Disaster Was My God (12 page)

The sagging vest is like a pair of lungs with armholes; it is heavier than life, this corset of gold bars. But this weight that he feels, it is not because of what this small fortune
represents
, or even the years that it might purchase. Nor is it because of the years of suffering, penury, and odiousness that it took to amass his hoard, such as it is.

No, what stops Rimbaud cold is the terror of losing it all—of losing it at the last possible moment. Of being pulled down, like a wildebeest, and just when he is on the verge of hope.

Hope is the wound, he realizes. Of all people and at the worst possible time, he, Arthur Rimbaud, realist, scientist, cynic, is actually suffering from hope. Despite everything, he hopes.

W
ell, he bluffs himself, buckling on this vest of gold. No one will take it without a fight. For inside this muscular gold cuirass he stuffs a .32 revolver. Then, in his right boot, in case of capture, a two-shot derringer, once in the head for a speedy exit. While alive, however, there are other remedies. For reaching under the bed, Djami hands him a double-barrel 10-gauge shotgun, a bludgeon of Damascus steel loaded with 00 buckshot. Nine balls fat as hailstones. Nine in one blast—enough to bury a charging lion.

God, however—Allah, or Jesus of the Ascension, that heavenly swimmer doing a slow crawl in the clouds above—
He
is not impressed. These peashooters don’t change the facts about Rimbaud’s left leg, black
and blue and bloated. Take a whiff. There’s no hiding it. Hunkered down in the scorched grass, Mme. Hyena and her clan will sniff him out.
Here you are meat and to meat you will return
.

The door bursts open.

Downstairs, in their white uniforms and fezzes, three Egyptian sentries, his part-time hirelings, jump up as a fourth, hoping for a
baksheesh
, a tip, charges up the stairs. The Egyptian seizes an elbow, then attempts, fool, to relieve the erstwhile poet of his gun.

“I’ve got it,” he barks, hanging on his one crutch.

“Heavy, you heavy,” says the Egyptian, with a runny smile.

“Rot. Pay attention.”

Teetering on the rafters above, pigeons peer down while below, in the early cool, rises the not entirely unpleasant stench of commerce: bare earth, dry-rotted leather, and spilled spices kneaded by hundreds of bare feet to the consistency of some yeasty kind of cheese. A. Rimbaud Ltd., what is left of it. Bags of coffee. Kegs of bullets. Elephant tusks. Ten years—all junk now. Look at it. Stinking stacks of half-cured hides. Pots and trinkets. Even a box of cheap missals. And stacked in boxes, piled almost to the ceiling, is his principal stock in trade—smuggled Remington rolling-block rifles, bought, most of them, for Menelik the king. Old and outmoded, said items (in the manifest) are castoffs from various European armories smeared with thick protective grease and wrapped in oozing brown paper, which the heat has curdled to a kind of vile-smelling molasses. Purchased at auction by his agent in France in lots of a hundred, seventy-five francs each. The poet then sells them for around two hundred and twenty francs. Why, almost a threefold markup. Assuming, of course, that one actually gets paid. Or not eaten alive by arbitrary taxes imposed by the king via minor sub-lieutenants. Well, good riddance, he thinks. Have at it, weevils.

It’s like a hanging. Rimbaud can hear the crowd outside, waiting to see his face in his hour of shame. And so, sick to his stomach, with a practiced recklessness, he raises the gun, hits the door with the heel of his hand, and lurches out defiantly. And for one eternal second—silence.

Three hundred pairs of eyes, all riveted on him.

Blue black in white robes with oiled hair, the warriors are waiting, muscular twists of men bristling with spears and daggers and some with brass-tattooed muskets. Glazed eyes. Impassive lips. And in every cheek fat lumps of the narcotic
khat
s, bright, tiny, woozy-making leaves of an alarming green.

Zip. Zip zip.

Armed loiterers, these warriors—they have wives and beasts to do all the work. All that moves are their horsehair fly whips—zip—over shoulders. Zip zip, go the frog-tongued whips of these casual tribal murderers and herders of women, warriors, if you’ll notice, with strips of leather hanging off their knife hilts, each commemorating an enemy killed. Raiding or waiting to be raided—fighting the rival’s increase—this is the warrior’s work, and night after night it continues, this eternal murder game of snatch the bacon. No killing, no honor. No honor, no woman. And until you kill and castrate an enemy, steal his stock, rape his wife, and slaughter or enslave his family—until then you are a woman, without even the honor necessary to
have
a woman. And so, wails and fires in the night. The Issa, the Itu and Galla, the Asaimara and the Aroussis, the Ogadines. We are the mighty, the many. We are everything and they are nothing. Spears in the night.

Zip. Zip zip.

Hanging on his one crutch, balancing the shotgun, Rimbaud can feel the gold vest burning his guts, molten gold, as if he has swallowed the sun. For right now, as he well knows, each warrior is wondering exactly the same thing, namely, where his gold is, and how much the
frangi
has, and which man will get it. Slaughter him in the road. Snatch out his balls like two eyes, void him, then strip him like a goat. And yet the men sit, as always, blank and glassy-eyed, hateful and dazzled before the
frangi. Later
. Nighttime is their time.

But day. Daytime is for beggars, and it is the beggars who now mount the attack. A starving crowd on the heels of a famine, this is an angry crowd, and when it starts, it sounds like the tearing of a sheet. Rich
frangi
. Fat-bellied
frangi
. Like rain in a puddle, they dance their triumphant crowd dance, a jostling, poisonous, hand-flipping
gimme-gimme dance, shouting: “You, you, you!
Frangi!
 … 
Frangi
now. You! Now me! Me!”

By the dozens, they crowd up, stick-armed men and cricket-voiced widows—women squeezing empty breasts or holding forth wailing, runny-nosed, swollen-bellied babies. And most frightening of all, potbellied children with white starvation hair and hands like small shrunken gloves. Clawing at him.

“You, you, you—”

“Off!” he hollers, brandishing the shotgun, “Off of me—”

Boom!

A rifle goes off, two, then three, and here they come. Tunics blowing, criss-crossed with bandoliers and daggers, it’s Farik’s men,
his
men, Somalis, Sudanese, Arabs—jackals for hire, wild men with pistols and rifles, long spears and the heavy, curved Danakil daggers. Horses stamping into the crowd, his gunmen raise the dust, a hot, worn-out, dungladen dust that cauterizes the nostrils, like the stench of a snuffed match.
Boom!
Spears lower and swords rise.
Boom! Boom!
That second volley scatters them. When, out of the melee, like some lost Roman legion, here come his carriers, big, tall, dusty men—Oromo, big, strong men, four teams of four. This part he has planned with his usual logistical meticulousness, down to the last bullet and bag of feed for the horses.

“Go! Go now!” cries Rimbaud, raising the brute shotgun. “Double wages today. But only if we go now. Now, goddamnit, do you hear me?”

In this momentary lull, pushing them back, Djami grasps his hands, then lowers him onto the waiting stretcher, a length of canvas stretched between ridgepoles—adapted, in fact, from one of those seemingly insane construction manuals that the poet had inveigled his penurious mother to purchase for him. Lying on his back, level with the dusty feet of the mob, Rimbaud is now as helpless as an overturned tortoise. When—with a heave—he is launched. The porters hoist him skyward, up like a flag, sixty-two kilos of meat such that he is camel high. Eye to eye, in fact. For
look
.

Before him now, craning over the crowds, the camel’s eye is goblet-sized,
jet black and edged with dark, blubbery creases, like India rubber. And before the animal even hears the whip on its rump, the great eye contracts, disgorging one salty tear—one sip for the thirsty green fly that fastens on it, hot, like a spark. And
look
.

More flies. Bottle blue, black blue, green blue. Particles of life.

Then the flies are two swarms, two whirling balls. Like lungs, he thinks. Breathing, almost. Like a concertina. No, a corset, a black corset of flies, was it? Hadn’t he thought this, dreamed this, written this once?

For suddenly life is taking, even for the apostate poet, a spectacularly strange turn. Seeing again. That’s it
—seeing
, such as he hasn’t seen in years, back to his runaway days, a dirty child raiding the treasure house that God left unlocked. Days of light and storm when, high above, clouds coiled and spoke and limbs crashed and leaves blew white—then shot away, like bats! Cold and darkness coming. Then, coldest of all, that windy, hair-raising excitement, the sudden zero of writing. Writing—you, my willed and willing disaster, my storm. Writing, you be my coat. My war, my faith. My only command.

Bitten-down nails. Moving lips. When he wrote—that is, when life yanked him hard by the hair—he always moved his lips, mumbling and murmuring to himself. Trees shook and shone like ice. Leaves struck his nose and electricity seized his hair, until he felt like a candle, a very blown-down candle, to the point that he forgot his own hunger as the wind commanded,
Write more
. So, opening a rusty penknife, he whittled his already whittled-down pencil stub. Then, trembling, moved it over the dirty paper, then covered it with his body as the rain splattered down, walloping hot pellets that lashed his back and ran down his nose. And camped over himself, over words like hot food, he pushed and pushed the pencil, until suddenly it stopped: literally stopped, and he dared not look or speak.

“Monsieur!” comes the voice that breaks him from this reverie. It’s Djami. Shading his eyes, Djami is pointing across the street.

“Monsieur, don’t you see? Look. It is Monsieur Bardey! All the
frangis
. See? They come to see you go.”

9
The Poet Who Didn’t Know It

A proper send-off it is, too. For across the road, Rimbaud sees a very welcome sight. In his freshly stropped boots, tweeds, and tie, it’s Bardey, the so-called lord mayor of Harar. It’s Bardey and the “chaps,” his confreres, a dozen or more all turned out, having drunk all night to fuel themselves for Rimbaud’s not-so-fond bon voyage. And all of them, to a man, are now blocked—blocked rather conveniently—by the rising headwaters of the mob. Thank God. How men dread good-byes.

“A proper send-off,” Bardey had told the chaps earlier. “I mean, after ten years, the least we can do is bloody see him off.”

As Rimbaud’s employer, benefactor, and frequent apologist, Bardey is perfect in the role of the father-wise, merchant-diplomat savior, and not just for Rimbaud but for a whole host of castoffs from Europe and America, why even one poor fool, a cowboy soon deceased, who had arrived sporting an American Stetson hat and twin six-guns. In the case of Rimbaud, most observers would have said that Bardey was heaven-sent, his deus ex machina—when, for example, the rash Rimbaud royally pissed off the king. Or again, when he, a white man, struck a black man, the sort of thing that easily could have triggered an honor killing. But just what
has
rubbed off? What exactly has Rimbaud learned in ten long years in this country? This remains unclear.

One thing is for sure, though. Save for Cecil Rhodes with his diamonds, Alfred Bardey is the best cared-for chap in Africa: best fed, best rested, best turned out, and far and away best manicured in his Van Dyke beard and Panama hat. Bald but nobly so, with two slick curls that twirl, Disraeli-like, around his small, white ears.

Never ruffled. Never in a bad temper. Never—almost—on the losing end. Even more unnerving, while all others stomp about drenched in the heat, the fellow never seems to break a sweat. Then again, why should he, with two handsome mistresses on either end of town, not to mention an unquestioning wife very nicely set up in Mayfair. No sir, no
clap for Mr. Bardey! His life is one vast tent pole, all set up for him, wherever he goes. One does not see Mr. Bardey slouching and sneaking (unlike Rimbaud) into the town’s two bordellos. And equally unlike Rimbaud, Bardey takes regular annual holidays. By contrast, in his ten years here, the poet has set a world submersion record. Except for a brief trip to Cairo, never once in that time has he approached the fires of European civilization. And for several interminable years before this time, he rusticated in Crete as a troubled construction foreman, then in Aden as an ill-paid clerk. In short, serving an apprenticeship to nowhere—that is, until Bardey gave him a go.

In fact, it was Bardey who, one year ago, had heard (quite accidentally from a traveler) about Rimbaud’s growing and indeed extraordinary poetical reputation, then taking shape in Paris. As Rimbaud was all too well aware, he was already something of a legend, the subject of rumor, fantasy, and ridiculous speculation, and yet far from being flattered, he found it all tremendously
irritating
. Had he
asked
to be published? Had it ever been his
aim
to be famous? Had he ever
cared
what people thought? And so when Bardey asked him about these reports, Rimbaud did not deny them. He just refused to discuss the matter. Fame. Poetry. Any of it.