Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  “Oh, God!” cries Mrs. MacDonald in exasperation. “Oh, do let us all go on. And get on. Without all this head butting from you two tortoises.”

  “Mummy,” cries the girl, joining her, “Mummy, make him stop.” She glares at Rimbaud. “Like to see you walk!”

  “Children, hush!” cries Mr. MacDonald.

  “Oh, you hush!” snaps Mrs. MacDonald. “Yes, Mr. MacDonald, you are correct. The children are indeed knackered. In view of which, they are, I believe, entitled to have their feelings. Eh, Mr. Rimbaud?” Then she lets him have it. “You, you posh poet, you. You, up there. Reclining—you, sir, on your precious poet’s pinnacle.”

  Clubbed. With the dreaded word poet she flattens him.

  “But, please,” says Rimbaud, still desperate for her approval, “but, Madame. I—I wish we could all drink lemonade in the shade. I do. But …”

  25 Shame

  And bad as that day is, that night is worse, the moonlit desert glistening, almost phosphorescent, like the tropical night sea. Nighttime, the worst time. For if the skinny men can see you, rest assured, once darkness falls they are coming to kill you.

  Termite mounds ten feet high. Ravines. Glowing reefs of grass and bush. Swirling with light and dark, the ground is indefensible for the defender and almost hallucinatory in its vastness, cloaking like a second skin the night-crawling, diabolically patient skinny men. Of these, worst of all are the scorned young males—the Immortals, as Rimbaud thinks of them, boys of fifteen or sixteen, vicious as fire ants and hungry for their first kill so the older warriors will stop hazing them. But most of all so they can finally lie with a woman. Get laid. Be a man.

  Against this reality, weapons are deployed, animals unloaded, circles laid, and fires started. Let the fire roar, as Rimbaud’s gunmen fan out on snorting, reluctant horses—ten of the twelve, four with long spears to prod the bushes and run down intruders, this as the rest of the pack closes in, with repeater rifles and muskets and curved daggers.

  Hy-eet. Gouging their mounts’ ribs, off they trot, Rimbaud’s hunter-killers. Chewing coffee beans, they are jumpy tonight, eyes on fire after several days with barely any sleep. As for supper, they eat it riding, eat it raw, knifing raw strips off an antelope shot that day, its hind quarters flipped like two saddle bags on the steaming rump of Shaheed’s horse. Hy-eet.

  Furze burning and sparks flying, roaring up heaven’s flue. No one really sleeps or eats; other than MacDonald, flipping the pages of his Bible, no one really does anything as one anxious hour passes, then two, then three. When all jump at a distant shot—this followed, endless seconds later, by a final capping shot so you know. Then, after another agonizingly long pause, they hear another wild tattoo of shots, one, two, then three and more, roaring into the night.

  Breaking open the breech, Rimbaud rechecks his brute-bored double barrel. Sets down his pistol, the lever-action Winchester, too, then lays out fat shotgun shells—ten in neat rows of two. Fast loads if they burst out of the bushes. Blood is squeaking in his ear, heart blood, his eyes dizzy, inhaling, as it were, the whorling, ever-widening darkness. And MacDonald, sitting by his wife with his Bible, his two children squeezed between his knees? Still unarmed. Even now, when any minute they could be attacked and overwhelmed.

  Horses and men emerge from the darkness.

  “Rinbo!” says the hunt’s leader, Dabir. Eyes blazing, he grins as two horsemen emerge from the darkness, holding, between them, a drape of human meat. “See,” he says proudly, “see what tried us.”

  Like cats with limp prey, they drop the bloody corpse. Fifteen or sixteen, perhaps, still limp and oozing. Eye gone and jaw shot off, flap and bone.

  “God!” cries Mrs. MacDonald, “Up, up, children.” Shielding the children’s eyes, the MacDonalds disappear behind a tent. No matter. Furze is thrown on the fire, sparks belching—revealing men with their blood up, excitedly settling pistols and daggers and thrusting into the darkness the still warm barrels of dull-gleaming rifles, pointing where they had been, pointing where they had shot. Apparently the first attacker, badly wounded, had crawled off—to die, Dabir assures his employer. Truly. Big blood trail. Black clots. White foam. Lung foam—done. About death, the many species of death, the gunmen are as specific as Eskimos might be enumerating the many varieties of snow. As for Rimbaud, trapped in his world with his frightened guests—well, he is mortified. Socially embarrassed. All the more when he knows there can be no putting off this business, the children notwithstanding. For here, dead at his feet, is a bill now due. Same for the one that crawled off and the three more that ran away. For such success there must be shillings. Shiny shillings. Shiny-new, hence worth more. English, the best. Not the thalers used to pay the haulers and camel drivers, not for fine horse warriors such as these. No, no, the English. This is what they want.

  Thus the bartering starts, as Dabir’s men, like the solid workmen they are, gab and point at the corpse quite as if he were a gazelle.

  Beau-ti-ful!

  This is a word they like, Shaheed now motioning how beau-ti-ful that first blast that took the legs out from under him—shot from a horse, a running shot, too. Rimbaud nods. Yes, yes, he knows well the lethal .45-70. A beauty. A knock-down weapon, with its slow, heavy slug. Don’t be distracted. Sit up, Rimbaud, he thinks. Fuck the children. He is now the judge and the captain, and if he is not—if at this moment he is anything less than riveted and commanding—well, then they’re all cooked. Frangi children. White children. Here they are nothing—needless mouths to feed.

  Meanwhile, he can see Mrs. MacDonald behind the tent, then behind the camels, cloaking the children and whispering. But finally she has had it. Tromping over:

  “Mr. Rimbaud. Fully one-quarter of an hour has passed for this horror. Sir! I mean, really. Will they now eat him, too?”

  But then, before he can even react, she, a woman, does the unthinkable. Directly, she confronts Dabir. And worse, before his men:

  “Sir!”—pointing behind her—“Sir, these are children. Now, please, sir, take that poor dead child away and bury him. Do so, I beg of you. Or I will.”

  “Missis!” cries Rimbaud, so flummoxed that he forgets her name. “Missis, sit down. Dabir, please, the fault is all mine. Mine, and I am sorry. Big baksheesh for this, believe me. See here.”

  “Twenty-five!” snaps Dabir, pointing at the woman. “And be happy I don’t kill the white meat.”

  And so the sagging corpse is dragged off and dumped and the men fan out again, nine, while three sleep. Later, nearing dawn, more shots are heard—two, then ten or more. Eyeing Rimbaud with fury, Mrs. MacDonald piles the fire higher. Then, wrapped in her blanket, fairly twitching, she erupts:

  “And you paid them. And for what, sir? Shooting a boy? A child?”

  “Child!” he says. “Do you think, Madame, that that so-called child was not coming to kill you? You and your children?”

  “Pieces of silver!” she retorts, for she is a Londoner, stubborn and knowing and sure. “For a boy! Really, sir, how barbaric. How pathetic. How long have you been out here to have so thoroughly lost your moorings? You, sir, a poet.”

  “This is the system.”

  What is happening to me? he thinks. Why does he feel on the verge of tears, frantic that she will think ill of him, that she will abandon him to all there is now—to pain and more pain. “And here you come as my guest,” he continues, raising his voice, “of whom I have asked not a farthing. You with your Bibles—yes, you, MacDonald. Do you know how it is out here? Do you? Do you think that your Jesus will magically protect you? Do not look to your wife, sir. Look at me—me—you who will not pick up a gun. You, sir. Here, sir, you are a menace. Do you hear me? A menace.”

  Strange thing, though. At this final vomit of bile and vileness, Rimbaud stops; his whole brain seizes up, as there he sits, emptied. Staring into the hot, pulsing heart of the fire, it’s the hypnosis of sorrow he feels. Blank minutes. No words.

  Meekly he hopes that now it is over, that maybe the
y didn’t mind; that, being English, they will pretend, cover it over, and let an ugly moment simply pass. The fire crackles. Twigs combust and crumble, fall to dust, as he sits there locked in the stupor of observing, to his horror, the sad spectacle of himself being himself—his inescapable self. When MacDonald clears his throat. Looks up, not sad, not angry, not beaten or even particularly put out, but merely present. In the firelight, MacDonald’s eyes shine gold. And then, much to Rimbaud’s surprise, Mr. MacDonald does respond to his complaints. He does indeed.

  “You ask me what I think, sir,” he begins. “Well, I know, sir, what you think of me. And Mr. Bardey and the others, too, no doubt. Oh, I know. I made a hash of it, and that is true. I know. Believe me. I have been sacked and I made a terrible mistake coming here. All very true. But then what? Here I am. And here, sir, are you, and here it is. And so, sir, since I am powerless to change it, well, all I can do is accept it, my black mark, my failure, like a sin upon my soul. Yes, it happened. Indeed it did, and I did it. I don’t blame my wife. Stupid or not, or rash, or blind, yes, I have dug myself a hole, a very deep hole, and yes, before my wife and children I will continue, as well as I can, to make my amends. Amends, sir. It’s all I can do, just as you, sir, all you can do now is go home, home to France, and hope. Hope, sir. Hope for the best.”

  The fire burns. The children lie dead asleep and the wife says nothing, as Rimbaud sits there, seized up. Crushed as if by a boa constrictor in this straitjacket of gold. But it is not yet over. Mr. MacDonald has not said his full piece, and it comes with detectable heat.

  “But, Mr. Rimbaud,” he says, “if you really ask me, well, if you could accept such from me—if your pride was not to get the better of you, well, at this time, I think that I would pray with you, sir. Not because I’m proud or better than you—obviously not. But rather, sir, to help you at a very, very hard time in which you saw fit to help us, stranded as we were without funds or employ in a foreign country. So we pray. But praying, well, I know that won’t sit with you. Not now. Not yet. Someday, perhaps. I certainly hope so. But since it won’t work now, well, all I can do is to beg your pardon most kindly and sleep. Sleep, sir. Sleep and hope tomorrow is a better day.”

  Hot shame. At this Rimbaud’s face feels burning hot. Words rise but fail to emerge, and his tongue is fat and twisted, blocking his throat. Not that, inside, he doesn’t rail and struggle against the jaws that now have him by the leg. Shaken, he tells himself that with MacDonald it is all evasion and nonsense and dereliction; that this man is guilty of—well, really, desertion under fire, as it were, cowardice under a different name. Shaken and now trapped, trapped in his own life, Rimbaud tells himself many, many things. He tells himself that they, the MacDonalds, not knowing the country or its customs, that people such as they would never in a lifetime, ever, understand. The terms. The conditions. The way in one instant it could all turn on you. Blow up. Go to hell. How everything could seem just fine—until suddenly it was not.

  He tells himself that he only has to hold on, to go on, to get home to France, home to his family, where life will be better, or at least not here, or not like this. And yet the more Rimbaud tries to dismiss it and explain and delay it, the more it flies back on him, hot as whiplashes, blinding waves of shame. Shame at his cruelty. Shame at his abuse. Shame at attacking MacDonald, a man unafraid who merely refused to fight. Shame at the sham of his life. Shame at that last searing glimpse of Tigist. Shame—blind shame—that he dismissed Djami, probably the one person he ever really loved in this rotten place, Djami, his son!

  “I”—in humiliation, then in almost vomiting relief, he says it finally—“I need—”

  “I know,” she says quietly. “Mr. MacDonald, will you kindly assist Mr. Rimbaud as he endeavors to demonstrate he has a bladder, if not a heart?”

  26 Toward a Heretic Poetics

  Stink, stank, stuck. The kid was stuck. Stuck at home, stuck in Charleville—stuck. As he wrote to his friend Paul Demeny:

  Situation of the accused: for more than a year I gave up ordinary living for what you know. Closed up without respite in this unmentionable Ardennes country, seeing not a single man, engaged in an infamous, inept, obstinate, mysterious work, answering questions and coarse evil aspostrophes by silence, appearing worthy in my extralegal position, I provoked at the end frightful resolutions of a mother as inflexible as seventy-three administrations with steel helmets.

  She tried to force me to perpetual work, in Charleville (Ardennes)! Take the job on such and such a day, she said, or get out.—I refused that life, without giving my reasons: it would have been pitiful. Up until now I have been able to avoid these terms.

  And yet—however incomplete and slapdash—he was discovering raw beginnings of a heretic poetics. Of a brilliant, albeit half-baked, or at least not fully baked, philosophy. Indeed, an incomplete and magic-infused manifesto of sorts, a loud complaint that he would nail, even if it killed him, on poetry’s rugged door.

  Beginning with a warning from the Boy Jesus to poets especially—to any and all fakirs and art mongers out there. For any who wouldn’t die in the pursuit, in hell if need be, and gratefully. As he wrote in that same letter:

  Therefore, the poet is truly the thief of fire.

  He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he will have to have his inventions smelt, felt, and heard; if what he brings back from down there has form, he gives form; if it is formless, he gives formlessness. A language must be found. Moreover, every word being an idea, the time of a universal language will come!

  And more on the march toward universal progress:

  This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colors, thought holding on to thought and pulling. The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in his time in the universal soul: he would give more—than the formulation of his thought, than the annotation of his march toward Progress! Enormity becoming normal, absorbed by all, he would really be a multiplier of progress!

  And more still, on an issue that virtually no one thought about at the time—woman:

  When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man—heretofore abominable—having given her her release, she too will be a poet! Woman will find some of the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours?—She will find strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things; we will take them, we will understand them.

  He was still sixteen, after all. He was not methodical, nor could he be at that age, and in Charleville, certainly, there was no one to advise him; there was no known path and, in a way, almost no point. At the same time, however, the kid was cagey—anything but unmindful of how to get his, get yours, and get on his way. And, to be sure, in his often clueless and unerringly self-sabotaging way, he did at this point very much want to get on. But how?

  Be a worker? But doing what? Be a journalist? But how then would he write, really write? Write poems for the now aroused workers? Workers arise! But, being workers, would they, could they, understand?

  Pack of bitches in heat, eating poultices,

  The cry from the house of gold calls you. Steal!

  Eat! See the night of joy with its deep spasms

  Coming down the street. O sad drinkers,

  Drink!…

  And what about the sundry compromises and disguises required by such pathetic forms of bourgeois subterfuge. Wear a suit? Wash face? Get up early? On this question at last he wrote his young and equally clueless friend, Paul Demeny, this in the hope that Demeny might find him some semiagreeable form of employment. But please, he added, not too taxing. Another worthy theory: workless work.

  It all went nowhere, of course. But then in the midst of his luckless isolation and scheming and pipe dreaming, the kid meets in the tavern a ponderous local personality named Charles Auguste Bretagne. A sort of taproom ruminant.

  Bretagne, a big brain in a guppy bowl. Bretagne, poet of sorts, sucking on his meerschaum pipe. Indeed, a barroo
m braggart and know-it-all so competitive that he would bet on which of two flies inching up a wall would be the first to reach the top. And this while he played two hands of whist, with a two-hour disquisition on Zoroastrianism thrown in.

  But give the man his due: This Bretagne is a genuine polymath, albeit without direction or degree, working by day as a clerk in a local sugar refinery. Bretagne is, in addition, two-seat fat, with swollen knees and a ragged Mephistophelian beard. See the smoke creeping up his beard—yellowy brown with nicotine—even as his rheumy eyes grope this tasty young morsel he has heard so much about.

  Ah, but the kid is no longer so green. On the contrary, our lad has done his homework and he is now on the hunt. For this Bretagne, settling in on his fat elbows and quoting the great quoters, he is, the boy has been told, “un type louche,” then a witty code term, known only to the cognoscenti, for homosexual. In short, a mark. Throw some darts, the kid figured, have a few pints, and let him pay. Then bum a few francs off him, never to be repaid, and give the old bird a thrill out back by the outhouse. Grim work to be sure, to stand tall and hard, hearing the grim whop, whop, whop as the old buzzard—even as he sucks away—desperately tries to inflate (through accordionlike rolls of fat) his pitifully small tool.

  Anyhow, the point is, this Bretagne, gurgling away on his pipe—well, he knows certain people and some poets in particular. In fact, he says he knows a certain poet in Paris. One Paul Verlaine. Who, ho ho, is too much a poet, if you catch my drift—and drifting hand.

  And so with a semigroveling, brilliantly calculating, and deftly suggestive letter—and enclosing some beautifully copied-out and this time actually good poems—some weeks later Rimbaud receives and, with trembling hands, reads Verlaine’s gushing reply: “You are a discovery.… You must come forthwith to Paris … to stay as my guest … as our guest, in my home with my charming wife … please, that I might toast and introduce you to all of literary Paris.”