Radiant Days (28 page)

The last of his money was gone. His tobacco pouch was empty; even his pipe was barren of ash. Walking was the only intoxicant that remained to him.

So he walked, for miles upon miles, and slept in ice-covered fields; visited taverns where he cadged beers from workmen or sold himself inside horse-drawn cabs for the price of tobacco and a ploughman’s lunch. He was thin, almost gaunt, and taller, his
blond hair so sun-bleached it looked gray. Only his big hands and icy pale eyes betrayed something of the tousled boy who had been startled awake in a lockhouse a few years before.

After several days he reached the village of Hampstead, just north of London. He strode across the heath until he came to the Kentish Town Road, then headed south, through Kentish Town and on to Camden Town, where he and Verlaine had lived on Great College Street. He continued on to the Regent’s Canal, with its stone bridges and placid water, which reminded him of the canals in Charleville and Paris and his dream city. Some nights he dreamed that the canals were all linked, deep below the surface of the earth; other times he dreamed that they flowed through him, deep within his arteries and veins.

He walked beside the canal path, pausing to watch a carp break the smooth green water. In the distance, a tramp fished from a stone span. Arthur waved at him: the tramp lifted his head and nodded, sunlight glinting from his topaz eyes as Arthur hurried along.

He was so lost in thought that, when he first saw her mark, he thought he imagined it. He drew up short, reached to push aside the tangle of mulberry bushes that covered a wall. There was a brilliant yellow sun-eye.

“Merle,” he whispered, tasting the old name as though it were a mouthful of absinthe. He traced the words with his finger, then pressed his palm against the brick.

It was warm—not warm,
hot
. He stepped back onto the path and walked more quickly, until he spied her second mark—the
same glowing rayed sun. Gingerly he touched it and snatched his hand back. The brick had burned his fingers.

He turned and broke into a run. Beneath his feet the canal path began to shimmer as with heat; he heard a faint ringing sound, the clamor of distant bells. He looked up, and saw a radiant eye gazing down at him from the arch of another bridge spanning the canal. Beneath it, a set of stairs led up to the High Street.

A painted sun-eye blazed from each step, rising from a painted sea. He laughed, his own words thrown back at him like a handful of dead leaves.

He raced up the stairs. A boy sprawled across the top step, drunk. Arthur stepped nimbly over him and strode down the sidewalk. Strange vehicles filled Camden High Street, magically propelled: sleek omnibuses, metal cars like those he’d seen with Merle in the dream city, glittering velocipedes. Lights flashed from red to amber to green; sirens wailed; his ears hummed with the din of trains. Far overhead something gleamed across the gray sky—a flying machine like a silver dart, trailing white smoke.

He gazed up at it, his heart pounding with joy: the great dream had engulfed him again. He turned in a circle, dizzy, heedless of
those who pushed him aside as they hurried in and out of glass-fronted stores, or clambered onto red omnibuses the size of small buildings.

Yet strange as it all was, he recognized it: he had lived here. He knew the pub on the corner. He knew these buildings, though none of them resembled the shops where he had bought beer and fresh-baked bread, writing paper and brandy.

Everything was different, except for her mark, that radiant eye beckoning him from walls and buildings, sidewalks and the sides of buses. Like the trail of crumbs left by the boy in the fairy tale: a trail of golden eyes led him from the High Street onto a narrower way, past shops that sold exotic perfumes and jewelry, dresses and trousers that hardly resembled clothing at all.

The trail ended in front of a building with tall windows and words painted across the glass.

Inside he found a crowded room lit by brilliant electrical lanterns. Huge canvases covered the walls. Knots of people stood before them, holding champagne flutes and talking excitedly. No one noticed him as he strode to a painting twice his height, a green swath stippled with jots of scarlet and emerald, orange and violet and indigo. A pair of gray-blue eyes rose above a cloudlike promontory, with tiny capering figures inside the irises. At
the lower right-hand corner of the canvas, a golden sun-eye was stamped beside a signature.

He stood and stared at it, then wandered to another painting, a blaze of vermilion through which he could discern the outlines of a city, with the same signature and sun-eye in the corner.

They were all like that, cities and shadowy rivers with half-seen figures on the shore, on bridges, in boats. The scale of the canvases made it seem as though he stood inside them, as though he inhaled the haze of yellow and umber and pale green like smoke. He moved from one painting to the next, so absorbed he never saw their titles, printed on white cards beside each of them.

Une saison en enfer. Alchimie du verbe. Voyelles. Le bateau ivre.

It was as though she had captured his dreams.

Near the back of the room, he came upon three canvases that were different from the others. No rivers, no spires or towers or flying machines. Instead each depicted a desert, vast reaches of sky and sand, a dazzle of lacquered blue and vermilion interrupted by a bundle of bleached bones, the black strut of a rifle bore; the recurring image of a bone harp, hanging in the sky like a crescent moon.

He gazed at them entranced, until his head began to ache. Around him the gallery had grown more crowded, the buzz of conversation and laughter loud enough to break his reverie. He felt a pulse behind his eyes, that strange vertigo he experienced
sometimes when writing. He turned to look for a way out.

She was on the other side of the room, surrounded by people in spare black clothing. They held glasses of champagne and listened raptly as she spoke, her voice throatier than it had been; more confident, accustomed to an audience.

“It’s not just that I love his work.” A sudden hush allowed the words to rise above the
tink
of glasses. “He changed my life when I was young and didn’t think I would ever become a real artist. His poetry saved me.
He
saved me. I painted these to honor him.”

Her hair was dark, cut close to her skull, and she wore a sleeveless shift over loose black trousers. She was older than she had been, older than he was—thirty, maybe—her face pale, her eyes dark with kohl. Her bare arms were covered with tattoos, images that might have sprung from his poems: towers and waves, eyed suns and an arched rainbow, leaping fish and a man who carried a harp of bone. She had her arm around a tall woman whose fair hair was bound upon her neck in a loose chignon. Each of them wore a plain gold band upon her left hand. As he watched, the tall woman bent her head, and Merle raised hers. Their faces touched, and Merle kissed the tall blond woman on the mouth. The people around them laughed and raised their glasses.

As though he had spoken her name aloud, Merle turned.

For an instant their eyes met. Her mouth parted in a stunned, joyous O of recognition. Arthur nodded, smiling, and she raised her hand, a gesture at once greeting and farewell.

Arthur lifted his hand, mirroring her gesture. A man walked
in front of him, and when he stepped away Merle was gone, swallowed by the crowd.

It was time to leave.

Arthur looked around for a door. Crowds made him jumpy; he wanted a drink. He turned and walked to the back of the gallery. A long corridor stretched there, dim save for a faint yellow glow that grew brighter and larger as he approached, until it blossomed into a great rayed eye.

The eye erupted into a blinding vista like molten gold: a desert where instead of sun or moon a bone lyre hung in the blazing sky, a signpost to show him that, indeed, this was the way. He walked through the passage, the flash of heat upon his skin erupting into a shimmer of quicksilver light, the dying plaint of bells and horns drowned by the rush of time past and time present mingling into an endless, enveloping stream that bore him away.

The heat burned his skin like fiery rain and dissipated. The quicksilver light faded into chill December mist, the rumble of carriage wheels and the impenetrable yellow haze of London’s winter twilight. He sidestepped a beggar whose teeth had rotted to stumps, paused to let a horse-drawn carriage pass, its well-dressed customers staring out at him with contempt.

Arthur didn’t notice them, or the coal-dust darkness pressing down upon the street. He walked quickly, as he always did, and he did not stop or look back again.

He didn’t need to: he knew the way. His life was still before him. Night would fall soon enough. Right now, he was on his way to Paris.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

There was only one Rimbaud, just as there was only one Shakespeare, and there is no substitute for reading his work in the original French. Rimbaud’s poetry was famously allusive, using puns and neologisms, many of which don’t translate easily (if at all) into English. And of course, much of it was written in elaborate rhyming sequences, sonnets and the like.

The translations of Rimbaud’s poems are my own, and I have loosely transcribed and edited his letters for brevity. I tried to give a sense of the flavor of Rimbaud’s work for an American reader: there are many far better and more elegant translations, and I’ve listed some in the bibliography.

In 1870–1871, Prussia was the most powerful state of an empire we know today as Germany. Under Napoléon III (not
the
Napoléon, but his nephew) France declared war on Prussia—a
big mistake. The Prussian army retaliated and marched through the French countryside, and ultimately laid siege to Paris. Cut off from the rest of the country during the winter of 1870–1871, the residents of Paris survived bombing and starvation, the latter by eating dogs, cats, horses, and yes, rats.

ON ARTHUR RIMBAUD

Rimbaud may be the patron saint of young writers: he wrote nearly all of his poems before he was twenty years old, and many of them between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. I first stumbled upon his work when I was seventeen and a junior in high school. That was when I read (in English) his extraordinary
Lettres du voyant
, known in English as the
Letters of the Visionary
or
Letters of the Seer
. Rimbaud wrote them when he was sixteen, on May 13 and May 15, 1871, to his teacher Georges Izambard and the poet Paul Demeny. Graham Robb, Rimbaud’s biographer, calls the first of these “one of the sacred texts of modern literature.” The letters’ most famous pronouncements are “‘I’
is somebody else
” and this:

A year after reading the “Letter of the Seer,” I heard Patti Smith chanting, “Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud!” on her landmark album
Horses
. I was hooked.

Rimbaud’s creative impact didn’t begin in the 1970s, of course. He influenced generations of writers and poets and artists, as well as musicians and songwriters, including Smith, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison of the Doors, Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine (who took his name from Rimbaud’s lover, the poet Paul
Verlaine), Nick Cave, KT Tunstall, Tom Waits, the Clash, Beth Orton, John Lennon, Cat Power….

You get the idea. It would be hard to find a literate songwriter of the past fifty years who was
not
influenced by Rimbaud. His impact on writers has been even more extensive, from French Symbolists to Dada to the Surrealists, Beats, hippies, punks, post-punks, and beyond. His relationship with the older, married poet Paul Verlaine scandalized Paris; it ended with Verlaine being imprisoned for shooting Rimbaud in the hand. Years later, when Rimbaud was in Africa, he was rumored to be living with a local woman. His work has influenced numerous gay artists and writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the late artist-activist David Wojnarowicz, who famously referenced him in his photographic series
Rimbaud in New York
, and the elegant novelist and critic Edmund White, author of
Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel
. In 2005, the French government named the writer and artist Patti Smith a Commandeur in the Order of Arts and Letters (the highest honor given to an artist), noting how much Smith has done to promote Rimbaud’s work in the English-speaking world.

Leonardo DiCaprio played Arthur Rimbaud in the 1995 film
Total Eclipse
, based on the play by Christopher Hampton about the teenage poet’s volatile relationship with Verlaine, and Ben Whishaw played Rimbaud in Todd Haynes’s 2007 Dylan movie
I’m Not There
. The title of that movie (and the Dylan song that inspired it) is a riff on Rimbaud’s line,“‘
I
’ is somebody else.”

There are myriad books and Web sites about Rimbaud. I’ve
listed what I found most useful. The single best book, in my opinion, is Graham Robb’s 2000 biography
Rimbaud
, which is extremely readable and often very funny.

For the most part, I relied on Robb’s Rimbaud chronology for this novel. Rimbaud ran away from home several times between the ages of fifteen and sixteen, and I wanted as much as possible to have my time line follow the actual events in his life. But there are some “missing days” during these periods, and I used those as the days when he meets up with Merle in our own time.