Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  There was one witness, however. Down the hall, Rimbaud heard the ruckus and he recognized his name, and although he winced at points—and of course never dreamed the full extent of it—the cold truth was, for him, these were the sounds of home. His lullaby. Soothing in a perverse way.

  Night brawls. Shouting matches. And after the kid’s father left, there was the late-night spectacle of a woman man-dumped and God-banished, storming through the house. Find the guilty. Find that one pin out of place that wrecked everything. Explained everything. It was the sound of a screech owl. It was cats fighting. It was shame given lungs, a woman howling in the darkness, like a dog chained to an iron stake.

  On a more practical level, however, Rimbaud felt the keen satisfaction of exercising his impossibly high ideals, in this case, by rescuing a fellow poet from the lie of bourgeois domesticity: the wife and son, the stupid in-laws, and now the brat. Enough lies. It would never last. Why, just the thought of Verlaine as a father—mad. Even in the space of several weeks, Rimbaud held no illusions about Verlaine’s character.

  Besides, he thought, the brat had his stupid grandfather and a houseful of women to adore him: toys, clothes, nannies—so much it was ridiculous. So why get the kid’s hopes up, thought Rimbaud. Honestly, he thought he was doing the kid a favor.

  As for Verlaine, there was that special, spectral terror of the morning after—of knowing, for a fact, that something horrible had occurred, even as the Green Lady assured him to the contrary.

  What if the police are after me?

  Ridiculous. Were that true, you would be in jail.

  Which proves it! The child fell.

  Fell. But she picked him up and he’s fine—fine.

  Fell, there’s the story.

  And that’s all you need to say.

  Picture him, wrapped in a blanket in the back of a laundry while some fellow cleaned that pelt he called a suit and a bootblack scraped the ordure off his boots. He drank two pitchers of water. He wolfed down four eggs, runny eggs, with ham and black coffee. Then it was off to the Turkish bath. There for an hour, he boiled himself, then doused himself in rosewater. And so at 3:00 p.m.—sharp—there he was, the paterfamilias, bathed and brushed, blue-eyed and trembling sober. Wobbly-kneed, he stood before the great oaken door of 14 rue Nicolet—Judgment Day.

  He knocked, that was the giveaway. Silently, the maids let him in, coldly, then disappeared. Even Mme. Mauté had been warned away, her daughter having assured her—without specifics—that her tolerance was at an end. And so it began, when Mathilde recoiled from her husband’s teary, ill-advised embrace.

  “Do not dare touch me.”

  “But, please, I know I—”

  “Just sit! Sit, animal. Sit with yourself. Sit with the truth and do not speak.”

  And what could he say when, pulling down her collar, Mathilde showed him the necklace of fingerprints around her throat? How to respond when she not only told him but showed him how he had nearly killed his son? Who? he almost wanted to ask with husbandly indignation, now confronted by his own hideous double, this spawn with whom he swam through chill green seas of alcohol. And, all too predictably, of course Verlaine broke down, falling to his knees, pounding the floor—the usual histrionics.

  “If I had any courage, any decency, any … I simply would kill myself. Kill myself.”

  “Oh, stop it. Up! Follow me.”

  Panic—her parents?

  “No,” she replied, happy to see him sweat, “the nursery.”

  “But he’s napping.”

  “Come, coward. You will now apologize to your son.”

  Feel something, he thought, for there, on his back, stupendously alive and just waking up, was his child, his own child. Tiny balled fingers. Hair wet with sweat. Ruddy red eyelids. What do I feel? What?

  “Paul,” she snapped. “Pick him up.”

  Parisian fathers did not, as a rule, pick up their issue at this unsavory age—non. The child well might have been a kicking hare with long, sharp claws. Verlaine fumbled. Drew in his neck, lifted him unsteadily, then, in terror, looked at his wife for further instruction.

  “Now,” she said, “look at your son and hear me. I know too well you will beat me again—I know this. But if you ever again touch this child, and if my father does not first shoot you, then I swear to you, Paul Verlaine, I shall leave you. Before God I swear it. Even if I am excommunicated, I will divorce you. And after what I tell the courts, never again will you see us. Ever. Do you understand?”

  “I know, I know.” Bitterly, he wept, but Mathilde wanted none of it. One last matter remained—Rimbaud.

  “Tomorrow he is out, do you hear me? Out.”

  “I agree,” he gushed. “In a few days. At most a week.”

  “Paul,” she hissed, “hear me now. Not days or even a day. Tomorrow by noon—noon sharp—Rimbaud is gone. If not, I tell my parents everything.”

  42 Boy on the Cusp

  As for Rimbaud, even before he got the boot from 14 rue Nicolet, unusual for him, he had been in a visible funk, a detail not overlooked by the perspicacious Mme. Mauté.

  Much of it, she knew, was the letdown of his ill-starred debut, but was that all, she wondered. It was then that she recalled the observation that her son-in-law had made some days earlier to throw them off the trail—about Rimbaud’s needing a girl. Ah-ha, thought Mme. Mauté. A girl, was that it?

  Honestly, it was hard to know. For example, Paulette, the youngest of the three maids, was, she thought, quite pretty, albeit in a déclassé sort of way. Yet whenever Paulette entered the room, stiffly Rimbaud would leave—embarrassed, if that was quite the word. Just what was that word, exactly?

  Indeed, Mme. Mauté became genuinely curious as to what a suitable enough girl might do, or better yet, the effect that too suitable a girl might have. For what was required, after all, was not the girl but merely a girl. A girl not only heartbreakingly pretty but hopelessly unattainable.

  It was then she remembered Mme. de Robert’s seventeen-year-old Natalie, who, much to her mother’s dismay, was presently more focused on writing poetry than on finding a husband. Poetess, sniffed Mme. de Robert to Mme. Mauté. Bubbling like two doves, the two ladies were having their thrice-weekly tête-à-tête in two facing chairs of blue velveteen. Mauté blue. Indeed, it was the blue of the Mauté family coat of arms, a contrived artifact allegedly last seen when some chain–mail-wearing forebear was hunched over, helping his betters up into their stirrups to go fight the English. “Ah,” said Mme. de Robert, ever alert for signs of social decline in her set. “Poetess,” she continued, “this barbarism reminds me of that odious new title actress, with which the various tartlettes of the stage and the music halls now cloak their revolting nocturnal escapades.”

  They replaced their porcelain teacups on their porcelain saucers—blue, of course. Mme. de Robert, meanwhile, remained discomfited.

  “But what if she becomes interested?” asked Mme. de Robert, albeit with great deference. Despite her unfortunate son-in-law, Mme. Mauté was seen as brilliant in the womanly stratagems of matchmaking.

  “Ridiculous,” replied Mme. Mauté. “Un paysan du Danube? A penniless rube. But of course, it will go nowhere. What does a puppet do when one drops the strings?”

  Never mind the machinations involved: Mme. Mauté’s puffery about Rimbaud’s genius, together with the two poems, two of the more innocent (“The Green Cabaret” and “The Hands of Jeanne-Marie”), that she hand-copied (much bowdlerized) for the impressionable Natalie. Suffice to say that young Natalie arrived enthralled, a lithe, dark-haired girl in braids, buttoned black shoes, and short white gloves crocheted to resemble white nets. More wounding still, unlike most very beautiful girls of means, Mme. de Robert’s daughter was utterly natural, blithe, and unaffected.

  “Ah, Monsieur Rimbaud,” said Mme. Mauté as she swept into the garden where he was reading—loutishly, of course, sprawled on the divan in the same foul suit in which he had arrived. “I have long been meaning to
introduce you to this young lady who”—she looked at him with a great smile—“who also writes poems. Very good poems, actually. May I present …”

  Madame’s dart was true. Rigidly he shot up. Colored and grunted, his big hands flopping. Incredibly, he said, “Bonjour,” then—unprecedented—“very nice to meet you,” whereupon, dropping his head, Rimbaud blindly fled the house. And not because he didn’t find the girl attractive—quite the contrary. His paralysis and terror before her, it was all too emblematic of his sexual ambiguity and emotional incoherence—of the stumbling nakedness in life that he could cloak instead in art.

  Beyond questions of art or theory, it was shame that propelled him down rue Nicolet, down the boulevard Barbès, onto the rue d’Hauteville, and eventually to the open market of the Halles, sweet with the smell of overripe fruit, then the sharp blood reek of flayed sides of beef and freshly split pork. A butcher whisk-whisking his knife. A woman brushing away flies. And almost dialectically, running through his mind:

  Why can’t I think of women?

  Because I need a theory, a lie, to justify who I am?

  Because, even if it kills me, I always must do the opposite?

  Of the opposite?

  Because I do hate women?

  Or because I secretly hate liking to hate them?

  Dazed, he looked up. Fully two hours had passed. He was on the Pont Neuf, suspended over the black waters of the ever-churning, seaward-surging Seine. Golden cupolas in the distance. Swift pigeons. Water and sky. Here was Paris in all its sweep: marble and iron, spires and statues and trees—hot, raw life, spinning him dizzy.

  Peer down into those waters. Whirlpools of sex, boiling dark, boiling deep. Two choices, two poles. Here is childhood and here is adulthood. Here is male, and here is female. And here in the middle, staring at the roiling water, here we find an overbrilliant boy, wishing for a rope, for a rock, but most of all wishing he had a choice. Just a choice, when, really, the choice had already been made for him.

  43 Out!

  But with the usual randomness, of course the kid did not drown himself. Instead, he returned to 14 rue Nicolet confused and humiliated—out of control. And so, summoning all his powers, the next day he got even.

  “Monsieur Rimbaud! Rimbaud! Down here! Where is he! Where?”

  It was glorious. It was M. Mauté downstairs, bellowing at the top of his lungs. A moment prior, as was his tedious custom, M. Mauté had been timing, to the second, the chimes of his many disparate clocks—a clearly hopeless task which, for that very reason, occupied large portions of his day.

  When he saw it.

  It was his trophy wall of tiny stuffed deer heads … and everything was wrong.

  The twig horns. The dubious smiles. On those dozen hare-sized heads everything had been altered—everything. The glass eyes. The smiles. Even the diameter of the nostrils. It was diabolical. It must have taken hours, this outrage, hours daubing black paint with a brush of perhaps three hairs. Detectable but to one man, now about to have heart failure.

  “Monsieur Rimbaud! Now! Get down here!”

  But of course, the boy came right away. The whole household was there.

  “Look at this!” cried the old man, now armed with a magnifying glass. Rimbaud looked quizzically at his host, with perfect, malevolent innocence.

  “Ah, Monsieur, I came right away. Did something happen?”

  “YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED!” Fiercely, M. Mauté looked to the women for support. “You see! Of course you see. Here!” he pointed. “And here! See? See? Do you not see what he did?”

  The women looked at one another, puzzled.

  “Look!” cried M. Mauté, now nose to nose with the third specimen from the right. “Notice the smile—almost gone. And that eye—now dull. And that nostril—ruined. As was your foul intention, Monsieur!”

  “Intention?” asked the boy.

  “Yooou.” He bellowed. “Yoooooou—”

  “But, Monsieur,” inquired the boy, now going in for the kill, “I am confused. Is it this one? Or wait—is it this one here that bothers you …?”

  And yet, even after his three-week siege, with a new infant in the house—and now with this fiendish assault on his host—the lad was shocked. Actually shocked when Verlaine called him down to the foyer. There, by the door, stood a new valise purchased in advance for this great day, along with several shirts and undergarments. And there, atop it, was a fat envelope containing thirty francs of good riddance.

  “What is this?” demanded the kid. He waved the envelope in Verlaine’s face. “What is this?”

  “Severance pay. Come now,” said Verlaine good-naturedly, “you’ve thoroughly abused our hospitality—you’ve been brilliant in every way. Now come say a proper good-bye. I’ve booked you a room.”

  “Judas! Go screw yourself.” The kid stormed out.

  Let it be said: it did look odd, exceedingly, for a grown man with a valise to be chasing a boy clearly not his son. A horse cab clopped by. Verlaine hailed it, then directed the driver to troll beside the still cursing refugee, head down, beating down the street.

  “Arthur!” he said, hanging out the window. “Come on now—in. I’ll pay for your room. We’ll eat, then we’ll both get plastered.”

  “All right,” he agreed. “But only if you shut up.”

  And so in silence, riding through old Paris, they came to a medieval, almost undersea wreck of a hotel on the faubourg Saint-Denis. Truly the end of the line. Buckling timbers, bleary windows, rotting walls plastered with peeling posters. It had about it a kind of horrifying grandeur, snaking up the riverine street.

  They got the key. They climbed the creaking, listing stairs, two floors to No. 8, in which they found a cot, a grimy table thick with tallow, and a small window the hue of a stagnant pond.

  “Well, well,” joked Verlaine, setting down the valise. “Comme … chez soi. Home sweet home.”

  Boom. Dazed he lay on the floor—felled with a vicious rabbit punch.

  “Asshole! Liar!” Slapping him, Rimbaud had him by the throat. “We’ll see who’s the bitch here!”

  Double man and double boy. Slapping and kicking, rolling and wrestling, they were soon laughing, then not laughing at all, as they popped buttons and shucked shoes. White-fleshed youth. Rimbaud stood at full and erect attention. Jutting, pink and bouncing, he was not overlarge but, as only sixteen can manage, most impressively vertical.

  No question how this was going to go. The elder poet was on his knees, and here, above him, like a young god, fingers locked on his throat, was his muse and master. Joy incarnate as Verlaine opened his bearded lips—well-versed lips that expertly covered his teeth, stroking and tonguing, gumming and humming to a tom-tom beat.

  Mamma’s boys together. So it began, really, as only it could have begun, their two-year rampage through Paris, London, and Brussels. Leaving just four people, all women, of course, to pick up the pieces: Mme. Rimbaud, Mme. Verlaine, and Mathilde Mauté Verlaine—dewy-eyed no more. And of course their leader and strategist, the ever resourceful Mme. Mauté.

  Le scandale! Enter police and solicitors, the wronged, the fleeced, the injured. The mad race was on.

  44 Off

  Putting things right before he left Africa—this was Rimbaud’s aim when he asked Mrs. MacDonald to kindly summon her husband.

  Hearing that Rimbaud wanted to see him, Mr. MacDonald scooped up his Bible, assuming that it was time, that at last Rimbaud was ready to receive the spirit. How very surprised Mr. MacDonald was, then, to discover that it was he who was to receive. As Rimbaud explained, it was his intention to give Mr. MacDonald the very generous sum of two hundred and fifty pounds, funds sufficient, he calculated, not only to cover the family’s passage home but to carry them until Mr. MacDonald found suitable employ.

  Mr. MacDonald’s eyes welled over with gratitude. For much as he glossed over it and trusted to God’s providence, well, the truth was that Mr. MacDonald, now stammering and quaking, had been wracked over money an
d the blind way in which he had brought his family to grief. As for Rimbaud, naturally he was discomfited to be faced with such undisguised and, above all, joyous emotion. So, to distract the poor fellow, Mr. MacDonald’s unlikely benefactor asked him what kind of employment he might seek. A parsonage, perhaps?

  At this Mr. MacDonald’s face colored. Forthrightly, he admitted that he was not qualified or educated nor, frankly, of the class for a position so exalted. Rather, it was his hope to become an omnibus driver, a horse-drawn omnibus such as you saw around Piccadilly and London’s wider thoroughfares.

  Here Mr. MacDonald brightened, for evidently he had given the matter considerable thought. His wife, on the other hand, thought the job very lowly—she wanted him to seek a civil service post, but he stubbornly disagreed; in his view driving would mean heavenly freedom. Obliged to wear a uniform with a hat and a badge, he would not have to even think in a worldly way of what to wear, or even much about where to go or stop, as the horses knew the route. Two blinkered Clydesdales. A rolling ministry, you might say. Holding the reins, he could pray and perhaps even reach certain unfortunate individuals, such as often rode the trams, young men in despair and unwed girls in a family way. Horses, he noticed, have a calming effect on people. Moreover, as the driver keeps his eyes on the road and not the passengers, people are relieved to unburden themselves on the driver. Any willing set of ears.

  Indeed, it was curious, the calming, almost hypnotic effect that Mr. MacDonald had upon Rimbaud just then—the way he made him, however briefly, a better, more balanced spirit. Listening to MacDonald, Rimbaud was like a child being read a bedtime story. Not only was he less arrogant and exacting, but he was more patient and deferential, to the point that he wondered if there might be individuals, perhaps not overly bright individuals, around whom brilliant, difficult people might become better people. Rimbaud actually wondered about this in a fugitive kind of way.