Pilgrims PilgrimsThis was 1872, Rimbaud’s eighteenth year, two years into his siege of the Muse. It was then that the first blow fell, at breakfast one morning when Vitalie coughed into her napkin, then shrieked. Blood, it was covered with a bright mist of blood, and when Mme. Rimbaud examined it, although she said nothing, she saw everything. It was Veronica’s veil, perfect in every detail, the bloody visage of Christ who died on Calvary, the hair, the lips, and cored-out eyes of suffering. Hope did not blind her. She had no doubt what was coming.
There were of course mountain sanitariums and other places for consumptives, well-known places, good places, and certainly Mme. Rimbaud had the means to send her baby to such a place. But to avail herself of the usual recourses, this would have presumed that Mme. Rimbaud herself had the usual power to leave—that she was able to seek the help of other mortals, to change direction, even to hope.
Pas question. Home was the best cure. Open windows, cold air, camphor rubs, mustard plasters, and of course long bouts of prayer. This was the way, God’s way, even as the girl, hacking and wheezing, began to expel leechlike spots, then bubbly white spots of lung foam, small caterpillars at which she would placidly stare, as if then they might move.
Vitalie knew, of course: the dead-to-be always know. Her body was in insurrection and she was leaving for heaven, and with an odd thrill she knew, devout girl that she was, that her mother knew that she knew. No secrets now. Why, everybody in Charleville knew. Pathetic, horrifying, to see Mme. Rimbaud firing one doctor, then another, helpless before the inevitable. And Arthur? As a male, naturally, he was absent for this part, though Mme. Rimbaud wrote to him her usual long, prayerfully disconnected letters. She wrote to him repeatedly, but at this point the two so-called roommates were in London, self-exiled and successively evicted, such that almost nothing reached him, not even through the normally reliable school chum channels.
But then late one night while praying, Mme. Rimbaud had a vision. It was a vision of Chartres, of a family pilgrimage to the great cathedral, a place of miracles built during the feverish outpouring of Mary worship that swept France in the late twelfth century.
The passion in those days, the fear. Death had ears and sickness had wings, and yet, miracle of miracles, in an ornate golden box the town of Chartres had—and don’t ask how—Mary’s tunic, her actual tunic seen by the actual eyes of Christ. And so from all across Europe, pilgrims and cripples and the blind and the dying, they all came to bask in its holy radiance. A wooden cathedral was built around it. The cathedral burned down, then a second, and when the tunic didn’t perish in either fire, its survival was declared a miracle. And so on that blessed site, over fifty years amid ever-rising tides of darkness and evil, stone upon stone, the great cathedral rose, until it could be seen like a great Ark itself, beached on those vast level plains of hay and barley and oats. Fortunate thing, too, for the devils were so thick, the witches were so crafty, and sickness was so rampant that the poor, fleeing this plague, actually took to living in the church, they and their animals, all taking shelter in Mary’s vast stone barn. In similar fashion, some six hundred years later, the Rimbaud women also sought shelter in the great cathedral of Chartres.
And so on the train two days later, after passing through Paris, when Mme. Rimbaud and her two daughters saw the great spires rising over the fields and trees, truly, as they gazed upon that massif of time-begrimed stone, for the first time in months Mme. Rimbaud felt unburdened, certain, even vindicated. Later, entering the church, the three women anointed themselves with holy water, then humbly entered the towering nave, frankly frightened at first even to look up, as if they might see the face of God.
Vast-echoing Goliath. Smelling of snuffed tapers and old hopes, the great cathedral was a hollowed-out man-made cave of light, a veritable mountain of gray limestone laboriously sawed into pieces, then reassembled into arches and domes and tall shields of stained glass, intricate jewels of red and clear and of a blue found, in all the world, only here. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Long dresses gliding over the massive, foot-polished stones, through forests of columns, the three Rimbaud women thrilled to feel so small, to be specks! To add their voices to this ceaseless, surflike echolalia of voices—lives flying up to God!
No longer were the Rimbaud women oddball hermits, not now. By trains and omnibuses, by wagons and on foot, pilgrims by the dozens—whole legions of the faithful, rich and poor alike—kept arriving, and in every nook, there were confessions, and in the side chapels, there were Masses for the dead, and everywhere it seemed there were votive candles to light, holy flames of blue and red, touched to life with slender tapers. Look, there were saints’ statues to kiss and, they heard, remnants of the Holy Cross. Imagine, tiny splinters of the actual Cross! But happiest of all, for Mme. Rimbaud, there was Mary’s tunic, which had protected the Virgin, she was convinced, from the prowling hands of her husband, Joseph. Who, even if he was the good simpleton carpenter they claimed, was nonetheless a man. So it seemed to Mme. Rimbaud.
Still, she could go only so long distracting herself with such thoughts, numbing herself with these prayers that God would not answer, waiting in vain for the soft, warm rain of fresh belief. Any belief that could defy a word like consumption. Ach, these lying doctors, these useless priests.
Belief, failed belief, this was what crushed Mme. Rimbaud—belief, betrayal, and now her anger, that after all her offices and prayers and good works, that even so, her baby would be taken from her, just as her son, once her hope, was surely bound for hell. Failure then. She was an utter failure, she knew this now. Failure was her prayer. She was a failure as a mother, a failure as a wife, and a failure as a woman. I am a failure, a failure, a failure. But lo, as she shuddered and wept into her folded hands, down it fell finally, a single feather of mercy, twirling down from the stars, whitely down a million miles from the kingdom of heaven. And when she actually looked up, for the first time in months, she felt hopeful, even forgiven, light, almost happy, as she stuffed money into all the sick and poor boxes. And so one after another, as to a bath, she and the girls, they all went to confession. But once inside the confessional the size of a coffin, once shut up in that airless abattoir of sin, stinking with sweat and fear—zip, the black screen opened before Mme. Rimbaud’s frozen eyes. Exposed, she shrank in fear, desperate to ask the priest, this candlelit silhouette, the terrible question that now weighed on her.
“Father, I made my confession yesterday. I talked about my poor daughter who is sick—don’t ask, please. But you see today—today, Father, I come to you about my son, my youngest son, because perhaps he’s the problem. I mean, if he’s the reason this awful thing has happened to my daughter.” She paused a moment, licking her lips. “I know this sounds crazy, Father … but I came to ask … well, how would one know if one’s own child is demonically possessed?”
The shadow flickered; she could almost see his eyes, two somber ovals, like bloody tears, in the darkness. “Madame,” replied the priest, “you mean, then, that your son spits, fights, raves, curses God?”
Garlic—she could smell him, his breath, his armpits, his maleness. “Father, he fights me. And he hates God, hates him. Yes, even at fifteen he refused to go with us to church. It was then that he started writing on the walls, the village walls. Writing things, Father, vile things, even on the walls of the church, slanders against God. And now, Father, he runs away to Paris, living … with a man. Openly, do you hear me? An older man—in unspeakable sin, if you can understand me.”
The darkness ruminated. “And where is his father?”
“Oh, his father, he is away, away with the army in Africa.” Although a hysteric and a chronic exaggerator, Mme. Rimbaud was not a liar. And yet an irresistible fancy bloomed in her mind. “Because you see, Capitain Rimbaud, my good husband, defending our colonies against the Mussulmans, against fanatics—well, at such distance he is powerless to help us. Oh, he tries. He sends us letters, money. It wounds him to his heart. But he is a patriot, Father, so he is away, always away. In Africa, as I say. Algeria, I think. Someplace like that.”
Would the priest not catch her in this awful lie? For after all, closeted with God, as he was, wouldn’t the priest just … know? Finally, after a long pause, the priest said carefully, “Yes, children do terrible things, ridiculous things. But possession is exceedingly rare. Rather, Madame, I think you need to pray with me today. Persévérez dans la foi, this is what you need, my child. More faith is what is needed here.”
“La foi?” She hissed through the jewel-like perforations of the screen. She was outraged! The presumption, that he could be so deaf and so disparaging of her sex—a woman starved and he tells her, in effect, to eat faith. “But, Father, I have broken my knees for God; I have given Him my last heave. How can you tell me this, that I, of all people—that I need faith! Yes, and a pair of angel’s wings, too! Father whatever-your-name-is, come now, do you think that a woman would ever just sit in there, as you do now? That a woman would just sit there on her little throne and tell a mother such utter nonsense? You who have never been a parent! You, on your high horse! Why, a woman would make a better priest any day.”
Here they were at Saturday vespers, and within two minutes, God’s own emissary was rapping on the confessional, his mouth hard against the screen, hissing, “Madame, mind your tongue. And listen to you, speaking heresy, suggesting that women should be priests, while here you bitterly complain of your son’s heresy. And in Chartres, Madame! Of all places! To pick a fight with me? Ah well, Madame whatever-your-name-is, I think the bad apple does not fall far from the tree, eh? Ehhhh?”
She slapped the confessional. The maternal rebel ran outside, Eve expelled without Adam into the evening light, out into the courtyard. There she was, in the strange shadows of the dragonlike flying buttresses, looking at her almost murderous hands, then at the barn swallows twittering, sweeping the skies for mosquitoes—mere birds! Les hirondelles sont hautes—the swallows are so high—good weather, never better … such small, such stupid things. The ants and beetles beneath her feet, even that dog loping down the drive, all living when here her own flesh was dying, dying! Then she heard footsteps. It was Vitalie, doomed and now right behind her, skinny as a stray.
“Maman, are you all right?”
“Leave me, please.” And looking up, she said audibly to God, to the Deaf One in the sky, arrogant man, “Do you see? Do you see this? Must my children chase me? Must everyone ask of me everything?”
“Maman,” cried the girl, frightened. “Maman, what is the matter?”
But her mother charged off, weeping. And damned beyond even anger, Mme. Rimbaud was what she never was—beaten and now ashamed.
But then that night, in all the annals of faith, truly, an amazing thing occurred. In those days, there were no hotels, so they slept in a lady’s house, a very nice lady and, one might have thought, the last decent woman left in all the world. This was Mme. Isambert, an elderly widow of noble mien serving in the rectory. Here clearly was a woman who had suffered—as on the Cross—the seasick pounding of the marital bed, the drunken, often disappearing husband, and the ungrateful children. And so, late into the night, in hushed whispers, Mme. Isambert talked to Mme. Rimbaud, as women do, about this death of which she had spoken to no one except the priest. The good lady listened, and to Mme. Rimbaud’s amazement, she actually heard herself talking, openly talking, woman to woman, even about her deepest shame—her youngest son.
“I fear I have raised the devil. Do you think I exaggerate? We live in shame. Even in Paris he is infamous, living like a wild animal. Worse.” Grief, she muzzled it like a sneeze, pinching her lips.
“But Madame Rimbaud,” whispered Mme. Isambert, “you cannot let him sap all your energy, your peace—not now. Madame, God’s arms are but weeks away from holding your daughter. You can’t help your son now—no. All your energy, your womanly self-control, your love, all this must go to your daughter. To her, and her only.”
Ravaging day! In the snake pit of Charleville, it would have been inconceivable for Mme. Rimbaud to quietly receive or accept such sensible advice, to hear the gentle voice of reason, leading her like a horse from the burning barn of her life. Mme. Isambert asked her, “Do you remember the story of the daughter of Jairus? The daughter whom Jesus raised from the dead? Just so in unblemished white garments he will raise your own daughter. Do not give up. As for your troubled son, he is but what? Twenty? Twenty-one? Yes, he may seem to have no heart, a dead heart. Yes, he is selfish—as all boys are at that age. And yes, you must be realistic, of course, but you also must be hopeful and of good cheer—he cannot remain so forever, and time is on your side. Not until thirty are men truly lost.”
Lost! Was over never over? she thought, swollen-eyed. Was enough never enough? And just as his job was to foul up, it was hers to clean up after him. Perfect, she thought, they were complete.