Raising the Dead Raising the DeadThe gravedigger raises his pick, then drives it, with a cough, into the hard, rocky soil. And there in a black gig, not thirty feet away, sits the old woman draped in black veil, a pool of shadow watching the man’s every move. Raise the dead.
For behind the gravedigger, laid to the side in the grass, are two now-to-be discarded grave markers, white, like upturned faces to the sun. Such was the gravedigger’s hard task today, to rebury the old woman’s two children, two of the four, a daughter gone for twenty-five years and the son, the famous poet Arthur Rimbaud, for almost ten. When clang. The gravedigger’s pick strikes another large stone.
“Careful.” The veil stirs, revealing a glimpse of craggy face and spud-like nose. “Monsieur Loupot, there is no hurry. Obviously.”
“Madame—”
“Veuve. Widow,” she retorts in an unhand-me voice. “Do you forget the conversation we had earlier? You will call me Veuve Rimbaud. And as for all these rocks, do you blame the shovel? Do you blame the pick? Who, then, Monsieur? God above?”
“Unavoidable,” replies Loupot, a solid man, beefy, mustached, and sunburned. Beery-smelling, she thinks. And the insolence of him, holding out a rock as he adds, “There is a reason, Veuve Rimbaud, why your farm is named Roche.”
“What?” she says, now aroused, raising the veil, like two black wings. “So we surrender to the rocks? To break the legs of our cows and horses?”
“But, Madame, please, as I have told you—repeatedly. I did not dig this grave or leave these stones. On this you have my word.”
“Words,” she sneers, dropping the veil. “For you, Monsieur, I have but one word—dig.”
Dig, then. For once unearthed, away they will go, these two old coffins. Away from Roche they will go to the town cimetière of Charleville, lofty, sanctified ground at the summit of the rue de Mantoue, the main avenue, where a tall budded cross stands atop an old stone arch. There, with a groan, when the church bells toll eight, an ancient watchman slowly swings shut the iron gates, then padlocks them against thrill seekers and wandering lovers—against any who might disturb the peace of this petit village.
Stone chapels. Urns. Obelisks. Commandment-like stones. Beneath the cinder paths of this marble forest lie Charleville’s finest families: Blairon, Corneau, Demangel, Tanton-Bechefer—folk bunched in their old-fashioned suits and cravats, wilted corsages and gowns of lace, their rosaries tied like mittens round their withered fingers.
As one might divine, however, the old woman’s family does not flow from such exalted bloodlines. Au contraire. Her people are mere peasants, granted from high, as it were, conspicuous exemption into this exclusive club. And, loath as she is to admit it, only because her dead son wrote such deathless works as “Vowels,” “The Drunken Boat,” A Season in Hell, and his cycle Illuminations, virtually all completed by the age of twenty. Consider just one, his sonnet “Vowels,” an early masterpiece written in 1871, at the age of sixteen, and this in a discipline in which, unlike music or mathematics, prodigy is almost unheard of, and all for the very evident reason that, at that age, most of us are as impulsive and unformed as we are lacking in life experience. Start there, then consider a work that in sensibility and diction is decades ahead of its time. Revolutionary, in fact. And, unlike the work of virtually any prodigy in literature, is still read, passionately admired, and even now genuinely disruptive. Poetry that comes with a sword:
Vowels
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
One day I will tell you your latent birth:
A, black hairy corset of shining flies
Which buzz around cruel stench,
Gulfs of darkness; E, whiteness of vapors and tents,
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, quivering of flowers;
I, purples, spit blood, laughter of beautiful lips
In anger or penitent drunkenness;
U, cycles, divine vibrations of green seas,
Peace of pastures scattered with animals, peace of the wrinkles
Which alchemy prints on heavy studious brows;
O, supreme Clarion full of strange stridor,
Silence crossed by worlds and angels:
—O, the Omega, violet beam from His Eyes!
But then just a few years beyond this time, at twenty or so—at the point when most careers have barely begun—Arthur Rimbaud stopped writing. Utterly stopped. Stopped forever, an act itself as rare as literary prodigy. Even more troubling, Rimbaud ended his career by denouncing—in writing, and indeed in one of his greatest works, the long prose poem A Season in Hell—the cheap sophistry of writing and the cheat of art itself:
For a long time I had boasted of having every possible landscape, and found laughable the celebrated names of painting and modern poetry … I dreamed of crusades, of unrecorded voyages of discovery, of republics with no history, of hushed-up religious wars, revolutions in customs, displacement of races and continents: I believed in every kind of witchcraft.
His abandonment of art, poetry, style, vocation, belief—all of it—fell like a curtain on his life, a total eclipse, deliberate and irrevocable. As he had calculated so brilliantly, it was deeply disturbing to art’s believers, the hero-rebel turned traitor. A self-defrocked priest. A willed disgrace, if not an artistic suicide. And worst of all, a man who, some time later, after years of drifting, went on to sell guns in Africa, on the edges of the slave trade. Most preferred to forget this Rimbaud, the cynical gunrunner, in favor of the young genius, the bad boy Rimbaud. For what on earth had happened to him? Had he turned yellow? Lost his mind? Who could square the two images? After all, writers may stop writing for a while or find themselves blocked, but where is the poet or writer, or artist of any type, who renounces his or her craft as folly and fakery—a lie? Who then refuses even to read poetry or novels? Who wants none of it. Any of it, or France or Europe, either.
I grew accustomed to pure hallucination: I saw quite frankly a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drummers made up by angels, carriages on roads to the sky, a parlor at the bottom of the lake; monsters, mysteries. The title of a vaudeville conjured up horrors before me.
Then I explained my magic sophisms in the hallucination of words!
At the end I looked on the disorder of my mind as sacred. I was idle, a prey to heavy fever. I envied the happiness of animals—caterpillars representing the innocence of limbo, moles, the sleep of virginity!
No matter: now, in death, Rimbaud, in Charleville at least, is utterly redeemed—arisen, in fact. Once the town pariah, he is now Charleville’s chief claim to fame. Why, soon to have his own statue! A monster made cherub. Actually cute!
Morons, thought the Widow. Needless to say, she wanted nothing to do with their little charade. And yet, note the site the Widow has picked to nest her small brood, the old social climber. Why, there it lies even before the graves of Charleville’s former bigwigs, at the vertex of the cemetery’s two diverging gravel paths—the first grave a visitor will see. Trip over, in fact. Here the brother and sister will rest under two baroquely ornate markers, even as the old mother lies almost prostrate before them, beneath a great icelike slab of Carrara, the marble of Michelangelo. Night! And stone! And at this one thought, of this bull of rock crushing her bones, the Widow Rimbaud will feel a shiver, then a fatal tingle. To think! That at the summit of this packed necropolis her son’s idolators, the loose-tongued, the easily led, and the snoops, that they will see these seven letters beetling back at them in warning, evoking the dignity of the noble, the God-fearing and now never-to-be forgotten name:
Stop, then. Look down upon this name, once so blighted. Feel lucky. Hug your life like a child and be of good cheer. For perhaps in this life you will be wiser or better or more fortunate than this man and his small troubled family. Or failing that, blessed with better children, or at least better balanced children. Dominus vobiscum! Et cum spiritu tuo.
Back, then, to Roche, ancestral farm of the famille Rimbaud. Back to this disinterring, to this Pietà scene where the mother, Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Rimbaud, sits perched in the antique black gig with two dented, now cross-eyed brass lamps.
As for this cloaking veil draped over her, this is against the gnats—gnats, she will tell you—not an attempt to hide the face of some old shoe weeping on virtually the worst day in all her life. For what can you—any of you—know of the sufferings of an old woman who has been called by God? Spoken to in days of dark, silent, overflowing ecstasy, like those bald-pated saints you see in illuminated manuscripts, robed men with tiny flames over their heads, blessed by the Holy Spirit. Many, many times as a girl and young woman she, too, was so blessed, only to have God utterly and summarily ignore her. Suddenly deaf to her. Punishing her for what crime she does not know! As she would read in her missal, from the Psalms:
My God, my God, look upon me: why have you forsaken me? O my God, I cry out by day and You answer not; by night, and there is no relief …
But imagine: God was silent to her not for one year or two or even a string of years but for forty-five years, three months, and now thirteen days, a lifetime of darkness and privation. Why? she wondered, weeping as she prayed through this blear darkness. How could God be so cruel? Why? To test her faith? Was that it, as a priest told her once? But still, for forty-five years? To yearn but feel nothing of Your Holy Presence? To pray and hear nothing? To give—to give endlessly, like a fool—all to receive Your Holy Contempt? Paralyzed, then enraged, then despairing, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud’s suffering old mother, she would think it was her, her unworthiness, her mothering, her ignorance, her two terrible sons. There was, there had to be, a reason.
When lo, two months before this time, early one morning, Mme. Rimbaud’s forty-five-year drought finally broke. The old woman was just waking up, dawn breaking, golden still and cool, when suddenly she heard Him—Him!—a surging river of force so strong her jaws clenched in ecstatic ache:
LIFT THESE BONES. THEN BRING THEM TO ME. YOU, THEIR MOTHER.
You, their mother. She knew exactly what God meant by this utterance. She—she personally would have to shoulder their untombing, and not merely with hirelings, gravediggers, undertakers, and other such riffraff—no! And so against all argument she refused the services of an undertaker, without whom two gravediggers flatly refused to take her money. Never when the mother insisted on being present, and especially not with the daughter, also called Vitalie, in the ground for twenty-five years. Please, Madame, they reasoned, this was surgeon’s work, carried out, often, with small spades and even teaspoons. But certainly not with the departed’s mother present! Never! Unheard of! Madness!
In her stubbornness, the Widow likewise refused the offices of a priest, believing, in a kind of ecstasy, that God was moving through her, not through his various earthbound flunkies, these priests, sanctified know-nothings for whom, as men, she had no high regard. The blow, however, was when her other daughter, her forty-year-old daughter, Isabelle, the scatterbrain, refused to accompany her, willful girl—and never you mind about Rimbaud’s brother, just one year older, banished years before as an idiot no-good and a bum. Much to her vexation, this is not the same Isabelle whom she had bullied and ordered around for years when the two worked the farm together. Now married, freed, Isabelle is no longer so pliant or scatterbrained. Now she is like a nun who has left the order, talking back to Mother Superior.
“Mother, why are you doing this? It’s ghoulish. Ridiculous. Leave them be.”
“Because God told me, daughter,” insisted the old woman. “Have I ever told you that God told me to do anything? Well, then. Did Noah hear God’s voice, then ask hirelings to build his Ark? Did Noah ever do such a thing?”
“The Ark, Mother, wasn’t morbid.”
“Morbid! When here you two”—meaning Isabelle and her husband and literary collaborator of five years, Paterne Berrichon—“when here you two are both writing Arthur’s, what do you call it, biography? Stirring up gossip! To stir this pot of this stinking?”
“To correct his memory, Mother. To stop the gossip, the lies!”
“What—so your ridiculous brother becomes even more famous?”
Fame: for the old woman this was the true plague, his would-be acolytes and the curious now descending on her with their impertinent questions. Scruffy littérateurs and journalists. Threadbare poets. Pince-nez professors and similar busybodies from Paris, Bordeaux, London, Brussels. All knocking on her door. Accosting her on her street. Shocked that he, their god, could have sprung from such as her. And all with the same idiotic questions:
But why did he stop writing?
Did he stop?
But how could he just … stop writing?
And why to Africa?
And did he not return with manuscripts?
And you are quite sure, Madame, there are no other manuscripts? Hmmm?
Add to this the many rumors heaped on her. That just before his death, when he returned from Africa, he brought back a great final outpouring of poems, indeed, the future of poetry, which she then burned like witches in a great bonfire upon a wintry hill. Whoof.
The Widow, then, is the only Rimbaud present at the disinterring, and not merely to observe, for this is her land, beautiful rolling country, green pastures, oak and aspen and silvery river birches—hers, all hers.
There, to the east, peering out in four directions—vigilant like her—is the craggy, mansard-roofed farmhouse in which she raised her four children, then lived for years more, running the dairy farm with her daughter, Isabelle, the dizzy one, as she thought of her. That is, until four years ago, when, surely on the last train out of spinsterhood, Isabelle was married and the old woman was forced to give up the farm. Renting to a serflike tenant, the feckless Mercier, the Widow then took a small flat in town. Ah, but see it now, below, Roche, in all its sweep. Surrounded by trees and deep hedgerows, her whole world can be seen, the house and the two once-spotless barns that her tenant farmer, the aforementioned Mercier—crétin—has left to choke with manure.
And see down there, see that brown horse, the gelding, now staked to a chain, eating a circle in the grass, c’est la vie since he can do nothing else. And who staked him today after she drove out from Charleville? Who dragged, by her own shoulder, seventy-six years old, the heavy chain? And who then banged the stake with a great mallet, this as bald Mercier the tenant (hoping she would not raise his rent!) begged her:
“Veuve Rimbaud, please, in this heat! You should not be doing this!”
“Ce n’est rien.” She whacked the stake harder, with steam.
“Madame—Veuve Rimbaud, please.”
“Away—”
Whack and whack—victoire. Pleasure immense, to show these two males how an old woman can toil like the stallion, like a fiend, never helpless.
But then, once back in the gig, as suddenly, the fear returns. Clouds blot out the sun. She feels a shudder, then a mounting panic at this long-dreaded resurrection. When clang. Blessed distraction. The gravedigger—his back now a sopping tortoise shell of sweat—strikes another large stone.
“Monsieur Loupot!” she erupts. “Deny it no more. It was you who buried my son nine years ago.”
The gravedigger stares at the sky.
“Veuve Rimbaud, please,” he says, “look at my face. I am not yet forty. Ten years ago I was still in the army. As God is my witness. Back then I was not even in this miserable trade.”
“Eh,” she retorts, “so then it was your father, perhaps blinded by his great beard, who left these stones? Eh? Is that how you evade the truth? Blame your father?”
The black gig rocks as the old fury climbs down. Then, throwing back her black veil, she faces him, her glasses two fiery ovals as the sun bursts once more through the clouds. “It is all right,” she soothes. “We know your story. You are of the people of troubles. A lost, gypsylike people thrown off their land, lost and wandering with their shovels.” Her twisty eyebrows rise. “What? Do you deny this? That you are a Jew—is this not true?”
“We Loupots,” he thunders, “we are Catholics. Dwelling here for generations!”
Hmmph. Does he think he frightens her, standing on his hind legs like a circus bear? Frightened? She who must unearth her two children today? With a shrug, she returns to her gig. Climbs up, spreads the black veil, loudly blows her nose, then resumes her lonely vigil. Crouched over herself, she is like a lone fisherman, sick, soul-sick and now trembling before the storm.
But was the Widow indeed a widow? Only God knew. Certain only was her husband’s desertion, not his decease. Abandonment—this was her widowhood. A life’s vocation, a profession in fact.
The deserter in question was Captain Frédéric Rimbaud, an army chasseur who in the winter of 1852 arrived in Charleville in a splendid blue uniform with golden epaulettes and splendid black boots. A handsome, compact man, the captain was blond and swarthy from the equatorial sun, with the regulation long mustache and goatee that drove to a point, like a spade. Expert in fencing and riflery. And, as befit an officer, expert in the equally vital skills of whoring, dueling, horse racing, and gambling. A veteran, too. As a captain in the artillery, he had served in the Crimea and before that had fought the bedouin in Algeria, one of the myrmidons of the imperial and resurgent France of Napoleon III, an empire then bent, as all the European powers were, on building colonies and spreading Christian civilization. That is, once they could put down the dark peoples, the Arabs and the noirs, fanatics, most of them.
Indeed, in the great cause of subjugating the Mussulmans and the noirs, Captain Rimbaud was particularly useful owing to his great love of languages: Latin, Greek, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, and Swahili. Bush dialects, too. The man was a sponge. Why, in a matter of weeks, Captain Rimbaud could pick up virtually any language. Smart was his problem, the young Mme. Rimbaud used to say, for at first she was in awe of him, an educated man. But then tapping her index finger against her temple, with sly conceit the new bride would add, “But, as you can see, God blesses the slow and the stupid.”
After all, her family, the Cuifs, peasants, lard heads perhaps—well, they knew what they knew: money and timber, land and beasts. But what the Cuifs really knew was how to spit on nothing, rub it up into something, then sell it for a tidy profit to the next fool. And of all the Cuifs, the slickest by far was her father, Alphonse Cuif. Bald and broad, with wads of hair in his ears, Alphonse Cuif was the master when it came to selling the nearly dry cow or the kicking horse. If he could do that, he said, surely he could find a man for his then twenty-seven-year-old daughter, in those days a Methuselah age, connubially speaking.
Stuck—this was Vitalie Cuif’s other great theme. Stuck she was, stuck since the age of five, when her mother died. And since her father never remarried, stuck with taking care of him and her two useless brothers. Cooking, cleaning, milking, chopping, emptying, then washing the chamber pots—all this and more Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Cuif did. Even as a girl, she was effectively a wife for her father, not only a demanding man but also a quite thirsty and, frankly, physical man. Every night at the tavern he drank too much ale, and so every night, once he had stumbled home, he always had a terrible thirst, calling out, Daughter, I’m thirsty.
Her brothers slept far downstairs, muffled. But to be ready, she slept upstairs, at hand, in the next room. Where in the middle of the night she would hear, Vitalie, bring me water. Cold, cold water brimming fresh from the pump, this was her father’s wish. Good girl. There’s a good girl. After all, it was water, just water, and it was dark and all so long ago. Her brothers, with their private boy language, they might as well have been deaf and blind—they heard and saw nothing. And why would they with a father who was merely thirsty and demanding, as was his paternal right, to be served quickly—and with no sass—by his women. Woman, rather.
It almost goes without saying that nobody ever saw anything or remembered anything because, of course, nothing had happened or could happen. Forget it. The girl had to forget it. Even in the confessional there was nothing to say about it, not when there was a male sitting on the other side. For after all, was not the father thirsty? Was the girl not his daughter and was he not her father to obey in all things? Girls needed to be quiet and kept busy, with their foolish wagging tongues, and so they were. There was church. There was needlework and crocheting, ironing, and chicken plucking—plenty for a girl to do. And for those spoiled girls that couldn’t be happy, the malcontents and hysterics, there were options. There were nunneries. Asylums, too. And Alphonse Cuif’s daughter, as he warned her repeatedly, was on the cusp, for she had a nasty disposition—un sale caractère—and, with almost no time to call her own, virtually no friends, save God, of course. Talking to herself, the girl was always talking to herself, desperately clutching herself as she wandered the fields, hair blowing, truly a peculiar and disagreeable girl, everybody said so. In short, even among the gossips there was nothing to think. It was blank; it was null; nobody in those days ever wondered, or would have wondered, why the girl was so. Weeping so. Upset so. Don’t be foolish. Think what? There was nothing to think.
Well, finally, inevitably, the father kicked out her useless brothers, true, both drunks like him, but sissies with no heads for business, no instinct for the jugular. Alone with her father—this was what did it for Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Cuif. Alone, she felt completely trapped, exposed for the first time and shamed before God. And so for the first time she said no—no to what she couldn’t remember, but no. No more water. No more nursely visits. No.
Vengeance was swift.
“Petite salope,” cried her father, pounding on her door. “Find a man or I’ll find you one—blind, or crippled, or crazy. Or even ninety years old. Be a nun for all I care, but get out! I want you out.”
It was hopeless. She was far too old. She knew no men and had no women friends to invent the clever pretexts and make the necessary introductions. But then in the tavern one night, deep in his cups, her father looked up to see, through the swirling blue pipe smoke, an officer, a captain in the chasseurs.
“Captain,” said Cuif père, red of face, raising his tankard of ale, “I drink to our brave defenders! Sit, captain. Allow me to buy you a glass!”
Hooking his thumb on his upper teeth, or what remained of them, the old sharp had sold his share of cows and horses, but never one that came with a farm and a dowry of 15,000 francs. Why, the little bitch sold herself.
And so, about every year, the captain would return on leave, just long enough to force upon her the same old feelings of panic and suffocation. Jammed himself in, bucked a while, shuddered, then promptly rolled off. Wiped himself on the sheet, then fell to snoring. And so each visit, Vitalie Cuif Rimbaud was stuck and bucked, then stuck again … Frédéric in ’53, Arthur in ’54, Vitalie in ’58. And finally, in ’60, Isabelle—the baby.
And of course, once the money was spent, adieu, the captain was gone, too. Slamming the door, he narrowly missed being brained by the heavy brass jug that she hurled at his head. It rang. Ricocheted. Spun like a top on the floor. The two boys stood frozen. It was the size of a head, his head. She picked it up, started smashing it on the table, weeping and shrieking. Stuck again—stuck with three and, soon, four.
“Here,” she said, showing the battered jug to the two small boys. “See what your father leaves you?” She pointed to the two dents. “There, do you see?” Two holes, like the Man in the Moon. “Do you not see his face?”
And so atop the mantel stood the smashed jug with the two dents for eyes and the jug handle for a nose. Warning from the queen that, in her hive, men were drones, utterly expendable and easily banished.
Then, down the road, the farm dogs are barking. It’s the gravedigger’s boy, a blubbery, freckled, red-faced youth riding bareback a sideways-trotting plough horse heaving his great neck and flapping his tail against the flies.
“Bonsoir, Madame.” Wondrous the lad’s unsurprise at the old sphinx. Does she not realize she is pointing an open clasp knife at him?
“Whoa, boy,” she says. She holds up the old clasp knife with which she is peeling an apple, white like a doll’s head, trailing a spiraling ribbon of peel. How tiny she looks before the enormous plough horse. “First, boy, it’s Veuve Rimbaud. Second, I know all about you young jackasses, flapping your jaws. And you did not blabber? You swear?”
“Nothing, Veuve Rimbaud.” Placidly, he slaps a fly. “I do not swear.”
“And you were not followed?”
The gravedigger pops up.
“Ah, Georges,” he says with relief, “right on time.” But then as quickly his tone changes. “Veuve Rimbaud, they are present now.”
“Who?” She feels a chill.
“Your two children. Please, I say this to prepare you.”
“I am prepared.”
Then, to distract her, the gravedigger pays her—he thinks—a compliment.
“I hear they are giving Arthur his own statue. In the town square.”
“Ridiculous. Give the money to the poor.”
How she hates it when the townspeople call him Arthur, as if he were theirs, the friendly village ghost. One leg. Of course she has heard the awful joke. That, against his terrible mother, he had only one leg to stand on after they amputated his other in Marseille. It was an emergency operation, when he returned from Africa with his right knee swollen the size of a beehive with a carcinoma. Twelve hellish days being carried on a litter across the desert, followed by hostiles. Sixteen litter bearers, fifteen camels, six drivers and a dozen hired gunmen—all that and a family of four, two of them young children. Thirty-eight souls, they had crossed the Abyssinian desert, a capsized land of blue mountains, red mud, volcanic washes, and dried-up riverbeds that might have been ploughed by whales. For those twelve days, sunburned and thirsty and losing two men, the party pushed on to the Gulf of Aden, below the Red Sea. Even then Rimbaud’s ordeal was not over. He was fifteen days more, steaming to France, half out of his mind, terrified he would lose the gold that it had taken him years to amass—a pittance, he thought, compared with what had been devoured by thievery and murder, extortion and fictitious taxes. From first to last, his was a life of antipodes, veering from visionary idealism to the guttering twilight of capitalism, the only constants being restlessness, grandiosity, and the sand-blind tyranny of dreams.
At his death Rimbaud was only thirty-seven but, after a decade in the desert, looked at least a decade older. His once blond hair was gray, and he had grown a small razor mustache. In his kepi, he looked, in fact, like a Muslim, and on his chest, in a special vest, he carried some four kilos of gold, a .32 pistol, and, in case of capture, a double-shot derringer: one shot under the chin. Better that than castration, the rule in the Danakil Desert, preferably while the victim was alive to watch. In this state, Rimbaud arrived. That is, before the ether-soaked gauze was laid over his face and night, blessed night, filled the globes of his eyes.
“Oh, of course,” said his mother as she and Isabelle rode the train to the hospital in Marseille to see their prodigal. “Only when there is trouble—or he needs money—only then does he come home.”
“Mother,” corrected Isabelle, ever his apologist. “Whatever else, he needs no money from you. Not now.”
“But he needs. He needs and he feeds, and here I am. What am I, a cow with four teats? And when does he return? But of course, when he is going to die.”
“But why should he die?” yelped Isabelle. The amputation had been successful. In no way, then, was his death apparent—to her. Hatefully, however, her mother, with her sudden fears and premonitions, was rarely, if ever, wrong about such things, especially when it came to death.
When deep in the hole, a boom is heard: deep, wooden, inhabited.
“That’s him,” cries the undertaker. “Arthur’s coffin. Perfect. Why, almost new.”
Go, says the voice and her hands tremble as she pulls off the veil. But no sooner has she climbed down from the gig than the gravedigger calls to his Buddha-sized boy, locks arms with him, then up—out of the hole—he flies. Arms upraised. To stop her.
“Madame”—blocking her—“Veuve Rimbaud, please. Please, no further. For your daughter, believe me, an undertaker is required.”
“Nonsense. Stand aside.”
And look, as Mme. Rimbaud peers down, below the lip of turf, deep in the late sun, there it shines—hair. A shock of reddish blond hair. Like yesterday. Exposed to air and life, in the late rays of the sun, as if through some mighty, subterranean phosphorescence, even after twenty-five years, the girl’s red hair ignites, as her mother stands above, clawing her elbows, then grasping her trembling knees.
Snow, it snowed that day twenty-five years ago, then turned bitterly cold—cold and dry, she remembers. Sitting with Vitalie in her boatlike coffin, rocking and crying, she felt almost pregnant with grief, her eyes swollen like two boiled eggs. The wood stove was pulsing hot and the wintry air, it itched her nose it was so dry. So dry that, behold, the dead girl’s red hair—electrified by the mother’s helpless stroking—it rose, almost living … right to her palm. Only hair, she thought. Just hair. The hair but not the girl.
And Arthur, that albatross, then twenty-one, once again he was home, and again “around her neck,” this after a two-year rampage through Paris and London and Brussels with his lover, Paul Verlaine, a poet ten years older. That it had been the most creative period of either poet’s life—much less that her son had written poems in a language never before heard—naturally, of this the Widow Rimbaud knew nothing and cared even less. All she knew were the horrifying reports from Verlaine’s mother and Verlaine’s teenage wife—of crimes so foul that her son most certainly was damned. Nevertheless, she had come to his aid, visiting him in London, where he and Verlaine were living, openly cohabiting, when they came home drunk or high from the opium dens by the wharves, foul rookeries in which cadaverous men lay on benches, as long pipes—pipes stuffed with burbling black goo—were served up by Chinamen with quill-like nails and longer beards. For the kid, by then, pretty much everything had collapsed or was collapsing, dying like the dreams of childhood. His great boast, for example, that he knew all forms of magic and would revolutionize love. Or the still more ridiculous claim that he and Verlaine would live as children of the sun, baptized in the new faith, in new loves and new hopes, surging like the sea. Rot, thought Rimbaud, all rot. As he wrote then in his own dark night of the soul:
I had to travel, to dissipate the enchantments that crowded my brain. On the sea, which I loved as if it were to wash away my impurity, I watched the compassionate cross arise. I had been damned by the rainbow.
His blindness! His arrogance! he thought. In his four years as a committed poet, had he changed anything or improved anyone, least of all a moral toad like Verlaine? Had he written a word that wasn’t a lie and self-delusion? Had he, who said that charity was the key, had he not been a demon of pride and selfishness, perhaps even the devil, leading Verlaine to destroy his marriage, desert his infant son, and squander his inheritance? And even then he could profess, abracadabra-like, with no apparent hypocrisy, that he had absolutely no interest in money. He was the rain without the wet. The crime with no consequences. The rhyme that rhymed with everything.
All this was bad enough, but then the kid (and it was he who called the shots in their relationship), he told the older man that he was leaving for good, really leaving this time. It was for the best, he said, the good, the kind, the logical thing, a mercy, really. Sentimental as ever in such matters, uselessly burdened as adults are, the elder poet, Verlaine, was weeping. Uch, bawling, and at that moment Rimbaud, as clear and cold as a star, had the sensation of drowning him—of smothering the very love that he had sworn to reinvent. Outwardly, the kid was completely calm, explaining everything matter-of-factly as one can only from the unassailable and unknowing bluffs of youth. That accomplished, the kid went to buy a rail ticket, leaving Verlaine to sob himself to sleep. Two hours later, however, it was a different story. Returning, he found Verlaine swaying drunk and enraged, aiming at his chest a small-caliber pawnshop pistol that he had just purchased.
“Silly bitch! What is that?” demanded Rimbaud. He was almost insulted. “Asshole, do you seriously think you can threaten me with that peashooter? Do you?”
Rimbaud grabbed for it. He never heard the report, but look, he was shot, shot in the arm. The angels had fled and he was staring at his own dark, fast-dripping blood. Incredible. He was not God but flesh, human flesh, he realized, as he blacked out and hit the floor.
And so Verlaine was thrown in prison. As for Rimbaud, only mildly wounded and now fingered as an invert, he, along with sundry other undesirables, was put on a locked train car back to the French border, back to his mother and the now approaching death of young Vitalie. In the end, so violent were the girl’s coughs that bright blood, lung blood, sprayed her white sheet. No poem to be had here. For Rimbaud, it was like watching a mouse held in the jaws of an enormous cat. Numb, never a tear.
“Uch,” said his mother, “look at you, frozen like a snowman! Like a tailor’s dummy!” Yet characteristically for him, his suffering assumed a different form. Really, a kind of stigmata: ice-pick migraines, red-blue blooms of pain radiating out from the center of his skull, engulfing his eyeballs in flame. And all because of my hair, he thought. The crushing weight of it.
And so on the day of Vitalie’s burial, a bleak and snowy day, desperate, Arthur took off, resolved to find either a barber or a guillotine—anything to be freed of this horrid hair.
Three hours later, having crunched back across the ice, he slammed the front door. Nothing. As before, Mme. Rimbaud was in the parlor, seated by the open coffin, that death canoe, purring over her red-haired Vitalie. Carbolic. Heat. That sharp, singed-sweet smell like absinthe or almonds—sickly sweet, death sweet, to the point that he sneezed, as he did with strong peppermints.
“It’s so hot in here.” Twirling off his muffler, he removed his cap. Horrifying, he was shaved bald. White. She bounded up.
“What have you done to your head, you crazy cracked-in-the-head! What, so that all Charleville can see you shaved white! Like some lice-infested schoolboy! Like a cranium.”
He stopped dead. Dulled and death regressed as he was, he was actually shocked by her reaction; no one really understands another’s grieving. “But Mother, I told you, it’s my migraines. My hair was killing me.”
“Out!” Her arm was a saber. “Out, you crazy cracked-in-the-skull—you craaaaaa-nium!”
Twenty-five years later, the old woman’s laced black shoes are two wedges before the two open graves, long like keyholes in the setting sun. And the gravedigger’s boy lied—for look, they are invaded. Look at these busybodies, these ghouls coming out of the trees, five, then ten, then twenty and more, crowding in to see the corpse of the great Rimbaud. Even Mercier’s filthy children—urchins who run wild like the chickens—see them staring in awe at the dead girl, like a child fallen down a well.
“Go!” says Mercier’s wife to the children, but as with the adults, they are held helpless. To see what? Arthur’s coffin of rounded red mahogany is dulled and water softened in places but remarkably unspoiled. Not so Vitalie’s. After one quarter of a century, the soft white pine has collapsed, turned to mush like wet newspaper, revealing what? Two empty eye holes. Face gone, washed clean away, like blood in rain. An icelike mist has formed over the last rags of her white dress. Gone, all of her. All but her imperishable red hair, still burning like a flame.
“I thought so,” someone said, an echo in the old woman said, and right then the Widow Rimbaud knows: she knows exactly what needs to be done. Going back to the gig, the old ghost takes out the old white tablecloth, hard starched and much ironed, which a voice of cherished whisper had advised her to take today. Then, back by the hole, thunderstruck, she collapses, whump, on her bottom, like a baby. Actually surprised. When, before anyone can stop her, she swings her old legs down into the hole, into the rushing, cave-smelling darkness. Holding up her arms.
“Down. You heard me, down.”
“But, Madame,” reasoned the gravedigger, “there is no room for two—”
“No, only I. Only her mother. Down, do you hear me?”
And patting Arthur’s coffin—Hold on, you—she feels it hot in her hand, Vitalie’s hair, her actual hair, red and still warm. And what else? Ribs. Vertebrae. Eaten-out bones. Tiny pebbles of fingers, like pearls on a string. Now, however, the widow is absolutely calm, for this is a woman’s work, putting such disorder to right. Lay the table. Lay it down, cleanly. Lay it down, resolutely, like the old family silver. Nothing asunder. Put the bones each to each, the knives, the forks, the spoons. Lay it straight. Lay it all, all of her, into this small wooden box, not even a chest, which they swing down to her, as if it were any help. Then, when this is done, she takes out the scissors, which just that morning this same vesperslike voice had advised her, Slip these into your pocket.
Snip. See how it cuts, like fresh flowers, her beautiful hair. See how it fits in her hand, then how it feels, deep in her pocket, safe with her keys and paring knife—hers, still hers.
She reaches up exhausted. Why, God? Can’t I just stay? Please, with my Vitalie? Let them cover me, with dirt, clods, and shovelfuls, useless old woman. When, stumbling, she falls against it, hard. Hard like an elbow, it pokes her. So she pokes it back—him, Arthur’s coffin.
And she thinks, Mahogany. Arthur, of course, he got the mahogany, while his poor sister, she got the soft pine, to collapse on her, like a failed cake. And above, in the light, in a circle of faces, blinded, here are all these hands, these strangers, these horrid wriggling fingers grabbing at her. And scarcely do they haul her up than look! Of course. They forget the old lady. Instead, they are throwing down ropes. Ropes to take him out first, the great Arthur! Before even his poor sister!
“Did you not hear me?” she cries. Before thirty witnesses, like a devil, it leaps from her throat. “Are you deaf in your ears? I said her first—her, not him.”
Good, so she said it. Good. Then she looks down at him, helpless as a mouse squashed under her two black shoes.
“Wait for heaven, Arthur Rimbaud—big shot, you! This time you will wait and like it, boy, just as I have waited on you.”