Last Rites Last RitesWith any long death, there is the long and really long version. Or, in this case, the serviceably short version, for the end was not long.
Within a few weeks, as death pressed in, Rimbaud was not only snowbound with his malady but besieged with God and priests and Isabelle. This was the even more pious Isabelle preparing her brother for heaven. In this respect, her mother had made a deep imprint.
“Arthur,” she said for the hundredth time, “you cannot die out of grace! Quit being so pigheaded! You must reconcile with God, you must. Do you want to perish in hell? That thought is unbearable to me. Terrifying, for then I shall never see you!”
“And what has my life stood for?” he replied. “Freedom, not fear and muttering superstition. What, crawling back to God? No! For the last time, no!”
“Arthur, stop it, you’re being hateful, hateful.” Isabelle had toughened up these last weeks. “Do you want to die like this? Like her? Stubborn and mean and vengeful? Is this what you want?”
Entreaties went only so far, however. Two priests formed the second wave—eminent priests, too, the Canon Chaulier and Abbé Suche. Isabelle told them about her brother’s wicked and colorful past, his stubbornness and fame. The priests listened with deep attention. Pastorally speaking, the poet was quite a catch.
“Let the Inquisition begin,” said Rimbaud weakly when the two priests entered in their ankle-length black cassocks and white collars. This was Isabelle’s cue to leave—God’s dragoons had arrived. Canon Chaulier, in particular, a man of sixty, bald, with tufted gray sideburns, the canon was not one for small talk.
“Monsieur Rimbaud,” he said, “you know, of course, of Pascal’s wager.”
The patient rolled his eyes.
“Yes, yes,” hastened the canon, “of course you do, but please bear with me. To refresh your memory, Pascal says that God’s existence cannot be proven through reason. Perhaps. But the smart gambler would wager that God does exist. For after all, if the gambler bets wrong and there is no God, well, so what? But if his bet proves correct and he stays true, he avoids hell and gains the fruits of heaven. So tell me, then. What do you have to lose by embracing God? By confessing and taking Holy Communion? What?”
“I’ve always disliked that argument,” interjected the abbé, seeing too clearly that this particular appeal was not getting through. The abbé was a harder and more common man of peasant stock, broad-backed, with a pinched face and strong hands. “Canon, excuse me, but the idea of God and dice—well, clever certainly. But I’ve always found it a bit distasteful.”
“A trifle old-fashioned,” added Rimbaud, grateful for an ally.
But then the abbé seized the moment—got down close to the patient. “You see, Monsieur, in my way of thinking, and from how your sister describes it, it is really very simple in your case. Your life, your sins, your state of mind, if I were a betting man, I would wager that all your difficulties stem from one thing. Ah,” he said, catching Rimbaud’s now worried eye, “and what is that one thing, you ask? You, Monsieur, you are arrogant. Towering in your arrogance. Everybody sees it. Forgive me, but you reek of arrogance. Why, I saw it just now. The moment I laid eyes on you. And, believe me, Monsieur, not because I am so very perceptive.”
Rimbaud seemed utterly shocked at this accusation. “At one time,” he admitted, “once, yes, when I was very young, but not now. Not as I am today. Not really.”
“At one time!” mocked the priest, now almost nose to nose. “Please, do not insult me or your own intelligence. You are arrogant, still arrogant. Filled with arrogance. Ruled and blinded by arrogance. Just look at yourself. You are being arrogant right now. And for what? You, of all people, have nothing to be arrogant about—not now. Money, earthly attainments—meaningless now. Your body—already leaving you. As for your intelligence—no longer of value, an impediment, in fact. Leave all that, I say. Arrogance is not strength. Arrogance is just another mask for fear, a form of it. No, your arrogance cannot help you. Face it. You are going to die imminently, and I say to you, I ask of you like a brother”—his voice fell to a whisper—“put it down. Your arrogance is poison. Drain the pus from your soul. Let it out. Your arrogance is a mask. Tear it off. Look at you. Here you are in God’s pantry, in a room filled with good things to eat, yet here you are, in your shameful arrogance, your ridiculous pride, starving yourself.”
It was too much. In misery, Rimbaud turned his head away. “I’m sorry,” he gasped, now playing the invalid card. “I’m very—sorry. Tomorrow, perhaps. Too—too tired now. Please. Too tired …”
He fell asleep, the dying man, then sank swiftly, fathoms and fathoms, into the bent land of dreams. Primordial dreams. Child dreams, before poetry and all the disappointments and manic departures of his life. Before childhood died and the sun, too. Before Abyssinia further blackened his heart. In his dream now he is shin level with life, a small child just opening life’s bright, wide door.
Tall rye. Insects singing. Young, green rye heads swaying in the breeze. And sun, splashes of sun, sun everywhere. Age two or three, he is chasing his mother in the whiskery tall grass at the edge of the rye field. Tricks, she is playing tricks, and he, tiny boy, is squealing with excitement because of the grasshoppers. Scratchy, fat-bellied grasshoppers. Grasshoppers filled with gacky brown grasshopper spit—the grasshoppers now whirring before him, dozens, flying like woodchips from an axe. It is his mother who makes them fly. Causing them, just as she causes the water of the stream, her stream, to ripple and burble and come to her. A small boy twirling and squealing. Grasshoppers! Catch them! Chase them!
Whirring grasshoppers with wings of light. Grasshoppers that cling to Maman’s skirt, his maman, because she called them, the grasshoppers, and Maman’s skirt has folds to grab, a mother mountain that feels soft and warm on his face. Please, Mother, please, please pick me up. Up into that sweet, pure sundrop of once, before everybody changed and everything fell apart.
And when he awoke from this dream, feebly, he called for Isabelle, then wept and hugged her. Trembling, eyes drooling, anything but arrogant, he held his sister’s hand, waiting for the immense thing about to come. And although Isabelle, in her well-meaning way, went on to fabricate many things, she did not exaggerate the sincerity of her heathen brother’s deathbed conversion. In all meekness, before Canon Chaulier and Abbé Suche, Arthur Rimbaud sincerely made his confession and was given the last rites. He tried to take Communion. He tried—repeatedly—but like a boy trying to whistle could not coax out his tongue.
Was it God, then? Did God do it? Did God change his heart?
Because that next day, somehow, Arthur Rimbaud was not angry, not haughty, but just a self-surrendering human, waiting almost open-mouthed for death like a baby for his first spoonful of food. Truly, he was, as they say—or so it seemed—in the hands of God, a man unencumbered and now at peace with where he was going.
In fact, the day before he died, Rimbaud dictated to Isabelle a letter to the Aphinar Line, a ship company never heard of, or not in this life. In that letter, addressed to M. le Directeur, Rimbaud declared that he, a poor cripple, intended to book passage to Africa, passing east over the equator into the rising sun. God knew the azimuth.
He died the next morning around ten o’clock.