Vagabonds

by emptyque

Summary:

Verlaine and Rimbaud's last meeting, shortly after Verlaine was released from prison.

He sent me a long soggy letter before he was released from prison, saying he was sorry, he was so so sorry. The only thing he did more than apologize was evoke the names of God, Jesus Christ and all of Heaven, saying that as the Lord had forgiven him for such and such sins, and surely He could forgive me for my sodomy and my thievery and my rage and all, if only I humbled my spirits and prayed. Thanks, but no thanks, Paul. I don't know why I agreed to a meeting with such a pathetic windbag, unless I wanted the chance to look him in the eye and spit in such a loser's face. The only thing we had in common was the poetry, and I had since put down my pen. Well, I suppose we also had the other act, but religion had taken care of that.

But when from the window, I saw Paul hiking the path to my mother's farm, and him all dusty and worn from travel, I felt the old sympathy stir at the thought of him coming all the way here, straight out of Belgian prison and without another friend or lover in all France. I guess two people can't live as we did, clinging to each other like orphans in poverty, and not develop some slight bond.

It was spring in Charleville, lousy with rain, and steam rose up from the swampy forsaken ground. The day Paul arrived was cool and misty—the very opposite of that July day when he shot me in Brussels, and I stupidly had him arrested for a little scratch. I was but a teen then—a boy who dream of changing the world with poetry and personal degradation.

I ran out to meet him, not bothering with shoes. My feet had long ago reverted to farmboy's feet, covered in cuts and browned permanently. A few fresh wounds to meet Paul was nothing. I thought he would have grown thin and pale in prison, but though he was leaner, the hard labor molded him into something tan and sinewy, like he had been recast in hard bronze. He smiled when he saw me on the hill.

“How could a man lose so much hair in just two years?” I shouted as I approached.

He opened his mouth in shock, then closed it again. As if he expected me to change.

When we met, he hugged me into his prison-issued coat. “Bless you,” he said. “Bless you.”

When he pulled away he looked me over. His eyes had grown soft, like he had something broken inside him. I couldn't meet his gaze. “My, Rimbe, you've grown. I left you a only a boy.”

I felt my jaw, which was sprouting the beginnings of a beard.

“But,” he added, “I see your habits are no cleaner.” He nodded at my dirty farmer's rags.

“How was the filth in prison, old convict?” I said as I lead him to the house.

“I pray to the Father that you never end up in such a state, Rimbe, but fear at this point only the intervention of His grace can save you.”

“Oh, come on, Paul. It is easy to find religion when you have no access to the wonders of the flesh. You had no freedom whatsoever, let only the greatest freedom—the freedom to be a debauch.”

He shook his head sadly. “I hope I never lead you to such beliefs. True freedom only exists in Him.”

I saw my mother standing in the door up ahead, and lowered my voice to a hiss. “No, you never forced my views. You were always a pious grump.”

My mother always liked Paul. Though she suspected our relationship, she was too Christian a woman to ask directly about it. They would have been a perfect match, if she was but a decade younger and he hadn't such a fondness for my asshole.

He took of his hat and bowed to greet her. “Madame Rimbaud, you are looking as lovely as ever.”

She always blushes when she is treated like a lady. “You are kind, Mister Verlaine. Dinner will be on the table in a few minutes. Arthur wasn't sure how long you'd be staying.”

Paul looked at me with uncertainty. “A few days?” I nodded along.

“I wasn't sure if you had somewhere to stay after being in...where you were,” she said.

“I think my mother will take me in.”

“You think?” my mother clucked her tongue. “My, you poor thing.”

“She loves me well, but unfortunately,” Paul said, “we live in a world where not everyone is as Christian as you. ”

This was a response that fed my mother's pride, and it showed in her grin before she hustled back to the kitchen. Why do Christians always have to compete for piety? They literally fall over each other trying to become more miserable and boring. I ought to have said as much to Paul. That would send the shocks through him. I pictured Paul as an old widow yelling, “My vapors, my vapors!”

“Why are you laughing?” he said.

“I'm just so happy to have you here,” I said. “I missed your sweet kindness.”

My lie made him smile, which made me smile.

I sat through a tedious dinner with Paul and the family, where Paul went on about how he wasn't ashamed to admit he had been in prison because it had given him time to grow in God and all that crap. I knew then that with a mind as twisted as Paul's, I couldn't appeal to him with reason. If I wanted to corrupt him, I had to appeal to his body.

My mother had moved my sisters into her bed to give Paul his own room. I waited in the room I shared with my brothers, listening until their breathing slowed, then slipped across the hall.

I found Paul kneeling in front of his bed, still praying, by the light of a single candle. He turned to me slowly, as if he wasn't surprised at all that I was here, almost like he was waiting.

Still, I felt I needed some excuse. I put on my best tearful voice. “Do you think there's a hell?” I sat down on his bed, shaking with my pretended fear.

“Not like the one you wrote about,” he sat next to me and wrapped an arm around me.

“You read that?” I was embarrassed at all the adolescent rage I poured into that poem.*

“Of course, Rimbe,” he said softly. “I believe in your work. Just as I believe in a God who loves us and doesn't want to send us to hell.”

I nearly groaned, but I still had to pretend. Was I pathetic to want him still? In the two years he was in prison, I only once found a man sympathetic to my needs, and he too turned Christian on me and sent me back to my mother.

“But don't I deserve to be punished? Remember,” I added before he could answer, “how we used to punish each other with knives?” I united the neck of my nightshirt and pointed to an invisible line. “I still have a mark.”

He ran his finger along my collar bone, really feeling the scar my mind had put there. “We did a lot of things that God should not have looked on.”

“All the more reason for me to be disciplined.” I seized him by the arms. “I need you to punish me.”

He pulled away. “That's not my place.”

I put my hand in front of my face as if I was crying. “You won't love me, you won't punish me. I'm nothing.”

“No, no, Rimbe, I love you.” He stroked my face with his hand. When I looked at him, he kissed me. First a soft, friendly kiss, like a brother, but I put my hand behind his neck and drew him closer. I knew I had flipped a switch inside him, because he shoved me flat in the bed.

He lifted up my nightshirt and ran his hands along my legs. “Your skin,” he said.

“Your smell,” I said. Two years in prison hadn't taken away his musk of leather and old tobacco. He fell to my lips again. I could feel his manhood rising against my leg. Mine was long already there.

“Cut me,” I said. “Cut me.”

“With what?” he said in a lust-bleary voice.

I looked round the room, silently cursing that we were in my sisters' room and not my own. “Sewing scissors,” I said. “In the bag.”

He undressed as he went across the room to fetch them. He returned, rubbing the cold, sharp point down my now naked chest.

“Give me as many wounds as your god on the cross,” I said.

“Tell me wear to start,” he said timidly.

I turned over, letting him at my back. “So many,” he said, tracing a few lines with the metal. I guess I did have real scars after all.

The scissors were too dull for a clean cut, but instead broke the flesh open where the joint pinched, sending pleasant jumps down my spine. After a few of these, he bent down and licked the blood bubbling on my flesh. He kissed my ear and whispered, “How I wish I could be inside you, Rimbe.”

“Not yet,” I said. “We need to bleed together, as we always did.” I flipped over and he handed me the scissors, while he still pinned me. I stroked his chest back and forth with the side of the scissors. He trembled, but when I looked in his eyes, they seemed fiercer than they had that afternoon.

“What will you do?” he said at last.

I withdrew the scissors, then turned their point towards Paul. With all my might, I drove the point into his shoulder blade. He gasped and coughed in the sudden pain, but his erection only throbbed.

“Don't forget me again.” I threw the scissors across the room.

Paul kissed the wet spots on my cheeks and I realized I was crying. “I never forgot you, Rimbe,” he said. “I never forgot your body.”

“I needed you, and you went away.” My voice was so weak and pathetic, it was like it belonged to someone else.

He began massaging my anus. “I'll be here for you, Rimbe. I'll be within you when you need me.”

“I need you now,” I said, and he entered me.

We came together, and when I wept, Paul held me. I felt like a different, better person, one who doesn't lie and manipulate to get what he wants. This must be what the Romantic poets mean by the transcendent. Oh, if I could have spent all night in his arms! But I had to return to my bed before my brothers noticed my absence. Paul stayed for two more nights, which we entertained in the same fashion. And during the day, we walked through the country side, his hand in mine, stealing kisses in seclusion, like naught had ever come between us.

Later, when I got a letter from him talking again of God, it was like nothing we did had ever happened. And so I never answered.

 

Notes:

*Rimbaud seems to have lost interest in "A Season in Hell" shortly after he had it printed because he never distributed it beyond a few copies he gave to friends, including one he dropped off at prison for Verlaine.

General notes:
In a letter to a friend, Rimbaud describes his reunion with Verlaine as successful, saying "Verlaine arrived here the other day, a rosary clamp...Three hours later he had renounced his god and bled the 98 wounds of Our Lord."
However, they pair stopped all contact shortly afterwards.