Delirium (12 page)

             
Rimbaud found himself deserted in London. He was left without money or provisions, thrown in again upon himself and faced with the inexhaustible need to find material support for his life of spiritual aspiration. Often it is hard to find the money even for a bus-fare. The editorial whiz-kid sprinting up from the provinces to London in a BMW, would be unaware that Rimbaud’s destitute predicament can inflict anyone who pursues poetry as a commitment and not an avocation. Broken down, threatened by everything inside and out, Rimbaud wrote a letter (4 July 1873) intended for Verlaine:

Come back, come back, dear friend, my only friend, come back. I swear I’ll be kind. If I was mad with you, it was only a joke, and one I couldn’t stop. I am more sorry than words can ever say. Come back, everything will be forgotten. How terrible that you should have taken that joke seriously. For two days I haven’t stopped crying. Come back. Be brave, dear friend. Nothing is lost. You have only to make another journey. We’ll live here again, courageously and patiently. Ah! I beg you. It’s for your good, too. Come back, you’ll find all your things here.

             
I hope you realize now that there was nothing serious in our argument. What a terrible moment! But why didn’t you come when I signalled to you to get off the boat? Have we lived together for two years to come to this! What are you going to do? If you don’t want to come back here, would you like me to come to you?

             
Yes, I was in the wrong.

             
Oh! you won’t forget me will you?

             
No, you can’t forget me.

             
As for me, I still have you here.

             
Listen, answer your friend, aren’t we to carry on living together?

             
Be brave. Reply to me quickly.

             
I can’t stay here much longer.

             
Don’t read this except whole-heartedly.

             
Quick, tell me if I must come to you.

             
Yours, all my life.

              Rimbaud must have feared madness. There is a love that comes from incompatibility, both partners fearing to exchange the irreconcilable for the unknown. Everything in their lives together must have streamed through Rimbaud’s consciousness with extraordinary clarity. The tempestuous audacity of their initial love, things said and done, hopes, aspirations, poverty, humour, despair, viciousness, brutality, accusations, and always the face of Mathilde, Verlaine’s wife who had so often interposed in their relationship. Verlaine hated her but he blamed Rimbaud for implanting that emotion in him. And was he not made to feel a failure because he lacked characteristics that Verlaine had known in his wife? They could never be happy because Verlaine had known and loved this woman.

             
For the first few hours Verlaine’s absence was an unreality. There had to be a mistake. He would be back on the next crossing. But Rimbaud had insufficient money to wait. Whatever their differences there had always been two of them; one could protect the other. Now there was nothing but this huge fear enveloping him, picking him up in its talons, threatening to suffocate him. Rimbaud was paralysed. The only place that offered respite was home, but how could he get there? He was convulsing. What if he lost his mind and found himself homeless and without identity in the underground? Even the prospect of Roche and his unwelcoming mother must have been consolatory. And when one is hysterical, which means in inner flight, one imagines that one can get to a place just by thinking oneself there. Rimbaud must have thought of the leaky old barn where his presence scared rats, of the old days in Charleville when he and Delahaye were free to roam the countryside and imagine a future that was still open-ended. But his had happened. He had run clean up against a wall. He was trapped in a sticky black net. It was tightening over him so that he could not breathe. And the terrible poverty of the room and house. He was going crazy and Verlaine wasn’t there to listen or to receive the blame.

             
He wanted to scream and he did. There was a knock at the door. For a moment he thought it was Verlaine. He was back again. And since the marvellous occurred in his poetry all the time, he had no need to ask questions. Instead it was a threatening English voice, telling him that if he didn’t quieten down, the police would be called. The police? They would want to know the nature of his relationship with Verlaine, they would search for drugs.

             
The evening and the night must have been relentless, implacable, interminable. There was nothing he could do but sit like a red-eyed beast in his lair and wait for the morning. And the next day Verlaine’s letter arrived, full of the sentimentality which was inseparable from his nature. He threatened suicide. ‘If three days from now I’m not reconciled with my wife, in perfect conditions, I’m going to blow my brains out... My last thought will be for you, for you who were calling me, this afternoon, from the quayside, when I wouldn’t return, because it is necessary that I should die.’

             
Rimbaud found himself once again the victim of Verlaine’s deluded belief that he could resume his former married life simply by appearing to renounce his homosexuality. But Mathilde had no intention of hurrying to reunite with a man who had once set fire to her hair, beaten her up physically and dashed their child against a wall. Verlaine had been given chances and on each occasion he had burnt his boats. Mathilde would leave him to the reflection of flames on a black night sea.

             
Verlaine’s mother rushed to Brussels to be with her son. And Rimbaud’s mother, informed of the situation by Verlaine, wrote to him (6 July 1873) with an emotional honesty and inspiritment that suggests levels of compassion she was never to show her son.

Kill yourself, unfortunate man! To kill oneself at a time of extreme crisis is an act of cowardice; but to commit suicide when one has a loving mother, who would give her life for you, who will die of your death, and when one is also the father of a young boy... to kill oneself in these circumstances is infamy... Monsieur, I do not know the nature of your quarrel with Arthur; but I always knew that your relationship would end disastrously. Why? you will ask me. Because what is not authorized by good and honest parents cannot possibly bring happiness to the children.

How much did she know? From the nature of her letter, it seems everything. It is much to her credit that she delivers no moral imprecations against homosexuality. Possibly her experience of life with her husband had clouded her views of hetero-sexual relations, and in a perverse way she warmed to her son’s attraction to his own sex. If Rimbaud’s relationship had been with a girl, and therefore a rival to Madame Rimbaud’s psychological regime, doubtless she would have maintained an impenetrable silence. She would have disowned her son and considered her parental duties ended. But with a man it was different.

             
She had corresponded with Verlaine in London and seemed prepared to overlook his alcoholism and ambivalent sexuality. And her feeling towards both him and her son is that they are children. The disciplinarian in her advised Verlaine to pull himself together: ‘You must also apply yourself to work, find a purpose in life; you will naturally have many bad days still to go through; but however disillusioned you may be with men, never despair of God. Believe me, he alone knows how to comfort and heal.’

             
One wishes only that she could have found it in her heart to write her son a similar letter.

             
But Verlaine was sobering up. Suicide is an irrevocable act; it was not in his nature to make incisive decisions. He could imagine himself dead and conceive of the subsequent guilt incurred by both Mathilde and Rimbaud. Yet he would not be there to experience it. He would like to have had them believe he was dead, only to reappear and find himself the subject of profound sympathy. But of course the latter was not possible. Still intent on acting out a drama, on 8 July he wired Rimbaud to come to Brussels, Hôtel Liègeois, as he Verlaine was about to go to Spain to enlist as a volunteer in the Carlist ranks. This scheme was a way of maintaining dramatic action — Verlaine was on the edge of the heroic or cataclysmic, as he saw it — and Rimbaud must be made to suffer for having pushed him to such extremes.

             
And the plot succeeded. On the proceeds of selling their clothes and a few possessions, Rimbaud arrived in Brussels on 9 July, Verlaine having meanwhile moved into the Hôtel de la Ville de Courtrai in the centre of the city. Rimbaud found himself once again faced by Verlaine and a woman, only this time it was the latter’s mother and not his wife. He sensed that he was to be the subject of humiliation and all of his prickly, obstinate Cuif blood rose to the defensive. To counteract Verlaine’s drunken scheme of enlisting, he had decided that his future lay in returning to Paris. To have said Charleville would have been to admit defeat. And, anyhow, he had not given Paris a sufficient try. During his stay there in 1872 he had been angry, destitute, engaged in a process of sensory derangement. He had wanted to outrage the literary world and he had succeeded in his design. Perhaps he hoped that the book he had begun in April and May would establish his name as a poet. He would show Verlaine that he could succeed alone. His genius was meteoric; it would light up the century.

             
But for the moment Rimbaud was trapped. The presence of Verlaine’s mother prevented honesty of expression. And there was a rift. Perhaps for a time he felt strong in the belief that he would regain his independence and be free of Verlaine’s lachrymose dypsomania. But Verlaine was not going to make things easy. He wanted to force the issue; he was drunk, belligerent and looking to blame Rimbaud for the dissolution of his marriage and his premature redundancy as a poet. The night was taken up in bitter argument, in as much as Rimbaud could attempt to reason with a man who was little more than a gelatinous sponge of absinthe. Something of the twisted fury of their love is evident in the emotional deadlock. Neither wanted to be the first to break, although this time Rimbaud must have been firm in his intention to leave for Paris the next day. He must have been nervous, urinating excessively, breaking out into cold sweats from the absence of drugs, strung out over the void on a breaking thread. When Verlaine passed out from alcohol there was the long summer night to endure, broken by snatches of sleep, livid hallucinations, panic that the next day would be a repetition of what they had already suffered.

             
The next day Verlaine went out early. He had noticed a gunsmith’s shop in the Passage des Galeries St Hubert. We know from the evidence given at the trial that he purchased a 7 mm, six-cylinder revolver and a box of fifty cartridges. He spent the morning drinking and loaded the revolver in the latrine of the Café Rue des Chartreux. We do not know whom he intended to shoot; but it was an accelerative step to the momentum of his Brussels drama. Whatever he did, news of it would get back to Mathilde. It might finally persuade her to come to his assistance.

             
Rimbaud was resolute. He would leave for Paris at ten to four. He wanted to be out of it. Verlaine was still whipping himself into an intoxicated fury, locking Rimbaud in the hotel room and going out for another drink to fortify his courage. Verlaine’s mother interceded once and offered to pay Rimbaud’s train-fare to Paris. Time was running out. Three-thirty. There was less than twenty minutes dividing Verlaine from a blank, loveless future. He had to make an example of someone for the losses he had suffered. In his fury, he blamed this obstinate peasant boy, so intractable in his obduracy, for inciting him to this savage retribution.

             
There was fierce shouting. Neither would concede. Verlaine locked the door. ‘Now try to go!’ he threatened Rimbaud. And something in him snapped. A red tiger raced through his blood. He fired three shots. The first hit Rimbaud in the left wrist, while the other two went wide and embedded themselves in the wall.

             
Verlaine promptly ran into his mother’s room and threw himself on her bed. It must have been huge in his head. Homicide. Mania. Rimbaud’s face breaking up like a red meringue. But it was only his wrist, although the bleeding was copious. When Rimbaud appeared, Verlaine threw the gun at his feet saying: ‘Here, unload it in my temple.’

             
Rimbaud was taken off to St John’s Hospital where his wound was treated and bandaged. No one in the hotel seemed to have heard anything, and Rimbaud’s injury was explained away as, an accident. The gun had automated itself while Verlaine was cleaning it. No one at the hospital could have believed this. The sort of violent altercation that had occurred lives as a charge, a current on the skin. It is there as an animation in the voice, a dilation of the pupils. Verlaine’s mother must have told the lie with her anxiety over her son’s unpredictable conduct.