by Bruce Duffy
Done!
Why, as a down payment on this new state of affairs, the railroad interests had given Menelik a model miniature railroad, with a baby-elephant-sized steam locomotive that puffed real steam. Upon this the king would ride round and round the palace, his caftan flying and his knees hiked to his chin. The king loved a good show. White-liveried flunkies stood at attention holding silver salvers containing sweating glasses of tea and lemonade; they put out stogies and spittoons and even crisply ironed napkins on which to wipe one’s lips. Good show! Standing in the equatorial sun with their creamy suits and Panama hats, waiting for an audience, his European handlers, so called—the various envoys and vendors, engineers, representatives of the mineral interests—would clap as he rode around and around and around. But, good heavens, as thirty minutes became one hour—as once more the recreating potentate rounded the bend—some fell out, while the rest stood cursing and grimacing.
Toot, toot!
Frangi! Menelik loved to see them all sweaty and standing at attention, like hungry dogs, he said. Ha! Let the frangi fools stand in the sun—Rimbaud, too. For the old fox, it was a game, a negotiating tactic, like his threats and arbitrary taxes or even turning them all out—having waited the afternoon—because His Excellency was suddenly “tired.” Wear them down. Change the rules. Pretend not to understand. Or erupt into one of his very favorite English words, e-vent-u-ally.
Peace, eventually. Everything, eventually. Sewers. Schools. Water in pipes. Feet in shoes. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
“There, there, my boy,” Bardey would say to Rimbaud when he returned in fury from one of these ritual hazings. Or when Rimbaud would rage in general about the laziness and mendacity of the populace—the utter indifference to progress, the casual lying, the all but undisguised thievery! The genial Bardey would intone, “Mr. Rimbaud, may I remind you that before crumpets and concertos someone first needs to drain the swamps. And here you are, lad, in your gum boots! Why, right at the elbow of History.”
“Arsehole, more like it.”
“Well, then, I am off to my office,” punned Bardey, ever brightly. “Leaving you, dear boy, to your orifice.”
After Ambos, later that same day, they saw something resembling a military patrol, then a small outpost with a flag—the first signs of civilization since leaving Harar now ten days ago.
Tomorrow, or the next day, or certainly the next, they would reach the sea. For Rimbaud, however, relief turned to anxiety, and not merely about France, his family, or impending medical unpleasantries. Without Djami, he was panicked at the idea of separating from the MacDonalds, and not merely Mrs. MacDonald. It was the idea that they should leave him before he left them. Yet another dream, for whatever else, Rimbaud’s leaving days were now over.
So it was after they left the killing grounds of Ambos. A lizard could at least break off his tail—scuttle off, even half his length, to persist another day under a rock. Now even the crutch was useless. He was an inanimate object, a thing. When he called a rest halt, immediately the bearers set him down—down as if he were a crate—then left him like bad luck.
Left. Lying back, the shotgun straddling his lap, as if from the hereafter Rimbaud watched the MacDonalds. He watched in particular Mr. MacDonald caring for the children. How ably he followed their moods, distracted them, contained their fits, the girl especially, who, quite understandably, was in a bad way. Crying jags. Screaming fits. Yesterday, sleep-deprived, ant-bitten and sunburned, with itchy hair, the girl had screamed at her supine host, actually screamed at the top of her lungs, as if she were the sun, “I hate you.” Then, in case he missed the point, she narrowed her swollen eyes and said, “You!”
Shocking. He dodged her eyes—a child. He filtered sand through his fingers, trying not to think, then found himself watching Mr. MacDonald playing “marbles” with small stones in the dirt. Anything. Sticks. Or the grass he had twisted, several days ago, into a crude doll for the girl. Her name began with H, didn’t it?
What if I’d had a son?
You’d have made a hash of it.
I could learn. I didn’t do badly with Djami.
Asshole. You left Djami.
To protect him.
Left him.
I was a fool!
Yes, you are a fool, a bloody fool.
But look at MacDonald, thought Rimbaud, destitute in a foreign country, no money, no prospects—truly a fool for his family, a donkey. Yet when Mr. MacDonald arose, Rimbaud was still under this dizzying spell. When suddenly the girl—whose name, even the first letter, for the life of him he could not recall—H? Or was it P?—caught him looking.
“Stinking, horrid pig! Stop staring!”
“Don’t hate me,” he said. Pled. She looked away, sucking on her braid—exactly as his sister Isabelle did at that age.
“Miss,” he struggled, still blank on her name, “Miss, I did all I can do.” He wished he had a doll or something to give her, or even some plausible endearment. “One day you’ll understand.”
“No, I will not understand, you beast! Ever! Now don’t talk to me.”
Slapped, violently slapped by a girl. It felt like the fever sweats, violent, clenching chills like a beating, as he thought, Her name. If only I knew her name.
Still, he thought he might have a chance with the boy. For after all, he had been one, once—a boy. Ralph. Excellent, Rimbaud—you even remembered the lad’s name. And sitting in the sand, that very afternoon after Ambos, he found a bug, indeed, a very interesting and even unusual and quite curious bug.
“Ralph.” Smiling as best he could, he held out his closed hand. “Here, I’ve something for you.”
“What, a bug?” The boy scowled.
Rimbaud held it up, slowly gyrating. He smiled. Its legs were like black wires, almost mechanical. “It’s a stick bug.” Rimbaud waited. “A walking stick.”
“So?”
“Well, they’re considered lucky here, I think.” He waited. “Lucky.”
“Oh.” A caustic pause. “A lucky bug.”
“Ralph,” he said, as if, with the name, he held the magic key. “It’s for you.”
“Oh, no, no, no. You keep it.” The boy spun around. “You’re the one needing luck.”
32 Ill-Timed Visit
The next morning Verlaine, needless to say, was not home in his soft bed at 14 rue Nicolet. Nor, fortunately for him, was his father-in-law, M. Mauté de Fleurville. God no. To escape the waiting and female drama, the patriarch had fled to the country for a few days of hunting. It was shortly after nine—far too early for callers—that a dirty hand lifted the massive brass knocker and gave four resounding knocks, then a fifth. Then, injurious to the peace, even a sixth.
Naturally, one of the maids answered, then with swishing maid’s steps hurried into the parlor where the women maintained their vigil for the absent Paul, the furious Mme. Mauté in her high-backed chair and, opposite her, on the lyrelike fainting couch, the dazed and puffy-eyed Mathilde, rubbing her enormous belly.
Mme. Mauté made a face when the maid informed her who was at the door. Or claimed to be, rather.
“Impossible. Did he not give you his card?”
“No, Madame, nothing.”
Hauling up her overabundance of petticoats, then the swanlike bustle (a sure sign of the trollop, believed Mme. Rimbaud), Mme. Mauté then did the unprecedented and answered her own door—stunned. It was as the maid had said.
For here, claiming to be Arthur Rimbaud, was not the grown man they expected but rather a blond, blue-eyed schoolboy—un potache—wearing a bowler hat, an ill-fitting jacket, two twisted strips suggestive of a tie, and ankle-high trousers. And the socks! Rude blue socks, bright blue, such as a rube might knit. Fat red hands. Big feet. Even more objectionable to Madame’s haute-Parisian ears was the boy’s hopelessly Ardennais accent. No bow. Not even a tip of the hat.
“I assure you,” insisted the boy, for the second time, “I am Arthur Rimbaud.”
“Ah,” she sco
ffed, “you play a trick on me, boy. Perhaps you are Monsieur Rimbaud’s nephew.” Mme. Mauté peered around the doorway, looking for Paul’s feet under the bushes. Some drunk’s idea of a joke.
“Paul, enough!” she cried. “No more tricks. Produce the real Rimbaud.”
“I am the real Rimbaud.”
Whereupon, as evidence, the boy withdrew from his back pocket a sweaty wad of paper. Slapped it to life, then unfolded it, damp and smeary. “There, do you see? My newest poem. Brand-new. ‘The Drunken Boat.’ ”
“What kind of title is that?” she challenged. “Drunken boats! Boats do not get drunk—how old are you?”
He didn’t just blush. His face bloomed in splotchy, adolescent dials of rose. In these hormonal days he embarrassed easily, particularly in the presence of women, and especially with this one of aristocratic bearing.
“Seventeen,” he lied.
“Seventeen! I think fifteen, perhaps. And where is your luggage, young man? Did it fall off the hay wagon?”
“As you see,” he said, with a crimson shrug, “I am wearing it.”
“Look at this,” she said, bustle swaying like the tail of a honeybee, “no clothes, drunken boats—”
Turning, she called back to Mathilde, who just then had emerged. “Do you see this adult child? He insists that he is the great Rimbaud.” She hitched her hips, and to his mortification, he cringed—cringed just as he did when, in her palm, his mother held a slap with which to paint his impudent face. But clearly, this was not his mother, nor his class, nor anything even remotely within his experience.
“Very well, then, Monsieur Rimbaud, who arrives in Paris sans valise. Please,” she said, motioning him inside. “I am most sorry that I mistook you. Now do please follow me into the salon.”
Torture. There he was, sitting upon—or rather, sinking into—a pouf-pillow chair of goose feathers and tufted satin. Worse, he faced not just the mute terror of women but two perfumed, splendidly dressed, haute bourgeois women of a class about which he had heard and railed but which he had never encountered in the flesh, let alone in their priggish, pretentious environs. Who, worse still, were not scolding him but merely making conversation. Worse, it was Parisian female conversation, as formally elaborate as it was, at this point in their brief acquaintance, quite deliberately inconsequential.
As for the house, this sturdy manse, never had he seen so many things, indeed so very many things that these things, breeding like rabbits, seemed to spawn yet more things. Tables with clawed feet. Armchairs dripping tassels. Gloomy paintings. Gold-encrusted clocks. Porcelain figurines. And mechanical maids who, like the figures on a cuckoo clock, appeared every time the old sorceress pulled a velvet rope. Yes, Madame, no, Madame. Swish, swish, swish.
Worse, behind the piano, M. Mauté had a trophy wall packed with horned heads, tiny stuffed heads, probably one dozen in number, with twiglike horns. What on earth were these poor things he’d shot and had stuffed? thought the boy. Dwarf deer? Runt mountain antelopes? Animal poets—murdered. Duly noted, thought the kid. Another bourgeois outrage that would not go unpunished.
“One lump or two, Monsieur Rimbaud?”
“What?” This was his default answer to any question. He stared at her—at the air—at the wall just to her left.
“Lumps,” she prompted. “Sugar.”
“Four.” He’d never seen such a thing—lumps. Of sugar?
“Four? Are you a bee, Monsieur?”
He looked down. “Four, yes.”
Plunk. Plunk. Plunk. Then, with the clawed tongs, she plucked up a fourth. Eyed him dubiously. Then, decorously, let it fall—ploop.
What, he thought, was she trying to embarrass him? Put him in his place? Ominously, the cup rattled. Tea slopped in the saucer and his face flushed crimson, and not merely owing to his natural clumsiness at this age. For here, talking to him, and not merely lecturing or yelling but conversing—socially conversing—here were actual women, one a young, pregnant, and therefore sexual woman and, worse, a pretty woman, scarcely older than he.
Women, girls, all that—how did this fit in with his program of derangement, systematic derangement, in his quest to be both seer and thug, voyant et voyou—the thief of fire? Anyhow, what girl was going to sign on for this? More to the point, how, in the midst of revolutionizing mankind, well, who had time to think about that? Intercourse. Menstruation. Sticky wet darkness smothering you.
Now, true, in the kid’s manifesto about the voyant, he had prophesized about the eventual ascendancy of woman—that is, once her sad servitude had been broken, waiting on men, rearing kids, milking cows. But what did he—what could he—have known of actual flesh-and-blood women?
Little, obviously. The former prize boy over whom Charleville’s mothers had once fawned was now a public disgrace effectively quarantined from the opposite sex. Then again, who were his models, his authorities? His two sisters, told to shun him? His mother? The odd, claret-gilled bachelors who had versed him at the collège?
“But where do you get your ideas?” inquired Mathilde, trying to draw him out.
He sighed. Rolled his eyes, hung his head. He wasn’t saying Madame, not even to the old one, let alone to her, another kid, pregnant, he thought, with her sloshing bosoms leaking milk.
“Ideas?” she said again, a poet’s girl, he thought. But that black spider between her legs—uch.
“Ideas?” He scowled. “I have no ideas.”
“No ideas?” she replied, giving him, she thought, a lovely opening to expound upon his ruminative process, his dreams. “What then do you have, Monsieur Rimbaud?”
“Kittens.”
“Kittens?” she asked, at first thinking (owing to his unfortunate accent) that she had somehow misheard him. When, spastic—unable to stand it—he bolted up. Knocked over his cup, eggshell thin, then watched in a kind of willed dream as it shattered like an orgasm on the floor.
“Mon Dieu!” exclaimed Mme. Mauté. She looked at him in horror. “That was my mother’s finest porcelain.”
See him now, hunkered and picked on—wrongly accused, when it was the porcelain’s fault. Or really, Mme. Mauté’s fault for giving him porcelain in the first place.
“Mother,” said the resourceful Mathilde quietly, as the maids converged. “Mother, I think it is time to show Monsieur Rimbaud to his room.”
33 Torn
Surprise! Returning from his troll through Paris’s nocturnal rookeries, then a failed rendezvous with the kid at the Gare de l’Est, Verlaine was shocked—nay, stupefied—to be presented with this otherworldly child. This delicious fawn.
“Cher maître,” said the boy, brightening, for he could kiss ass, and masterfully when it suited him. “I am so very honored to meet you.”
Master, ker-humphed Mme. Mauté, still smarting over the broken teacup. And this from a brat who, for his hostess, couldn’t summon a single “Madame” or “thank you.”
“Why, Paul,” she said to her son-in-law, now lizard-eyed and foul-smelling from his evening’s stumble, “what will you discover next? An eight-year-old Victor Hugo?”
“Mother,” he replied, “do you think that great wine comes only in old bottles?”
“Bottles,” she said with a low glance at her daughter. “How very apt.”
“Dear,” he said to his wife, ignoring this slur, “how are you feeling?”
Abruptly, she turned, clearly near tears. Uxorious, he followed, as much for her benefit as for the boy’s—that this strange boy should see his gallantry and protectiveness of the female flock, his male command.
“Monsieur Rimbaud, please,” said the elder poet as he withdrew to see to his pregnant spouse, “do make yourself at home. I’ll show you a bit of Paris shortly. Please, I’ll only be a few minutes.”
So began Verlaine’s struggles. Torn between two teenagers. Two antipodes.
He followed his wife into the room. Precariously, he laid her down, leaning too close, when he remembered, perfume. Any trace of trollop. And so, le
st she sniff him out, preemptively he burst into tears. Another talent of our poet’s—the ability to cry at will, much as a skunk, with a flip of the tail, cloaks its escape in malodorous fog.
“I was so horrid,” he wept. “I know that—I know. But your mother …”
Keep talking.
No matter how groundless, hopeless, or off point, Verlaine always relied on this stratagem with women. And, it must be said, with often baffling success.
Mathilde knew, of course, about the Green Fairy and her ilk. But being of tender years and so recently wed, she could not have conceived the stamina and cunning—the sheer stupefying imagination—of a depravity so insatiable, so enterprising and gargantuan.
Now, granted, a mistress or favorite whore—bien entendu, most men of his class kept one or two, perhaps. But a bestiary? And in Verlaine’s case, of course, the possibilities were doubled, if not trebled. Both sexes. All ages. All classes—the more louche the better, actually. Paris, then, was his amusement park and hunting ground, all the more when the poor fellow was not only bored and blocked but on short rations at home.
And here was the trouble: the omnivorous Verlaine, this sexual Achilles, for a man of his inclinations, he harbored one fatal flaw—he loved. Of course, he loved badly, inconstantly, hopelessly, ridiculously, recklessly, and violently—but loved. However rashly. However inconstantly. However disastrously—loved. And why? His mother, of course. As with any other man’s mother, Mme. Verlaine was the Rosetta stone. It was she who told the story as far as his relations with women went. And while hardly “right” in the usual sense, all was not wrong with Verlaine in his dealings with the fairer sex. Au contraire.
Owing to his many years interned with his mother, Paul Verlaine knew women infinitely better than did most, if not all, of his sex, who at the time scarcely knew them at all. Such home training had made our womanizer adaptive, sporting, and joyeux. Moreover, in a time of rampant misogyny, remarkably, he actually liked, and often preferred, the company of women, including their loud disapproval—anything so long as he held the attention of women, even if it meant crossing rapiers with, say, the formidable Mme. Mauté.
