Disaster Was My God by Bruce Duffy Read Free Book Online Page A

now that Arthur’s problematic return seems all the more probable. For after all, as an enterprise run by two women, their little life has worked well enough. “Quite well,” Mme. Rimbaud will chirp when Isabelle gets too down at the mouth. Down, that is, about being stuck, lonely, unmarried. Meaning—to her mother’s way of thinking—falling into all her boo-hooing female feeble-headedness.
    Which is all to say that Roche, this five-hectare Amazonian caliphate, is a female-run enterprise. Meaning that Roche runs, despite the usual vagaries of weather and pests, moderately, consistently, and on its own—without men, since the Michauds of the world, bottle-sucking itinerant worms that they are, obviously do not count. Nevertheless, this impending sense of
Arthur
, of his return, this weighs heavily on Mme. Rimbaud, who, in her son’s absence, has even further mythologized (if such were possible) his stupendous ill effects on ordinary life.
    Ignore her bluff, then. Her anxiety grows by the day.
    W ell, if such worries chafe Mme. Rimbaud at 4:00 a.m., evening is worse. Evening, that flabby time of the day, as the old woman calls it.
    “Shoo! Out, cat.”
    Clawing the rug, Minet—their one, outnumbered tom—flees for his life. The old woman looks around. At the clock in its idleness. At that fly bouncing off the pane—
whack
.
    “Honestly, I preferred him when he was poor.”
    No antecedent. None is necessary.
    “Mother,” sighs the daughter, “in three lifetimes, Arthur could never earn enough money to satisfy you. Even if he
had
become a barrister. This was your fantasy, not his.”
    Money, another topic, for never are they idle. Even now as supper simmers, mother and daughter are absorbed in yet another little moneymaker: needlepoint. Pillows, doilies, fancy dress panels. Even framed whimsies:
Let Peace Reign Through Our Little Abode
.
    “Sewn, they think, by ill-paid village simpletons just blind with happiness,” says the old woman. Her voice, never raised, sounds like the coughs of a small, asthmatic dog.
    And yet, the deep concentration of needlepoint, the slow, shallow breathing is, in its way, calming. “Because, of course”—another stitch—“he always puts himself on the wrong side of luck. As if”—another stitch—“at this point”—she coughs a dry cough—“he must prove the obvious.”
    “Which is?”
    “Failure. What else?”
    The needle stops; Isabelle drops her head.
    “Maman,” she says, marshaling what little stubbornness she has left, “Arthur is not a failure. He has a business. Property, too.”
    “
Business
. Do we see him in the
Congo
, running diamond mines? Of course not. No, he sells hides and ostrich feathers for floozies. Low-profit trash.
Mon Dieu
, did the boy learn nothing from me?”
    M oments later, in the barren dining room, beneath the portrait of Jesus with his hound’s eyes, they take their meager supper. Leek and potato soup, a piece of Rocroi, a soft, creamy cheese covered in fine cinders and buttered on yesterday’s almost stale bread. There they will sit at a long, rectangular, otherwise empty table with rattling tallow-soaked boards at which Isabelle occupies the same place—and indeed the same, still wobbling chair—at which she has sat since the age of two listening to her mother’s soliloquies. As for the three remaining chairs—those of Arthur, Frédéric, and Vitalie—these relics hang in the barn, tilted high in the rafters, flying away like three witches.
    Once more, Madame rings the tureen with a dull spoon.
    “Daughter!”
    Clumsy steps down the stairs: Isabelle steps, losing steps, retracing steps. Again, the mother trumpets at the ceiling.
    “Good heavens, can’t you ever just
leave
a room? Daughter, you are like a burr, always sticking to things.”
    Whump
, Isabelle hits the bottom stair: young-pretty, old-pretty, man-hungry, her hair pinned up with combs, feathery strands falling in semidisarray. Silence is served. Bowls are