Disaster Was My God (7 page)

“Hear me now. Because here is how it is with your brother and his knee. God has given your brother a cross,
un travail
. But, being Arthur Rimbaud, naturally, he denies it—no. It is varicose veins! It is a bruise. It is anything but what it so obviously is. But will he yield before God? Will he yield in his arrogance?”

Isabelle’s chair honks back. “Meaning what? That Arthur deserves the leg? So you can be miserably right again?”

Insulted, the old woman rises suddenly, her old knees cracking like two broomsticks. But no sooner has she taken the bowls and turned her back than Isabelle snitches a piece of cheese—openly. The mother jerks around; she always takes the bait.

“I saw that! Then eat. Openly, not sneakily.
Eat.
”

“Eat what?” Pure provocation. Isabelle is like a cat with a mouse in her jaws, the tail still switching.

“I—saw—you—” Snatching up the remaining plates, the old woman shuffles around. They are in a diorama. It is the reprise of a very old play, and we are now hearing something she might have said fifteen or twenty years ago—to a child. “Go on then, you and your brother! Eat it all up! All of it, like the pigs! Root, root, root.”

T
hen, at 8:30 p.m., it is Compline, prayer time in this nunnery of two. On her knees and elbows, Mme. Rimbaud kneels over the creaky iron bed, in the room with the listing washstand, the one chair, and the battered breviary now open to Psalm 91:

Vivid shadows mass around her, and as she prays, with one hand she pinches her eye sockets, wallowing down on swollen, watery knees. Awe and pain. Crowd it out. Pray for pain, like rain, since it is bound to come. Like the Prodigal Son, Arthur will return. Or worse, her other son, Frédéric, the estranged, he too will return. Fat sot. Years ago she had turned him out. Nonetheless, she heard the periodic reports—knocking girls up, lying drunk in the road. Or once, most grievously, selling newspapers in Charlevill
e—newspapers
, can you imagine?
Mon Dieu!
Any day now, she expects to see Frédéric carted home, found months after the fact like Mme. Moreau’s son, another drunk lost in the snow; who, come spring, once found, had to be scooped up with muck shovels and hayforks.
And this is
my
fault, Lord? I birthed him and I raised him—is that not enough?

Snuffs the lamp, smacks the pillow. But then, with a final bounce, like an indigestion, she remembers it, another bee in her bonnet.

A newspaper article. She’d seen it in her solicitor’s office. Just that morning, in fact. This was after Mass, when, to further punish Arthur in absentia, Madame had amended—yet again—her much-revised will. With which, even from the hereafter, she would pull the strings, plying Isabelle with drips and drabs of money, while Arthur—as a moral precaution—would find himself written out. Heh, locked out entirely.

Anyhow, it annoyed her, coming upon this article concerning this high-hat Russian count, this blowhard
writer
, whatever his name was, with his long white beard and big carbuncled red nose. To whom it seemed idiot peasants and Jews from the city would flock—Jews from all around the
world
—begging the so-called count, this charlatan, to tell them the secret of life. Can you imagine? For days and weeks at a time, they camp on his lawn like locusts, these softheads, denuding his apple trees and picking his pole beans bare. But finally, glory be! The door opens and here he is with his red snout, white beard, and big Cossack boots. And on their knees, how they grovel before the old jackass.

“Please, Count. Please tell us the secret of life.”

Secret—another
male
raising his little finger, serving up his horse apples as if they were Sunday dumplings. Heh, thinks the old woman,
counting her black sheep. Send these dunderheads to me—I’ll tell them the secret. A woman’s secret, too. Pick a rock. Pick up a good heavy one, then lug it between your legs for sixty-odd years. Secret!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
.

4
Dogs

The dogs of Harar, the incessant dogs. Every night, the town dogs battle the hyenas for the butcher’s slops and the beggar whom no one will bury, and tonight, Rimbaud’s last night, it’s terrible, packs of dogs insanely baying and barking and scrapping until they are covered with bloody slobber. No one calls them. No one owns them. And so it escalates, the snarling and barking, until the shriek that sends his heart exploding through his chest.

Never before in Abyssinia, not even growing up on a farm, had he realized that animals can scream, not like this. The victim, just below his window, is one of the larger dogs, but he is nothing once the hyena bitch sinks her teeth into his windpipe. Fanged apes. To Rimbaud, the hyenas are almost mythological, terrible raging sphinxes. Half creatures, with big heads and powerful chests. And yet absurdly propelled by puny, withered legs—chicken legs, almost.

Beware the hyena’s stare. Yellowy eyes. Hypnotic, never veering, locked on her quarry. And never snarling or growling like a dog but rather emitting panting, fretting, seemingly frightened yips. Give up, mutt. The dog stupid enough to lunge for her, even the largest, has no chance, and the mad thing is the dogs always lose, always, night after night, hyena killing dog, dog killing dog, until once more it stops. And then, candle lapping the walls, in her nightgown—with that seamlessness of dreams—his mother shuffles into his room. Pokes him—up.

Arthur, Arthur, why aren’t you up! You have an examination
.

In his boyhood and teenage years, she was forever rousting him out of bed for endless rounds of study terminated by examinations lasting, some of them, for four and five hours. Indeed, by the age of fourteen, the
boy felt like a great waddling foie gras goose—not with a succulent liver but rather with force-fed mental muscle. Ramming the funnel down his throat, the masters filled his young gullet with grain, brain grain, and, to be sure, for a time the boy exulted in the attention, the power to dazzle, the prizes, the whispering girls, and the approving mothers pointing at him, this model boy—why, the smartest boy in the county, they said, if not the smartest boy in all of France! All this was his due, and each May Mme. Rimbaud would gloat to see his name,
their
name, printed in the local rags: Arthur Rimbaud,
her
Arthur, inseparable from her. Rimbaud on the
tableau d’honneur
. Arthur Rimbaud. Winner of all the laurels.

Most memorable, every May, were those ordeals of mental single combat—the national poetry contest, the Concours général. Locked alone in a classroom, in his blue trousers, black coat, and the stringy, sagging tie then in fashion—in this cage the boy was given nothing but some sheets of foolscap and a pencil with which he wrote, to the clock, over many hours, for many preening masters, overweeningly long poems. Show-offy poems. And make no mistake: these masters were immensely proud of
their
boy, poor, tireless wretch. God help him, to be
hers
, this woman always waving her arms when she came to the school. Doing, as the masters put it, her dreaded
da-di-da
, as if she were some insane conductor. Bah! she exclaimed, dismissing them.
Chiens savants
, clever, performing dogs.

Long, intricate, and metrically complex, these exercises took as their models a range of classical Latin poetic forms: dactylic hexameter, followed, perhaps, by elegiac couplets and hendecasyllables. Long beat, short beat, spondaic leaps—well, whatever the case, these classic trotters were then arbitrarily applied to unimaginative or simply torpid topics not of the boy’s choosing: In Praise of Justice. Or, The Shadow of Dido on the Ruins of Carthage. Or, still more rousingly, The Ashes of Themistocles Returned to Athens. On your mark and get set, messieurs, for the clock is ticking.
Go
.

And off he went, face flat to the table, and no tapping, peter pulling, or shilly-shallying—
pensez-vous
! The boy was a mad machine. Shoulder
bones bunched, cowlick erect, fidgeting and cracking his knuckles, the boy wrote these poetic parlor tricks almost metronomically, yet with such verve that word of his prowess reached even the dusty rococo-encrusted, bust-presiding offices of the highest educational authorities of Paris. Who duly dispatched two bearded, black-suited, black-top-hatted worthies to palpate the lad’s lobes. Learned men, Gobineau’s disciples, the two men were steeped in the new but promising science of phrenology, a way to determine character as revealed in the facial-cranial-racial structures.

Indeed, at none other than the Faculté de médecine de Paris—in the medical amphitheater—these same two worthies had presented before a crowd of two hundred in their top hats and waistcoats. Or rather, two hundred and four, if one counted the four male cadavers lying naked on blood-guttered marble slabs. Gaslight reflectors illuminated the scene. Marbleized white flesh. Wide-open faces unreacting to the fly that landed upon the cheek of the middle man, then, inching, proceeded to explore the recesses of his nose.
Voyez …
see here, gentlemen, cried the moderator, here we have a common laborer—a simpleton—along with a learned professor, a vicious murderer, and a Jew. A little game, then, doctors!
Alors
, guess who, eh, guess who.

“This is what we will be looking at,” said the taller of the two men, unfurling before Mme. Rimbaud’s eyes a sheet on which she saw depicted a head dissected into the cranial zodiac. Specifically, the twenty-seven mental organs forming the worm bucket of human attributes otherwise known as
character
.

“Cuts of beef,” said she, unimpressed. Again, she flapped her palm. “No nonsense now, Monsieur, twenty francs. In my hand.”

“But please, Madame, in the cause of science. For the pride of France.”

“Come, come,” said the hand. “Do you think me a fool, Monsieur? I have four at home, and no man to feed us. Pay up.”

Greedy peasant—they paid her. Whereupon they turned to the boy’s cranium, pounded like a fresh scaloppini from his poetical exertions. As for the subject of these inquiries, the two doctors did not engage
him
with their chimerical depiction of the brain. Nevertheless, they thought it peculiar, if not impertinent, that so clever a boy did not inquire and in fact evinced no interest whatsoever, the little snot. Well, really, this taunting knuckle cracker! This desk humper and peter puller with his supercilious smirk!

“Monsieur Rimbaud,” intoned the taller and dourer of the two, “follow, please, my two fingers.”

The man’s beard was tallow slick and otterlike, and so, in his utter boredom, the boy had named him the Otter, then decided the other was the Hedgehog, this for his bristly puffball of a beard. In fact, lying under the Hedgehog’s prognathous jaw, this hirsute cud, the boy could see copious crumbs and even yellow speckles from that morning’s egg yolk.

“Please, Doctor, the calipers.”

Shaped like a giant C, these were measuring instruments fitted with spindly tines and queer springs, which they then fitted over the lad’s mental antlers. And still not a howl, as they peered into the phantasmagoria of his mental sensorium.

“Here, here,” said the Otter, plastering down, like flypapers, the greasy flaps of his now exercised hair. “
Attendez
, Monsieur Rimbaud.”

Whereupon he struck a metallic tuning fork, then moved it—furiously humming like a wasp—before the boy’s blank eyes, searching for some reaction,
any
reaction. Still nothing. Whereupon the Hedgehog—first asking the little know-it-all to recite, in Greek, two hundred lines of Homer—clapped his hands over the boy’s suspiciously small ears,
deviant ears
, then bade him recite, this time in Latin, two hundred lines of Virgil.
The Aeneid
, book 1.

“Louder, please,” said the Hedgehog, as the boy gargled and the Otter followed word for word, with his trot—

Perfect to the syllable, the little rat! Then the trouble started.

“That’s enough,” said the mother, jingling her twenty pieces of silver. “Come now. You have had your fun.”

“Patience, Madame,” said he, standing well back. “We have scarcely begun.”

“I would like,” said the boy, “some water.”

“Later,” shushed the Hedgehog. At this he got down to eye level with him, as one might with an obstinate schnauzer.

“A question, Monsieur Rimbaud. I know, I think, what
we
think. But what do
you
think about yourself? Of a boy such as yourself. Such a bright boy. What? I wonder.”