Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  “No!” she said, furious at this blasphemy. “Never! I forgive you! Of course, I forgive you, and now you must stop this ridiculous, this horrid talk. Stop it!”

  Completion.

  Still on his knees by her chair, her torturer was blubbering in her warm lap as she rubbed his hair, a woman now in ecstasy, as soul-bruised as she was heart-fulfilled. Grief and guilt, mother and son, rocking in that after-assault, almost postcoital, sense of completion. When—

  “Mother, please,” he said, lifting his head, as a seasick man might from the pitching rail of a ship. “Mother, you’re so convincing. Oh, how can I dare ask this of you …”

  “What?” she said, now very excited. “What is it you need from your maman, what? Tell me.”

  “Could you—would you please speak on my behalf to my boss, Monsieur Michaud? Oh, would you, Mother? I need my job.”

  Talk to his boss! True, around her throat Mme. Verlaine was wearing a necklace of fingerprints, but this was now far in the past—her boy needed her. And, whatever else, it was a brilliant stroke on Verlaine’s part, for once away from her little brood, Mme. Verlaine was a badger, cunning and relentless. Especially when it concerned her son’s fortunes.

  Nor would it be a single, forlorn appeal—no, no, this would be a full-fledged campaign. The next day, as a knight might pull on a mailed fist, Mme. Verlaine pulled on her long blue opera gloves; she donned her furs and her fur muffler, topped off by her opera hat with the alarming V of pheasant quills that made the object of her opprobrium feel like a bull’s-eye in a gun sight. Then, for added power, she took up her black lorgnette, two beetling lenses on a conductor’s baton, ideal either to wave around theatrically or train on the popinjay who had aroused her displeasure.

  All this would have been enough, but she then ordered a special horse cab, a white bath of leather ideal for the Sunday tour of the Tuileries. She sent one of the girls to fetch—for cheap from the local funeral parlor—an obscene amount of flowers, the bigger and gaudier the better. And, for further theater and moral support, she took with her two of her staff, her truculent maid and, even more formidably, the cook, a stout, red-faced woman with arms like rolling pins always ready to make a scene.

  In great alarm, she burst through the door of her boy’s late employer.

  “Monsieur! Monsieur Michaud! I feel so awful. I see my son has tried your patience! I was so furious when I heard, believe me. And a man of your importance.”

  Poor man. M. Michaud had scarcely risen from his somber desk than Mme. Verlaine had stuffed into his compact arms a bouquet the size of a small child. It was all a tragic mistake, she said. Paul was unwell, sleepless, racked—tracassé of late, she agreed. “But, mon cher Monsieur,” she said, as the tears started flowing, “he did not tell you, he could not, that … that he was particularly upset that day over the death of his treasured aunt Héloïse.”

  When this excuse failed, the maternal thespian then invoked art and the glory of France! The shame, the public odium, when it was found that the law practice of M. Michaud had wrongly dismissed the future of French literature. But when this, too, fell on deaf ears, the badgeress had no choice. Summarily, she collapsed and her two shrill accomplices swarmed in, even as M. Michaud’s clients watched aghast.

  Ah, but when Mme. Verlaine awoke, note the pathos, the charm, not to mention her need for a solicitor to manage her not inconsiderable affairs—above all, her woozily obdurate refusal to leave. Until, incredibly enough, M. Michaud had agreed to come to dinner—a lavish dinner for twelve, she promised. Next Thursday at eight. There, she promised, he would meet the true Paul Verlaine, the devoted son, the husband and father soon to be. And the man now resolved, she assured him, to reform his life.

  A man of his word, M. Michaud did indeed come to dinner the following Thursday—naturally, in evening attire, accompanied by his stoutly regal wife in long bustled gown and furs. All was as Mme. Verlaine had promised. They were twelve—fifteen, counting the Wee Ones hidden under the black coverlets of crepe and organdy. (Eccentric, yes, the Madame, but not mad.)

  Here, the honored guest and his wife met Mme. Verlaine’s treasured daughter-in-law, Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville, pregnant, lovely—so sympathetic, poor girl. As for Paul, he was overdue, said Mathilde. Alas, he was sequestered with his publisher, going over the proofs of a new book of verse—utter rubbish, of course, but for the first hour it worked. Finally, Madame tinkled an absurdly tiny bell—this always brought a smile after the apéritif.

  The table, the candles, all was glittering, and for the escargot she had the most exquisite silver clasps, said M. Michaud, amazing contrivances with steel springs to hold them, and so nicely, as, with a tiny two-prong fork, he teased them out. And the aroma of these escargots, these tidy hermaphrodites of the garden, the first of spring, with mahogany shells in which the former inhabitants, now black nubs, swam in a pungent stew of clarified butter and finely minced garlic! Dusted with fines herbes—sublime!

  When wham.

  The door battered back and in stumbled M. Michaud’s late employee, looking himself, in his witless inebriation, not unlike an escargot.

  “But, Monsieur Michaud!” cried Mme. Verlaine as he bundled his plump wife, bustle bouncing, down the coiling stairs. “Madame, I appeal to you! You are a mother—please! My Paul is just terribly upset! He lost his job, after all …”

  Truly, Mme. Verlaine had a remarkable ability to dismiss, discount, and expunge from her memory virtually anything her son did. And since, like most men, he had married his mother, Mathilde was almost equally indulgent of him, especially in those comparatively calm months before the arrival of this storied rube from the provinces.

  Thus, for Mathilde it was not so much her husband’s rampant hedonism and laziness and lack of employment that concerned her. It was, rather, the world’s failure to understand the trials, the tempests of a man so “singular,” so “sensitive,” so “artistic.”

  No matter that her husband produced no income. She had a plan, Mathilde Marie Mauté de Fleurville. They would give up their wonderfully situated and appointed apartment. She had some money, and with two spacious floors in their house, her parents certainly had the room. And the point, she told her mother, was not that Paul had lost his job. The point was that, for the honor of the family and to secure his place in literature, Paul effectively had no choice, condemned as he was by genius. He had to do as duty dictated—to write.

  “And, Mother, you must realize,” she let slip, “since we have been married, poor Paul, formerly so industrious, he has written not one poem. Not one.”

  Well, for Mme. Mauté, whose job, after all, was to be unindustrious, she was apoplectic.

  “What, then, is he doing? Good heavens, what is a sonnet—some piffle of fourteen lines? And for how many months has he been at it, idling and drinking, and all to write nothing? Can this even be possible?”

  “Calm down, Mother. He will emerge from this trough. He now has a wife to help him.”

  “Look at you—you, too, coddling him,” she said, drawing down her chin to form the neck pouch that each night before sleep she tied in a bow, such that she looked like a rabbit. “You are worse than his mother. Revolting, giving in to his every childish whim!”

  “He is my husband, Mother. I care for him.”

  “Coddle him.”

  And so, on the eve of Rimbaud’s arrival, we return to Verlaine charging down the stairs after Mme. Mauté’s grievous and unfair insult about a man who had, as it were, taken a priestly vow of unemployability in the service of a higher calling. And so once downstairs, he ignored the maid. Grabbed his tatty old deerstalker cap and, with it, another rough-trade familiar—his Malaccan sword cane.

  “Paul, my sweet,” cried Mathilde, cradling her pendulous belly, counterbalanced by her bustle. “Come back, calm down. Mother will apologize.”

  The door thundered.

  God damn them all, he thought. Qu’ils aillent tous se faire foutre, these Mautés and their fat n
eighbors living in their fat, soft houses on their fat featherbeds of money. And all this female babbling about le bébé, le bébé, le bébé. Mathilde was now so focused on the baby, and now so rotund and fearful of hurting the child, that she would not perform for him her energetic wifely duties. “Non, Paul, je ne peux pas … Je crains pour l’enfant.”

  Anger, it was an erection of sorts, but to achieve its full majestic girth it had to be carefully stoked and stroked. And so at the café Verlaine calls for the one lady to whom he is always faithful, his Muse, Dame Absinthe, burning the throat like the devil’s honey. Fresh as a first kiss she is, two pillowy green lips exhaling that delicious fragrance of wormwood and anisette!

  But my, how the Green Fairy bites. Hallucinogenic and hypnagogic, triggering rage, she causes the jaws to seize, the eyes to water, and the mind to sweat—to see in sounds and hear in colors. Mauve skies. Swirls and swipes of color, a sensorium such that the poet can feel his famished eyes swelling in size, like two embryos.

  Truly, in the pantheon of alcohol, Dame Absinthe, soon to be outlawed, is no mere drink—no, she is a ritual. There is the glass of pale green absinthe, a glass bulbous at the bottom and fluted at the top, like the throat of a flower. There is the ornately perforated spoon holding, over the glass, a lump of sugar. And finally a silver cruet of water—icy cold water—to slowly dribble it through the accepting sugar. Sugar, this was the accelerant of this divine fire, from which the brain, with its sodden white matter, was the organ of holy transubstantiation!

  For see him now, almost level with the table, Lavoisier in his laboratory. Absinthe, the aperitif one sips alone, carefully nursing one’s rage. Before his eyes, the sugar water blooms. Turns pale yellow when it enters the Green Fairy, suggesting, to his somnambulant eyes, fresh spunk, a homunculus, or perhaps a worm. Meee-oowww. Forecast of the prowl to come!

  And two hours later—presto! Maleficent are his eyes. Fresh from the third dive of the evening, Verlaine swings wide down the balustrade, holding forth, like a bowsprit, the elegant sword cane. Nasty piece of work! Observe, first, the natty brass head, a studded, lead-filled bijou heavy as a hammer. But then, with a twist—tszing! The pièce de résistance. A gleaming rapier of spring steel.

  En garde, tarts and tartlettes! Hawk-faced whores! Old trollops with scalloped arseholes, pouty purses, and baggy ankles. Hah! Thighs bowed wide like overstuffed chairs, eager to receive his saluting wood. Aaah! La chasse aux fesses—let the cunt hunt begin!

  30 Not So Distant Glimmerings

  In the desert the next day Rimbaud’s English guests, the MacDonalds, caught one last, unfortunate glimpse of their now seriously fraying host.

  For there on the red desert, shimmering in the distance, the party saw what looked to be white pieces of wood—wood, or birds, perhaps—white with black bits, likely residues of volcanic charring. But white? Rimbaud sat up.

  “Down,” Rimbaud told the porters suddenly. “Put me down.”

  Heat slithered, viscous and shimmering, as he squinted into the blazing white distance, looking first one way, then the other, confused. Now his heart was beating. Disoriented, Rimbaud took out his brass telescope. Extended it with a clap, only to see larger, more confusing white blobs, smeary in the ascending heat.

  Sprawled on his gurney, he unfolded his map, now dog-eared, like ancient scripture. He laid it out in the sand. Here much of the land lay unexplored, and what had been charted had, for obvious reasons, been drawn hastily—hazy recollection, rumor, dream. Damnit. Damnit. He took out his brass compass. Laid it across the map, oriented it. Then with something between fear and stupefaction, he gazed at the steel blue needle trembling irritably, like a fly, as it spun and dithered.

  It’s not you, it’s the dratted map.

  Settle down. Keep going.

  So he changed his mind. With some relief, he concluded, rather, that he was wrong about being wrong. He waved the column on. But then, within a short distance, once again, he was bothered by these white blobs. What is bright white in the desert? It made him squint until his eyes watered. Made no sense.

  But thirty minutes later, just as a mirage will sizzle and vanish, suddenly the column was ambushed. Surrounded, in fact. For there on the ground lay the answer to what is white in the desert. It was a long, sun-bleached bone, too long to be an animal bone. Dragged and animal-scoured, it was a human femur lying in what, to his horror, now revealed itself as a field of bones. Indeed, the very bones that he had so assiduously sought to avoid—the remains of Ambos.

  Ambos, pillar of fire. Three years before, with almost Old Testament fury, it had been obliterated by the king Menelik in his continuing campaign to conquer and subjugate the country—to rid it of its barbarism, ignorance, and defiance of him. In the land of the skinny, the fat man is king, and the long-bearded Menelik was a bullying whale of a man, cunning and relentless and not to be resisted. When the local potentates balked, Menelik did not interminably negotiate in the old ways. Abyssinia would be made modern, he promised them. He, the great Menelik, would found cities and lay railroads, he assured them, even if he had to run the rails over their bones.

  Before them, scattered like a shipwreck, lay the scorched remains of their insubordination. White bones crushed in the hyena’s bulging jaws. Skulls broken like crockery and others that lay whole, like great prehistoric eggs. And rags, some in kelplike heaps and some snared on cactus thorns and stunted trees, tatters faintly chittering in the breeze, like agitated fingers.

  Erroww, the camels groaned in fear, their teeth the size of piano keys.

  And so many. Only God knew how many. Too many, washed up in the storm. Before it, the scale of it, the tongue went dry. The eye gorged and the mind went dim—said it couldn’t be, these rib cages still attached with leathery dark strips of skin and cartilage. This was a herd of animals, not people.

  Listen, the breeze told the taller wind, evil is not a fairy tale. Evil lives. It is vast in scale. It swarms and spreads like hysteria. Explodes, then vanishes, ownerless as a shout, empty as the sky. But before it, to see it with one’s own eyes, one is hypnotized. Only there is no hypnotist to break the spell, nothing to make it go away, not ever.

  Gnats danced in globes, like invisible flowers.

  Dazed, he heard a bone crunch, almost grumbling, under a foot not his, obviously.

  Fortunately, the children were frozen. If you don’t notice nobody else will.

  And look. Just then a very interesting bird landed on a tree—yellow with a droopy blue head feather, like a comma.

  Then he said, someone said, quite as if nothing had passed or could be seen, “We’ll cross down there.”

  And it was not true.

  In fact, as Rimbaud stirred from his shock, his mind, in a state of semidream, his then blank mind, revolted at the assertion of what was being averred by these bones spread out over half a kilometer. What so plainly was, was not so—was not and could not be. This was not life, and this life was not his life. Like a dog kicking grass, disowning what he had just now left, Rimbaud’s thinking was now quite magical. This happened to them, not me. I’m alive.

  Suddenly he felt so very tired. Emptied, in fact.

  Then, with curious relief, he remembered, It’s Sunday.

  And look. There in the distance, like tomorrow, were the immense clouds. Wondrous, steamy white clouds—sea clouds.

  The coast, the sea!

  He wondered, with an odd kind of thrill, if they would hit the coast late tomorrow or the next day, and if he was lucky he would find a waiting ship, praise God, a ship on the blue-blue sea.

  A bead of sweat rolled down his nose, briefly clung to his septum, then slid down to his upper lip. He licked it, salty as a tear, then stood there blinking, his eyes like dials. When, on the ground, all around him, he saw glinting yellowy flecks—gold.

  Not gold—brass.

  Brass shell casings.

  Fat .45-70 cartridges sold in casks heavy as hogsheads. Not his. Perhaps not. Mercifully, he had his comp
etitors—competitor. Well, one, although he had heard rumors of two more in the trade.

  “This way,” he heard himself, his other, his better self say. “Here’s the way,” he said, as if what they now saw was the result of lightning, famine, unstoppable forces. Some act of God. “There’s the gap,” he said as if he were Moses. “There we will cross.”

  Mr. MacDonald was stumbling, murmuring prayers, herding and shielding the children as best he could. Tied in her hat and veil, with her peeling red nose, Mrs. MacDonald, however, was now fully, horrifyingly awake as she fixed him in her gaze.

  “Ah, Mr. Rimbaud,” she said overpleasantly. “You are too modest. Are you not the author of this lovely poem that we now see stretched out before us?”

  He reddened. Grasped the poles of his gurney. Go. Go.

  “What?” mocked Mrs. MacDonald, trembling with rage. “You cannot share with us several odious lines? Oh, but we should so love to hear them, Mr. Rimbaud. Please, poet, a poem! A pretty poem to pass the time.”

  31 Lucky Bug

  What eye can see itself? What eye wants to see itself?

  He, Rimbaud, did not direct the guns. He did not aim them, did he?

  He was a businessman. The country was ill-organized and chaotic, as Menelik himself was, now in a preposterous military uniform, now in a suit, now in tribal dress. Or, often as not, some mélange thereof—molting into eventual civilization, as it were. To be sure, the Europeans were very expert liars, but none so expert as Menelik. In return for money and assurances, Menelik gave the Europeans bluff assurances that he would stamp out slavery—of course, reverse the rivers, too. Yes, even as they grabbed Africa and pulled her wealth around their necks like some rich fur, Europe’s anxious publics needed reassurance that their investment would return white and pure.

  No slavery!

  Done!

  Nor would the savages be armed!

  Done!

  The railroad, the telegraph, proper hygiene—progress was coming.