Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  “Lord, I beat my mother! I beat my wife, I threw my own son, my own blood, against a wall! Lord, I shot my friend, my beloved. I shamed my family and my wife’s family. Lord, I have failed everyone. Everyone who ever depended on me …”

  Vanity, hope, dignity—there was none. Will—gone. Nothing was left—no, he had sunk too deep; sprawled lifeless across the desk, he was dead in the arms of the world. Flattened, fouled, and naked, wet with his own fluids, he was drowning in his pain, hard soul contractions, labor pains, expelling, like spiny demons, his guilt and self-loathing. Out it poured, sorrows and splashing black poisons, a flood, to the point that he was now panting, hysterical, and crying out for God. Famished for God, any god. Crying over and over and over:

  “Seigneur, prenez pitié. Lord, have mercy. Please—please—please God, forgive me—forgivvvve me. Anything so I can die. Die—die—die—die—die …”

  When, up in a blast, a storm swept through him, a torrent of blazing, overpowering light and blessedness. Wind and star showers. Tingling crystal ecstasies. White, like sea light. Sweet, like rain. Pure, like the sun, and then with such overpowering love as could have drowned the ocean and lit, in a single radiant second, the whole universe. Words—but there were no words. Explaining—but there was no explaining. Fear—but there was no fear, or sorrow, or want, or desire. For now was the first second of the first minute of the first morning of the first day. And look, up there on the clothes peg, see how it hung so brightly, a whole new life and soul, a luminous second skin as white and breezy as a sheet blowing in the sun.

  But what was it? God? The god of sobriety? Some trick of mental chemistry?

  Say what you will. So filled, so overflowing was Verlaine that afterward he dared not, and could not, speak. Lying on his iron cot, cradled in God’s gigantic arms, he was a man forgiven, new like the dawn, freed like the rain and washed clean on the greatest day in all his life—in jail.

  Jail—thank God!

  Dry of drink—praise be to Him!

  Cold iron bars! Rules! Routine!—Hosanna in the Highest!

  Here, behind bricks and bars, like so many before and after him, Verlaine found blessed refuge from the terrors of his inner chaos. And so for the next twelve months, mopping floors, meekly caring for the sick, and, of course, having a bounce in the hay or ten, he was the reformed Paul Verlaine, upon whose quivering tongue the white Host landed, as cold and alive as a snowflake on a child’s tongue. Good, the idea of being good, gluttonously good, it was like hunger, like thirst. Lord, just let me be good. Honestly, for a bent nail, Verlaine was true, more or less. Moreover, in his overflowing, he was now a religious poet. It was ecstasy. Deep in the night, by the glow of one small candle, he could be seen, filling page after page of a small notebook with his jail cell canticles.

  The Sky Above the Roof

  The sky above the roof’s

  So blue and calm.

  A branch above the roof’s

  Fanning the air.

  The bell up there in the sky

  Makes little sounds.

  A bird up there in the tree

  Sings its lament.

  Dear God dear God life’s there

  Simple and quiet.

  Those soft and distant sounds

  Come from the town.

  What have you done, you standing there

  In floods of tears?

  Tell me what have you done

  With your young life?

  But then one black day Paul Verlaine was released—condemned, even as he petitioned the warden to let him stay. Please, warden, he begged, just another year! Just a few months until I can find my footing!

  Too late. They put him on a locked train with sundry other miscreants and mental cases being shipped back to France. Terrifying, to be released into the shark-filled waters of his own recognizance. Paris, certainly, was death—a plague zone. Instead, he went to the monastery in Rouen, a blessed sanctuary of near-perpetual silence, ready to enlist in God’s Foreign Legion. Alas, the father superior, seeing the pox of wantonness on his face, was all too familiar with such lost souls. Sorry, Monsieur. No room at God’s inn.

  Fatherhood, then! Against all advice, the poet returned to Paris.

  Shaved and sober, bearing a toy boat with a white sail, the new Paul Verlaine went to Mathilde’s house—she then had moved into her own home—determined to see his son. Who by now was a lad of two or three (or four?), living in what—to Verlaine’s mind, at least—was still morally and legally his home, as he and Mathilde were not yet divorced. And so the returnee knocked and waited. Briskly, Odysseus knocked again, when above a window rattled up—Mathilde?

  No, it was her hateful old maid, Claudette, shrilly calling down, like slops hurled from a chamber pot, “Please, Monsieur, are you crazy? Go away. She will not see you, never, a convicted criminal! There, Monsieur, there are your two feet. Use them! Quickly, please. Vite, vite!”

  “Can you not see?” he cried, arms upraised, rotating Romeo-like unto the heavens. “I am a changed man. Please, I am a devout Catholic … a changed man, do you not see?”

  No surrender! He was fighting for his son, for the sanctity of his marriage and all that was sacred—for them. Many heard his cries. Indeed, in that genteel quartier, after thirty minutes of his bellowing, maids and then their ladies, too, could be heard jeering.

  “Go home, imbecile! I will have you arrested!”

  No matter. Bravely Paul Verlaine chanted his case, his love—why, even his resolve to seek honest employment. And so, much as the stalwart Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV stood barefoot in the snow pounding on the locked Papal gates at Canossa, so the intrepid one carried on until three gendarmes arrived in a police wagon drawn by two black dray horses with massive chests.

  Hurled to the lions! Handcuffed before his child! Indeed, before the now jeering neighborhood, the police padlocked the poet into a rolling cage. A circus animal. Fists balled around the bars, standing on his toes, there he was, two eyes peeping out the slit window, watching his life go away.

  “Reformed,” sneered the magistrate before whom the felon-poet stood the next day in handcuffs and leg irons. “Heed me, poet. So far as your wife and son are concerned, legally speaking, you are a dead man. Dead, do you hear me?”

  Desperation is nothing if not resourceful. And so when these appeals failed, Verlaine returned to cobble at what he knew—heartbreak and failure. Another go at Rimbaud. This occurred some eighteen months after the shooting, in 1875.

  Hoping it might be different this time, after long wheedling he managed to meet Rimbaud in Stuttgart, where once again Verlaine found himself standing before a locked door. An utterly different person.

  Peasant. Right away Verlaine saw it. He could see Mme. Rimbaud in his face, the hard blue eyes, the boredom, the implacable way he stood, jaw muscles kneading as if he were working up a spit. As for a roll in the hay—forget it. Almost immediately, Verlaine realized his terrible mistake.

  “Look,” offered Verlaine hopefully, “perhaps we will both feel differently in a few months.”

  “Undoubtedly, you will,” replied Rimbaud patronizingly. “You always do, eh? But as for me, I can promise you, old chum, that I will feel no different. Not now, not ever.”

  Verlaine teared up in anger. “But how can you know this? This is ridiculous, you are but what … twenty-one, is it? How on earth can you speak for the rest of your life? For when you are thirty? Or forty? How?”

  Rimbaud stared clear through him. “Because I don’t need to hope. I don’t need to believe, and I no longer need to write. What I need, Verlaine, is to not write.”

  “Not write! So this is your new vocation? You who wrote of what the hare said speaking through the spiderweb to the rainbow? You who woke up with the summer dawn in your arms? Who wrote, I assure you, deathless things. And all this is shit to you now? Answer me! What on earth has happened to you? To deny everything and embrace—nothing?”

  “Verlaine, you have my Season in Hell,”
Rimbaud said, referring to his adieu to art and poetry. It was a long prose poem that, amazingly for him, he actually had published—half published, rather. No one had seen it, of course. The three hundred copies were sitting in a box in the printer’s warehouse, awaiting Mme. Rimbaud’s payment. Never mind she had promised to pay for it when Arthur was home in a bad way—perhaps suicidal, she feared. Now that he was better—not good, but better—so let the printer whistle for his money, having set into type, as she put it, his wahh-wahh-wahh. A Season in Hell, another Rimbaud mummy. There it was, lying forgotten in a printer’s warehouse under dust, dead wasps, and mouse droppings. A renunciation that begins:

  Long ago, if my memory serves me, my life was a banquet where everyone’s heart was generous, and where all wines flowed.

  One evening I pulled Beauty down on my knees. I found her embittered and I cursed her.

  I took arms against justice.

  I ran away. O witches, poverty, hate—I have confided my treasure to you! I was able to expel from my mind all human hope. On every form of joy, in order to strangle it, I pounced stealthily like a wild animal.

  So there would be no ambiguity, Rimbaud clarified his position:

  “Verlaine,” he said, “as I burned my past, did I neglect to say that art is stupid and a lie and, above all, useless? Useless. Did you think I was just writing these things to create some poetic frisson? Some effect?” He shrugged. “God knows what I wrote. You have my pages. I don’t. And this will surprise you, but now I wish I had not given away all my poems. Honestly, if only I’d had the good sense to keep them! Had I only! Then I could burn them, all my little darlings, every last lying, stupid word.”

  “Ah,” said Verlaine, almost choking, “and you call me a coward. You gave them away so others would publish you—for you. So you could be innocent. Or invisible. And all the while you do what? Walk away from your work, your dreams? What, like an animal from his own shit? Or was it just your usual arrogance, God exiting with a shrug after the first six days, bored with his own creation!”

  “Really, Verlaine,” replied the young man, with affectionate menace, “you, of all people, calling me a coward. Burn them, please, every page. God help me, but I would. And dance in the flames. Trickery. Fakery. Vanity. That’s all it ever was.”

  The coldness, the viciousness and God hatred, and all this from one who, at the same time, managed to believe with Saint Paul that charity is the key. Angry tears sprang in Verlaine’s eyes, as he stammered, “I do—I—I do not understand you.”

  “Too true. And never did.”

  Verlaine tried again. “Please, I do not mean to misunderstand you. I did understand you in our day, you know I did—well, better than most—and I want to understand you now. But patience—God, you have no patience. And life, I must tell you, especially a life spent alone, is a ferociously long time.”

  Who was this stranger who had taken up residence behind Rimbaud’s eyes? It was like talking to a disturbance of which the disturbance was magically immune: a lion does not know it is a lion, liable to attack—it just is, and does. “Dear, dear Verlaine,” said Rimbaud at last, “do forget it. Forget me. Forget us.” The young man shrugged. “Look, I wish you no ill will, so enough. Have a good life, and now I bid you good night. Time to go.”

  How effortless it was for him with his big hooligan hands. Cooly, Rimbaud turned and left. No past, no future, no friction. Verlaine almost marveled at him, heading down the street, in his loping headstrong walk, his big, red hands flapping with careless menace.

  “We’ll meet again!” cried Verlaine. “Oh, yes, we will.”

  There Verlaine stood in the German air, in the German street, weeping—left again. And not even the familiar parting tap for money.

  “I do know you,” he cried. “I love you, Rimbaud. And we will be together again. We will, you’ll see!”

  How wrong he was.

  50 The Phantom

  “You know, we have another patient due to—to amputate tomorrow.” So Michel, the orderly, informed Rimbaud early the next morning, the third day after his operation.

  Lovely, thought the patient, another amputee. Comrade in misery. Such was now what passed for good news.

  “And,” added Michel, but of course with convulsive difficulty, twisting his mouth around the words, even as he cracked his long, bony wrists, “your mother and sister are coming. Today, I think I heard.”

  Rimbaud gripped the armrest of his wheelchair. Where were his porters, his beasts and hired rifles—his command? Good grief, what was life now? Stewed prunes?

  Here on day three at the forward-thinking Hôpital de la Conception, it was time to get up and be ambulatory. So said his doctor, the ebullient Dr. Delpech, the same who had amputated him. Heavyset and bearded, with tiny pince-nez glasses, Dr. Delpech was an exceedingly pleasant man who rocked on his feet and made steeples with his fingers as he pronounced upon things medical. Moreover, Dr. Delpech always had for his patients a new, overly long, and not very good joke—torture when Rimbaud, like a dog awaiting his dinner, was wholly fixated on his life. Or rather the point of his life now, if indeed there was one.

  “No, no, Monsieur Rimbaud,” mused Dr. Delpech with a warning smile, detecting another morbid turn in the patient’s thoughts, a return to the bad old habits, the old ruts. “You must not allow yourself to think in this way. Throw that thought overboard. Throw it away.”

  Like a conductor, with a genial flick of his wrist, Dr. Delpech banished all such negative, such habitual thinking, to which so many were captive—especially this one, who seemed almost to be plotting against his own recovery. Non! The stump, bleeding, sepsis, his mother’s impending visit, fears of ever walking again, death, the future—don’t worry about it, advised the good doctor. Any of it.

  “You’ll be back on a horse,” Dr. Delpech assured him. “You can get married—I believe you were talking about that as you came out of the ether. Young man, you are still young, vigorous, and I tell you now, you are on the right road. True, limping a bit at the moment,” he added, wriggling his large nose as he did when he snuck in a witticism, “but on your way. Do you dance?” he asked suddenly. “No?” he asked with evident surprise. “Well, I do, Monsieur, and I will waltz at your wedding! I will! And you will, too. Did I mention that I am prescribing, especially for you, dancing lessons?”

  Rimbaud stared at him in horror. The good doctor just laughed.

  “There, do you see? I am pulling your leg! Dear me,” said the doctor, looking for a laugh, “did I say that?”

  Laugh? Just then the patient was struggling not to start weeping, to be brave and cavalier—or something. And so, woozily, Rimbaud himself ventured a bad joke:

  “Well, Doctor, then I suppose I shall do the one-foot.”

  “There you go, that’s the spirit!” agreed the doctor, the conductor, rocking on his feet, with a flick of the wrist. “After all,” he continued, “in the desert, among the tribals, did you ever give up hope? Ever?”

  Rimbaud grew uncomfortable. “Well,” he admitted, “I didn’t give up. But hope? Hope was in short supply, Doctor—much like ice in drinks.”

  “Ha-ha,” laughed the doctor. “Now there’s the spirit! Just like that.”

  It was the drugs, the residual laughing gas and ether; it was the opiates that gave him constipation. For after this examination, Michel took him outside for a “spin” in the sun, pushing his wheelchair down a promontory, over the bluffs where the wind took his steely gray hair, causing him to crease his hollow, wrinkled, now rather Mongol-looking eyes. The prominent forehead, the compressed lips, the sunburn-spotted fingers ground down like brute implements. In his lap, his large hands now jiggled slightly, still on guard, as if a skinny man might burst from the red hibiscus now buzzing with enterprising French bees.

  Wearing blue pajamas with one leg pinned, he could feel the sun warm upon his face, grazing his long eyelashes. Before him, in all its sweep, lay the port of Marseille and the inky Mediterranean, upon whose b
rilliant surface the blood-orange sun laid down a carpet of flamelets. Such sweep and beauty—such calm, such order. This in itself was eerie and alienating, a modern world now so mechanized and routinized and pacifistic. No dung. No stench. No empty, hostile stares—no open hand. For him to go from perfect chaos to consummate French order—it was too much, like plunging a red-hot iron in water. If only he could have gone to some intermediate spot, he thought, some moderately botched place where he might have been better prepared, mentally speaking, for this vast spectacle of civic passivity. Pools of flowers and cypresses pointing heavenward like green fingers. Sunday painters at their easels. Look, actual children—white children—children eating ices in wide-brimmed hats with ribbons gaily twirling in the salt sea air. And blithe pleasure seekers, dandies with canes and cravats and women in foamy white gowns under open white parasols … people at leisure, spending, and merely enjoying themselves. All this made him intensely irritable and anxious, a self-styled soldier like himself among these civilians.

  Then he heard Michel. Good grief. Had they been conversing?

  “I said,” said Michel with some exasperation, “do you like her?”

  “Her?” said Rimbaud, craning around. “Do I like whom?”

  “Your mother.”

  Like her? he thought. She’s my mother.

  “Well,” said Michel, continuing this line of inquiry, “you were gone a long time in Africa, no?” He scratched his little goatee. “A long, long time, huh?”