Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  But then, once back in the gig, as suddenly, the fear returns. Clouds blot out the sun. She feels a shudder, then a mounting panic at this long-dreaded resurrection. When clang. Blessed distraction. The gravedigger—his back now a sopping tortoise shell of sweat—strikes another large stone.

  “Monsieur Loupot!” she erupts. “Deny it no more. It was you who buried my son nine years ago.”

  The gravedigger stares at the sky.

  “Veuve Rimbaud, please,” he says, “look at my face. I am not yet forty. Ten years ago I was still in the army. As God is my witness. Back then I was not even in this miserable trade.”

  “Eh,” she retorts, “so then it was your father, perhaps blinded by his great beard, who left these stones? Eh? Is that how you evade the truth? Blame your father?”

  The black gig rocks as the old fury climbs down. Then, throwing back her black veil, she faces him, her glasses two fiery ovals as the sun bursts once more through the clouds. “It is all right,” she soothes. “We know your story. You are of the people of troubles. A lost, gypsylike people thrown off their land, lost and wandering with their shovels.” Her twisty eyebrows rise. “What? Do you deny this? That you are a Jew—is this not true?”

  “We Loupots,” he thunders, “we are Catholics. Dwelling here for generations!”

  Hmmph. Does he think he frightens her, standing on his hind legs like a circus bear? Frightened? She who must unearth her two children today? With a shrug, she returns to her gig. Climbs up, spreads the black veil, loudly blows her nose, then resumes her lonely vigil. Crouched over herself, she is like a lone fisherman, sick, soul-sick and now trembling before the storm.

  But was the Widow indeed a widow? Only God knew. Certain only was her husband’s desertion, not his decease. Abandonment—this was her widowhood. A life’s vocation, a profession in fact.

  The deserter in question was Captain Frédéric Rimbaud, an army chasseur who in the winter of 1852 arrived in Charleville in a splendid blue uniform with golden epaulettes and splendid black boots. A handsome, compact man, the captain was blond and swarthy from the equatorial sun, with the regulation long mustache and goatee that drove to a point, like a spade. Expert in fencing and riflery. And, as befit an officer, expert in the equally vital skills of whoring, dueling, horse racing, and gambling. A veteran, too. As a captain in the artillery, he had served in the Crimea and before that had fought the bedouin in Algeria, one of the myrmidons of the imperial and resurgent France of Napoleon III, an empire then bent, as all the European powers were, on building colonies and spreading Christian civilization. That is, once they could put down the dark peoples, the Arabs and the noirs, fanatics, most of them.

  Indeed, in the great cause of subjugating the Mussulmans and the noirs, Captain Rimbaud was particularly useful owing to his great love of languages: Latin, Greek, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, and Swahili. Bush dialects, too. The man was a sponge. Why, in a matter of weeks, Captain Rimbaud could pick up virtually any language. Smart was his problem, the young Mme. Rimbaud used to say, for at first she was in awe of him, an educated man. But then tapping her index finger against her temple, with sly conceit the new bride would add, “But, as you can see, God blesses the slow and the stupid.”

  After all, her family, the Cuifs, peasants, lard heads perhaps—well, they knew what they knew: money and timber, land and beasts. But what the Cuifs really knew was how to spit on nothing, rub it up into something, then sell it for a tidy profit to the next fool. And of all the Cuifs, the slickest by far was her father, Alphonse Cuif. Bald and broad, with wads of hair in his ears, Alphonse Cuif was the master when it came to selling the nearly dry cow or the kicking horse. If he could do that, he said, surely he could find a man for his then twenty-seven-year-old daughter, in those days a Methuselah age, connubially speaking.

  Stuck—this was Vitalie Cuif’s other great theme. Stuck she was, stuck since the age of five, when her mother died. And since her father never remarried, stuck with taking care of him and her two useless brothers. Cooking, cleaning, milking, chopping, emptying, then washing the chamber pots—all this and more Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Cuif did. Even as a girl, she was effectively a wife for her father, not only a demanding man but also a quite thirsty and, frankly, physical man. Every night at the tavern he drank too much ale, and so every night, once he had stumbled home, he always had a terrible thirst, calling out, Daughter, I’m thirsty.

  Her brothers slept far downstairs, muffled. But to be ready, she slept upstairs, at hand, in the next room. Where in the middle of the night she would hear, Vitalie, bring me water. Cold, cold water brimming fresh from the pump, this was her father’s wish. Good girl. There’s a good girl. After all, it was water, just water, and it was dark and all so long ago. Her brothers, with their private boy language, they might as well have been deaf and blind—they heard and saw nothing. And why would they with a father who was merely thirsty and demanding, as was his paternal right, to be served quickly—and with no sass—by his women. Woman, rather.

  It almost goes without saying that nobody ever saw anything or remembered anything because, of course, nothing had happened or could happen. Forget it. The girl had to forget it. Even in the confessional there was nothing to say about it, not when there was a male sitting on the other side. For after all, was not the father thirsty? Was the girl not his daughter and was he not her father to obey in all things? Girls needed to be quiet and kept busy, with their foolish wagging tongues, and so they were. There was church. There was needlework and crocheting, ironing, and chicken plucking—plenty for a girl to do. And for those spoiled girls that couldn’t be happy, the malcontents and hysterics, there were options. There were nunneries. Asylums, too. And Alphonse Cuif’s daughter, as he warned her repeatedly, was on the cusp, for she had a nasty disposition—un sale caractère—and, with almost no time to call her own, virtually no friends, save God, of course. Talking to herself, the girl was always talking to herself, desperately clutching herself as she wandered the fields, hair blowing, truly a peculiar and disagreeable girl, everybody said so. In short, even among the gossips there was nothing to think. It was blank; it was null; nobody in those days ever wondered, or would have wondered, why the girl was so. Weeping so. Upset so. Don’t be foolish. Think what? There was nothing to think.

  Well, finally, inevitably, the father kicked out her useless brothers, true, both drunks like him, but sissies with no heads for business, no instinct for the jugular. Alone with her father—this was what did it for Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Cuif. Alone, she felt completely trapped, exposed for the first time and shamed before God. And so for the first time she said no—no to what she couldn’t remember, but no. No more water. No more nursely visits. No.

  Vengeance was swift.

  “Petite salope,” cried her father, pounding on her door. “Find a man or I’ll find you one—blind, or crippled, or crazy. Or even ninety years old. Be a nun for all I care, but get out! I want you out.”

  It was hopeless. She was far too old. She knew no men and had no women friends to invent the clever pretexts and make the necessary introductions. But then in the tavern one night, deep in his cups, her father looked up to see, through the swirling blue pipe smoke, an officer, a captain in the chasseurs.

  “Captain,” said Cuif père, red of face, raising his tankard of ale, “I drink to our brave defenders! Sit, captain. Allow me to buy you a glass!”

  Hooking his thumb on his upper teeth, or what remained of them, the old sharp had sold his share of cows and horses, but never one that came with a farm and a dowry of 15,000 francs. Why, the little bitch sold herself.

  And so, about every year, the captain would return on leave, just long enough to force upon her the same old feelings of panic and suffocation. Jammed himself in, bucked a while, shuddered, then promptly rolled off. Wiped himself on the sheet, then fell to snoring. And so each visit, Vitalie Cuif Rimbaud was stuck and bucked, then stuck again … Frédéric in ’53, Arthur in ’54, Vitalie in ’58. And fi
nally, in ’60, Isabelle—the baby.

  And of course, once the money was spent, adieu, the captain was gone, too. Slamming the door, he narrowly missed being brained by the heavy brass jug that she hurled at his head. It rang. Ricocheted. Spun like a top on the floor. The two boys stood frozen. It was the size of a head, his head. She picked it up, started smashing it on the table, weeping and shrieking. Stuck again—stuck with three and, soon, four.

  “Here,” she said, showing the battered jug to the two small boys. “See what your father leaves you?” She pointed to the two dents. “There, do you see?” Two holes, like the Man in the Moon. “Do you not see his face?”

  And so atop the mantel stood the smashed jug with the two dents for eyes and the jug handle for a nose. Warning from the queen that, in her hive, men were drones, utterly expendable and easily banished.

  Then, down the road, the farm dogs are barking. It’s the gravedigger’s boy, a blubbery, freckled, red-faced youth riding bareback a sideways-trotting plough horse heaving his great neck and flapping his tail against the flies.

  “Bonsoir, Madame.” Wondrous the lad’s unsurprise at the old sphinx. Does she not realize she is pointing an open clasp knife at him?

  “Whoa, boy,” she says. She holds up the old clasp knife with which she is peeling an apple, white like a doll’s head, trailing a spiraling ribbon of peel. How tiny she looks before the enormous plough horse. “First, boy, it’s Veuve Rimbaud. Second, I know all about you young jackasses, flapping your jaws. And you did not blabber? You swear?”

  “Nothing, Veuve Rimbaud.” Placidly, he slaps a fly. “I do not swear.”

  “And you were not followed?”

  The gravedigger pops up.

  “Ah, Georges,” he says with relief, “right on time.” But then as quickly his tone changes. “Veuve Rimbaud, they are present now.”

  “Who?” She feels a chill.

  “Your two children. Please, I say this to prepare you.”

  “I am prepared.”

  Then, to distract her, the gravedigger pays her—he thinks—a compliment.

  “I hear they are giving Arthur his own statue. In the town square.”

  “Ridiculous. Give the money to the poor.”

  How she hates it when the townspeople call him Arthur, as if he were theirs, the friendly village ghost. One leg. Of course she has heard the awful joke. That, against his terrible mother, he had only one leg to stand on after they amputated his other in Marseille. It was an emergency operation, when he returned from Africa with his right knee swollen the size of a beehive with a carcinoma. Twelve hellish days being carried on a litter across the desert, followed by hostiles. Sixteen litter bearers, fifteen camels, six drivers and a dozen hired gunmen—all that and a family of four, two of them young children. Thirty-eight souls, they had crossed the Abyssinian desert, a capsized land of blue mountains, red mud, volcanic washes, and dried-up riverbeds that might have been ploughed by whales. For those twelve days, sunburned and thirsty and losing two men, the party pushed on to the Gulf of Aden, below the Red Sea. Even then Rimbaud’s ordeal was not over. He was fifteen days more, steaming to France, half out of his mind, terrified he would lose the gold that it had taken him years to amass—a pittance, he thought, compared with what had been devoured by thievery and murder, extortion and fictitious taxes. From first to last, his was a life of antipodes, veering from visionary idealism to the guttering twilight of capitalism, the only constants being restlessness, grandiosity, and the sand-blind tyranny of dreams.

  At his death Rimbaud was only thirty-seven but, after a decade in the desert, looked at least a decade older. His once blond hair was gray, and he had grown a small razor mustache. In his kepi, he looked, in fact, like a Muslim, and on his chest, in a special vest, he carried some four kilos of gold, a .32 pistol, and, in case of capture, a double-shot derringer: one shot under the chin. Better that than castration, the rule in the Danakil Desert, preferably while the victim was alive to watch. In this state, Rimbaud arrived. That is, before the ether-soaked gauze was laid over his face and night, blessed night, filled the globes of his eyes.

  “Oh, of course,” said his mother as she and Isabelle rode the train to the hospital in Marseille to see their prodigal. “Only when there is trouble—or he needs money—only then does he come home.”

  “Mother,” corrected Isabelle, ever his apologist. “Whatever else, he needs no money from you. Not now.”

  “But he needs. He needs and he feeds, and here I am. What am I, a cow with four teats? And when does he return? But of course, when he is going to die.”

  “But why should he die?” yelped Isabelle. The amputation had been successful. In no way, then, was his death apparent—to her. Hatefully, however, her mother, with her sudden fears and premonitions, was rarely, if ever, wrong about such things, especially when it came to death.

  When deep in the hole, a boom is heard: deep, wooden, inhabited.

  “That’s him,” cries the undertaker. “Arthur’s coffin. Perfect. Why, almost new.”

  Go, says the voice and her hands tremble as she pulls off the veil. But no sooner has she climbed down from the gig than the gravedigger calls to his Buddha-sized boy, locks arms with him, then up—out of the hole—he flies. Arms upraised. To stop her.

  “Madame”—blocking her—“Veuve Rimbaud, please. Please, no further. For your daughter, believe me, an undertaker is required.”

  “Nonsense. Stand aside.”

  And look, as Mme. Rimbaud peers down, below the lip of turf, deep in the late sun, there it shines—hair. A shock of reddish blond hair. Like yesterday. Exposed to air and life, in the late rays of the sun, as if through some mighty, subterranean phosphorescence, even after twenty-five years, the girl’s red hair ignites, as her mother stands above, clawing her elbows, then grasping her trembling knees.

  Snow, it snowed that day twenty-five years ago, then turned bitterly cold—cold and dry, she remembers. Sitting with Vitalie in her boatlike coffin, rocking and crying, she felt almost pregnant with grief, her eyes swollen like two boiled eggs. The wood stove was pulsing hot and the wintry air, it itched her nose it was so dry. So dry that, behold, the dead girl’s red hair—electrified by the mother’s helpless stroking—it rose, almost living … right to her palm. Only hair, she thought. Just hair. The hair but not the girl.

  And Arthur, that albatross, then twenty-one, once again he was home, and again “around her neck,” this after a two-year rampage through Paris and London and Brussels with his lover, Paul Verlaine, a poet ten years older. That it had been the most creative period of either poet’s life—much less that her son had written poems in a language never before heard—naturally, of this the Widow Rimbaud knew nothing and cared even less. All she knew were the horrifying reports from Verlaine’s mother and Verlaine’s teenage wife—of crimes so foul that her son most certainly was damned. Nevertheless, she had come to his aid, visiting him in London, where he and Verlaine were living, openly cohabiting, when they came home drunk or high from the opium dens by the wharves, foul rookeries in which cadaverous men lay on benches, as long pipes—pipes stuffed with burbling black goo—were served up by Chinamen with quill-like nails and longer beards. For the kid, by then, pretty much everything had collapsed or was collapsing, dying like the dreams of childhood. His great boast, for example, that he knew all forms of magic and would revolutionize love. Or the still more ridiculous claim that he and Verlaine would live as children of the sun, baptized in the new faith, in new loves and new hopes, surging like the sea. Rot, thought Rimbaud, all rot. As he wrote then in his own dark night of the soul:

  I had to travel, to dissipate the enchantments that crowded my brain. On the sea, which I loved as if it were to wash away my impurity, I watched the compassionate cross arise. I had been damned by the rainbow.

  His blindness! His arrogance! he thought. In his four years as a committed poet, had he changed anything or improved anyone, least of all a moral toad like Verlaine? Had he written a
word that wasn’t a lie and self-delusion? Had he, who said that charity was the key, had he not been a demon of pride and selfishness, perhaps even the devil, leading Verlaine to destroy his marriage, desert his infant son, and squander his inheritance? And even then he could profess, abracadabra-like, with no apparent hypocrisy, that he had absolutely no interest in money. He was the rain without the wet. The crime with no consequences. The rhyme that rhymed with everything.

  All this was bad enough, but then the kid (and it was he who called the shots in their relationship), he told the older man that he was leaving for good, really leaving this time. It was for the best, he said, the good, the kind, the logical thing, a mercy, really. Sentimental as ever in such matters, uselessly burdened as adults are, the elder poet, Verlaine, was weeping. Uch, bawling, and at that moment Rimbaud, as clear and cold as a star, had the sensation of drowning him—of smothering the very love that he had sworn to reinvent. Outwardly, the kid was completely calm, explaining everything matter-of-factly as one can only from the unassailable and unknowing bluffs of youth. That accomplished, the kid went to buy a rail ticket, leaving Verlaine to sob himself to sleep. Two hours later, however, it was a different story. Returning, he found Verlaine swaying drunk and enraged, aiming at his chest a small-caliber pawnshop pistol that he had just purchased.

  “Silly bitch! What is that?” demanded Rimbaud. He was almost insulted. “Asshole, do you seriously think you can threaten me with that peashooter? Do you?”

  Rimbaud grabbed for it. He never heard the report, but look, he was shot, shot in the arm. The angels had fled and he was staring at his own dark, fast-dripping blood. Incredible. He was not God but flesh, human flesh, he realized, as he blacked out and hit the floor.

  And so Verlaine was thrown in prison. As for Rimbaud, only mildly wounded and now fingered as an invert, he, along with sundry other undesirables, was put on a locked train car back to the French border, back to his mother and the now approaching death of young Vitalie. In the end, so violent were the girl’s coughs that bright blood, lung blood, sprayed her white sheet. No poem to be had here. For Rimbaud, it was like watching a mouse held in the jaws of an enormous cat. Numb, never a tear.