Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  “What?” broke in Isabelle, now shaking. “Then you read it? And never showed me?”

  “Read it?” Inwardly, the mother couldn’t help but smile, thrown a bone so juicy. “Good heavens, why on earth would I? Whatever he wrote, he only tore it up, or gave it away, or ran away. And then, being Arthur, after all the theatrics and getting shot—you do remember that, I hope—well, naturally he gave it all up. Failed before he could be called a failure. Remember that lost period? When he was robbed and beaten in Germany? Then nearly died in that blizzard in the Alps?”

  “Mother,” she said, fanning her nose as a sneeze. “None of your insulting stupid digs and distractions. Why on earth did you never tell me? Me, your own daughter—his own sister! It had to be intentional. Had to be. It feels completely malicious.”

  “Why?” the mother spat back. “Ask yourself why. Why are you not married? Why at your age are you still sitting here at this table why-why-whying me. Wahh, wahh, why. Another baby.”

  Naturally, this mauling had its intended effect. By then, Isabelle was wiping away embarrassed tears with the heel of her palm. In which case the old woman could be magnanimous.

  “But you know what,” said the mother, as if she’d just now found a sweet in her dress pocket, “now that I think about it, some man even told me—oh, when was that? Two months ago? Four? Well, apparently in Paris, some fancy-pants place published some of your brother’s old tear buckets. And to some idiot praise, too. Well,” she shrugged, “so what. What’s the difference? Arthur never mentioned it.”

  Isabelle slapped the table.

  “Good heavens, Mother, here your son is praised, and not only are you not proud, but you won’t even tell me. Why? I could have been happy for my brother. That’s right, happy for probably the one person I ever wanted to, or could, understand.”

  “Understand him!” said the old woman, hunkering down. “Come to your senses, daughter. In all his years away, did he ever send you one line? One franc? Or—perish the thought—an interesting gift from some faraway place? Listen to me.” The old woman paused, visibly upset, for she was not a cruel woman, she thought. Truth was cruel. “Daughter, this is hard to say, but face the facts. Through no fault of yours, your brother has no real interest in you. Anybody, really.”

  “And how could he?” Isabelle sat there, wiping her eyes, shaking her head. “It was you, Mother, you who made him a foreigner in his own home. You barely allowed him to talk to us. Honestly, girls of nine and ten—his own sisters. Quarantined.”

  “Right!” The old woman flung down her napkin. “That’s right! Boys no more belong around girls than snakes do in henhouses. You wait until you”—she stopped herself—“well, if ever you had children—”

  Even she knew she’d gone too far. Breaking off, she patted her daughter’s arm, signifying, to her, a hug. A peace offering. But Isabelle was already off, t-tt-tromp-omp, down the hall to her room.

  46 New Vocation

  Honestly, what parent ever tries to be a bad parent? For the sad fact is, all parents, even the worst, most hopeless, are honestly trying to do their best.

  Fortunately, for the old woman, when all else failed, there was always prayer. And so she was squashed in her “stall,” as she thought of it, the stall in the corner between her bed and the wall, where, kneading her forehead and working her lips, she knelt on a rug, on her mushy old knees. Then, when her old knees gave out, she crumpled, with some shame, on her now bony bottom. Can I have no peace, Lord? I am not a bad mother.

  Her prayers and complaints, her murmurs, up they went like smoke up a flue—to what? God did not answer. Of course God did not answer, but by then, after this decades-long drought, the old woman had begun to think that His not answering was, in itself, almost a form of answer. Of course her faith was dry as sticks. Of course she felt famished and abandoned, but by then this fig leaf was her faith, a thing so familiar that she did not feel abandoned. In fact (and here was the oddest thing), she often felt the presence of another presence praying beside her. A ghostly presence.

  For here beside her was another lady on her knees, another supplicant and not some saint or divinity—no, this august personage was, like her, another cow of faith, longing to be milked of her equally great thirst. Who, apropos of God’s filibuster of silence, would say to Mme. Rimbaud, Don’t stop. You mustn’t stop. Never, Madame, for never has a woman outlasted God’s silence as you have. This is why He loves you. Because you will never give up hope! That is why He gives you the cold shoulder on these long, terrible nights of being old and lonely and deserted. Because you, Madame, are like that cow, the Charolais, good for milk or meat or draft—a cow of purest white who can both feed and pull out stumps! Do not despair. When all others have collapsed, it is you upon whom He depends.

  The murmuring, the head bumping, the muffled sobs—all this Isabelle could hear as she knelt against the wall that adjoined her mother’s room. But finally, mercifully, the commotion fell to snoring, then silence. With that, Isabelle lit her candle lantern. Then, slowly opening her door, a little scared, as always, she followed the glowing lantern down the hall, to the front door entrance, there to see her old friend, the blackened, time-frosted mirror. In the darkness, she studied her dazed image. There it danced before her, a little crackled, like a loose stone in a broken ring.

  Double thing drizzling silver. As she pored over the mirror’s surface, here the draining silver was like lace, there like skeletal leaves rotting on the surface of a frozen pond. Falling silver, failing silver, the black absorbed and the silver reflected, a wintry oblivion of whispers and secrets, as luxuriously warm as a fur coat. Leaning forward, close enough to fog her breath, Isabelle Rimbaud told her old friend the mirror:

  But she never told me.

  Of course she never told you. Why on earth would she?

  But no one did! Or Arthur! Or people in the town! Or my girlfriends, well, at least before they all married. Do you know how stupid this makes me feel?

  Never mind that, dear. You’ve got a horse. You’ve got a buggy—go.

  Go where?

  To Paris, even for three days. Anywhere. Go. Just to show her.

  But how? I’d have to ask her for money. She has all the money.

  Just take the money. You earned it.

  But what if Arthur arrives and I’m not home? I’d never forgive myself.

  Poor dear. Just look at you. Go.

  But how? A train? And with what? Isabelle knew nothing about her mother’s money, much less her own money. What money, when of her meager stipend one-quarter went to the church and half was saved but where, only her mother knew. As for the other quarter, a pittance, the old woman just gave it to the girl. Let her spend it on her sweets and fripperies—wasteful, thought the mother, but otherwise the girl became blue. “Then how much do I have?” Isabelle would demand in one of her not infrequent spells of sadness. “More than you need.” “Fine, then I shall go to Paris.” “And stay where?” cried the old woman. “In a hotel? With those sorts of women, breeding disease like pigeons? Do you know why in France more than five unrelated women cannot be legally domiciled together? Do you know what the police assume about such unsavory arrangements?”

  It was a frightening world.

  Why, only a few months ago, to prove that not only was Isabelle not going to Paris but would not want to go, Mme. Rimbaud had “bought” for her (part of a block auction) a rattling old gig and a swaybacked old mare. That shut her up, for never once had the old mare left the property, proof the girl was pure bluff. But then what in those parts did they call a spinster like her, now beyond thirty? Rabbit fricassee. A hopeless case. Never would she marry.

  But this changed the following day. While her mother was out, Isabelle did it. Sneak that she was, she caught the horse with carrots. Harnessed her, then, with unaccustomed swats as the old nag bounced her head, Isabelle left to find some answers about her brother the writer. And where else but from the booksellers of Charleville. Or even Charleville�
�s sister city, Mézières, if necessary.

  On its coiled spring, the doorbell tinkled. Isabelle Rimbaud drew up her shawl as the bookseller rattled the lock. Naturally, she did not identify herself. It was frightening enough to ask a man anything, let alone to ask a stranger if he had heard of Arthur Rimbaud or had one of his works.

  “Yes, of course,” said the first, an old, old man with a gold watch chain that he fiddled with nervously. “He grew up here. Don’t know if he amounted to much, or what became of him. But, Madame—Mademoiselle—if I may inquire, why do you ask?”

  “Ah,” said the second bookseller, younger, dark-haired, and scaly-skinned, after Isabelle had fled the premises of the first. “Then you heard,” he said, clearly excited. “Yes, I thought he’d come to nothing, but now I hear that some of Rimbaud’s poems were published. Fairly recently in Paris—to some acclaim, I understand.”

  “Indeed so,” mused the third, his pipe popping as he hungrily lit it, then waved out the match. “And I have a copy—yes, I’m quite sure I do of … of”—laying hands on his stool—“La Revue Noire—if I can find it—I have an essay on Rimbaud by a very noted critic, Félicien Champsaur, who pronounced him the greatest French poet since Baudelaire. Oh, indeed, a strange, strange talent, he averred. And so young when he wrote—shocking. Eighteen or nineteen. A wild man, I heard, but great. Yes, Champsaur used that word, ‘great,’ and I can tell you he uses it only very parsimoniously, if ever. Moreover, I have heard there are young poets of some stripe—some school—who have formed, after Rimbaud, a Socratic following. Heaven knows, Mademoiselle. And where is this poet now? Africa, did I hear?” The bookseller disappeared behind various piles and shelves. “Wait, wait … I have a publication with many of his poems, Les Poètes Maudits.” The cursed poets.

  How her face burned as he put into her hands the chapbook with her brother’s poems—that and the review, in which, with a slip of paper, he had carefully marked Champsaur’s essay. Dazed, she paid him. Cheeks burning, pretending she didn’t hear the flirting of his at-the-door question, Isabelle felt like a shoplifter, ready to explode as she burst through the door. Ears twitching, the old mare pulled her head around and looked at her. She looked at the mare. Then, with the leather traces trembling in her hands, she drove out of town, rumbling over cobbles, past the last homes, then down a long curving road lined with birches, silver birches following, like stitches, the flashing-green, clear-flowing brook.

  No one was around, so she stopped. Preparing herself, she opened the book, feeling the sharp pages and incised type, the strange irregular shapes of poems—the almost human shapes. A blur of words of which, at that moment, she could read not a line.

  The book, this fetish of the book, it had weight. It was a fact. And look: here, forever captured in time, was her brother’s name, Arthur Rimbaud Arthur Rimbaud Arthur Rimbaud Arthur Rimbaud Arthur Rimbaud.

  It was here, freed from her mother for all of two hours, and then with a rapture almost religious, that Isabelle Rimbaud burst into joyous, uncomprehending tears, swearing before God that no matter what her mother or anybody else said, she would tell the true story, the touching and surely holy story of her great brother—their story, once he returned home. Never would her brother have to fend for himself or beg their mother. No, she would care for him—him and only him, and for once in his life her brother the esteemed poet, he would have whatever he wanted, when he wanted it, and as he wanted it, without his mother to thwart him.

  So in soft early May swore Rimbaud’s younger sister and future biographer. No confusion now. Adrift in the gig in the sun, as the old horse walked circles, nibbling the sweet green grass, for the first time in ages it was clear to Isabelle Rimbaud what she would do, just as it was clear how much her mother would revile it as a blow to decency. A revolt against family secrecy. Why, a betrayal of the first order.

  Tant pis. Mousy no more. With a pleasure almost obscene, Isabelle Rimbaud resolved that day to be her brother’s biographer—a writer after all.

  47 Empty Crèche

  Pay attention, thinks Rimbaud, now floating and trying to collect himself—to reassert command.

  Situation: He is in Marseille, alone in a white room in a white bed at the Hôpital de la Conception, warm, blooms of morphine and ether wearing off, and—he thinks—his mother and sister have been summoned. By telegram? But are they then in transit?

  Alone, he knows that much. Don’t ask. Don’t beg. Don’t break down.

  But they know. Everybody knows—what?

  His gold. His two pistols. His pain—where?

  Escape—but how?

  Outside, he can see Jesus’ brides, the assembled Sisters of Providence, five in number. Whispering, of course, always whispering, nuns in heavy black habits and starched white headpieces so tight they cause their cheeks to plump, like warm muffins. Shhhh, one says, pointing. Pain has long ears. He can hear them talking. Good, they say, the patient is awake and now alone with his grievous wound, now waiting to be embraced, like a newborn. Très bien, Monsieur Rimbaud. Behold, Jesus above, flying over all, like a great robed kite. Offer the Lord Jesus your suffering, offer it up! But, as for receiving comfort and mercy at this terrible moment, even vocation has its limits—the sisters flee.

  And it is here, lying in bed with him—the beast, the same that stalked him across the desert, then watched him almost die on the airless ship, its iron bulkhead beaten like an anvil by the equatorial sun. White sun, white sheet. Before this expanse of white sheet, Rimbaud feels as he did leaving Harar that last day, when he looked across the white desert, blazing like freedom, free freedom, if only he could reach the warm, the blue, the amniotic sea, warm and sloshing like a good mother. Sun mother, mother sun, golden sun—red dial of sun, where did you go with your piercing eye of gold? Why did you leave my life, a puddle of molten gold vanishing into the sea’s shining lips?

  Am I crazy?

  Don’t do anything, he thinks now, paralyzed, and not entirely without logic, imagining that if he does not raise the sheet—if he lies perfectly still—it will not be. Then when this fails, he reverts to the stratagems of his youth, destitute on the Paris streets or on the road, free to be robbed, raped, or killed. About which he had written, A voice clenched my frozen heart: “Weakness or strength: you are there, it is strength. You do not know where you are going, or why you are going. Go in anywhere. Answer everything. They will not kill you any more than if you were a dead body.” So he had written in Season in Hell, but what now? What, teller, is his tale now?

  Upon finding a source of nectar, a bee returns to the hive, there to sip only as much sweet liquor as it needs to return to the source, then back to the hive—just enough and not one drop more. Like that bee, a human soul has only so much bravery and denial, only so much energy, only so much resilience and hope—just that much and not one drop more. And so like that bee, Rimbaud plummets, empty from the emptier air.

  He is a child. Where is my mother? Why have they not summoned my mother?

  He is outraged. Robbed! I demand an explanation. Why was this not discussed?

  He is argumentative. Intolerable! Where is the surgeon? The civil authorities?

  He is French again. Is this not France? Am I not a French citizen with rights?

  He is wildly irrational. Draft evader, you’ll be caught and conscripted!

  Sssh. It’s the nuns again, whispering, Do it, coward. Raise the sheet.

  Now his hands, his whole body, are trembling as he strains forward, pressing the spot. Flat—gone, it’s all gone, everything. He rips up the sheet, then stares at it. No knee and almost no thighbone. Nothing but a roast-sized stump bound in blood-brown gauze. Gauze with a bloom of bright blood in the center.

  His eyes blurt; they burst like fat grapes. Lashes of rain, torrents of grief, awful to see, a man bawling and rocking in a blinding heart storm. This is not crying, it is the heart’s nausea; it is the greasy, burning accumulation of twenty dry years of willful starvation pouring blindly down his
face. Who is he now? His hair, peppery only a month ago, is now almost white. The man once so vigorous, so headlong and heedless, he is now a dying glutton exhausting his last fat reserves of hope. Shuddering and sucking, slurping and spitting, almost catatonic, he stares through the pounding rain as hot tears, salt tears fat as spits soak his nightshirt, then run burning down his belly, to the already evident pool between the legs. When:

  “Hrrr-re,” says a quavering voice. “Hhh—here.”

  A hand shoves a metal pan in his lap. He jumps. It’s a young man not more than twenty, lanky, with blue eyes, an eruption of dark brown hair, and a patchy, stubbly beard. What’s wrong with the kid? he thinks. Leaning in, the kid jerks, he trembles, his shoulders twitch.

  “HEEhrre,” he insists, shoving a metal pan under his chin.

  “What?” Agog, still weeping, Rimbaud looks up at this impostor. “You’re not the doctor—”

  “I’m—the—the—h-or-der-ly.” The young man smiles after a fashion. “M-iiiiii-chel.” He grimaces, assembling the next statement, “I—I clean h-up.”

  “What?” At that moment, Rimbaud scarcely knows what he’s saying, but the boy takes this literally, as if he is asking what he cleans up.

  “Ev-ev-ever-ry—thing. I-I cl-lean it up. Before, d-durring, and-and—haf-ter.” Again, he stops and smiles a twisted smile, spittle, a little, at the edge of his lip. “Seeee, I t-talk sl-looow. But I-I-I’m not sl-ooow. H-hee-re. Go on.” His mouth tightens. “Vommm—it. If—if you have to.”

  At this time, of course, nobody really understands what afflicts this young man; it just is, and what is there to know? He’s a stutterer, palsied and slow. In any case, let us not belabor Michel’s stutter in prose—assume it and read pure and clean what he means to say. Note, rather, Rimbaud’s shock at the young man’s lack of horror or disgust. For a person in Rimbaud’s state, this is immensely consoling—calming. Lying back down, he feels Michel’s puffy eyes guiding him, cuing him in that almost hypnotic way young children are lured to listen to a story, calmed by the voice and trusting there is an end to the story, not good or bad but just an end. It is a story. It is the story of his missing leg, and Rimbaud’s mind is so slowed, so primitive and unmoored, that he is floating in that hypnotic state of two boys conversing, oblivious to the outer world.