Disaster Was My God
Page 4
Before dawn, they will be off, with him leading the caravan. And not walking or on horseback but carried—carried on a stretcher. This will be his ordeal, broiling in the trackless desert under the unending sun. Twelve days later, ten if they are very lucky, they will arrive in Zelia by the cobalt blue sea. Then away he will go—away on the first steamer smoking back to France. Away from these vulturous women keening, “Ayyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
2 What the Night Said to the Night
But it isn’t just the women at their well who have their eye on him. Later that night, awaking from a bad dream, Rimbaud realizes that, once again, his mother is right about him. Right about the leg, right about his needing to marry, and right about his crawling back home—hatefully right about everything.
In this dream, he is four or five. It’s a winter night, freezing cold, and they are in the barn at Roche—the birthing pen. The lantern smokes. His breath smokes, and before his five-year-old legs, fat as a rain barrel, lies a dying cow, Marie. Her calf is stuck, something’s stuck, and he is frantic, crying, “Maman, get up, she’ll kick you.” But, lying on her side in the straw, rolling up her sleeve, his maman is all concentration, peering up Marie’s black bum.
A witch. The boy has heard it so whispered. People in the town say so and, as for Paul, the hired hand, he knows so. “The cow’s as good as dead,” he says. “The calf, too.” “Enough,” says his mother, slicking her arm with the cow’s own butter. “Now hold up the lantern.”
Then up the blubbery black lips she slides her fingers. Black pie, it sucks and spurts. The dead cow shudders to life and, like that, his mother is gobbled up, sunk to the shoulder, when, splat, out they come—born together, his mother and the slick, wet calf, jumbled in thick, wet snakes of umbilical rope. They’re both upside down. The calf’s neck twists around. Brown and wet, he’s like warm clay, smoking he’s so new, and the boy’s ears are clanging, and he is shouting, “Is it is it is it?” Alive, he means. “Of course it’s alive,” says his mother, stirring a piece of sharp straw in the calf’s nostrils, an old farmer trick, to itch her to life. The calf snorts, twitches. Look, the nostrils are smoking. Then Paul hoists the lantern. “Lord, the calf has five legs!”
And after that, in gigs and wagons, from miles around, people come to gawk at Cinq the cow. It’s a sign, that fifth leg. God’s finger, thinks the boy. Pointing at them, the Rimbauds. Warning all against the witch.
And look at him now, still drenched with this dream of a five-legged cow, a boy still floating in the blocked and unknowing soul of a now bitter man. Fine freckles and lines mark his face. His thick boyish hair is gray blond, close-cropped like that of a soldier or convict, and below the gray blue eyes and sandy lashes there is the chevron mustache, a Muslim touch, like the fez and his fluency in Arabic, Amharic, and a host of local dialects. How old is he at thirty-seven? Younger than he knows and older than he can possibly be, living in a place where the years are doubled, like prison sentences.
Truly, to see him lying here in the moonlight, it is hard to know how old this man is. Whatever happened? Who was he once, before too many things happened? We are looking at the face of a man who, having survived himself, now finds himself bobbing in the middle of the desert, the lone survivor, clutching his body like a life preserver.
And yet, even faced with life’s worst, there is in him a wildly optimistic side, times when he will think to himself, But who knows? There are medical miracles, salt cures, and even operations, if it comes to that. And perhaps if you’re courageous, if you don’t panic and you tough it out, you may return to Abyssinia. Perhaps even better than before. For really, who knows?
All through the downslide of these past few weeks, such optimism has been his mantra, this sunny voice telling him, Who knows, who knows? Look, you can only do so much. Perhaps you will return to Harar, possibly with new investors—bankrolled. Then there is La Société Géographique, which, in its February 1884 bulletin, has published his account of a harrowing three-week trip into the interior region called the Ogadine. True, it was only 150 kilometers, but you didn’t need to go far to find yourself surrounded by hard-muscled, bushy-haired men whose life’s ambition was to spear, then castrate a godless white affront such as yourself. Anyhow, his report upon which he had pinned such hopes, it had gone mostly unnoticed, but it was a start, he thought, the point being he had reinvented himself as Arthur Rimbaud, explorer, ethnographer, scientist.
And quite possibly he will, he might, he could return with this new French wife his mother has been dangling in her letters. All picked out, she claims. Young? Old? Pretty? Not so fast: of course, his parsimonious maman withholds even the most rudimentary details of said maid, even as he, mad with curiosity, holds his breath for months, to spite her by not asking. Desire. Desire withheld. This is their little game, mother and son. One of them, anyway.
Nonetheless, Rimbaud can picture this woman, a sensible, handsome, and presentable woman, bustled in her embonpoint, with lyrelike hair carefully arranged with combs and tucked up under a smart hat. A solidly French (but not stupid) woman, with whom he will have a son. Father a son, rather. Fatherhood. As a fatherless boy, at this stage of his life, he finds the idea of fatherhood deeply appealing, he who once had dreamed of being a child of the sun, running down a foaming, exploding beach. A world so new it was forever being born, like eternity.
And the world he will return to after fifteen years away? Unrecognizable. The Eiffel Tower, the buildings of the Exposition Universelle de Paris of two years before, all this is new, just as Paris now has a model sewer system in which, for a modest fare, well-to-do, big-hatted ladies with a taste for the stygian—indeed, ladies holding parasols—can glide through the gloom in lantern-hung boats.
Yes indeed, in an explosion of steel and steam, electric lights and dynamos, the modern industrial world was booming, and all built by the very men he had once spat upon: businessmen and bankers, men of science, engineers, and riveters—men of steam, like Georges-Eugène Haussmann, architect of modern Paris, or Charles de Freycinet, creator of the first state-owned rail network. These “types,” once dismissed by him as the slaves of bygone orders, twenty years later, he now holds these men in abstract awe—men hot to pan the Yukon, conquer the North Pole, or, like Ferdinand de Lesseps, dig the Panama Canal. And so, even in an Africa backwater like Abyssinia, Rimbaud maintains a keen interest in amateur engineering manuals on such odd and diverse topics as metallurgy, the stringing of suspension bridges, and the manufacture of tiny precision toys—tumbling clowns and monkeys clapping cymbals and such. But will his bullheaded and unimaginative mother procure for his edification said self-bettering books? Could the old witch not see?
MOTHER JUDGMENT. Books to buy where, to do what? Has the heat driven you crazy? What do they even make in that place?
PETITIONER SON. Why am I still waiting for the aforementioned volumes? And two months without a word from you.
MOTHER JUDGMENT. (Silence.)
SON blinks. Three months have passed without a word from you. I am still here, with the idea that I will remain here for another three months. It’s very unpleasant, but this will nonetheless end by ending. I do hope, however, that I soon shall see these books, especially the one on suspension bridges.
MOTHER ON HIGH. Bridges in the desert—built by whom? By you who never so much as lifted a hammer?
But here’s a question: Where would one even start in a thousand-year-old civilization in which antiquity slumbers like the Sphinx? With what conceivable workforce or industrial capacity? Here, in a hut as hot as an oven, you will find half-naked zombie men drenched in sweat and soot—low-caste men of a scavenger tribe, expert makers of knives, axes, and scythes. Dazed by the narcotic khats they chew, tiny green leaves mashed and wadded in one cheek, one man works the wheezing ox-hide bellows, two more wield the great spark-splattering mallets, and a fourth, the tong man, then plucks from the fire a pulsing, livid heart of iron ready to be shaped. But honestly, tintinn
abulating toys? Does Rimbaud fancy these men are thrifty Swiss in disguise?
What can he be thinking, then, this missionary of modernity? Or writing, for that matter. For here we come to another issue that cannot be ignored in his strange late letters. Namely, the even more perplexing matter of writing style, or rather the utter absence of style, indeed a regression to his earliest schoolboy days in which, like other children under the rod, he numbingly memorized, then recited in schoolboy sing-song, all the rivers and streams of France. Consider a representative passage to his mother and sister:
Dear friends,
I arrived at this country after twenty days on horseback through the Somali desert. Harar is a city colonized by the Egyptians and dependent on their government. The garrison is made up of many thousands of men. Our agency and our storehouses are here. The saleable products of the country are coffee, ivory, skins, etc. The country is at an elevation, but the land is cultivatable. The climate is cool but not unhealthy.
Contrast this with:
It has been found again!
What has?—Eternity.
It is the sea gone off
With the sun.
Sentinel soul,
Let us whisper the confession
Of the night so void
And of the day on fire.
Or this incantation:
O seasons, O castles
What soul is without flaws?
I have made the magic study
Of happiness which no man evades
A salute to it each time
The Gallic cock sings
Ah! I will have no more desires:
It has taken charge of my life.
Which again raises this disquieting question of language and style. Namely, how a poet prodigy of almost unfathomable abilities could willfully forget how to write. How could such a man disable a style and unlearn ageless rhythms—stubbornly resist, as one might food and water, words and their phantom secrets, indeed the modern secrets of language that he had been the first to discover, in his teens?
How, in short, could a poet of genius systematically erase his own life—unwrite it? How? Why? To what conceivable end?
3 The Rimbaud Luck
The lanterns are two golden balls in the darkness. “Come on,” says the one.
In black rubber boots, down the hill they trudge at 4:00 a.m., two dumpling-skirted, lumpy-sweatered women hauling steaming buckets to the barn where the beamy, big-eyed ladies are now loudly stamping and mooing, Feed me milk me feed me.
“Well,” says the mother in the darkness, as if a malicious voice has just whispered it. “I now know that Arthur’s knee is worse than he has let on. Much worse.”
“Mother,” says Isabelle, his one surviving sister, a thirty-year-old girl-woman still half asleep, “how can you presume to know this?”
“Because, daughter, I had a dream.”
Setting down the bucket, Mme. Rimbaud turns up the lantern wick, licking and smoking. “Hold up the lantern—up.” Turns the latch, then pushes light into the piss-perspiring beast heat. Cats, skinny barn cats, leaping, mewing, and twirling round her ankles—things needing things. Dehors! “Out!” Then, bumping Isabelle as if she were a cow: “In with you, in.” Claps the door, then continues: “Of the four of you, Arthur always kicked the hardest … as an infant. Are you listening to me? He kicked me last night.” Isabelle is now staring at her in bafflement. “In my sleep,” insists the mother, “he kicked me.”
“You mean, as a baby Arthur kicked you?”
“I mean, I felt a kick. Last night. How do I know if he was a baby? But then I knew—I knew it’s bad.”
“But, Mother, you always think the worst. You jinx it.”
“Jinx what? It is jinxed. Good lord, your brother doesn’t need me to jinx his life.”
At this, Isabelle plops the rag into the hot, soapy water. Rubs her nose on her woolen sleeve, wipes down the udder teats, drops her stool, then starts wringing. Sploosh, sploosh, sploosh.
“Ignore me.” The mother stands there, burning. “Go on with your pretending. You’ll see I’m right.”
Sploosh sploosh.
“And, you hate that I am always right. And I hate always having to be right.”
Grabbing the next cow by the tail—by the balls, as it were—Madame hand-jacks her, bucking and stumbling, into the stall: seize the tail and, rest assured, Bossy will follow. Wrings out the rag, then starts wiping. “You’ll see. Or rather, two months from now you will—as usual. Monsieur Michaud!”—this is the hired man, another itinerant tippler and oddball—“Get in here! You and your two friends. And not too close to the lantern, lest you blow us up, all the alcohol on your breath.”
And not merely is the old pest probably right, thinks Isabelle, but she is wrong-right. Mme. Rimbaud always sides with the worst, and at the pessimist’s betting window, almost invariably, she is handsomely repaid, Arthur’s leg being a case in point. For the past two months, they’ve been skirmishing over the leg and what it portends, especially now that Arthur’s problematic return seems all the more probable. For after all, as an enterprise run by two women, their little life has worked well enough. “Quite well,” Mme. Rimbaud will chirp when Isabelle gets too down at the mouth. Down, that is, about being stuck, lonely, unmarried. Meaning—to her mother’s way of thinking—falling into all her boo-hooing female feeble-headedness.
Which is all to say that Roche, this five-hectare Amazonian caliphate, is a female-run enterprise. Meaning that Roche runs, despite the usual vagaries of weather and pests, moderately, consistently, and on its own—without men, since the Michauds of the world, bottle-sucking itinerant worms that they are, obviously do not count. Nevertheless, this impending sense of Arthur, of his return, this weighs heavily on Mme. Rimbaud, who, in her son’s absence, has even further mythologized (if such were possible) his stupendous ill effects on ordinary life.
Ignore her bluff, then. Her anxiety grows by the day.
Well, if such worries chafe Mme. Rimbaud at 4:00 a.m., evening is worse. Evening, that flabby time of the day, as the old woman calls it.
“Shoo! Out, cat.”
Clawing the rug, Minet—their one, outnumbered tom—flees for his life. The old woman looks around. At the clock in its idleness. At that fly bouncing off the pane—whack.
“Honestly, I preferred him when he was poor.”
No antecedent. None is necessary.
“Mother,” sighs the daughter, “in three lifetimes, Arthur could never earn enough money to satisfy you. Even if he had become a barrister. This was your fantasy, not his.”
Money, another topic, for never are they idle. Even now as supper simmers, mother and daughter are absorbed in yet another little moneymaker: needlepoint. Pillows, doilies, fancy dress panels. Even framed whimsies: Let Peace Reign Through Our Little Abode.
“Sewn, they think, by ill-paid village simpletons just blind with happiness,” says the old woman. Her voice, never raised, sounds like the coughs of a small, asthmatic dog.
And yet, the deep concentration of needlepoint, the slow, shallow breathing is, in its way, calming. “Because, of course”—another stitch—“he always puts himself on the wrong side of luck. As if”—another stitch—“at this point”—she coughs a dry cough—“he must prove the obvious.”
“Which is?”
“Failure. What else?”
The needle stops; Isabelle drops her head.
“Maman,” she says, marshaling what little stubbornness she has left, “Arthur is not a failure. He has a business. Property, too.”
“Business. Do we see him in the Congo, running diamond mines? Of course not. No, he sells hides and ostrich feathers for floozies. Low-profit trash. Mon Dieu, did the boy learn nothing from me?”
Moments later, in the barren dining room, beneath the portrait of Jesus with his hound’s eyes, they take their meager supper. Leek and potato soup, a piece of Rocroi, a soft, creamy cheese covered in fine cinders and buttered on yesterday’s almost
stale bread. There they will sit at a long, rectangular, otherwise empty table with rattling tallow-soaked boards at which Isabelle occupies the same place—and indeed the same, still wobbling chair—at which she has sat since the age of two listening to her mother’s soliloquies. As for the three remaining chairs—those of Arthur, Frédéric, and Vitalie—these relics hang in the barn, tilted high in the rafters, flying away like three witches.
Once more, Madame rings the tureen with a dull spoon.
“Daughter!”
Clumsy steps down the stairs: Isabelle steps, losing steps, retracing steps. Again, the mother trumpets at the ceiling.
“Good heavens, can’t you ever just leave a room? Daughter, you are like a burr, always sticking to things.”
Whump, Isabelle hits the bottom stair: young-pretty, old-pretty, man-hungry, her hair pinned up with combs, feathery strands falling in semidisarray. Silence is served. Bowls are stirred, but little is taken. It is their nightly contest of feminine virtue, that is, over who can consume the least, pitting Mme. Rimbaud’s flagellating self-denial against Isabelle’s purposeful-seeming vacuousness, periods, as now, in which Isabelle will dutifully sit, rabbitlike, chin tucked into her neck. Madame stirs, then restirs her watery soup. Holds her spoon almost pastorally in midair. Narrows her eyes—her final pronouncement on the subject of Arthur.