The Phantom The Phantom“You know, we have another patient due to—to amputate tomorrow.” So Michel, the orderly, informed Rimbaud early the next morning, the third day after his operation.
Lovely, thought the patient, another amputee. Comrade in misery. Such was now what passed for good news.
“And,” added Michel, but of course with convulsive difficulty, twisting his mouth around the words, even as he cracked his long, bony wrists, “your mother and sister are coming. Today, I think I heard.”
Rimbaud gripped the armrest of his wheelchair. Where were his porters, his beasts and hired rifles—his command? Good grief, what was life now? Stewed prunes?
Here on day three at the forward-thinking Hôpital de la Conception, it was time to get up and be ambulatory. So said his doctor, the ebullient Dr. Delpech, the same who had amputated him. Heavyset and bearded, with tiny pince-nez glasses, Dr. Delpech was an exceedingly pleasant man who rocked on his feet and made steeples with his fingers as he pronounced upon things medical. Moreover, Dr. Delpech always had for his patients a new, overly long, and not very good joke—torture when Rimbaud, like a dog awaiting his dinner, was wholly fixated on his life. Or rather the point of his life now, if indeed there was one.
“No, no, Monsieur Rimbaud,” mused Dr. Delpech with a warning smile, detecting another morbid turn in the patient’s thoughts, a return to the bad old habits, the old ruts. “You must not allow yourself to think in this way. Throw that thought overboard. Throw it away.”
Like a conductor, with a genial flick of his wrist, Dr. Delpech banished all such negative, such habitual thinking, to which so many were captive—especially this one, who seemed almost to be plotting against his own recovery. Non! The stump, bleeding, sepsis, his mother’s impending visit, fears of ever walking again, death, the future—don’t worry about it, advised the good doctor. Any of it.
“You’ll be back on a horse,” Dr. Delpech assured him. “You can get married—I believe you were talking about that as you came out of the ether. Young man, you are still young, vigorous, and I tell you now, you are on the right road. True, limping a bit at the moment,” he added, wriggling his large nose as he did when he snuck in a witticism, “but on your way. Do you dance?” he asked suddenly. “No?” he asked with evident surprise. “Well, I do, Monsieur, and I will waltz at your wedding! I will! And you will, too. Did I mention that I am prescribing, especially for you, dancing lessons?”
Rimbaud stared at him in horror. The good doctor just laughed.
“There, do you see? I am pulling your leg! Dear me,” said the doctor, looking for a laugh, “did I say that?”
Laugh? Just then the patient was struggling not to start weeping, to be brave and cavalier—or something. And so, woozily, Rimbaud himself ventured a bad joke:
“Well, Doctor, then I suppose I shall do the one-foot.”
“There you go, that’s the spirit!” agreed the doctor, the conductor, rocking on his feet, with a flick of the wrist. “After all,” he continued, “in the desert, among the tribals, did you ever give up hope? Ever?”
Rimbaud grew uncomfortable. “Well,” he admitted, “I didn’t give up. But hope? Hope was in short supply, Doctor—much like ice in drinks.”
“Ha-ha,” laughed the doctor. “Now there’s the spirit! Just like that.”
It was the drugs, the residual laughing gas and ether; it was the opiates that gave him constipation. For after this examination, Michel took him outside for a “spin” in the sun, pushing his wheelchair down a promontory, over the bluffs where the wind took his steely gray hair, causing him to crease his hollow, wrinkled, now rather Mongol-looking eyes. The prominent forehead, the compressed lips, the sunburn-spotted fingers ground down like brute implements. In his lap, his large hands now jiggled slightly, still on guard, as if a skinny man might burst from the red hibiscus now buzzing with enterprising French bees.
Wearing blue pajamas with one leg pinned, he could feel the sun warm upon his face, grazing his long eyelashes. Before him, in all its sweep, lay the port of Marseille and the inky Mediterranean, upon whose brilliant surface the blood-orange sun laid down a carpet of flamelets. Such sweep and beauty—such calm, such order. This in itself was eerie and alienating, a modern world now so mechanized and routinized and pacifistic. No dung. No stench. No empty, hostile stares—no open hand. For him to go from perfect chaos to consummate French order—it was too much, like plunging a red-hot iron in water. If only he could have gone to some intermediate spot, he thought, some moderately botched place where he might have been better prepared, mentally speaking, for this vast spectacle of civic passivity. Pools of flowers and cypresses pointing heavenward like green fingers. Sunday painters at their easels. Look, actual children—white children—children eating ices in wide-brimmed hats with ribbons gaily twirling in the salt sea air. And blithe pleasure seekers, dandies with canes and cravats and women in foamy white gowns under open white parasols … people at leisure, spending, and merely enjoying themselves. All this made him intensely irritable and anxious, a self-styled soldier like himself among these civilians.
Then he heard Michel. Good grief. Had they been conversing?
“I said,” said Michel with some exasperation, “do you like her?”
“Her?” said Rimbaud, craning around. “Do I like whom?”
“Your mother.”
Like her? he thought. She’s my mother.
“Well,” said Michel, continuing this line of inquiry, “you were gone a long time in Africa, no?” He scratched his little goatee. “A long, long time, huh?”
“I was working.”
As always when Michel became particularly excited or exasperated, a snail trail of spittle issued down one side of his mouth. Working his lips: “But Rimbaud, to never go home? In ten whole years?”
“Of course not. Do you think I was on holiday? I was far away, weeks away. I had a business to run.”
“But didn’t the other fellows go home? And didn’t you miss her?”
“Miss whom?”
“Your mother.”
Rimbaud slapped the armrests. “Excuse me, excuse me! Face me around.”
Michel stepped in front of him. “Look, I won’t tell nobody.”
“Tell them what?”
“About your mother. How you feel about her. I won’t.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Take me back now. Inside—please.”
Upset, Michel turned the wheelchair around. Then started pushing, hard. Too hard. Hitting a rut, the chair gave a jolt. Fire shot down Rimbaud’s leg. But when he grabbed the pain, he found himself holding only air. Empty air from the part now separated from him, the ghost.
“Owwwww! Shit, watch it!”
His bulbous knee, he could feel it, a fireball of pain, clenched in his hands. Paralyzed, he could feel every gram of it. Pure absence, pure pain.
“That’s the phantom pain,” said Michel. “Leg’s gone, but it still pains you. Right? We call it the Phantom.”
Beauty, safety, and happiness—why, thought Rimbaud, why would life show him these things, these now useless things, at the curtain? When again, without warning, Rimbaud burst into tears.
Doubled over, helplessly weeping, Rimbaud sat with his Phantom and this baffling, fervent young man who had so upset him. And all by merely asking him if he liked his mother.