Disaster Was My God (5 page)

“Yes, it is true!” shouts the date woman, holding her wares over the crowd. “Today he goes, the Bastard! Look, dates, fresh dates!”

“But no, you are wrong,” dismisses her rival, another date seller. “They say tomorrow he goes—
pthu
. Away, the thief.”

“But how?” asks the youngest, pressing her shawl against her face, poor girl, as if to ward off some dreaded contagion. “But how can he go when his leg is so fat and sick? He cannot ride.”

“Ride!” sneers another. “With his money he will buy a golden leg! Two! The devil, he will find a way.”

Out is the way, and hastily, too. For even now, upturned on sweaty backs or balanced atop heads, the last dregs of A. Rimbaud Ltd. are being rapidly disgorged into the street: desks, crates, hempen bags, tusks—yours, at a fraction of their wholesale cost.

Two stories above this scene, the besieged proprietor peers out—well back from the peeling, rickety louvers, his face striped with bars of sun and shade. Ah, but not back far enough. For just then the rising sun illuminates his silhouette—exposed! With that an ululating cry can be heard. It is the chorusing, cicadalike cry of fifty female tongues clucking.

“Ayyyy​eeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eeee!”

U
nfortunately, our hero has lost the element of surprise. For although it is not the actual day of his departure, it is the last full day of his tenure at this torrid, misruled school. And a downcast day it is, too.

How sad to be misunderstood, when for years, in his missionary way, he has tried to be good. Not
great
, he would hasten to add, but merely good—good enough, living a modest, human-scale existence that might be characterized, if not by faith, exactly, then by its very simplicity and decency. Good works. Even charity. Well, of a kind … if he could manage even
that
, hang it.

And indeed, until only very recently in these parts was there any stain on his otherwise faultless reputation for actually
good
goods, for fair dealing and sure delivery within days or weeks, as opposed to months. A. Rimbaud, known as far as Cairo and Nairobi as a steady man. A handshake man. A man who honored his word, paid his debts, didn’t whine, and ran a tight ship—rare in this land of fugitive oddballs and crooks. But look. Even now as a woman, keening
Ayeeeeeeee
and suffering some kind of spasm, is gesturing horribly at him.

The crutch groans. As he turns away, it spins like a peg on the rough wooden floor, his one crutch and his one good foot—the left. It’s his right leg that is now the problem, specifically the knee, now swollen to enormous size.
Merde … les varices!
Varicose veins! This continues to be his stubborn diagnosis, and even now, incredibly, he remains wedded to the idea against considerable medical and commonsense evidence to the contrary. Why, even as recently as a week ago, obstinately he had marched on the bad leg. Stamped on it. Rode with it until it was numb. Varicose veins: this remained his steely reply when people presumed to inquire or insisted on staring.

And when at last, to relieve the swelling, he was forced to tear open the knee of his trousers—well, fine. Indeed, the knee was purple, but a commanding man, a deliberate man, he does not change his answer. Never, even as he dispatched his poor mother to scour Charleville, their town, and even Paris if necessary to find a special sock. A medical, elastic stocking he had seen in some months-old newspaper. Just the thing to compress the veins. Pressure. For him, this is always the answer: pressure.

Alas, when said sock arrived ten weeks later in a mildewed package mauled beyond recognition, the sock did not work, hang it! In fact, just as his mother had predicted, the sock only worsened the condition. And then last week came the final blow—a crutch.

It was the leg that had started this nonsense with the women. Arrogant
frangi
! This was not just bad fortune. To them, it was God’s retribution for his having chucked the girl out three months before. Because the girl could not give him a child, not even a girl child, let alone a male child, the
frangi
, the foreigner, he had thrown her out, but see then how Allah punished him! As anyone could tell you in Harar, the backed-up man poisons, the poisons from his bad seed, they had seeped down his leg. Allah, who sees all, Allah the Just had turned his leg to stone, his business had failed, the girl had triumphed, and every day now female justice waits outside his window, praise be to Him—
al-hamdu lil-lah!

Oh, it’s bad, quite bad, and he knows it. But it’s not just the leg, it’s
his whole life, even the state of his room. Papers strewn. Drawers hanging out. Bags half packed. It’s life with the stuffing pulled out—evicted. For yes, admittedly, he had done—

Or rather, it had so happened—

Fine then, he had let happen a rather stupid thing. A rash thing. An obstinate thing. And, perhaps most unforgivably for his European colleagues, a rash and
unnecessary
thing, ejecting the girl. “Good heavens, man,” as one English bloke had put it. “What
are
you thinking? Have you a positive wish to die?”

The girl also had a family, and a large one, so throw in “impolitic,” too. And yet, having found the girl, this flower sprung in the mud of the bazaar—well, for once in his life, Rimbaud had done the brave and honest thing and followed his heart. And yes, it was regrettable, but certainly he had made copious amends to the girl and her family. Hecatombs of amends—God! People had no idea what he had paid to her people—for months—in his vain efforts to hush it all up. And all too characteristically he had thought, I can fix this. Set her up fresh—in Egypt, perhaps. Find some wealthy man.
Une belle situation
. A governess or mistress position, perhaps.
I’ll fix it
.

Pack of dogs! Bandits! And after all his generosity to the town, too.

Anonymous, most of it. Oh, they didn’t know the half of it, ignorant savages. The leper colony, for example. Had he not donated bandages, then even frocks to his friend Father Lambert and the little children in the school adjacent to the quarantined “hot” compound? Quite beautiful healthy children, too, even as their parents, earless, noseless, fingerless, boiled in their own skins. The children! Among whom he would sit, as if among wild monkeys, when he was feeling low. Voices raised in song—remember? On his birthday? How they had sung to him so beautifully!

But it wasn’t just the orphans to whom he had been so kind. Thanks to him, ten, twenty, probably thirty men had been inoculated—alive merely because they worked for him. And the food! Piles of food he had given away during the famines, why, openly in the streets, stopping the
wildfire of hunger before mobs sacked his store, or worse. Could they, could any of them, appreciate his generosity, his sacrifice?

No more. Tomorrow, after long years of comings and goings in the region, he will leave it, all of it, the reputation he wants and manly competence as he knows it, and all in the hope that his mother and Roche, even France—that this time it will be good, or at least better than it was before. For a man with the pride of Lucifer, it is a point of particular pride that he himself has organized his rescue, himself and his gold, kilos of the gold protected by a dozen gunmen, wild Yemenis and Somalis, mostly, bound to him through a local chief whom he had long supplied. Ruthless, efficient men. Blooded horsemen personally armed by Rimbaud himself—five of them with the Remington lever-action repeater rifles so prized—he loves to point out—by the American cowboys. Rimbaud was proud indeed that he could procure such weapons. And tomorrow at dawn they will come for him, a dozen men with guns and spears and bandoliers of ammunition. A trotting armory, each man carrying, athwart his hip, the long Danakil dagger, a heavy, J-shaped rip of steel that curves like a sideways smile. Reaper men. And reliable men. Or so he hopes, carrying all his gold.

Before dawn, they will be off, with him leading the caravan. And not walking or on horseback but carried—carried on a stretcher. This will be his ordeal, broiling in the trackless desert under the unending sun. Twelve days later, ten if they are very lucky, they will arrive in Zelia by the cobalt blue sea. Then away he will go—away on the first steamer smoking back to France. Away from these vulturous women keening, “Ayyyy​yeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eee!”

2
What the Night Said to the Night

But it isn’t just the women at their well who have their eye on him. Later that night, awaking from a bad dream, Rimbaud realizes that, once again, his mother is right about him. Right about the leg, right about his
needing to marry, and right about his crawling back home—hatefully right about everything.

In this dream, he is four or five. It’s a winter night, freezing cold, and they are in the barn at Roche—the birthing pen. The lantern smokes. His breath smokes, and before his five-year-old legs, fat as a rain barrel, lies a dying cow, Marie. Her calf is stuck,
something’s
stuck, and he is frantic, crying, “
Maman
, get up, she’ll kick you.” But, lying on her side in the straw, rolling up her sleeve, his
maman
is all concentration, peering up Marie’s black bum.

A witch. The boy has heard it so whispered. People in the town say so and, as for Paul, the hired hand, he knows so. “The cow’s as good as dead,” he says. “The calf, too.” “Enough,” says his mother, slicking her arm with the cow’s own butter. “Now hold up the lantern.”

Then up the blubbery black lips she slides her fingers. Black pie, it sucks and spurts. The dead cow shudders to life and, like that, his mother is gobbled up, sunk to the shoulder, when,
splat
, out they come
—born together
, his mother and the slick, wet calf, jumbled in thick, wet snakes of umbilical rope. They’re both upside down. The calf’s neck twists around. Brown and wet, he’s like warm clay, smoking he’s so new, and the boy’s ears are clanging, and he is shouting, “Is it is it is it?” Alive, he means. “Of course it’s alive,” says his mother, stirring a piece of sharp straw in the calf’s nostrils, an old farmer trick, to itch her to life. The calf snorts, twitches. Look, the nostrils are smoking. Then Paul hoists the lantern. “Lord, the calf has five legs!”

And after that, in gigs and wagons, from miles around, people come to gawk at Cinq the cow. It’s a sign, that fifth leg. God’s finger, thinks the boy. Pointing at
them
, the Rimbauds. Warning all against the witch.

A
nd look at him now, still drenched with this dream of a five-legged cow, a boy still floating in the blocked and unknowing soul of a now bitter man. Fine freckles and lines mark his face. His thick boyish hair is gray blond, close-cropped like that of a soldier or convict, and below
the gray blue eyes and sandy lashes there is the chevron mustache, a Muslim touch, like the fez and his fluency in Arabic, Amharic, and a host of local dialects. How old is he at thirty-seven? Younger than he knows and older than he can possibly be, living in a place where the years are doubled, like prison sentences.

Truly, to see him lying here in the moonlight, it is hard to know how old this man is. Whatever happened? Who was he once, before too many things happened? We are looking at the face of a man who, having survived himself, now finds himself bobbing in the middle of the desert, the lone survivor, clutching his body like a life preserver.

A
nd yet, even faced with life’s worst, there is in him a wildly optimistic side, times when he will think to himself, But who knows? There are medical miracles, salt cures, and even operations, if it comes to that. And perhaps if you’re courageous, if you don’t panic and you tough it out, you may return to Abyssinia. Perhaps even better than before. For really, who knows?

All through the downslide of these past few weeks, such optimism has been his mantra, this sunny voice telling him, Who knows, who knows? Look, you can only do so much. Perhaps you will return to Harar, possibly with new investors—bankrolled. Then there is La Société Géographique, which, in its February 1884 bulletin, has published his account of a harrowing three-week trip into the interior region called the Ogadine. True, it was only 150 kilometers, but you didn’t need to go far to find yourself surrounded by hard-muscled, bushy-haired men whose life’s ambition was to spear, then castrate a godless white affront such as yourself. Anyhow, his report upon which he had pinned such hopes, it had gone mostly unnoticed, but it was a start, he thought, the point being he had reinvented himself as Arthur Rimbaud,
explorer, ethnographer, scientist
.

And quite possibly he
will
, he
might
, he
could
return with this new French wife his mother has been dangling in her letters. All picked out,
she claims. Young? Old? Pretty? Not so fast: of course, his parsimonious maman withholds even the most rudimentary details of said maid, even as he, mad with curiosity, holds his breath for months, to spite her by not asking. Desire. Desire withheld. This is their little game, mother and son. One of them, anyway.