Disaster Was My God (8 page)

The boy looked as if he had tasted spoilt milk. “Of myself, Monsieur? And who would that be? I am quite sure that I think nothing.”

“Nothing?” said the Otter, looking at his colleague. “Can such be possible? And are you not greatly pleased with your
triumph
here today? That men such as ourselves, medical men, scientists, learned men from the Academy, should be examining your cranial apparatus? At all this fuss over your—your
mental faculties
?”

“Water,” insisted the boy. “I
asked
for water.”

“No water,” insisted the Otter. “Your brain will blot it up.”

“Like a sponge,” agreed the Hedgehog. “Next, your hands.”

As if they were stinking fish, the Hedgehog flipped them over, whiffed. Unmistakable, that gluey odor—loathsome. It was the web-fingered swamp smell of Onan and his solitary crimes. And, with those outsized hands of his, his eel was bound to be disgustingly large. Pink. Crooked, too, no doubt—another subject of study, one worthy of Euclid, the hypotenuse of cranium to crank. But then, rank boy, he yanked back his sticky digits.

“When I get my glass of water.”

“Well,” mused the Otter, to his bristly partner. “Now he is not so bored with us.”

Attention
, Messieurs: now the mother bear was getting agitated. As warned, they saw the dreaded
da-di-da
, the windmilling arms, the compressed lips.

“Arthur,” she thundered, “
Big Brain
, were you not listening? They said it will cause your brain to swell.”

“Mother,” he replied haughtily, “has
your
head swelled—ever—with a drink of water?”

“Offer it up!” she said, for these knifelike flashes of intelligence frightened her. “Imagine how thirsty our Lord was as he hung on the Cross!”

“Ah,” replied the boy, rolling his eyes, “then that explains it.”

“Explains?” prompted the Otter, grabbing for this morsel. “Explains what?”

Down his nose the prize boy peered at them. “In church, Messieurs. Surely, you have noticed how our poor Lord’s head slumps there on the Cross. Did he drink too much water, do you think? Or do you suppose, Messieurs”—he paused with just the trace of a smirk—“do you suppose our poor Lord was
drunk
?”

“Madame!” cried the Otter.

“Young sir!” chided the Hedgehog

“Blasphemer!” howled the mother, not to be outdone. “Oh, you’ll taste some slaps once we leave!
Un! Deux! Trois!
A Holy Trinity! Enough, Messieurs. Now do you see? Do you see what I, a woman alone, must contend with?”

“But, Madame, in the interest of science—”

“As the esteemed mother of such a—”

Bigwigs. She knew at once what they wanted.

“Good heavens, Messieurs. Can you be asking to feel … 
my
brain?”

“Twenty,” bid the Otter.

“Thirty! And you’ll be
vite-vite
about it, too.” Muttering, she stuffed her needlepoint into a bag. “But mind you, Messieurs, be careful, very careful of my large bumps.”

“Bumps, Madame?” At this they shivered like wet dogs.

Picture it, they thought. Years from now, in the Musée de la Société phrénologique de Paris, in the Halls of Madness, in cloudy, piss-colored specimen jars, there they would bob, like prehistoric eggs. Two brains. Mother and son. Peasant and genius, opposite sides of the same moon.

“Easy, Madame,” said the Otter, raising the great calipers.

But at this, she sprang. Snagged her nestling by the collar—
up
. Then, with a smirk, left them high and dry. Left money on the table, too—a first. Moments later, as promised, three sharp reports are heard:

“God the Son!”

“God the Father!”

“God the Holy Ghost!”

Slap! Slap! Slap!

R
emarkable thing, though. The boy was not the usual mathematical or musical prodigy, say, like the seven-year-old, periwigged Mozart dressed in blue satin and white knee britches, mesmerizing kings and queens as his tiny fingers swept up and down the keys of his little pianoforte. Rather, he was that rarest of rarities and oddest of oddities—a prodigy of letters.

And by sixteen—and then writing his own poems—Arthur Rimbaud was not merely dazzling or surprising, say, like young Thomas Chatterton, dead at seventeen, a century before this time. By then—not that anyone then knew it, of course—Arthur Rimbaud had anticipated, and exceeded, Dada and Surrealism, had checkmated and rewritten fifty or sixty years of future poetry, had barged headlong into the twentieth century, and then with the recklessness and bravado practiced, in France at least, only by painter provocateurs like Honoré Daumier or Paul Gauguin.

Go on. Stand them all up. Name one. Anyone. What other nineteenth-century writer managed to break through to the twentieth?

Poe—a first dark industrial explosion, an inventor of forms, the detective story for one, but in diction thoroughly nineteenth century. Baudelaire—a dazzler and an outlier dancing on the razor’s edge of beauty and perversion, yet stylistically still in the classical mode. Mallarmé—a lord of sonoric discipline and a boundary stretcher but still a flowery, rather precious nineteenth-century effusive. Wilde—very close, at least in humor, and a great master of prose, but in poetry (save
for “Ballad of Reading Gaol”), a hothouse, late Romantic when the parade had long passed. As for the titanic, hairy-chested Whitman, that great liberator, hankering, gross, mystical, nude, however magnificently the bard sprawls and swims, his long, powerful lines still teem with the prolixity and Yankee gimcrackery of that age.

And Emily Dickinson? Ah, but she was her own century.

Not so Rimbaud. Indeed, by his teens, at his height, the boy had rid himself of the florid, bowdlerizing earnestness of his time, with its pieties and fripperies and oddities of punctuation. In fact, with one shrug, he pretty much had freed himself from the prevailing notion of poetry, which, however artfully, was finally written in the language of common sense. Meaning, at least on a basic level, that pretty much anybody could read and understand it, just as anybody could see what typically was all too evident. True, there were exceptions to the boy’s harsh judgments—precious few, like Albert Mérat and Paul Verlaine. But otherwise, what was the
point
? the kid wondered. Where was the power and mystery? Who would ever want to be
that
kind of poet? An obvious poet. Really, a butler poet with white gloves holding a silver tray for the reader.

Never! Being a wild child, an immortal, he was more than ready to die for the cause. Which, being a kid, was to
revolutionize love and transform life
. In this great cause, he was elliptical and irrational. Dissonant. Obscurantic. Crazy. Throw in scatological, too. And so he was alone. Out of his mind
with
his mind. The Pied Piper had outrun even the rats.

Still more unsettling, the lad was a peasant savant, a hick, why, a
Belgian
, almost. Indeed, as Baudelaire had warned, “The over-egoed and over-arted Belgians are so civilized / They are sometimes syphilised.”

And, worse, born to this bullheaded plough woman of no particular education. Odder still, there was the case of Arthur’s brother, Frédéric, a virtual twin. Who, until almost the age of sixteen, the mother had dressed like a doll, just as she had Arthur—her two doily boys. Indeed the next year, when the Hedgehog and Otter begged to examine poor Frédéric’s noggin, the mother summarily dismissed the idea—as preposterous, ridiculous.

“That one?” she said of her second son. “Don’t waste your time. There is a muck fork in that boy’s future.”

O
ur Arthur, then, was not only a bona fide miracle but
her
miracle, about whom she was—early on, at least—extraordinarily, if secretly, vain: that this boy of hers could be so brilliant; that of nothing she could produce something—amazing, even if it was of the testicular male subspecies. Pride, then. This was Mme. Rimbaud’s sin of choice. And as a realist, she recognized it and suffered terribly because of it, and then in a way our age will never comprehend.

Pride was her weakness. And pride was precisely what she prayed against and confessed to, even as she hotly blew on it like a coal, into full and dangerous effulgence. Others knew of her outsized pride. Around Charleville her pride was legendary, second only to her ability to sense, and pounce upon, distress.

When trouble made its rounds, over the hill the unfortunate soon would see Mme. Rimbaud’s black buggy. Before the gendarme and
le croque-mort
—the undertaker—before even the worm, she was the early bird.

A woman had to be alert, she said. To drunks being carted home. To public notices. To gendarmes at the door, to distressed crops, women weeping at the pawnshop, and the like. Obviously, unlike the males, she couldn’t get her news at the various “troughs,” the tavern and cafés.

And make no mistake: in her way, Mme. Rimbaud could be charming when she wanted to. Very, when money was involved, and especially with the desperate or blithely unsuspecting. The Rimbaud children would hear, “The Rivières are having trouble.” Or still more vaguely, “There is trouble up the road—don’t speak of it.” Crossing herself. Actually shivering, lest she contract the human disease she most dreaded—failure.

And yet: she was a midwife of failure, Mme. Rimbaud. Made house calls, too. At the first whiff of bad news, she would tie her black bonnet into a big bow, then climb into her black gig. Spokes spinning, away she
went, first to the
boulangerie
to pick up the
pain de campagne
—that resilient country loaf nested so fetchingly in a napkined basket in which the unsuspecting would find a pot of fresh butter and her pungent black cherry jam.

Odd thing, though. Cut loose from her children, Mme. Rimbaud was a woman set free on these strange excursions. Indeed, when the prize presented itself, she could be playful, shameless, even getting down on her knees to hypnotize a rooster.

Hush, children
. Cluck-clucking, she flattens old Red in the dirt, sweetly jibbering the chickenish of sexy hen talk. Now observe: again and again she draws, before Red’s crossed eyes, a line in the dirt. Line after line after line, until even her young audience grows sleepy. When—

“Voilà!”

Red rises, his comb a spastic asterisk. Sputters, crows, flaps, and quakes—this as his harem, pantaloons bouncing, dives beneath the chicken house. Hypnotizing Red, Mme. Rimbaud almost hypnotizes herself. Look at her, laughing with a gaggle of children. However briefly, some hidden school-mistress self appears; she experiences actual mirth, even pleasure, to the point that she must wipe her eyes. But of course the Rimbaud children never see this side of their mother, ever.

Once this bit of tomfoolery is over, it’s back to business. She returns to her defeated neighbor crouched in the doorway, elbows squeezed between his knees. “Monsieur, save what you can, while you can,” she says helpfully. “This will be your last chance.”

When the rot is on the wheat and the pox is on the herd, who can argue with this? He can’t. And even then, walking through house and barn, pointing at things, no sooner does she name her price than her captives, almost hypnotized, silently carry them to her gig. Then away, black horses! Away from this contagious house! Spit on a sou. Pull out a hair. Toss it over your left shoulder, snap the reins, and
never
look back.

And so, driving away in her overburdened gig, she would be clucking, thinking what a pity that “pauvre Arthur” in Africa did not have
her
as his partner—someone smart and tough. Heh. She’d make them pay up! Even the fat black king!

But now to have to
wait
upon Arthur’s return from Africa—to be cast as the powerless old woman, this is beyond Christian; it is superhuman, unbearable. And with each week, towering and funneling up, her anger only grows. Indeed, the only thing greater is her dread at his impending return, blackening the skies like the locust clouds over Pharaoh’s Egypt.

5
Old History

Worse, it all feels so familiar, bailing him out again. It takes Mme. Rimbaud back to the old days, his poet days, twenty years before, when for months at a time, perhaps forever—perhaps dead this time—he would run away to Paris. Back to the arms of Paul Verlaine, whose teenage wife, saddled with child and social humiliation, began to write to Mme. Rimbaud. Heart-wrenching letters. Scandalous letters, horrors beyond her comprehension. And yet, inevitably, six months or a year later, something would blow up and, like a homing pigeon, back the kid would come to Roche, always back, and then as blindly and arbitrarily as he had left. Often this would mean walking clear from Paris, some two hundred kilometers, traipsing from village to village and farm to farm with no money, no blanket, no kit. Nothing but his pencil and penknife and a soggy wad of paper upon which, toward sundown, a hunched-over boy rocking and murmuring and blowing into his hand wrote: