by Paul Theroux
‘Last May, I had a phone call – a woman’s voice,’ Sister Alexandra went on, and melodramatic in her mimicry of a distant voice, said, “ ‘I know who you are. I think you should know that he has died. Thank you for respecting us.” That was all.’
The windblown dust whirled around us, slashing and buffeting the Land-Rover. I did not know what to say about the dead man except to inquire as to whether he had had a long illness.
‘It was lung cancer – he never smoked or drank. He was only forty-seven,’ Sister Alexandra said.
There was no commiseration I could offer. I might have said: I too have experienced the death of loved ones, but what consolation was that to someone suffering the peculiar pain of loss? I just made noises but as I did so I realized that she was protesting.
‘No, no – he is not dead,’ she said. ‘He is still alive for me. I live with the memory of him. I even speak to him, and he guides me. Can you imagine how important it is to have been loved?’
‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘There’s a nice poem about that by an English poet.’ I partly recited and partly paraphrased the Larkin lines from ‘Faith Healing’:
In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
‘Recently, I heard that the woman is going to marry again,’ she said. ‘No one understood him or loved him as I did. That is why he is still alive to me.’
‘It’s true, the dead don’t seem to die, and the people we love seem to go on living within us,’ I said. ‘Or maybe that’s just how we deal with grieving.’
‘You are a writer?’ she said. ‘Maybe this is a story you can write.’
But I said what I always say to people who offer such stories as grist for my mill: you must write it yourself, because there is more to it than you’ve told me, and since you know everything it is your story not mine.
She didn’t object, she said she might, and she added, ‘I am a bit of a poetess. I have written some poems.’ She smiled the enigmatic smile of He is not dead, and said, ‘But I am a nun. If I published what I wrote it might seem strange, coming from a nun.’
‘I’d love to read your poems,’ I said, imagining something steamy and ecstatic, more John Donne than Thomas Merton, both of whom (for being poets and clergymen) I mentioned to her.
If the stereotype of the missionary is of a strong, dull, smiling person with endless patience and no libido, possessed by a conversion mania, Sister Alexandra was the opposite: tenacious, certainly, but also temperamental, opinionated, open-minded and passionate. And after I got to know her better I discovered that she was a gourmet cook. She was much loved at the convent and school but it struck me that she would have made a wonderful wife and mother. She didn’t use the word sin. Perhaps that was why she was such a success in Harar, the only faranji woman in the province.
‘These people are all horribly rich,’ she said as we passed Aweyde. ‘Pay no attention to their houses. They save their money, they don’t spend it on clothes or houses.’
The grubby qât-producing town on both sides of the road had a teeming market with one product on sale, the bunches of green leaves. The hills were thick with it, hedges and bushes of it; everyone grew it, sold it, chewed it. The particular conditions there in Aweyde were perfect. The local price per bunch was $1.20. It was three times this in Addis Ababa; much more in Yemen and Oman and the Emirates, where it was shipped from Dire Dawa in small planes. The qât flights were more reliable than the passenger flights, because the stuff lost its potency so quickly and had to be sped to the qât chewers.
‘The quality comes down within a day,’ a trader told me.
Harar was not much farther. Small houses were more numerous, the road widened, there was a stadium, a church, a mosque, and more mosques, and ahead a walled city, the gates gaping open.
Burton wrote of Harar being a forbidden city, attempted by many travelers in vain. ‘The bigoted ruler and barbarous people threatened death to the Infidel who ventured within their walls; some negro Merlin having, it is said, read Decline and Fall in the first footsteps of the Frank.’ He went on to say that the English were the most reviled because ‘at Harar slavery still holds its headquarters, and the old Dragon well knows what to expect from the hand of St George.’
There was also a superstition among the people of Harar ‘that the prosperity of their city depends upon the exclusion of all travelers not of the Moslem faith.’
Burton set off in 1854 and after an eventful trip from Zayla (present-day Zeila on the Somali coast, near the border of Djibouti) he saw the city on the hill, not a lovely place at all, but a walled hill town, a ‘pile of stones,’ and entered the eastern gate of Harar, palavered with various officials and was at last admitted to an audience with the Emir (who called himself Sultan), who extended his hand ‘bony and yellow as a kite’s claw’ and invited Burton to kiss it. Burton refused, ‘being naturally averse to performing that operation on any but a woman’s hand.’
Burton stayed in Harar for ten days (but unwillingly – for six of those days he was trying to leave). My stay was slightly less but only because I was headed for Cape Town by road, rail, ferry, whatever, and figured upon months more of travel. People all over Ethiopia regarded Harar still as a bastion of fanaticism and rural poverty, where proud war-like Muslims, handsome Hararis who would not dream of marrying anyone but a Harari, lived uneasily with Copts. In addition, there were the groups of hungry Somalis who attached themselves to the town; and camel herders, beggars from the hills, and a fairly good-sized leper colony at the back of the town, not to mention the hyenas, wild and ravenous, for which Harar was famous. All this had compelled my attention and people in Addis trying to worry me with images of Harari savagery merely roused my curiosity. I would happily have stayed in Harar longer.
The beggars were numerous because the Muslim Hajj period was ending, and the Muslim faith enjoins its believers to give generously to the poor on such occasions. Mosques are magnets for beggars, and such a festival as this had throngs of people looking for alms. I had never seen so many derelict people with their skinny hands out, demanding charity.
The xenophobia that Burton described was still a feature of life in Harar. Hararis limited their marriage partners to other Hararis, and did not mix socially with anyone else. They disliked the very presence of foreigners, observing the old belief that foreigners make Harar unsafe and unlucky. It was not unusual for a person – usually old and toothless and wild looking – to rush from a doorway and howl at me. Invariably when I made eye contact with a Harari I saw distrust and menace, and usually the person seemed to mutter something against me.
‘Oh, the things they say to faranjis,’ an Ethiopian woman told me, rolling her eyes at the memory of the remarks, ‘and especially to faranji women.’
‘For example?’
‘I could not repeat such things.’
A Belgian aid worker told me, ‘Some people spit on me at the market, for no other reason than that I am a faranji.’
This is an interesting word. Burton said, ‘I heard frequently muttered by the red-headed spearmen the ominous term “Faranj” ’ and went on to say that the Bedouin ‘apply this term to all but themselves.’ In his time even Indian traders were called faranji if they happened to be wearing trousers (shalwar).
The word is derived from Frank – the Franks were a Germanic tribe who peregrinated western Europe in the third and fourth centuries. But the name, of which French is a cognate, probably gained currency from the Crusades of the twelfth century when Europeans plundered Islamic holy sites and massacred Muslims in the name of God. In the Levant and ultimately as far as South East Asia, a Frank was any Westerner. ‘Immense crowds collected to witness the strange Frank and his doings,’ wrote Edward Lear about himself in his Albanian journal in 1848. A form of faranji,
the word afrangi is regarded as obsolete in Egypt though it is still occasionally used, especially in combination (a kabinet afrangi is a western toilet). I heard it now and then in the Sudan, and the word traveled east – to India and as far as South East Asia, where pale-skinned foreigners in Thailand are known as farangs, and in Malaysia as feringhi.
Almost the entire time I spent in Harar I was followed by children chanting, ‘Faranji! Faranji! Faranji!’ Sometimes older people bellowed it at me, and now and then driving slowly down the road a crazed-looking Harari would rush from his doorstep to the window of the car and stand, spitting and screaming the word into my face.
Meanwhile, I was a guest at the Ras Hotel, where Sister Alexandra directed me. Fifteen dollars a night included breakfast, and there was always Ethiopian cuisine (‘national food’) on the menu. The Coptic season of Lent was in full swing. Copts were as fastidious in observing their Christian holidays as Muslims were Ramadan and Eid – in fact they seemed to vie with each other in the strictness of their pieties, ‘I am holier than thou’ the subtext of their senseless mortifications and stern fasting rituals.
‘A dreary, Coptic-flavored brew of the more absurd ideas of old Christian and Jewish priests, all this spiced with local abominations,’ is Vladimir Nabokov’s bluff characterization of the Abyssinian Church, in one of his extensive appendices to his four-volume Eugene Onegin. Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather was born in Abyssinia, probably in Tigre. Breezily sketching the progress of Christianity in the region, Nabokov goes on,
The Gospel was introduced there about AD 327 by Frumentius (c. 290–c. 350), a native of Phoenicia, who was consecrated bishop of Aksum by Athanasius of Alexandria… Jesuit missionaries affronted the nameless dangers of a fabulous land for the holy joys of distributing images of their fair idols and of secretly rebaptizing native children under the pious disguise of medical care. In modern times, Russians have been pleasantly surprised at finding a kind of natural Greek-Orthodox tang to certain old eremitic practices still persisting in Ethiopia; and Protestant missionaries have been suspected by the natives of paganism because of their indifference to pictures of female saints and winged boys.
This month, Copts ate no milk or meat or fish, only ‘fasting food’ – mashed vegetables – mounded on injera, a layer of gray spongy bread made from fermented grain and spread over a whole large platter. ‘Like a crêpe or a pancake,’ people said, but no, it is cool, moist and rubbery, less like a crêpe than an old damp bathmat. Spicy sauces called wot were placed on the injera at intervals, with pulped beans, lentils, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes or, in non-fasting months, fish or meat. In Harar the injera was made from millet, and sweet, not fermented, but it still looked and had the mouthfeel of an overripe bathmat.
I was so contented in Harar – cheap hotel, good weather, strange sights, unworkable telephones – I sketched out the erotic story I had conceived on the Nile about the young man, the older woman, and her enigmatic doctor. And I began writing, to console myself in my solitude and to ease the passing of time.
One morning I bumped into Mr Nyali Tafara at the main gate to the city. ‘I am born and bred in Harar.’ He was unemployed. Most men in Harar were unemployed, he said. He had been to Addis many times, but had never set eyes on Djibouti, an easier trip, six hours up the line. He was a Christian and fasting his heart out. He said local history was his favorite subject.
Harar was the setting of a strange little tale, like something out of Borges’s Fictions that might have been called ‘The Exile.’
Since aloneness is the human condition, a stark example of the perfect stranger was the white man in black Africa, alone in his post, odd man out. The whitest of these would be the celebrated poet living in obscurity in a walled town, among black illiterates and philistines whose respect he had to earn as a man. He was a solitary entrepreneur in a society of organized slavers. His head teemed with surreal imagery and cynical retorts, though he seldom spoke his own language except under his breath.
To the Africans, this original was just another sickly faranji in a shabby suit, wandering the reeking market, watching the lepers crouched for alms by the mosque, the alleys piled with goat shit, the fly-blown camel haunches hanging in the butchery.
Even the fox-faced village woman in the gauzy headdress that he took as his mistress did not know his history, not that he knew hers either: they were opposites, black and white, yet they rubbed along. Perhaps his traveling with her (occasionally to Aden) seemed proof that he loved her. She was photographed by an Italian adventurer and she described the life she had led with the faranji, his silences, his questions, his maps, his stash of coins, the letters he wrote, his passion for photography, his books, how he hated interruption and any talk of his past. She had no idea where he was from. He said he loved the desert. She did not know that his whole strange existence he had predicted years earlier in wild premonitory dream-like poems.
The nineteen-year-old poet who wrote, ‘it is necessary to be completely modern’ was now almost thirty, prematurely gray, and noting with stabbing pen strokes in a company ledger the weight of elephant tusks and coffee sacks to be taken by camel train to the coast. His unexpected enthusiasms set him apart as much as his color – his ability in Arabic, his knowledge of the Koran, his skill as a photographer; he crossed the dangerous Danakil region, explored the empty Ogaden desert, reported on its spidery routes and its few oases. After one terrible trip he wrote, ‘I am used to everything. I fear nothing.’
The price of rifles was something else he studied. The Arabs in Harar were never so curious. Faranjis came and went but this one stayed off and on for ten years, living in modest houses. He hated the food. No one knew what was in his heart, nor heard his muttered ironies, nor understood his gift for concealment. He denied his wealth, claiming he was cheated, while chinking tall stacks of thick silver Maria Theresa dollars and rustling bank notes from the king.
Later, Menelik’s emissaries sought him out, pleading for guns and ammo, which he brought in caravans from the coast. He knew Makonnen, the father of Haile Selassie. The king bargained with him personally and helped make him rich.
His worst day went like this: on a visit to Aden he was confronted by his employer, a Frenchman he despised. The man was gloating with astonishing news. A traveling French journalist had told him that he recognized the name of his employee. He had been a boy genius in France and was famous as a decadent poet.
This revelation was like a horrible joke, the diligent and dull and rather sulky trader being the toast of literary Paris. Absinthe, drunkenness, buggery, free verse! The employer needled him for the travesty of it. The sour coffee merchant in the African outpost a poet! At last the boss had something on him.
The exile denied it. I is someone else, he had also once written, loving its enigma. But exile was a condition in which wordplay was frivolity. Finally he admitted who he had once been and said it was ‘absurd’ and ‘I’m through with all that.’
You go to the ends of the earth to begin a new life, and think you have succeeded, and then the past breaks in, as it does to the fugitive in disguise spotted by an old enemy. He had been happy in his anonymity, just a white man in the bush. He was naked now.
Thus, Rimbaud in Harar.
I said to Mr Nyali Tafara, ‘I want to see Rimbaud’s house.’
‘The real house or the other one?’
‘Both.’
In fact, none of the many houses Rimbaud occupied in Harar now exist. The house advertised as Rimbaud’s was built after his death, an old three-story Indian trader’s villa, mostly of wood, Islamic gingerbread in style, with colored glass windowpanes and shutters and wide verandas. As Rimbaud’s latest, and best, biographer, Graham Robb, has demonstrated, Rimbaud’s irony and self-mockery and deliberate deceptions created the myth of Rimbaud as a ruin, a bankrupt, a desperate failure, a discontented exile.
In fact, he was a resourceful traveler, an imaginative trader, a courageous explorer – his report on his d
iscoveries in the Ogaden was published by the Société de Géographie in Paris – an accomplished linguist (he spoke Arabic and Amharic) and something of a botanist and ethnographer. He enjoyed living in Harar. He was a clever businessman, and though he had given up poetry he planned to write a book about Abyssinia. Posterity, unsmiling as always, took his mordant wit, his sarcasm and self-mockery literally. Robb’s description of him is apt, ‘a contented misanthrope.’
In one of my favorite self-portraits, grimly jeering at his life Rimbaud wrote home:
I still get very bored. In fact, I’ve never known anyone who gets as bored as I do. It’s a wretched life anyway, don’t you think – no family, no intellectual activity, lost among negroes who try to exploit you and make it impossible to settle business quickly? Forced to speak their gibberish, to eat their filthy food and suffer a thousand aggravations caused by their idleness, treachery and stupidity!
And there’s something even sadder than that – it’s the fear of gradually turning into an idiot oneself, stranded as one is, far from intelligent company.
Though he denied it, he was the happy captain of the drunken boat. Like many of us, he made a meal of his suffering – complained even as he was rather enjoying it, thrived on adversity and grumbled dishonestly about savagery and bad food, discomfort and poverty. Contemporary accounts prove that he lived well in Harar, made money, and felt at home in the town.
It was impossible for me to imagine Rimbaud in this villa, though various French cultural agencies had raised money to beautify the supposed Rimbaud residence. Around the turn of the century the building housed a French school, and the young Haile Selassie had conjugated irregular verbs in its classroom.
Now the building was devoted to the memory of Arthur Rimbaud, patron saint of all of us travelers who have echoed his unanswerable question, first uttered by him in Harar, What am I doing here?
