Final Flight Final FlightTwo weeks passed, then a third, by which point Rimbaud was like a flower blooming in reverse. His arm spavined and his hand twisted like a withered leaf. Even the tingles went numb, until one morning, with a start, he told Isabelle:
“I want to return to Marseille. Tomorrow, and no arguing.”
So they left the next morning, and as the carriage was being made ready, Mme. Rimbaud, in her guilt and paralysis, announced the incredible:
“I told them to hitch up Countess”—this was her own mare, the dappled silver. So the old mother said to the cobwebs, as her son, who might have been a chair, stared with great fixity out the window, then said to the door:
“It’s time to go.”
“We have time,” said Isabelle. “Come, come, you two. Surely you have things to say to each other.”
“Everything has been said,” replied the mother, fixing on a lint speck on the sideboard.
“Indeed so,” said the son to the wall clock. “Time to go.”
Certainly this would be the last time, in life, that mother and son would see each other. Nothing had been said, of course, but it was clear she would not be going to Marseille for the end. And yet, as the mother and son stood at that precipice, the strangest thing was how, latent in their pride and hatred, there was love of a kind, a duality trapped in time, frozen for all eternity, like two bees in a lump of amber.
“Au revoir, mon enfant.”
“Au revoir, Maman.”
“Monsieur Rimbaud,” said one of the hands as they wheeled him outside. With his hat the man gestured to the clouds, darkening rather ominously. “You’re sure, Monsieur?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” he said irritably. Humped over in his chair, he might have been a doubled-over rug. “Isabelle, come on.”
Isabelle shook the reins. Recalcitrant horse. Barely had Isabelle coaxed Countess out into the road than the old beast, missing the Madame, stopped dead, her ears twitching. Isabelle shook the reins. She tried sweet, then stern. All her life she’d struggled with horses.
“Isabelle,” fumed Rimbaud. “Don’t tickle her. Give her some whip!”
The Voncq station was only some five kilometers away, not far, but it started to rain and blow, then thunder. There came a sharp crack. The sky went white. Spooked, the old horse reared, then backed up.
“Give her the whip,” said Rimbaud.
“She’s too frightened. We should wait.”
“Then give me the whip!”
Water was pouring off the gig’s black bonnet, spewing down his back. It was a ghost Rimbaud saw, that of his old self, the caravan boss, the sea captain of the desert. He took the whip in his one, not very good, arm. He whipped at the old horse—he tried and tried—but the whip end didn’t crack. Rather, it danced like a fly, until he collapsed in a ball of shivering, wet exhaustion. How they got to the station he had no idea. The next thing he knew, he felt wriggling hands, people’s hands, lifting him down. Bloody hopeless. The train was long gone.
“No!” he said, shaking, when Isabelle proposed hiring a horse ambulance to take them home. “I am not going back. Ever, do you hear me? Not even if we stay here all night.”
“Arthur, look, look,” said Isabelle pointing out the train window.
The next day, nearing sunset, there it lay in the distance, under a mist of violet smoke. Paris, world metropolis, gleaming like a mass of old treasure—steeples, bridges, cupolas of gold. Not for Rimbaud, however. For him now Paris was like poetry, a thing now vacant of interest and void of memories. The dying man never even bothered to look.
Vagabond hope. At last in Marseille, Rimbaud was reunited with young Michel, with the hollow cheeks, thin, stubbly beard, and brush of dark hair. Staring in that telltale way, on the verge of tears, Rimbaud gripped Michel’s palsied hand as the young man stared back, shocked at how swiftly his patient had deteriorated. Moments later, Dr. Delpech arrived. No quips this time. Leaning down, the doctor felt Rimbaud’s paralyzed side and blooming, malignant bones.
“What,” asked Rimbaud, trying to be jocular, “no joke for me?”
“Oh, Monsieur Rimbaud,” sighed the doctor, “the joke is on me, I’m afraid.”
Stepping back, much like Dr. Colin before him, Dr. Delpech searched the patient’s eyes, then the sister’s. Did they not know? Was it possible? Clearly, they did not, and could not. Even now, they were waiting, as if for news of some patent cure. Some revolutionary treatment.
“Monsieur Rimbaud, Mademoiselle,” ventured Dr. Delpech, “I was wrong in my diagnosis, very, very wrong, and I am most sorry to have to tell you this—”
“What?” cried Isabelle “What?”
Already she was weeping, arms draped around her brother’s neck. As for him, the Great Criminal, the One Accused, he didn’t feel frightened. He just felt angry. Embarrassed. Furious at himself for having been so desperate and stupid—so blind, swallowing the greasy elixir of hope.
“I only hope it is soon.”
But this, of course, was not Rimbaud’s final word on the matter. Later, when he was calmer, Isabelle wheeled him around the gravel path in his wheelchair. Otherworldly, the twisted, almost tonsorial cypresses, the pale blue air, and, beyond, the blue, blue sea. In the sun, fat bees bobbed over trumpets of pink and red hibiscus. The rubber tires crackled in the cinders, and the dying man watched how his long, maundering shadow saturated, with his own life seepage, the gravel and blades of grass. In shock. Rimbaud looked back at his sister, so healthy, so beautiful, so alive. Then said not so much in anger or envy as in utter wonderment:
“And now I shall go down under the ground, while you will walk in the sun.”