Disaster Was My God (44 page)

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?”

D
esperation 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:

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 brilliant 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
.