumerable shawls, topped off with a droopy felt hat pulled almost over his ears. Past the weeping, raging stage, Rimbaud was in the stubborn, irritable, often transfixed phase, still trying to make peace with his disability, these jaws now closing around him.

“Thank you,” he said to Isabelle one morning on their daily trip to Charleville.

Isabelle stared in shock; her brother no more thanked her than her mother did. “I’m your
sister,
” she protested. “This is what sisters do.”

“Thank you all the same.
Thank you.
” Rimbaud sat staring at his one
foot, imagining if the one foot were somehow two feet. Thinking, If only I had been nicer, kinder. If only I hadn’t been me.

They were now entering Charleville. Clopping down the narrow cobbled streets, they passed the
collège
, the
boulangerie
, and the sweetshop, then went down to the small bridge where every day Isabelle would stop the horse, that, like a small boy, Arthur might peer down into watery dark slithers where, sometimes, he would see the shadowy back of a trout pointed like a compass needle into the current. Flickers, flecks, the hypnotically waggling weeds, green hairs streaming. Here was the river of “The Drunken Boat” and “Memory,” of which he remembered not a word, although he did recall, vividly, the
feeling
of writing, the buzzing heat, the shock and sometimes sweet oblivion of being absorbed in it
—it
and not himself. As he had written so thrillingly in “Genie,” one of the
Illuminations
and far and away the happiest:

“But what about your friend Delahaye?” asked Isabelle, returning to a frequent topic. “Or—what was his name—Fourier, Foyatier, was it? Did I not hear that name?” Her brother sat silently, as if he had the mumps. “Arthur,” she said at last, “
say
something. Please let me contact them for you.
Someone.
”

“Absolutely not.” He looked indignant. “Not until I get better.”

“Oh, come now, can you be so vain? These are your
friends.
”

“No, is that not clear? When I am better.”

Better? she wondered. Did he believe that?
Could
he believe that? For now there were further troubles in his shoulder, his right shoulder, a shooting pain that he described as being like a needle, a knitting needle, running almost arterially down his arm and down his side. It was the arm he blamed—three attempts on the crutches and that was it. Collapsing on his bed that last time, he threw down his crutches and never again picked them up. Refused.
Am I getting sicker? Am I going to die?
Although he pretended otherwise, he knew it was a milestone in the wrong direction, indeed a realization so painful that, quite honestly, he forgot all about it.

Picture him, then, one leg pinned, sitting in his pajamas in the sepia shade of his room coaxing moanlike sounds from his Abyssinian harp, six strong strings attached to a resonator of dark stretched skin sewn with darker gut. Rimbaud plucked it, then listened. Mouth open, an almost ecstatic expression on his face, he sipped not just the sound but the
feelin
g. Remarkable, really. However tentatively, Arthur Rimbaud was transmitting feelings, hungry, lonely feelings that buzzed in his mother’s ear:

Derrrrr-owwwwwn
.

Dwwwo​ooooo​oonnn​nn
.

Drrrrrrrrrrph-oowwwwwwwww
.

T
he harp was not his only means of escape, for even in those weeks of slow decline Rimbaud was able—in balletic mental leaps—both to banish reality and put the future in bright suspension.
I will marry. Perhaps I will marry. I might marry
. So he would think as Isabelle took him once again on his daily ride, down to the park and the village green, upon which, on a gentle rise, stood the white bandstand. Magic lantern. On those summer evenings so long ago, as the band played, almost inflated with sound and light, he remembered how the white cupola would be
surrounded by people. Families picnicking. Trolling soldiers and girls—Madeleine, Joséphine, Marie. Why had he fled the battlefield of ordinary life, he wondered—girls, safety, normality? Happiness, even. Why?

“Arthur,” said Isabelle, “no argument this time. Let’s go to the concert this Sunday. Please.”

“Isabelle,” and he closed his eyes, exasperated. “No.”

“No! With you the answer is always no.” She turned provocative. “Why? Because some know you to be famous? Is that it?”

He glared. “I am
not
famous. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Look at you. At any suggestion that you’re famous or have a reputation, you get testy. Why? Don’t just stare at me.
Why?
”

“Must I be forced to hear and talk about this,” he erupted finally, “something I have long disowned? Honorably disowned!” He grew more strident. “Is this not my right?”

“But Arthur, I’ve never heard of a poet
—any
writer—disowning his every word. And nearly twenty years later, there are those who think your work is
good
. Brilliant. Great, in fact.”

He gripped the leather seat. “Good or bad is not the point! I am Arthur Rimbaud,
merchant and explorer
. Why can you not understand this?
Accept
this?”

Isabelle couldn’t stand it, her hero raising his voice at her. Turning away, she sat hunched over, hugging herself, near tears at his stubbornness and negativity.

“No, I can’t accept it. It’s
horrifying
to hear you talk this way, to think this way. A writer renouncing his work. Saying it’s all meaningless. Stupid. Pointless. It frightens me. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

B
ut Rimbaud’s desires were now exceedingly clear and simple. In fact, he now had a discernable vocation. That is, if it would have him.

However tardy or unlikely, it was Rimbaud’s wish to be a son to his mother. Nothing halfhearted about it. They would forge an all-new relationship—this time an adult relationship. For look, he realized one day, between them there was now plenty of money, plenty for all three
of them, him, his mother, and Isabelle. Brilliant! He couldn’t wait to tell his mother. She was free. Time to let go of the dairy and her myriad moneymaking schemes.
Her son was home
. Home at last to protect her.

But this late dream, it sprang from a still deeper, more unexpected impulse, and this was to have what he had never had—love. Not his mad, ruinous love with Verlaine or, worse, the revolutionize-the-world love of his poet days—his Waterloo. No, what Rimbaud wanted now was human love, family love, mother love—ordinary love, on a human scale. And just as he needed this from her, so Mme. Rimbaud could feel in him an as yet unspecified need, as palpable as it was relentless.
He needed
. It made her irritable. After five weeks, the only reason there hadn’t been a blowup was because of Isabelle, always hovering, forever in the middle, trying to keep the peace. But then one morning, guiltily, Isabelle left to visit a sick school friend in the nunnery. Rimbaud was thrilled. At long last! Here was his chance to be alone with his mother.

The old hen was resourceful, however, instructing the cook to bring her son his breakfast and lunch. As for the old woman, she was in luck—she had an eviction to oversee. The usual scene, things heaped on the curb, clothes blowing down the road, women weeping—a terrible thing, tragic, they would be in her prayers. And so with the courts on her right shoulder and the gendarme on her left, clopping down the road in her gig, the old woman returned to Roche, ringing like a bell with her own righteousness. It was near four. Surely, Isabelle was home, thought Mme. Rimbaud as she pulled up, calling to her two flunkies to attend to her old dapple-gray mare, the elegant Countess. Approaching the house, stealthily, she pulled off her big straw sunhat, bent down, then listened at the front door. But when she eased the door open—too late. Arthur wheeled in. Good heavens. Freshly shaved and dressed, too. The old woman felt a chill.

“Good evening, Mother.”

“Oh,” she said, “you startled me. Yes, good evening.” Brusquely, she turned, affecting to be busy. “Now where was I?”

“Mother, wait!” He was smiling. Had he been drinking? she
wondered. “Mother,” he said energetically, “I have something very good to tell you.” He waited. “Something wonderful in fact.”

Wonderful?
“My son,” she sighed, as to a child, for sitting in his wheelchair, know it or not, he had been deeply demoted in her eyes, reduced to boy height, “please, I have had a long day and still have
things
to do.
Many
things.”

“Mother,” he said, blinking with surprise. She merely looked back at him, unmoved. “Mother,” he said, trying to be patient, but now with perceptible heat, “please, you
always
have things to do. This is important.”

She spun around. “Listen, Monsieur on Holiday, with your sister to wait on you hand and foot while she dumps the whole farm on me.” She looked at him almost for permission, a casus belli, what with him mooning at her, in that man-expecting way, waiting to be fed. “Well, that’s right, you’ve got her, don’t you? You’ve got your little sister to grovel before you, the great poet, but oh no, that’s still not enough for you, is it? Oh, no, being you, back from your big safari, you expect
two
women to wait on you, eh? Good grief, what do you suppose I
do
here all day? Fluff pillows?”

“But, Mother,… listen.” He paused a beat, thinking, Don’t antagonize her, let her settle down. “Because you see, Mother,” he said more softly, “in fact, I don’t
want
you to work so hard. For I was calculating”—he smiled again—“well, that with all your money and property, and now with
my
money, you needn’t work so hard. Or at all.” Earnestly nodding, he rolled forward in his wheelchair. “I’m back now.” He hesitated. “I’m your son, and I am home now.” The old woman was now staring at him, so shocked, he thought, that now he could say it. The unsayable. The unprecedented. “Mother, I know we’ve had our differences over the years, but I’m your son, and—and I
love
you.”

Love—that was the trigger.

“Love,”
she sneered. “Oh, of course, now that you’re flat on your back, here you roll in like the Savior, eh? You, who never lifted one finger! Home at last to take care of the poor simpleminded old lady. Run the old lady, run everything! Eh? Is that it?”

He was dumbfounded. “Mother, I just said I
love
you. Did I not just say that—”

She cut him off.

“You always running away—love! You who never loved me, or your sisters, or God, or anyone—love. Love—you who couldn’t stand it here. Love—you who could never stop running, you were just so
filled
with love!”

He was dizzy, his ears were ringing. “Mother,” he gasped, playing his last card, “why are you doing this to me? What did I do? Didn’t you just hear me say that I want to care for you? Didn’t I just say that? Then why are you doing this, you always talking about Saint Paul, charity? Is this Christian, what you’re doing?”

“Christian!”
she roared. That was the word. “
You
dare to talk to
me
about being Christian! What, life chops you down to size and now you find religion, eh?
Christian!
You who did evil things.
Vile
things—Christian!
Ruining
the good name Rimbaud …”

The rest was so natural it was instantaneous. Out it all spewed. Pure venom. And all from the same son who, only moments before, had declared his love.

“Hateful, money-grubbing,
wretched
old woman! Dumped by your husband—you, with your cold, dead heart. Why did I try? Why was I so blind! So
stupid
? God! So
stupid
to come home when I could have just died in the bloody road! Died the failure you always wanted me to be. Good lord, you old crown of thorns, what a
wife
you must have been! Of course I ran away. Goddamned
right
I ran away. Just like my father ran away! Just like you drove my brother away.”

“Get out!”

In rage, she took a step forward, pressing her face into his. Oh, it felt so satisfying, so righteous, to stare down upon him, crippled and defeated. “Look at you,
down there,
” she jeered, just as if she had clubbed him. Beaten him down, like a man. Flattened him with her two fists. “Take care of
me
! Helpless, useless parasite! Right now I wish I could wheel you out where you belong—out in the
road
!”