Disaster Was My God (43 page)

Seventeen years earlier, not only was Rimbaud wrapped in gleaming youth and genius but he was perched upon the heartless redoubt of twenty—of course he held all the power. He was not, like his lover, a fool in a foreign country who—thanks to him—had bankrupted himself, lost his wife and child, and destroyed his career. Nor was he the grown man who had followed, almost without question, this kid now resolved to leave him in Belgium. To leave him cold without a second thought.

This was the same mesmeric kid who, little more than a year before, had promised Verlaine that their love was forever, destiny,
historic
, even. Who told Verlaine apropos his wife, Choose: either her or me. As for little Georges, screw the brat—die a bourgeois or come with me, now, to
change life
.

Ever the ditherer and compromiser, Verlaine didn’t want to leave Mathilde and his child or, heaven forbid, Mathilde’s money and creature comforts. Yet here he was, in Belgium, after Paris, after London, after Charleville and God knows where, a man now penniless and facing catastrophe, having followed a cyclone into the land of whirlwinds. Still more humiliatingly for Verlaine, it was Rimbaud—by default, the “realist” in this couple—who had to tell the grown man that their fugitive, hand-to-mouth existence was now pointless, ridiculous and unsustainable. Worse, said Rimbaud, it was
repetitive
, and repetition, needless to say, was death. Death, the stupid drunken rows and run-ins with the law. Death, the sleeping in barns and under bridges, the running out on rents.

“But look,” said Rimbaud on that terrible night, in the five minutes it took him to stuff his things, like trash, into a dirty canvas sack. “Look,” he told Verlaine, “you’ve got poems in your pockets, great poems beyond anything you’ve ever done. There it is, mate—your reputation.” He smiled. “Go on now, no long face. Admit it. You got what you wanted, right?”

“Wanted!” cried Verlaine. “What is wrong with you! I
love
you. That is what I wanted, your love, your caresses, your thoughts. Can you be
this stupid and unfeeling, you with your beguiling nonsense about reinventing love? Creating an alphabet for feelings? God! What an idiot I have been! What an
arsehole
!”

“Can you possibly be this naïve?” countered the former idealist who, in those two years, had grown into a large, big-handed hooligan, as rough and crude in real life as he was peerless on the page. He had certainly inherited his mother’s flare for belligerent ridicule. “Good Christ, enough of your whining. I told you at the outset this road would bring suffering.”

“But you were never this
vicious,
” said Verlaine.

“And you were never so clueless. So much of a baby.”

For two days it had gone like this, but now, when Rimbaud finally reached for the door, swaying, drunk, Verlaine pulled out—or snagged rather, from his coat pocket—the cheap, ridiculous little pistol that he’d purchased only that morning in a pawnshop. It was an insult, a toy. But here it was, pointed at Rimbaud’s chest, a little black finger, drifting from side to side.

“Oh, of course,” sneered Rimbaud, “now for the real theatrics!
Connard!
Goddamnit, Verlaine, give me that limp dick. You’re completely pissed!”

“Don’t,” said Verlaine, trembling. “Don’t go out that door! And
don’t
you dare laugh at me, you miserable little prick!”

“And do you think,” threatened Rimbaud, taking a step forward to grab the thing, “do you think, bitch—do you actually
think
you can scare me with this?”

“Stop! Back! Stop—”

Bap
. Puff of smoke, a small dog’s cough—nothing. Confused, Verlaine looked at the gun, then lurched around and saw Rimbaud now white and dripping blood, fat red beads, splattering the floor. It was amazing, Arthur Rimbaud bereft of words, without comeback, sneer, or answer. When,
whump
, the kid crumpled, like a fallen child. Cheap gun, thought Verlaine,
it just went off
. Slipping on the blood, Verlaine shimmied down on his knees, weeping and shrieking, clutching Rimbaud
around the neck, peering into his guttering eyes. Then, afraid he might be dead, Verlaine ran bloody and stumbling down the hallway, bellowing quite as if he were the victim, “Help! Help!”

49
Rocky Redemption

Shooting Rimbaud, his muse, the very Sun—this for Verlaine had been the first blow. The second, in jail hours later, was to learn that, with barely a squeeze from the coppers, the squealing little Judas had given him up. Told them everything. There it was, lying before him on the police sergeant’s desk, signed, in Rimbaud’s own hand. “Here is your guarantee,” said the sergeant, triumphantly shaking this denunciation. “With this, sodomite, you will know well the inside of our jail. Your insides will know it too, eh?”

Then came the third blow—delirium tremens, teeth-gritting spasms so sudden, so violent, that Verlaine felt as if he were being clubbed about the ribs. And yet even as he was in extremis, with even greater enthusiasm the cops pressed him, demanding, in lurid detail, the legally irrelevant facts of their relationship.

Maniacs! thought Verlaine as he lay in his bunk, teeth chattering, gripping his hemorrhaging sides. By then he had confessed, wept, groveled—to no avail. For on the third day the gray police ferrets produced two telegrams, one from Mathilde and another from the Paris police—vile accusations and all quite true, unfortunately. Then an hour later came the final blow. This was the arrival of the jail doctor, Victor Vleminckx, a thick-backed, no-necked, mustached little man who got right to work, pulling gleaming, worrisome articles from his black doctor’s bag.

“Strip,” he said. “Everything.” The doctor looked first at the coppers, then at Verlaine. “And, prisoner, do not mistake me for Hippocrates. When I examine you, you will not move or speak. Or
look
at me.
Excrement!
This is what you are to me, do you understand?”

Naked and craggy-eyed, the prisoner stood dazed on the cold concrete, bloated and lard white, covered with whorls of thick red hair.

“I said,
uncover,
” ordered the doctor, when Verlaine attempted, wrongly, to conceal his privates. “Hands at your sides!
Your sides!
”

Verlaine watched—the three policemen, too—as Dr. Victor Vleminckx, bending close, took the flaccid tip of his penis, pulled it taut, then, taking out his ruler, measured it for edification of the court: precisely 9.25 centimeters. Alas, not overlarge.

“Hands at your side! Stand up!”

The doctor now had a pad out. Blew his nose. Readjusted his glasses, tiny, light-leaking lozenges. Furiously, he sketched, for some time actually, his nose whistling. Finally, reversing the pad, he presented Verlaine with the hairy, bestial-looking result.

“Prisoner, is this … your penis?”

Verlaine was agog.

“I
said
, is this your penis? Good. Then sign and date it, and I warn you, prisoner, do not tremble the pen for sympathy. Then, listen to me, you will pass it to the officers for
their
signatures.”

“Doctor,” protested the sergeant, “we cannot sign this likeness.” The three cops burst into laughter. “This is far too large!”

“Enough! E-nough!”

Dr. Victor Vleminckx now had in his tiny hands some kind of long, grooved mechanical contraption, some kind of telescope or speculum, that the doctor might scowl into the foul, black recesses of the prisoner’s soul. “You, Monsieur, will bend over.
Over
. Over the table—relax.
Wider
. Sergeant, note—you see, do you not, how distended it is. Red. Revolting. Do you not see? 3.4 centimeters of incessant buggery, you will attest—”

Dripping was heard. Black liquid …

“Ucch,” said the doctor, wiping the fouled tool. “Wretched pig.” The door slammed.

Gone, all of them gone, and Verlaine was just as they had left him—sprawled on the desk, naked and defeated, smashed to bits. Wheezing
and sobbing, gasping, he couldn’t defend himself; at that moment, he was powerless even to dress or clean himself, and so Verlaine wept for his weakness and helplessness, anything to vomit out this demon, this darkness that stabbed him to his soul. Guttural it emerged, a deep, room-inhabiting groan of horror, a birthing sound that grew to a wail as he broke into hysterical confession, a dithyramb of frantic, heartsick collapse:

“Lord, I beat my mother! I beat my wife, I threw my own son, my own blood, against a wall! Lord, I shot my friend, my beloved. I shamed my family and my wife’s family. Lord, I have failed everyone. Everyone who ever depended on me …”

Vanity, hope, dignity—there was none. Will—gone. Nothing was left—no, he had sunk too deep; sprawled lifeless across the desk, he was dead in the arms of the world. Flattened, fouled, and naked, wet with his own fluids, he was drowning in his pain, hard soul contractions, labor pains, expelling, like spiny demons, his guilt and self-loathing. Out it poured, sorrows and splashing black poisons, a flood, to the point that he was now panting, hysterical, and crying out for God. Famished for God,
any
god. Crying over and over and over:

“
Seigneur, prenez pitié
. Lord, have mercy. Please—please—please God, forgive me
—forgivvvve
me. Anything so I can die. Die—die—die—die—die …”

When, up in a blast, a storm swept through him, a torrent of blazing, overpowering light and blessedness. Wind and star showers. Tingling crystal ecstasies. White, like sea light. Sweet, like rain. Pure, like the sun, and then with such overpowering love as could have drowned the ocean and lit, in a single radiant second, the whole universe. Words—but there were no words. Explaining—but there was no explaining. Fear—but there was no fear, or sorrow, or want, or desire. For now was the
first second of the first minute of the first morning of the first day
. And look, up there on the clothes peg, see how it hung so brightly, a whole new life and soul, a luminous second skin as white and breezy as a sheet blowing in the sun.

But what was it? God? The god of sobriety? Some trick of mental chemistry?

Say what you will. So filled, so overflowing was Verlaine that afterward he dared not, and could not, speak. Lying on his iron cot, cradled in God’s gigantic arms, he was a man forgiven, new like the dawn, freed like the rain and washed clean on the greatest day in all his life—in jail.

Jail—thank God!

Dry of drink—praise be to Him!

Cold iron bars! Rules! Routine!—Hosanna in the Highest!

Here, behind bricks and bars, like so many before and after him, Verlaine found blessed refuge from the terrors of his inner chaos. And so for the next twelve months, mopping floors, meekly caring for the sick, and, of course, having a bounce in the hay or ten, he was the reformed Paul Verlaine, upon whose quivering tongue the white Host landed, as cold and alive as a snowflake on a child’s tongue.
Good
, the idea of being
good
, gluttonously good, it was like hunger, like thirst.
Lord, just let me be good
. Honestly, for a bent nail, Verlaine was true, more or less. Moreover, in his overflowing, he was now a religious poet. It was ecstasy. Deep in the night, by the glow of one small candle, he could be seen, filling page after page of a small notebook with his jail cell canticles.

The Sky Above the Roof

B
ut then one black day Paul Verlaine was released—condemned, even as he petitioned the warden to let him stay. Please, warden, he begged, just another year! Just a few months until I can find my footing!

Too late. They put him on a locked train with sundry other miscreants and mental cases being shipped back to France. Terrifying, to be released into the shark-filled waters of his own recognizance. Paris, certainly, was death—a plague zone. Instead, he went to the monastery in Rouen, a blessed sanctuary of near-perpetual silence, ready to enlist in God’s Foreign Legion. Alas, the father superior, seeing the pox of wantonness on his face, was all too familiar with such lost souls. Sorry, Monsieur. No room at God’s inn.

F
atherhood, then! Against all advice, the poet returned to Paris.

Shaved and sober, bearing a toy boat with a white sail, the new Paul Verlaine went to Mathilde’s house—she then had moved into her own home—determined to see his son. Who by now was a lad of two or three (or four?), living in what—to Verlaine’s mind, at least—was still morally and legally
his
home, as he and Mathilde were not yet divorced. And so the returnee knocked and waited. Briskly, Odysseus knocked again, when above a window rattled up—Mathilde?