Disaster Was My God (34 page)

“C’est fabuleux,”
he stammers. “I don’t even know how to explain—account for it, so strange, so distressing at points. But
extraordinaire.
” Yet at this admission Verlaine trails off, spinning and swept out to sea in his own drunken boat—overwhelmed, as was the kid’s intention.

L
et us now speak of courage, intellectual and artistic courage. Another man might have been envious, competitive, might have run the other way, confronting, in a child, an order of talent and understanding that utterly dwarfed his own.

Not Verlaine. Whatever else, he was not another of these envious,
bitter souls forever shortchanged by the world. No, to Verlaine poets were gladiators of a sort. Brutal entertainers. Drink, wench, die—glory or oblivion, one!

Fortunately, Verlaine’s mauled pride was soothed to feel himself the discoverer, the impresario and father of this great literary child prodigy, rarer than the white tiger. For whom, Verlaine fancied, he would be as Aristotle was to Alexander the Great. Or as the moon-brained Socrates was to the boys of Athens—a corrupter of youth. Or perhaps, cackled Verlaine, an
extender
of youth, for he did detect in the lad some deliciously mixed signals!

The omnivorous Verlaine, then, was not without enterprise. If not plans, exactly, he had certain as yet ill-defined
aims
for his young bumpkin friend. And here sagely he hedged his bets, aiming high, even as he aimed low.

37
Poltergeist

But what was the kid thinking, having fallen into this honey pot at 14 rue Nicolet?

He had a room, a splendid room—a room in Paris at an enviable address, with a soft bed, an expansive desk and a large, sunny window overlooking the pea-graveled path of Madame’s garden, a small miracle of arboreal geometry with aromatic thickets of rosemary, lavender, and boxwood, together with that staple of the French garden, the beloved red geranium.

Moreover, for the first time in his tramps, the boy wasn’t a fugitive, sick with hunger and transfixed with the endless schemes of survival. Here, freed from the maternal grip of the Vampire, and with all of his needs taken care of, he could live like a mental prince, in what, for most mortals, would have seemed the ideal artistic environment. Yet, oddly, and without quite recognizing it, he missed the Vampire, for much as he had fought her, she had always contained him, whereas now he felt dangerously
un
contained, as if he might explode.

He jerked off. It was no better.

He opened Mme. Mauté’s window, then for some time worked down long, supple spits. Agile spits, rapidly sucked in and out like a snake’s tongue, this to see how
long
spit could stretch before, with a kind of sigh, it broke. Splat, on Madame’s wrought-iron garden table.

Then things began to go missing. A silver cross. An expensive book. A porcelain figurine. In the material profusion of chez Mauté, these things were as grains of sand on a beach. Nevertheless, the thefts were immediately spotted by Mme. Mauté, second in vigilance only to the maids, terrified they would be sacked, branded forever as cupboard thieves.

Now, obviously the kid “did” it, yet in his own mind he didn’t do it, and in a purely magical sense he hadn’t. Rather, from on high, he watched another him, not him, do it. The Madame’s silver necklace, for example, a cross with a shriveled Jesus upon it. It was the cross’s fault. Morally, it offended him, this symbolic fetish lying openly on the table. With malice, he picked it up. He stuffed it down his pants, the cold metal tingling on the tip of his penis.

Then, lured as if by some aroma, like a fly, he took the necklace with the cross and snuck into a room the likes of which he had never seen. Amazing, these rich bastards. They even had a separate
room
for it.

For here before him, big as a woman, stood a bathtub, perched on clawed feet with a brass spigot that spurted water. And next door in the water closet—most stupendous of all—here was the toilet, the porcelain throne, famished for your ass, your piss, your shit. Obscene, he thought, fondling the long chain attached to the tank—the tank at the very top of the wall—that held the flush water. Pull it. Down it poured, a roaring, frothing maelstrom worthy of the author of “The Drunken Boat.”

He waited until it was silent.

He pulled it again. Whoosh.

If only the workers knew what these assholes had in Montmartre!

I will call it the Ass Dragon.

Why, it made him sick, almost dizzy, how the Ass Dragon gobbled down its morning repast, then roared,
Moooooore
. Looking at the cross
dangling from the chain, he realized the Lord Jesus was similarly intrigued. So, dangling him down, he watched the heavenly argonaut happily hip-hopping along the bottom. Then, being the Lord, His Holiness told the boy that he wanted to see the golden colors of sunset. So, squatting, still dangling his friend, the boy brought forth the golden waters:

Then the kid made an offering. Two, in fact, plopping down upon the waters like bread fed to hungry ducks. Then, again with this vagueness—this impulsiveness that would cover his eyes to what he did—suddenly he pulled the chain and let the necklace go down the chute,
oremus, oremus
. For just as Church doctrine said that God the Son was always one with God the Father, so miraculously was the Asshole always one with the Poet, crudity in sublimity, ruthlessness in sympathy—impulses forever at war.

Good grief. Did the kid realize he had extinguished one hour and a quarter in this malign and useless exercise? But if not this, what? Flopping in his lap like two puppets, his big hands fought with each other. For truth be known, he could as easily have hung himself as set the house on fire. That knife’s edge of sixteen, crazy sixteen.

S
till, in the main, his malign efforts were working! To his immense delight, the hounds of 14 rue Nicolet were circling outside the unsavory confines of his bedroom, the very sty in which yellowy-crispy, all but ineradicable stains of an unmentionable origin had been discovered.
Starched
, as it were, on his bedding—indeed, the very same stains that graced the silken, much-humped arm of Madame’s exquisitely upholstered chair.

“It has come to my attention,” intoned the high priestess of 14 rue Nicolet, who paused to swallow, that she might quell the tremors coursing through her body. “It has come to my attention that certain
articles
”—he betrayed no emotion—“certain valuable and, some of them,
sacred
objects”—with a lifetime of empty hostility he kept staring at her—“and we
wondered
”—of course she could not say
I
wondered—“we wondered if you might know”—at which point he was thrilled, knowing that
she knew that he knew that she knew
. And, best of all, the boy could see she was trapped! Trapped because, in her crippling and self-deluding bourgeois nobility, she hadn’t caught him red-handed like the vicious rat he was.

“Would—” she started, stopped, shook. “Would you behave—would you
dare
behave
at home
in this way?
Would
you?”

“Behave?” His vacancy was as utter as it was utterly aggressive. “But, Madame, behave how?”

“You”—her cheeks gorged—“I think you know how, young man.” She stuffed down a sob. “Arthur Rimbaud, strange as it might seem, I
like
you. At least, I
want
to like you. Please, my dear, do not force me to send you elsewhere. For, believe me, I shall!”

I
like you. I want to like you
. Precisely because Mme. Mauté’s admission moved him—at least in a way—well, obviously, and for that very reason, he could not
let
it move him, to be that sentimental, that dumb. Lie that it was, love was always the problem, especially when it involved females. After all, for all their enmity and confusion, in a certain sense, even he and his mother “loved” each other—much like two bubbling acids, contesting which would consume the other.

Love: as constituted, it was a base and lying metal against which he was an alchemist and sorcerer, transmuting lead into the solar splendor of gold—of love immortal. These half-digested notions of alchemy and the occult—specifically, of black magic, which he claimed to have studied in great depth—were hastily appropriated from the kaleidoscopic
histories of Jules Michelet, notably his work
La Sorcière
, duly stuffed down his trousers several years back at a Charleville book stall.

The point was, he was a poet, not a scholar, and as a poet he knew precisely what he needed to know, and often not one whit
more
than he needed to know, in order to make a poem. And here, like a magnifying glass concentrating a sunbeam, he was studying the very thing he had never really had and thus would never comprehend—love, so called. The great lie that, in his mind, he had been sent to earth to wholly reinvent.

V
erlaine, meanwhile—and naturally with the basest of intentions—was careful to cover his own unsavory tracks with his new toy. Hopped tracks, for in fact, nothing had happened—yet. Still, to throw the women off the scent, some two weeks after the boy’s arrival, the elder poet cunningly raised a possibility irresistible to women: a bit of romance for the lad.

“Mother,” said Verlaine one afternoon when, once again, Mme. Mauté was beside herself about the brat, “I’ll tell you what
I
think Arthur needs—a girl.”

“A girl?” She recoiled. “And who would be the matchmaker—you?”

Wisely, he let this pass. The hook was now set.

“Do you really think so?” asked the pregnant Mathilde, by then so desperate to deliver, and so vexed with her husband’s erratic behavior, that she needed almost any diversion. Especially if it might divert the boy and return her husband. And like her mother, she harbored vague hopes, Christian hopes, of rehabilitating this lad clearly so abominably raised.

“Well,” sighed her mother later, now entertaining this novel, if absurd, idea. “Perhaps—if he
bathes
. If he had—oh, I don’t know—money. Meaningful prospects. Or, dare I say, a
career.
”

“Well,” he stammered, nervous at the j-word, as in job.

“Well, what?” demanded the Dragoness. “Which comes first? The girl or the job?”

“The girl, the girl,” he agreed—anything so long as they were diverted.

“Well, now, I’m wondering,” said Mathilde, whose younger friends, after all, were still girls, but of course proper girls, not to mention Parisian. Still, this was appealing, especially if she and Paul could play the settled married couple charting the lad’s fate. But the class issue—not to mention his frightful manners. Might their baker have a daughter? Or, mmmm, perhaps a shop girl somewhere?

“Well,” said Verlaine, taking her hand, “a girl is precisely what he needs. As I myself did, my dear.”

“Well, my dear,” challenged Mathilde, giving him a close look, “once the child comes, many things will need to change.”

“And,” added the Dragoness, “a certain young lad will need to find other circumstances.”

“Well, of course,” he fibbed. “A child changes everything. Everything.” However implausibly at that moment, Verlaine actually believed he could have both the child
and
the boy. “In fact, ladies,” he added with some provocation, “I
welcome
that change.”

T
hen the second week of his visit, even as other lodgings were being discussed—and even as the siege in Mathilde’s womb continued—a carriage rolled up. Metal reinforced boxes were unloaded. Dogs barked, the maids ran down, the front door resounded, and there he was, the master, M. Mauté, a heavyset man of martial air dressed in riding boots, a belted tweed shooting jacket, and stylish breeches that ill concealed his girth. He dropped his rifle cases to the floor. He called the women and admonished with his trigger finger the two white muff balls barking at what they now smelled. Then, as the women dutifully assembled—the maids, too—he opened, for their evident amazement, a wicker creel.

“
La récolte de la chasse.
” It was indeed the harvest of the hunt.

“Ucch,”
said his wife, standing well back.

For inside the creel, in a bed of cool leaves, lay the dried and sightless eyes of No. 13 in his collection of dwarf deer heads. Teeth, tongue, two stubs of horn.

“Horrid!” she cried. “Get that vile, dead thing
out
of here.”

For M. Mauté, this, perhaps, was the summit of these subalpine hunts: when he could horrify the weaker sex with the mortuary proof of his male prowess. But zut, thought M. Mauté, to come home and find that, after more than a fortnight away, his daughter still had not delivered! That he had to endure still more female
theatrics
.

Worse for Monsieur was this houseguest, this rank wheel of Camembert, of whom he had heard disquieting squibs in the several terse cables he and his wife had exchanged during his sojourn. No, Monsieur was not pleased, not at all, when Verlaine introduced his sullen, unfragrant friend. The creel! Here M. Mauté thought he would show the ill-mannered lad with whom he was dealing.