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

stirred, but little is taken. It is their nightly contest of feminine virtue, that is, over who can consume the least, pitting Mme. Rimbaud’s flagellating self-denial against Isabelle’s purposeful-seeming vacuousness, periods, as now, in which Isabelle will dutifully sit, rabbitlike, chin tucked into her neck. Madame stirs, then restirs her watery soup. Holds her spoon almost pastorally inmidair. Narrows her eyes—her final pronouncement on the subject of Arthur.
    “Hear me now. Because here is how it is with your brother and his knee. God has given your brother a cross,
un travail
. But, being Arthur Rimbaud, naturally, he denies it—no. It is varicose veins! It is a bruise. It is anything but what it so obviously is. But will he yield before God? Will he yield in his arrogance?”
    Isabelle’s chair honks back. “Meaning what? That Arthur deserves the leg? So you can be miserably right again?”
    Insulted, the old woman rises suddenly, her old knees cracking like two broomsticks. But no sooner has she taken the bowls and turned her back than Isabelle snitches a piece of cheese—openly. The mother jerks around; she always takes the bait.
    “I saw that! Then eat. Openly, not sneakily.
Eat.
”
    “Eat what?” Pure provocation. Isabelle is like a cat with a mouse in her jaws, the tail still switching.
    “I—saw—you—” Snatching up the remaining plates, the old woman shuffles around. They are in a diorama. It is the reprise of a very old play, and we are now hearing something she might have said fifteen or twenty years ago—to a child. “Go on then, you and your brother! Eat it all up! All of it, like the pigs! Root, root, root.”
    T hen, at 8:30 p.m., it is Compline, prayer time in this nunnery of two. On her knees and elbows, Mme. Rimbaud kneels over the creaky iron bed, in the room with the listing washstand, the one chair, and the battered breviary now open to Psalm 91:
            
He shall say to the Lord
,
“You are my refuge and my stronghold
,
my God in whom I put my trust.”
            
He shall deliver you from the snare of the hunter
and from the deadly pestilence
.
    Vivid shadows mass around her, and as she prays, with one hand she pinches her eye sockets, wallowing down on swollen, watery knees. Awe and pain. Crowd it out. Pray for pain, like rain, since it is bound to come. Like the Prodigal Son, Arthur will return. Or worse, her other son, Frédéric, the estranged, he too will return. Fat sot. Years ago she had turned him out. Nonetheless, she heard the periodic reports—knocking girls up, lying drunk in the road. Or once, most grievously, selling newspapers in Charlevill
e—newspapers
, can you imagine?
Mon Dieu!
Any day now, she expects to see Frédéric carted home, found months after the fact like Mme. Moreau’s son, another drunk lost in the snow; who, come spring, once found, had to be scooped up with muck shovels and hayforks.
And this is
my
fault, Lord? I birthed him and I raised him—is that not enough?
    Snuffs the lamp, smacks the pillow. But then, with a final bounce, like an indigestion, she remembers it, another bee in her bonnet.
    A newspaper article. She’d seen it in her solicitor’s office. Just that morning, in fact. This was after Mass, when, to further punish Arthur in absentia, Madame had amended—yet again—her much-revised will. With which, even from the hereafter, she would pull the strings, plying Isabelle with drips and drabs of money, while Arthur—as a moral precaution—would find himself written out. Heh, locked out entirely.
    Anyhow, it annoyed her, coming upon this article concerning this high-hat Russian count, this blowhard
writer
, whatever his name was, with his long white beard and big carbuncled red nose. To whom it seemed idiot peasants and Jews from the city would flock—Jews from all around the
world
—begging the so-called count, this charlatan, to tell them the secret of life. Can you imagine? For days and weeks at a time,