The Rimbaud Luck The Rimbaud LuckThe lanterns are two golden balls in the darkness. “Come on,” says the one.
In black rubber boots, down the hill they trudge at 4:00 a.m., two dumpling-skirted, lumpy-sweatered women hauling steaming buckets to the barn where the beamy, big-eyed ladies are now loudly stamping and mooing, Feed me milk me feed me.
“Well,” says the mother in the darkness, as if a malicious voice has just whispered it. “I now know that Arthur’s knee is worse than he has let on. Much worse.”
“Mother,” says Isabelle, his one surviving sister, a thirty-year-old girl-woman still half asleep, “how can you presume to know this?”
“Because, daughter, I had a dream.”
Setting down the bucket, Mme. Rimbaud turns up the lantern wick, licking and smoking. “Hold up the lantern—up.” Turns the latch, then pushes light into the piss-perspiring beast heat. Cats, skinny barn cats, leaping, mewing, and twirling round her ankles—things needing things. Dehors! “Out!” Then, bumping Isabelle as if she were a cow: “In with you, in.” Claps the door, then continues: “Of the four of you, Arthur always kicked the hardest … as an infant. Are you listening to me? He kicked me last night.” Isabelle is now staring at her in bafflement. “In my sleep,” insists the mother, “he kicked me.”
“You mean, as a baby Arthur kicked you?”
“I mean, I felt a kick. Last night. How do I know if he was a baby? But then I knew—I knew it’s bad.”
“But, Mother, you always think the worst. You jinx it.”
“Jinx what? It is jinxed. Good lord, your brother doesn’t need me to jinx his life.”
At this, Isabelle plops the rag into the hot, soapy water. Rubs her nose on her woolen sleeve, wipes down the udder teats, drops her stool, then starts wringing. Sploosh, sploosh, sploosh.
“Ignore me.” The mother stands there, burning. “Go on with your pretending. You’ll see I’m right.”
Sploosh sploosh.
“And, you hate that I am always right. And I hate always having to be right.”
Grabbing the next cow by the tail—by the balls, as it were—Madame hand-jacks her, bucking and stumbling, into the stall: seize the tail and, rest assured, Bossy will follow. Wrings out the rag, then starts wiping. “You’ll see. Or rather, two months from now you will—as usual. Monsieur Michaud!”—this is the hired man, another itinerant tippler and oddball—“Get in here! You and your two friends. And not too close to the lantern, lest you blow us up, all the alcohol on your breath.”
And not merely is the old pest probably right, thinks Isabelle, but she is wrong-right. Mme. Rimbaud always sides with the worst, and at the pessimist’s betting window, almost invariably, she is handsomely repaid, Arthur’s leg being a case in point. For the past two months, they’ve been skirmishing over the leg and what it portends, especially now that Arthur’s problematic return seems all the more probable. For after all, as an enterprise run by two women, their little life has worked well enough. “Quite well,” Mme. Rimbaud will chirp when Isabelle gets too down at the mouth. Down, that is, about being stuck, lonely, unmarried. Meaning—to her mother’s way of thinking—falling into all her boo-hooing female feeble-headedness.
Which is all to say that Roche, this five-hectare Amazonian caliphate, is a female-run enterprise. Meaning that Roche runs, despite the usual vagaries of weather and pests, moderately, consistently, and on its own—without men, since the Michauds of the world, bottle-sucking itinerant worms that they are, obviously do not count. Nevertheless, this impending sense of Arthur, of his return, this weighs heavily on Mme. Rimbaud, who, in her son’s absence, has even further mythologized (if such were possible) his stupendous ill effects on ordinary life.
Ignore her bluff, then. Her anxiety grows by the day.
Well, if such worries chafe Mme. Rimbaud at 4:00 a.m., evening is worse. Evening, that flabby time of the day, as the old woman calls it.
“Shoo! Out, cat.”
Clawing the rug, Minet—their one, outnumbered tom—flees for his life. The old woman looks around. At the clock in its idleness. At that fly bouncing off the pane—whack.
“Honestly, I preferred him when he was poor.”
No antecedent. None is necessary.
“Mother,” sighs the daughter, “in three lifetimes, Arthur could never earn enough money to satisfy you. Even if he had become a barrister. This was your fantasy, not his.”
Money, another topic, for never are they idle. Even now as supper simmers, mother and daughter are absorbed in yet another little moneymaker: needlepoint. Pillows, doilies, fancy dress panels. Even framed whimsies: Let Peace Reign Through Our Little Abode.
“Sewn, they think, by ill-paid village simpletons just blind with happiness,” says the old woman. Her voice, never raised, sounds like the coughs of a small, asthmatic dog.
And yet, the deep concentration of needlepoint, the slow, shallow breathing is, in its way, calming. “Because, of course”—another stitch—“he always puts himself on the wrong side of luck. As if”—another stitch—“at this point”—she coughs a dry cough—“he must prove the obvious.”
“Failure. What else?”
The needle stops; Isabelle drops her head.
“Maman,” she says, marshaling what little stubbornness she has left, “Arthur is not a failure. He has a business. Property, too.”
“Business. Do we see him in the Congo, running diamond mines? Of course not. No, he sells hides and ostrich feathers for floozies. Low-profit trash. Mon Dieu, did the boy learn nothing from me?”
Moments later, in the barren dining room, beneath the portrait of Jesus with his hound’s eyes, they take their meager supper. Leek and potato soup, a piece of Rocroi, a soft, creamy cheese covered in fine cinders and buttered on yesterday’s almost stale bread. There they will sit at a long, rectangular, otherwise empty table with rattling tallow-soaked boards at which Isabelle occupies the same place—and indeed the same, still wobbling chair—at which she has sat since the age of two listening to her mother’s soliloquies. As for the three remaining chairs—those of Arthur, Frédéric, and Vitalie—these relics hang in the barn, tilted high in the rafters, flying away like three witches.
Once more, Madame rings the tureen with a dull spoon.
“Daughter!”
Clumsy steps down the stairs: Isabelle steps, losing steps, retracing steps. Again, the mother trumpets at the ceiling.
“Good heavens, can’t you ever just leave a room? Daughter, you are like a burr, always sticking to things.”
Whump, Isabelle hits the bottom stair: young-pretty, old-pretty, man-hungry, her hair pinned up with combs, feathery strands falling in semidisarray. Silence is served. Bowls are stirred, but little is taken. It is their nightly contest of feminine virtue, that is, over who can consume the least, pitting Mme. Rimbaud’s flagellating self-denial against Isabelle’s purposeful-seeming vacuousness, periods, as now, in which Isabelle will dutifully sit, rabbitlike, chin tucked into her neck. Madame stirs, then restirs her watery soup. Holds her spoon almost pastorally in midair. Narrows her eyes—her final pronouncement on the subject of Arthur.
“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.”
Then, 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:
He shall say to the Lord,
“You are my refuge and my stronghold,
my God in whom I put my trust.”
He shall deliver you from the snare of the hunter
and from the deadly pestilence.
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 Charleville—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.