Disaster Was My God (25 page)

“Mr. Rimbaud. Fully one-quarter of an hour has passed for this horror. Sir! I mean,
really
. Will they now
eat
him, too?”

But then, before he can even react, she, a woman, does the unthinkable. Directly, she confronts Dabir. And worse, before his men:

“Sir!”—pointing behind her—“Sir, these are
children
. Now, please, sir, take that poor dead child away and bury him. Do so, I beg of you. Or I will.”

“Missis!” cries Rimbaud, so flummoxed that he forgets her name. “Missis,
sit down
. Dabir, please, the fault is all mine. Mine, and I am sorry. Big baksheesh for this, believe me. See here.”

“Twenty-five!”
snaps Dabir, pointing at the woman. “And be happy I don’t kill the white meat.”

And so the sagging corpse is dragged off and dumped and the men fan out again, nine, while three sleep. Later, nearing dawn, more shots are heard—two, then ten or more. Eyeing Rimbaud with fury, Mrs. MacDonald piles the fire higher. Then, wrapped in her blanket, fairly twitching, she erupts:

“And you
paid
them. And for what, sir? Shooting a boy? A child?”

“Child!” he says. “Do you think, Madame, that that so-called
child
was not coming to kill you? You and your children?”

“Pieces of silver!” she retorts, for she is a Londoner, stubborn and knowing and sure. “For a boy! Really, sir, how barbaric. How
pathetic
. How long have you been out here to have so thoroughly lost your moorings? You, sir, a
poet.
”

“This is the system.”

What is happening to me? he thinks. Why does he feel on the verge of tears, frantic that she will think ill of him, that she will abandon him to all there is now—to pain and more pain. “And here you come as my
guest,” he continues, raising his voice, “of whom I have asked not a farthing.
You
with your Bibles—yes, you, MacDonald. Do you know how it is out here? Do you? Do you think that your Jesus will magically protect you? Do not look to your wife, sir. Look at me
—me
—you who will not pick up a gun. You, sir.
Here
, sir, you are a menace. Do you hear me? A
menace.
”

Strange thing, though. At this final vomit of bile and vileness, Rimbaud stops; his whole brain seizes up, as there he sits, emptied. Staring into the hot, pulsing heart of the fire, it’s the hypnosis of sorrow he feels. Blank minutes. No words.

Meekly he hopes that now it is over, that maybe they didn’t mind; that, being English, they will pretend, cover it over, and let an ugly moment simply pass. The fire crackles. Twigs combust and crumble, fall to dust, as he sits there locked in the stupor of observing, to his horror, the sad spectacle of himself being himself—his inescapable self. When MacDonald clears his throat. Looks up, not sad, not angry, not beaten or even particularly put out, but merely present. In the firelight, MacDonald’s eyes shine gold. And then, much to Rimbaud’s surprise, Mr. MacDonald does respond to his complaints. He does indeed.

“You ask me what
I
think, sir,” he begins. “Well, I know, sir, what
you
think of me. And Mr. Bardey and the others, too, no doubt. Oh, I know. I made a hash of it, and that is true.
I know
. Believe me. I have been sacked and I made a terrible mistake coming here. All very true. But then what? Here I am. And here, sir, are you, and here it is. And so, sir, since I am powerless to change it, well, all I can do is accept it, my black mark, my failure, like a sin upon my soul. Yes, it happened. Indeed it did, and I did it. I don’t blame my wife. Stupid or not, or rash, or blind, yes, I have dug myself a hole, a very deep hole, and yes, before my wife and children I will continue, as well as I can, to make my amends. Amends, sir. It’s all I can do, just as you, sir, all you can do now is go home, home to France, and hope. Hope, sir. Hope for the best.”

The fire burns. The children lie dead asleep and the wife says nothing, as Rimbaud sits there, seized up. Crushed as if by a boa
constrictor in this straitjacket of gold. But it is not yet over. Mr. MacDonald has not said his full piece, and it comes with detectable heat.

“But, Mr. Rimbaud,” he says, “if you really ask me, well, if you could accept such from me—if your pride was not to get the better of you, well, at this time, I think that I would pray with you, sir. Not because I’m proud or better than you—obviously not. But rather, sir, to help you at a very, very hard time in which you saw fit to help us, stranded as we were without funds or employ in a foreign country. So we pray. But praying, well, I know
that
won’t sit with you. Not now. Not yet.
Someday
, perhaps. I certainly hope so. But since it won’t work now, well, all I can do is to beg your pardon most kindly and sleep. Sleep, sir. Sleep and hope tomorrow is a better day.”

Hot shame. At this Rimbaud’s face feels burning hot. Words rise but fail to emerge, and his tongue is fat and twisted, blocking his throat. Not that, inside, he doesn’t rail and struggle against the jaws that now have him by the leg. Shaken, he tells himself that with MacDonald it is all evasion and nonsense and dereliction; that this man is guilty of—well, really, desertion under fire, as it were, cowardice under a different name. Shaken and now trapped, trapped in his own life, Rimbaud tells himself many, many things. He tells himself that they, the MacDonalds, not knowing the country or its customs, that people such as they would never in a lifetime, ever, understand. The terms. The conditions. The way in one instant it could all turn on you. Blow up. Go to hell. How everything could seem just fine—until suddenly it was not.

He tells himself that he only has to hold on, to
go
on, to get home to France, home to his family, where life will be better, or at least not here, or not like this. And yet the more Rimbaud tries to dismiss it and explain and delay it, the more it flies back on him, hot as whiplashes, blinding waves of shame. Shame at his cruelty. Shame at his abuse. Shame at attacking MacDonald, a man unafraid who merely refused to fight. Shame at the sham of his life. Shame at that last searing glimpse of Tigist. Shame—blind shame—that he dismissed Djami, probably the one person he ever really loved in this rotten place, Djami, his son!

“I”—in humiliation, then in almost vomiting relief, he says it finally—“I need—”

“I know,” she says quietly. “
Mr
. MacDonald, will you kindly assist Mr. Rimbaud as he endeavors to demonstrate he has a bladder, if not a heart?”

26
Toward a Heretic Poetics

Stink, stank, stuck. The kid was
stuck
. Stuck at home, stuck in Charleville—stuck. As he wrote to his friend Paul Demeny:

And yet—however incomplete and slapdash—he was discovering raw beginnings of a heretic poetics. Of a brilliant, albeit half-baked, or at least not
fully
baked,
philosophy
. Indeed, an incomplete and magic-infused
manifesto
of sorts, a loud complaint that he would nail, even if it killed him, on poetry’s rugged door.

Beginning with a warning from the Boy Jesus to
poets
especially—to any and all
fakirs
and art mongers out there. For any who wouldn’t die in the pursuit, in hell if need be, and gratefully. As he wrote in that same letter:

And more on the march toward universal progress:

And more still, on an issue that virtually no one thought about at the time—woman:

He was still sixteen, after all. He was not methodical, nor could he be at that age, and in Charleville, certainly, there was no one to advise him; there was no known path and, in a way, almost no point. At the same time, however, the kid was cagey—anything but unmindful of how to get his, get yours, and get on his way. And, to be sure, in his often clueless and unerringly self-sabotaging way, he did at this point very much
want
to get on. But how?

Be a worker? But doing what? Be a journalist? But how then would
he write,
really
write? Write poems for the now aroused workers? Workers arise! But, being workers, would they, could they, understand?

And what about the sundry compromises and disguises required by such pathetic forms of bourgeois subterfuge. Wear a suit? Wash face? Get up early? On this question at last he wrote his young and equally clueless friend, Paul Demeny, this in the hope that Demeny might find him some semiagreeable form of employment. But please, he added, not too taxing. Another worthy theory: workless work.

I
t all went nowhere, of course. But then in the midst of his luckless isolation and scheming and pipe dreaming, the kid meets in the tavern a ponderous local personality named Charles Auguste Bretagne. A sort of taproom ruminant.

Bretagne, a big brain in a guppy bowl. Bretagne, poet of sorts, sucking on his meerschaum pipe. Indeed, a barroom braggart and know-it-all so competitive that he would bet on which of two flies inching up a wall would be the first to reach the top. And this while he played two hands of whist, with a two-hour disquisition on Zoroastrianism thrown in.

But give the man his due: This Bretagne is a genuine polymath, albeit without direction or degree, working by day as a clerk in a local sugar refinery. Bretagne is, in addition, two-seat fat, with swollen knees and a ragged Mephistophelian beard. See the smoke creeping up his beard—yellowy brown with nicotine—even as his rheumy eyes grope this tasty young morsel he has heard so much about.

Ah, but the kid is no longer so green. On the contrary, our lad has done his homework and he is now on the hunt. For this Bretagne,
settling in on his fat elbows and quoting the great quoters, he is, the boy has been told, “
un type louche,
” then a witty code term, known only to the cognoscenti, for
homosexual
. In short, a mark. Throw some darts, the kid figured, have a few pints, and let him pay. Then bum a few francs off him, never to be repaid, and give the old bird a thrill out back by the outhouse. Grim work to be sure, to stand tall and hard, hearing the grim
whop, whop, whop
as the old buzzard—even as he sucks away—desperately tries to inflate (through accordionlike rolls of fat) his pitifully small tool.

Anyhow, the point is, this Bretagne, gurgling away on his pipe—well, he knows certain people and some poets in particular. In fact, he says he knows a certain poet in Paris. One Paul Verlaine. Who, ho ho, is
too much a poet
, if you catch my drift—and drifting hand.

And so with a semigroveling, brilliantly calculating, and deftly suggestive letter—and enclosing some beautifully copied-out and this time actually
good
poems—some weeks later Rimbaud receives and, with trembling hands, reads Verlaine’s gushing reply:
“You are a discovery.… You must come forthwith to Paris … to stay as my guest … as our guest, in my home with my charming wife … please, that I might toast and introduce you to all of literary Paris.”