Disaster Was My God (14 page)

Well? thinks Isabelle, plucking a chicken feather from her hair and flicking it.
Pfffth
.

You are too skinny, observes Mme. Mirror. Granted, a bit plain, but certainly pert and pretty enough. There are men out there for you.

So why not me? Why won’t Mother help me find a man?

Don’t be foolish. Why ever would she? Only a fool would lose her only daughter to marriage. Especially an old woman with a farm to run!

Finding her a man. Rationally, Isabelle knows this is an absurd expectation. Clearly, matchmaking is the last thing her mother would have the guile, the patience, or the female connections to contrive—never mind the motivation. Still, if she
tried
, thinks Isabelle—well, her mother could make her daughter’s desires known to the right gentleman. For example, to M. Dumont, the telegrapher, a widower with four children. Or even to the town recorder of deeds, the wordless, never-married M. Chaumas, who walks as if on two erasers, gliding between the shelves.

Mme. Mirror stares back at her. Then try Sunday.

Sunday? Even if Isabelle
wants
to go to town, to stroll and, frankly, troll the bandstand (where the mustached
soldats
patrol, hands stuffed in their brass belt buckles), well, how is she to broach the question with Maman? How?

Mother, I think I’ll go see the band this Sunday
.

Sunday, Mother, I might just go for a visit in town
.

Mother, on Sunday, I might just take myself into town
.

“And, pray, to do what?” sneers her mother, blinking, when finally she hears this floozy nonsense. “To see what,
strutting
around amongst those stupid idiot peacock men and the town sluts?”

“I do not
strut
around.”

“Wantonness and unhappiness on parade. Good heavens, daughter, you’ve seen the show. You’ve seen all there is to see.” Isabelle stands there transfixed, remembering this last conversation when—

Rap, rap, rap!

Isabelle jumps. It’s M. Lucas, the hired man, with his listing walk and hairy, dangling hands, those sex flippers. Another itinerant oddball. Turning, she sees his teeth, long and crooked, like old fence pickets. “Tell Madame the gig is hitched!”

Clump, clump, clump.

Down the stairs tromp her mother’s blocky black shoes with the waxed black laces like two whippy mustaches. In the sun, her muslin dress is black and sheeny—blinding, like sun on water. As for the bonnet, that sermon against vanity trailing two black ribbons, it is dented and twenty years out of style. And shaped like a coal bucket. Let them stare. Keeps the fools away.

“Enough mooning,” snaps the old woman. Mme. Rimbaud twists the bonnet ribbons in a fat funeral bow around her overburdened cheeks. “Now come
on.
”

“
Me?
Maman, I’m waiting on
you
.”

“Let’s go. And where is your hat? Or your missal? Or gloves! Good heavens, you are like a sticky burr—never can I get you out of the house.”

“Gloves,” remembers Isabelle, now running down the hall. “Gloves, gloves …”

It’s true. No matter how hard she tries, Isabelle is forever forgetting something, and that something, misplaced ever so momentarily, is precisely the chestnut that her mother seizes on so triumphantly, thereby ruining everything and explaining everything, beginning with the most obvious fact, that, just as she is always right, Isabelle is always behind, and usually wrong at that. And so as fast as Isabelle collects her things, checks her things,
double-checks
her things, then runs outside, late, late, late, it’s déjà vu. It has a kind of music box quality to it. A dream quality. Countess, her mother’s mare of spotted silver, Countess is already trotting and the black gig’s big-spoked wheels are whirling like two hoops, crunching down the long drive. Is Isabelle even there?

Ahead lies the warm, green middle distance, where the morning mist is burning off the fields. Crows take off, caw-cawing. Ducking grasshoppers, Mme. Rimbaud snaps the reins, now aimed like two
long pistols down the road. Then what happens? Isabelle forgets. Anger has gaps. As with her gloves, Isabelle forgets, blanks, loses time, until suddenly here they are again, just like yesterday and the day before that,
whoa
, at the old stone church, mossy green at the piers and, above, almost black with age. The two women venture into the cool, aged darkness. Hastily dipping their fingers in holy water, they cross themselves, then head up the aisle, past the various contagious old people, who always seem to croak on the first day of spring or summer—anytime the weather turns. Except for Isabelle, they’re almost all old,
old
old, sagging, tremor-kneed men at that point in life when they don’t even glance at two skirts, one with a good bum—quite good—sweeping up the worn gray stones. At the usual pew, the old woman bumps her in. Like a cow, thinks Isabelle. In you go. In to be milked of heavenly feelings.
Moo
.

Disaster, Isabelle often thinks. Her mother almost seems to pray for it, to summon and expect it, like a dreaded rain. Look at her. Fingers pinching her eyes, the old woman is slumped in agony, kneeling at the bleeding feet of Jesus, blood trickling down his toes. Ugh. To pray to a dead body—
who said that?
Bizarre, to hang on a wall some poor tortured corpse—
don’t think that
. Makes her flesh crawl, to have all these feelings, these
thoughts
. So, self-conscious, Isabelle ducks, covers her eyes, leaving open, in the crevasse between her fingers, a weep hole to spy on the men, any old man, floating in the misty morning brine in this lifeboat for the faithful. In which Isabelle isn’t so much praying as conjugating:

“G
ood heavens,” says the mother later, as they clop through town, “must you stare at every last one of these male weevils?”

It’s like dousing a cat with water.

“What are you even talking about?” the daughter sputters. “Who are you to presume? How do you know what my eyes see?”

“Good grief, don’t start your crying. Look if you must—have your pick. But let me assure you, daughter, each one is a grief in borrowed trousers.”

11
Magic Carpet

Flying above the crowd, meanwhile, jarred and jostled and bounced, Rimbaud is getting a final earful from Djami. Running beneath him, his upturned beard like an axe, Djami is chopping away at Rimbaud’s resolve.

“And who will care for you? These here? Murderers? Buggerers of goats?”

The crowds, the shooting pain, the blinding white distance ahead—as he holds the poles of his aerial gurney, Rimbaud’s voice is almost staccato.

“
My family
. As I’ve told you. My family will care for me.”

Wrong answer. Prying Djami has seen the mother’s terse letters. Even with his rudimentary French, the orphan can read between the lines.

“Rinbo,” he says—order is slipping, he who almost never calls him ‘Rinbo,’ as the townspeople do—“Rinbo, you are wrong.
Wrong
. When does she speak of home to you? When? Why does she not want her son home with her? Why? Why does your sister never write to you? Why, why, why? Because she cannot write?”

But Rimbaud is still stuck at the sister. “Because my mother writes.”

“Writes what? Hospital, hospital. Money, money. Cold, like the snow. Don’t make your long faces at me. Who will roast for you your goat in France like you like? Who will rub your sick leg? No one!”

“
They
will. And you, Djami, for the last time, you will stay here. Why won’t you understand? I am concerned about
you.
”

“Concern! Now you make me laugh, Rinbo.
Liability
. Your word. This is all I am to you, liability. How you think.”

Rimbaud sits up, stung.

“As you wish! Farik!
Farik!
Must I have you tied up? It is time—now go. Go—”

Djami stops dead.

“No,
you
go, Rinbo.” Djami smacks his camel stick. “Go to your
frangi
peoples, cold peoples living in their houses of snow. Go home, fool.
Go!
”

12
Spice Woman

But even this is not the end of it—not yet.

Spent, Rimbaud flops down in his do-it-yourself stretcher, holding the sides, seasick. But barely has he steadied himself than, near the Erer Gate—the gate aimed like a great siege gun, east toward the sea—feeling a twinge, he bolts up and sees her, waiting for him. Seething. His Tigist.

Of course, Rimbaud has been expecting her—dreading-hoping, sick for one last glimpse. Of those impossibly large, dark Abyssinian eyes, like spiders. Of her beautiful, brown translucent lips, like pillows. Before him, her beauty stands like fear itself.

As for those would-be Lotharios across the street, the chaps all night banging drunken songs on the battered, untuned piano covered with cigarette burns, they can see too clearly that God is a comedian. Poetic justice that Rimbaud should see Tigist with her spoiled, surly eyes, the boiling eyes that the old women daub with kohl paste—that she should turn up, one last slap, even as Djami breaks away.

Tigist, Tigist Tigist. Funny, even that morning as he was, uh, wiping himself off, having conjured with lust the girl he had thrown out, even then he recalled how in the early days she had thrilled to hear her name on her
frangi
’s lips.

“Say it,” she said, used to say, her sly tongue poised against the roof of her mouth. “Tigist.” Glottal. “Say it, Rinbo.
Tigist.
”

They played the same game when she fed him—hand-fed him, rather, his spicy goat, a kind of goulash simmered in spiced, clarified butter and the red chili–laden berbere sauce. Hot. Hot sauce. Hot bits. All to be picked up in small pinches with the thin, spongy ingera bread, which replaced so ingeniously, he thought, napkins and utensils. The girl loved to hear her name on his
frangi
lips. “Say it. Tigist,
Tigist.
” Then, in this game of eating, would urge him “Eat, eat,” sopping up the good sauce with further bits of ingera, this in an operation that could easily last the better part of one hour, until the girl was jammy for him, rubbing herself and smiling that pout-face capable of sending boys her age scurrying like monkeys into the trees. Tigist called the shots. She knew the love secret. Love was food, and food was love, and the secret, at first, was little bits. Little bits of ingera. Little, to make it last. Fatten him up. And so, in her insane girl-love, in her first love, offering him this catnip, she hand-fed him, just as later she hand-screwed him, pulling back her knees, aching to be wide for his manhood, hissing, “Tigist. Say it, Rinbo.
Thiiiii-gist.
” Like a thistle on the tongue.

“Look,” said she, on top later, bouncing on his bone, “I am a horse rider!”

Breathlessly watching in utter disbelief, he was, he saw, actually screwing her. Beauty itself. Him, an old man of thirty-five, rocking and thrusting, saying in a kind of sweet, willed death, “Tigist … Tigist … Tigist … Tigist.”

Love drunk, sex mad, the girl was those first months, almost frighteningly adoring, a great dark wave of
girl
rising over him, dominating him. But then, alas, there came Tigist’s insane, angry days, tearing through his things, imagining he was still frequenting the whorehouses, looking at other girls. But no, she wasn’t insane exactly, just at that knife’s-edge female age between thirteen and eighteen. Pure turmoil, tearing through his papers, then demanding, once more, that he read his mother’s letters to her.

“Read them to me. None of your tricks.
Really
read them.” Then: “Hah! She thinks you have a girl! You tell her, yes!
Tell
her, Rinbo! You promised to marry
me
, not these ugly, cold
frangi
girls.”

Then she switched subjects. Keep him off balance. The girl was cunning.