Disaster Was My God (53 page)

Tall rye. Insects singing. Young, green rye heads swaying in the breeze. And sun, splashes of sun, sun everywhere. Age two or three, he is chasing his mother in the whiskery tall grass at the edge of the rye field.
Tricks
, she is playing tricks, and he, tiny boy, is squealing with excitement because of the grasshoppers. Scratchy, fat-bellied grasshoppers. Grasshoppers filled with gacky brown grasshopper spit—the grasshoppers now whirring before him, dozens, flying like woodchips from an axe. It is his mother who makes them fly.
Causing them
, just as she causes the water of the stream,
her
stream, to ripple and burble and
come to her
. A small boy twirling and squealing. Grasshoppers!
Catch them! Chase them!

Whirring grasshoppers with wings of light. Grasshoppers that cling to Maman’s skirt,
his
maman, because she
called them
, the grasshoppers, and Maman’s skirt has folds to grab, a mother mountain that feels soft
and warm on his face. Please, Mother, please, please pick me up. Up into that sweet, pure sundrop of
once
, before everybody changed and everything fell apart.

And when he awoke from this dream, feebly, he called for Isabelle, then wept and hugged her. Trembling, eyes drooling, anything but arrogant, he held his sister’s hand, waiting for the immense thing about to come. And although Isabelle, in her well-meaning way, went on to fabricate many things, she did not exaggerate the sincerity of her heathen brother’s deathbed conversion. In all meekness, before Canon Chaulier and Abbé Suche, Arthur Rimbaud sincerely made his confession and was given the last rites. He tried to take Communion. He tried—repeatedly—but like a boy trying to whistle could not coax out his tongue.

Was it God, then? Did God do it? Did God change his heart?

Because that next day, somehow, Arthur Rimbaud was not angry, not haughty, but just a self-surrendering human, waiting almost open-mouthed for death like a baby for his first spoonful of food. Truly, he was, as they say—or so it seemed—in the hands of God, a man unencumbered and now at peace with where he was going.

In fact, the day before he died, Rimbaud dictated to Isabelle a letter to the Aphinar Line, a ship company never heard of, or not in this life. In that letter, addressed to
M. le Directeur
, Rimbaud declared that he, a poor cripple, intended to book passage to Africa, passing east over the equator into the rising sun. God knew the azimuth.

He died the next morning around ten o’clock.

Epilogue
  

Blazing Constellation

As for Widow Rimbaud, having waited a month for her news, and having a full month to plan, she was well prepared when Arthur’s mahogany casket finally arrived in Charleville. Indeed, she had a whole troupe of mourners prepared. And in a display commensurate with her guilt, for the first time since their balloon ride in London, the Widow did not stint.

Through the streets of Charleville, her son was borne in a black hearse of wood and glass and polished silver, a sort of mortuary music box drawn by four coal black horses with polished silver harnesses and, over their ears, tall black festoons that caused the poor blinkered beasts, much like dogs in costume, to snort and bounce their heads. As for the mourning party, mother and daughter and Mme. Shade, they rode in a sleek black coach with squinty windows through which they could peer, or peck, as necessary, at the town’s queer inhabitants. Mercifully, without the public sordidness of being seen.

Officiating, there was Abbé Gillet from Rimbaud’s old
collège
, followed by a drum beater and four robed cantors. Nor was that all. For after them came a cotillion of black-robed choirboys, then a frocked beadle in a cocked hat bearing his silver-globed staff, then a bell ringer, an undertaker, and, of course, the bibulous gravedigger, presumably the same who left all those rocks, for he was already quite festive.

Oh yes, and twenty somber orphan girls clutching candles.

“Sad, do you hear me?” insisted the Widow when she hired them. “I want dour girls,
unstained
, no older than twelve. No stinkers or nose borers. And you will make sure they are all duly confessed and have not drunk or eaten or done anything that will preclude
all twenty
from taking Communion. All of them. And no sneaking off to the toilets …”

This, then, was the bell-ringing, tom-tomming retinue that marched grimly all through the town, then to the Church of Saint-Rémy, where they were met by a thunderous pipe organ and a full choir. All rosy-cheeked prepubescent boys.

In all, there were some forty-seven people, all hired—with, of course, the three mourners, the Widow and Isabelle and Mme. Shade. Only them. Naturally, the Widow had put no notice in the paper, and as there was no one to invite, this made it
clean
, thought the Widow, very clean. No boo-hooing, no snoops, and no shiftless relatives with their hands out.

Indeed, except for the two little orphan girls who wet themselves and three others who fainted from standing—well, it all went tolerably well.

I
ronically, the day Rimbaud died his collected poems, entitled
Reliquaire
, appeared, only to be the subject of a dispute between the two editors, who then had the book withdrawn from public circulation.

Some weeks later, though, soon after the news of Rimbaud’s death had swept literary Paris, the very charmed Champsaur saw to it that Verlaine’s interview came out—naturally, at the very peak of the public frisson.

Actually, Champsaur’s interview was for the most part an exceedingly fair and faithful record of their discussion. Not that this pleased Verlaine, but then how could it? How could it feel to recall, publicly, those days of love, glory, and abandon, only to lose everything—wife, son, reputation, inheritance? And, cruelest of all, to lose the boy who had brought him glory and damnation, both.

In the afternoon sun, strolling down the boulevard Saint-Michel, Verlaine tapped his cane, tock, tock, tock. Red beard shining, his bowler hat pulled down just over his eyes, ambling, he might have been mistaken for a burlap-covered cotton bale, the bum lord greeting his public. But, whatever else, the great man was not alone, for there at his arm was Eugénie, the very picture of a tart. Naughty plaid skirt. Saucy hat. And, of course, the gleaming, rapier-like black boots over which many a naked gentleman on his knees had spat and worked the rag to a fare-thee-well.

“I sound like a selfish monster,” complained Verlaine, still ranting about Champsaur’s interview. “And a fool—a patsy. Are you listening to me? It’s
embarrassing.
”

“Come now.” Eugénie hated it when adults played pretend. “Rimbaud led you by the nose, and like an ass you admitted it to Champsaur. I told you not to drink so much.”

“But, God knows,” he fumed, “look what Rimbaud
gained
from me. My tutelage. My many friends and contacts. Not to mention my money.”

Eugénie stopped short.

“
Paul!
You’re a bloody goddamned Immortal—enough of your whining. I thought what Champsaur wrote was fair. More than fair.” Then, like a cat flexing her claws, her mien turned mischievous. “And I must say he
was
beautiful, that Félicien Champsaur.
Gorgeous.
”

“Now, wait a minute,” said Verlaine, detecting a sybaritic flicker in her eye. In his horror at that moment, his face suggested a freshly shucked oyster. “The way he
looked
at you! Now I see! Some assignation, was it? Was that it?”

“So what if I did?” she replied. “You threw me over. These pretty boys, they love a nasty treat!”

He shook his cane at her. “Miserable, faithless whore!”

“Well,” she sniffed, “unlike you, at least I bloody well get
paid
for it.”

Tock. Tock. Tock. Fuming and muttering, Verlaine started again, then stopped suddenly, leaning on the cane, blinking with emotion.

“What, love?” asked Eugénie, now playing the wife. “What?”

“Rimbaud. Damn him, I still can’t believe he’s dead. Really dead. And the madness of him—I mean to leave it all. Art. Reputation—”

“And you—”

“So laugh at me!” He paused, shaking his head. “But … but I thought, fool that I was, I actually thought, we would be together, the two of us—forever. God help me, I actually
thought
so, and I still feel the same disbelief. The same grief. Leaving what—poems? Was that the whole point? Bloody
poems
?”

T
hey walked on, man and mistress, and for five years more the carnival of Verlaine’s life continued, until he, too, died—died at the age of fifty-one. Died pretty much of everything, having burnt the candle at both ends, and the middle, too.

How satisfying, though. The many great and famous men who had avoided, or carefully managed their relations with, the old pariah—if only to escape the inevitable tap for money—well, the mighty turned out in force, as death redeemed him, such that people could step back, actually in awe of the Master and his contribution. No longer was he a clown, a drunk, or a pervert. He was genius in an age that idolized genius, just as he was Paris itself.

Candles were lit in his room, where he lay in his bed in his nightshirt—cheap party candles, the only ones anyone could find in his flat. A death mask was made. Then, after the newspapers reported his death, came the crush, the famous and the lowly. Mallarmé left a bunch of violets. A photographer was dispatched from
Le Monde Illustré
. Young men drew lots to keep vigil over the body, then, alone in the middle of the night, snipped off small pieces of his hair. And amid the crowds that tramped through his small dim chambers, many remembered the flitting lemon canary. The canary that wouldn’t stop singing—Eugénie’s canary.

Even Verlaine would have been flabbergasted at the outpouring on the day of his burial. When the casket was taken to the Cimetière des Batignolles, a quite lengthy walk, people lined the streets and every man
tipped his hat. There, behind the hearse, representing the people of the streets was Verlaine’s chimney-sweep majordomo, Bibi-la-Purée; clean as a baby, too. As for Eugénie—who had to be separated, twice, from her rival, Odette—she was accompanied by a phalanx of prostitutes and courtesans. And behind them? A crowd of several thousand. Poets, writers, artists, and musicians, Verlaine’s cortege brought forth a river of people cloaked in black and crepe, knots of people flowing steadily up l’avenue de Clichy, to the Batignolles cemetery.

A
s for the Widow Rimbaud, she lived on, quite healthily, until her death in 1907, at the then astounding age of eighty-two.

Isabelle by then had a husband, Paterne Berrichon, one of Rimbaud’s first biographers, a hack, quite honestly, but nevertheless a good husband who not only made Isabelle happy but, more importantly, made good her escape from Roche. Isabelle and Berrichon, then, were present for the widow’s burial—just them and the priest and two gravediggers: five in all. Such were the widow’s wishes, to be laid to rest just as she had lived, essentially alone.

But here is what speaks through time in that old cemetery with its cinder paths and gray mortuary houses veined with moss. There, at the head of the knoll in the plot of the Rimbauds, although three are buried, only two headstones stand, those of seventeen-year-old Vitalie and Arthur. As for the Widow, she who prepared the bed, she lies before them, prostrate, as it were, under a milky slab of marble. Clearly, whatever she said in life, and however much she pushed her younger son away, in death she wanted him close to her. Very close.

At hand, in fact. Two subterraneans of once boiling force, here they lie, love and hatred, hope and betrayal, forever coiled like figures in some heavenly constellation. Gaze down upon them, then, and wish them ease, mother and son lying forever under the blue night sky. Together at last and, who’s to say, perhaps even at peace.