Disaster Was My God (9 page)

Well, one may say that poetry is pure thinking, or pure feeling, or memories recollected in tranquillity. But this was not merely thinking, feeling, or memory, much less tranquillity. It was, if anything, the search for invisibility, pure oblivion, as he hurled himself back to the blind fear of home.

Dogs barking. Moon in streams. For days he would barge headlong down deserted roads, resolutely
not
thinking, a will and a walker, a bum and a stalker, with his big, rough hands, burr-studded coat, and rumpled hat. Raiding fruit trees. Sucking eggs and sleeping in barns—running, walking, jerking off when necessary.
Keep going don’t sleep don’t stop
. Never stopping until at last his boots reached the roiling, silvery weeds of the river Meuse, dark-braiding, propulsive river, his home river, gleaming like a blade under the moon. The rocks were treacherously slippery and the water, especially in spring, was too fast and deep. Frantically, like a dog on scent, he turned left, then right, then clambered up the bank to the humped stone bridge, where for some time he could be seen, standing in the middle, peering down at the muscular black water, water unending sweeping beneath him, pure blind will, like a sheet of liquid iron.

Then, on the other side, dropping down the culvert, he fell into waist-high wheat, whirring burrs that scraped his coat, first wheat, then hoof-pocked, boot-sucking bottomland, until at last he saw the slate roof of the white house shining in the distance. Roche: wide, well-tended lanes of rye and hay and oats for which he, lord of no account, had never once lifted a finger.

He always came in past midnight, and each time was the same. The
kitchen door was unlocked, and no sooner did he lift the latch than a raging, cored-out hunger drove him to the larder, there to wolf down half a ham, stale bread, raw eggs, even her preserves, a whole jar, pawed out as if by a starved bear. When, suddenly, he would wake up sickened, panicked like an overheated child who had spent the day playing, only to realize he had a
body
.

Not that
la vieille rombière
was fooled, ever, with her freak ears. At the sound of the floorboards creaking upstairs, groaning with the sodden weight of his ingratitude, one ear would perk up. It was almost reassuring. Exactly like the kid’s father, years ago, when he would stumble home drunk.

T
he next morning, however, the prodigal was masterful. Near noon, when he tumbled down the stairs, already the tension was such that he’d never left. Arrogant lout. Filling the doorway, he was larger than she remembered, the protuberant planes of his broad blond face now misshapen, as if his bones had outgrown his own skin. And the toll on him. Knuckles cut up. Bruises on his face. Clothes a shambles. Standing back, she realized that she was now frightened of him, much as he, too, was afraid—afraid she might try to strike him, in which case he’d have to break her stupid neck.

“Bien,”
she said with a sarcastic tremor, “we are back.”

Icily, awaiting the onslaught, “That’s right, Mother, I’m back.”

“Well, I’m not supporting you.
No
.”

“God.” In a stagy voice he narrated his saga. “For days he walks home. To
her
. And yet when she first lays eyes on him, his own mother, what does she do but
threaten
him. God.”

“You! Don’t you dare turn your back to me, Arthur Rimbaud! Why did you return? Why? Don’t touch that. What? Can I expect the gendarme this time?” Like barks, her questions followed him through the house, “So your pig friend, he threw you out? Eh?”

“I threw
myself
out.”

“Et voilà!”
How she adored being right. “Heh, even he didn’t want
you! And with that big brain of yours, what then did you think? That you would roll unannounced into
my
home? Your big brain, it told you that all this is
open
to you? Of course. Please, come in with your muddy boots. Please, put up your feet. Eat everything. Do nothing. Watch your mother slave for you, eh?”

Maybe he wanted this inquisition. Needed it. Perhaps in a sense he returned home to feel again, to be slapped awake. The chair honked back. Look. He was a giant, invulnerable; her words, her vituperation, her primitive fear, they slid right off him, like ice off a slate roof. No matter. Clear to his lair at the top of the house, she dogged him, while in the room below, his two sisters huddled in fear, hearing:

“What? You who refuses to work! You, with no prospects! Who just shows up here with your open jaws, uninvited!”

Slam.

Then she was slapping his door, beating it like a man’s chest, her voice magnified by the narrow stairway. Barking, “How dare you? Do you know what Madame Verlaine writes to me, the awful things? Are you
insane
? I ask myself.
Possessed?
Do you know what she tells me while you cavort around Paris, you and that devil, stealing the food from her poor child’s mouth! Do you know what the Church says about such
—arrangements
? That you are now abominable in God’s eyes.”

Vicious little prick. Suddenly, he snatched the door open, so she almost fell in. Then stood over her. “Go on, bloody
scream
, you old axe—you’re good at that. And what about you? Do you think that you did not drive my father away? That he was not revolted at the sight of you?”

“Me? Your father abandoned
you
! All of you, with your endless squalling and needing! And you with the devil in his flesh! The
devil
, do you hear me?”

But this was too powerful, too close. As might have been predicted, the old woman reversed course. Fell to her knees, seized his fingers, hot tears running down her neck, begging, “Pray with me,
please
. Do you not see what I am doing for you, my child? That I would get down on my knees before you? Before God? Do you not see?”

“Get up!” He starts to drag her, then drops her; it is all he can do not to slug her, clinging to his legs, “Jesus—there’s your man! A bloody corpse.”

At this, again she flips, ripping and scratching at him. “Condemned before God! Does this mean nothing to you? Do you care how your little sister cries, always thinking you are dead? Do you care about the shame you heap down upon us? That the whole town laughs at you—laughs! The great genius. Just like his father, another big talker. And doing what in Paris? Used
comme un chiffon
, by an older man,
un chiffon
!”

Or maybe he returned to see how far he had fallen, that he might fall further, faster, more heedlessly. Damned was the plan. The plan was, there was no plan. Publication—but what on earth would that have proved? Or the university—the trough. The law? Even more ridiculous. In his new order, all laws would be abolished. A job? Never. He was a poet. Let the world pay.

Still, to be fair, he was then all of eighteen, a hormone-mad former
collégien
who, half the time, would give his poems away. Away like cooties, lest these hallucinations perish with him during these frightening periods when his cycloning brain would not desist and sleep refused to come.

Had he merely been consistently sullen and hateful, this would have been one thing for his poor mother, but of course he had no such coherence. Witness his sisters, both famished for him, starved for any male presence, as in their room he played the hero, the long-lost brother and confidant. Listen to them, thought Mme. Rimbaud,
laughing and having fun
. Never! She did not approve of males, even siblings, being in the rooms of young ladies. To hear their laughter. His casual male duplicity. That behind their doors he could act almost normal, putting on the Arthur Theater, as she called it. How the girls shrieked as he played the part of the train conductor flipping his lid at this kid, this ticket jumper rummaging through his pockets … 
Ticket, my ticket, wait, wait! I know I have it
. Then, grabbing his own belt, theatrically, he hurls himself off the train, rolls across the floor, then comes to rest by their puckered,
wide-eyed dolls, before whom he is just a kid laughing hysterically, his big red hands flopping. And from the other side of the room, his two sisters, the canaries in this air shaft, they stare at him in wonder—at his male power to shrug it off and leave without a second thought. To
leave
. Imagine that!

6
Pilgrims

This was 1872, Rimbaud’s eighteenth year, two years into his siege of the Muse. It was then that the first blow fell, at breakfast one morning when Vitalie coughed into her napkin, then shrieked. Blood, it was covered with a bright mist of blood, and when Mme. Rimbaud examined it, although she said nothing, she saw everything. It was Veronica’s veil, perfect in every detail, the bloody visage of Christ who died on Calvary, the hair, the lips, and cored-out eyes of suffering. Hope did not blind her. She had no doubt what was coming.

There were of course mountain sanitariums and other places for consumptives, well-known places, good places, and certainly Mme. Rimbaud had the means to send her baby to such a place. But to avail herself of the usual recourses, this would have presumed that Mme. Rimbaud herself had the usual power to leave—that she was able to seek the help of other mortals, to change direction, even to hope.

Pas question
. Home was the best cure. Open windows, cold air, camphor rubs, mustard plasters, and of course long bouts of prayer. This was the way, God’s way, even as the girl, hacking and wheezing, began to expel leechlike spots, then bubbly white spots of lung foam, small caterpillars at which she would placidly stare, as if then they might move.

Vitalie knew, of course: the dead-to-be always know. Her body was in insurrection and she was leaving for heaven, and with an odd thrill she knew, devout girl that she was, that her mother knew that she knew. No secrets now. Why, everybody in Charleville knew. Pathetic, horrifying, to see Mme. Rimbaud firing one doctor, then another, helpless before the inevitable. And Arthur? As a male, naturally, he was absent for this part,
though Mme. Rimbaud wrote to him her usual long, prayerfully disconnected letters. She wrote to him repeatedly, but at this point the two so-called roommates were in London, self-exiled and successively evicted, such that almost nothing reached him, not even through the normally reliable school chum channels.

But then late one night while praying, Mme. Rimbaud had a vision. It was a vision of Chartres, of a family pilgrimage to the great cathedral, a place of miracles built during the feverish outpouring of Mary worship that swept France in the late twelfth century.

The passion in those days, the fear. Death had ears and sickness had wings, and yet, miracle of miracles, in an ornate golden box the town of Chartres had—and don’t ask how—Mary’s tunic, her actual tunic seen by the actual eyes of Christ. And so from all across Europe, pilgrims and cripples and the blind and the dying, they all came to bask in its holy radiance. A wooden cathedral was built around it. The cathedral burned down, then a second, and when the tunic didn’t perish in either fire, its survival was declared a miracle. And so on that blessed site, over fifty years amid ever-rising tides of darkness and evil, stone upon stone, the great cathedral rose, until it could be seen like a great Ark itself, beached on those vast level plains of hay and barley and oats. Fortunate thing, too, for the devils were so thick, the witches were so crafty, and sickness was so rampant that the poor, fleeing this plague, actually took to living in the church, they and their animals, all taking shelter in Mary’s vast stone barn. In similar fashion, some six hundred years later, the Rimbaud women also sought shelter in the great cathedral of Chartres.

And so on the train two days later, after passing through Paris, when Mme. Rimbaud and her two daughters saw the great spires rising over the fields and trees, truly, as they gazed upon that massif of time-begrimed stone, for the first time in months Mme. Rimbaud felt unburdened, certain, even vindicated. Later, entering the church, the three women anointed themselves with holy water, then humbly entered the towering nave, frankly frightened at first even to look up, as if they might see the face of God.

Vast-echoing Goliath. Smelling of snuffed tapers and old hopes, the
great cathedral was a hollowed-out man-made cave of light, a veritable mountain of gray limestone laboriously sawed into pieces, then reassembled into arches and domes and tall shields of stained glass, intricate jewels of red and clear and of a blue found, in all the world, only here.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus
.

Long dresses gliding over the massive, foot-polished stones, through forests of columns, the three Rimbaud women thrilled to feel so small, to be
specks
! To add their voices to this ceaseless, surflike echolalia of voices—lives flying up to God!