Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  Michel dropped Eleanor off in front of her apartment. When she told him how much she was paying for it, he said the price was too high and he and Alem could help her find something better. “Or see something of the country. There are busses, inexpensive ones. Why not go somewhere, why not to Harar?”

  He gave her his home phone number and she gave him her email address and they parted, kissing twice on each cheek.

  “I keep meaning to ask,” he said, pressing his thumb into my kidney and swerving us away from the picture window, “what happens to Eleanor’s libido? Even the Rocket seems to disappear in part three.”

  An ambulance followed by a fire truck barreled toward and past us; I couldn’t tell if I’d missed the last beat of his thought.

  “I don’t know . . .”

  He didn’t appear to be listening to me, though there was nothing else in particular he was paying attention to.

  “Maybe she’s still catching up to herself,” I said, removing his hand from my back and rubbing the spot where it had been. “Is it necessarily flight or sublimation to privilege, for a while anyway, alternative forms of desire?”

  ELEANOR STUDIED. She read the books she had brought with her and the e-books she had downloaded impulsively to her laptop at the gate while waiting for her boarding zone to be called. Some of the books she had brought or downloaded were about Arthur.

  That wasn’t exactly right. It’s not about being allowed on the mat. It’s about having a say in what game is being played.

  She studied the life of a man, a poet, attempting to put together the available facts and theories—attempting, impossibly, to distinguish theory from fact. She drank macchiatos at the outdoor tables of the octagonal café until her laptop battery ran out, and then she made small talk with the barista—her name was Genet (a hard “g”) and she was a student at the art college—who after three days of this asked if Eleanor would like a tour of the museum on the university campus. Eleanor said yes and they set a date for the following week. She returned the next day to read more theories and facts about Arthur, only some of which registered on the saturated screen of her mind.

  Still young, though not as young as before, having already been shot in the wrist by his lover, having already been an adulterer, a _____ and a poet, the son of a man who _____ and a woman who _____, he would have arrived on the horn of Africa in a _____.

  He was by all accounts a _____ youth and would have struck the residents of that place as _____, although who exactly the residents would have been and if any came to greet him is up for question.

  He loved men, but he loved women also, which made some give him the upper hand—though he denied, at least in public, being a top.

  His brother, Frédéric, a bus conductor, would live into his sixties, while Arthur was destined to expire much sooner, though—thanks to the famous youthful photo of him—not as soon as is generally imagined when his name comes up. He would have been _____ when he settled in Harar, lured by the promise of _____ and _____ and a continued will, now already _____ years old, to leave poetry behind.

  “Do you ever wonder,” he asked, taking another drag, “what—if anything—you can do in the time you have left?”

  As a child, he drove teachers mad with his scholastic success; his classmates too were agitated by his wolverine mind.

  “While still a kid, he had already become resolutely antibourgeois in the great tradition of French bourgeois authors,” wrote Edmund White in his book subtitled The Double Life of a Rebel.

  “Everything useful is ugly,” wrote Théophile Gautier in Mademoiselle de Maupin. The sentiment would have been picked up by Arthur in his youth through his interest in “art for art’s sake,” fueled by a bookstore near his home that stocked the Contemporary Parnassus review.

  A young professor who tutored the even-younger Arthur, who led him to Rabelais, Villon, et al., would be blamed for the direction the poet’s life took, for decades after his death.

  That the ecstatic discovery of “I is an other,” written in a letter by the juvenile Arthur to his tutor, is among the poet’s most lasting legacies would suggest that the power of the articulation is transferable; this might in turn be said to endow it with a non-Parnassian use-value, leveraged in this formula from Richard Hell in his review of White’s biography: “One witnesses one’s invention by life.”

  At some point he would announce his devotion to “free freedom.”

  At some point he would write the poem “My Bohemia.”

  At some point he would chant “Order has been banished!” with the Communards.

  At some point he would write “Merde à Dieu” on the walls of his hometown.

  At some point he would commit the remainder of his life to his “soles of wind.”

  Genet met her at the entrance to the museum, a large neoclassical building complete with portico, friezes, and wide stone steps flanked by two golden statues of muses, each holding three lamps in the air. They spent two hours wandering through the ornate rooms filled with ancient pottery, medieval icons, and Ethiopian furniture or, in the case of Haile Selassie’s bedroom (the building had been the emperor’s palace before the revolution), European antiques.

  Displaced from her role at the coffee shop, Genet seemed reserved, which triggered a reserve in Eleanor that made their conversation stilted at first, though she did manage to glean that Genet was a native of Addis Ababa, that she made small figurative paintings about the effect of globalized advertising on women’s lives, that she lived with her parents but hoped to move out soon, and that she was distressed by the current politics and by many of the changes happening in her city. Eleanor nodded, venturing that she’d noticed it felt like a construction site, and Genet said It gets worse every day.

  As they lingered among the Byzantine-era icons, Genet pointed out the signature style of the Master of Sagging Cheeks and taught Eleanor how to identify the sinners in the paintings: they were the ones whose faces were painted in profile, the ones who couldn’t meet the painter’s gaze.

  He was leading me somewhere, walking two paces ahead—a habit I always find annoying in the men who have it, who deny without exception that it has to do with dominance or control. I was struggling with my heels and I was struggling with my role. He was silent. The wind was steady and strong. Though we couldn’t see it and he hadn’t mentioned our destination, I assumed the lake was near.

  ESTABLISHED: Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud—from “Ribaud” (Eng: “ribald”), meaning “whore”—arrived in Harar, Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1880.

  ESTABLISHED: Beginning at age seventeen his itinerary was, essentially, as follows: Charleville, Brussels, Douai, Charleville, Paris, Charleville, Paris, Charleville, Paris, Charleville, Paris, Arras, Paris, Charleville, Brussels, Ostend, Dover, London, Charleville, London, Dover, Ostend, Roche, London, Brussels, Roche, Brussels, Paris, Charleville, Paris, London, Scotland, Reading, various parts of Europe, Charleville, Stuttgart, Switzerland, Milan, Marseille, Charleville, Vienna, Brussels, Sumatra, Java, Ireland, Charleville, America, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Marseille, Italy, Alexandria, Cyprus, Charleville, Cyprus, Egypt, Aden, Harar, Aden, Harar, Entotto, Harar, Marseille, Charleville, Marseille, Charleville.

  CONCLUDED: Before his decisive break with Europe, his most frequent destination was his childhood home: la mère, or as he referred to her, “La Mother.”

  After they had visited all the rooms in the museum and identified a number of sinners—an activity that made them giggle, breaking through their mutual reserve—they walked to one of Genet’s favorite outdoor cafés, where their reserve returned but to a lesser degree, and they had an enthusiastic conversation about the local art scene, and compared and contrasted the particular dysfunctions of the educational institutions to which they had both, not without ambivalence, given years of their lives. They said good-bye outside the café with waves and smiles. Genet mentioned she would be off to visit relatives in the south for a few weeks but that perhaps they could visit the new Goethe
-Institut museum together when she returned. Eleanor said she might travel herself, but that she’d keep in touch: more smiles and waves, and they walked off in opposite directions.

  ESTABLISHED: He was dismissive of his literary accomplishments in letters written from the Horn. His poems were “rinçures,” from “rinse water” or “dregs.”

  REPORTED: In 1873, when his ejection from the Paris scene was complete, he returned to Charleville, built a fire, and burned his poems.

  SUGGESTED: In Cypress he had killed a man in anger; soon after that he fled to Aden in what would be his final departure from the continent of Europe.

  ESTABLISHED: In 1887, he argued in the Bosphore Égyptien for France’s annexation of Djibouti. He hoped to become a journalist and travel to Zanzibar.

  REFUTED: He was, in addition to a gunrunner, a trader of slaves.

  ESTABLISHED: He was not opposed to slavery, though his longtime servant, Djami, was not enslaved.

  ESTABLISHED: He was gifted with languages and learned—besides Arabic and Amharic—both Harari and Oromo; in traditional garb, he could, eventually, pass.

  CONTESTED: His rape by French soldiers in the aftermath of the Commune was the catalyst for all his decisions to come.

  ESTABLISHED: In the single book he saw published in his lifetime, which he later renounced, he wrote that one must be “thoroughly modern.”

  PROPOSED: “He attains,” writes biographer Charles Nicholl, “at the end of his long journey, a kind of luminous ordinariness.”

  ESTABLISHED: When he parted from Djami for good, both men openly wept.

  At the end, he had lost a leg to infection.

  At the end, there was no love between him and “La Mother.”

  At the end, his arms were paralyzed; only a morphine drip could soothe him.

  At the end, there was Isabelle, the beloved sister.

  “I’m going under the earth and you will walk about in the sun.”

  “Allah,” he said.

  “Djami,” he said.

  His last letter, dictated to Isabelle and addressed to an imagined captain in the Messageries Maritimes, read: “Kindly inform me when I will be taken aboard the ship.”

  “Djami,” he said.

  “Allah.”

  He was buried in Charleville, to which he always returned.

  “THERE,” HE SAID, dropping cross-legged to the sand. The beach was empty; the skies threatened rain. He scooped up a handful and let it sift onto his knee.

  “I’m aware of how pathetic I must seem,” he said. I was still standing, my bare feet sunk into the sand, heels in hand. The beige grains continued to fall on his dark suit pants.

  “Otis Redding crashed in this lake at the height of his career. A small plane, bad weather . . . That was that. I always thought it was this lake, I figured this lake was cursed. But I looked it up recently, on Wikipedia. It wasn’t this lake. It was the other lake. He died in the other lake.”

  “But thank you for being here,” he said, keeping his eyes on the shore. “I needed you to say yes, and you did.”

  He thanked me often, and it wasn’t always clear what the thanking was for. He once said he found it soothing to be in my debt, to be in somebody else’s debt.

  I placed my hand on his head.

  “You never told me about the girls, that day you threw the rock. You said it was another story.”

  He smiled, intoned “Li-zétte Ta-ni-ká-wa” but nothing more.

  I watched him drop handful after handful of sand on his knee—a disorganized criminal meets geological time. I thought about his film and the things it didn’t address: the accented child, his origin, his accident, its aftermath. I wanted to give him something. Permission, maybe, though it wasn’t mine to give.

  “It wasn’t a rape,” I said after a long silence, and then I thought about his mother.

  “I mean Eleanor—she wasn’t raped. When will that not be the first thing to come to mind?”

  He turned to me then. My feet went numb in the cold sand.

  SHE WAS GREETED at the bus station by Alem’s niece, Hanna. They had no language in common, but they did what they could.

  Hanna: [Something in Amharic]

  Eleanor: [Grinning]

  Pause.

  Eleanor: [Something in English]

  Hanna: [Nodding. Pointing.]

  Hanna: [Something in Amharic; gesture for driving a car; gesture for a hand going around a clock.]

  Eleanor: [Shaking head. Hands palm-up, gesture for I don’t understand.]

  Hanna: [Gesture for Follow me]

  Harar was a small city but the level of activity was high. They faced a stream of pedestrians, donkeys, and cars—which here, in contrast to Addis, were all vintage French: Mercedes and Peugeots from the ’60s that she would later learn were decommissioned cabs shipped over from Europe. Women in orange-and-purple tunics walked single file along the street’s edge, balancing straw baskets and jugs on their heads; men crouched on narrow sidewalks in circles of five or ten, playing games or trading unidentifiable goods. The sounds of hawkers, car horns, and music from storefronts collided, producing an enveloping force that pushed Eleanor forward, like a tailwind.

  Hanna looked back to make sure her charge was keeping up, grinned when she saw that she was, and pointed to a building on the corner up ahead.

  Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady and lesbian; and Eleanor of Aquitaine, divorcée, falsely accused of sterility, mother of not one but two English kings.

  No longer a popular name, it derives—according to some—from Latin for “compassion” or “shining light.” And to others: from Greek for “foreign” or “not the same.”

  “So are you going to tell me the whole story, or whether the story is true?”

  THE HOTEL APPEARED to have been built in the ’50s, and the interior had a feeling familiar to Eleanor from places she hadn’t been to or thought of in years: Texas; California. Hanna led her up to the fourth floor and opened door number 5: brightly lit, small, with a balcony overlooking the intersection. In the relative quiet, their lack of a common language filled the room.

  As Eleanor dropped her bag on the floor, opened the sliding door, and took in the view from the balcony—a patchwork of low tin-roofed structures not unlike the bars on Chechenya Street, presided over by a large, faded COCA-COLA sign (this time written in English)—Hanna pulled out a cell phone and spoke rapidly into it. When she was done she tapped Eleanor on the shoulder, then looked into her eyes and pointed to her own watch-free wrist; she held out three fingers and jabbed the index finger of her other hand toward the carpet in a motion Eleanor took to mean “downstairs.” Then Hanna repeated the gesture of driving a car, then made the gesture for eating.

  Eleanor believed she understood that Hanna would return later with a car and that they’d go to dinner. She nodded and grinned and nodded again. She made the gesture for In that case, maybe I’ll take a nap. The bus ride had been long and she had spent much of it talking to her seatmate, an engineering student on his way to visit his grandparents in their village, where he was trying to help get a hydroelectric project off the ground. “Oromo engineering,” he said, interrupting himself to point out a row of thatched-roof round dwellings by the side of the road as the bus passed by.

  If she had understood Hanna correctly, she could assume her immediate future was secure, while her nonimmediate future was almost completely unknown; these combined facts, along with the pattern cast by the sun through the open-weave curtains, made Eleanor smile. Then she frowned: She had forgotten to ask Hanna (though how she would have asked this using gestures she didn’t know) which time-telling system she was using when setting their date. When Hanna had held up three fingers, Eleanor assumed that—because they were now in the provinces? Or because Hanna didn’t speak any European languages?—this meant 3:00 by the ancient clock, which (she had learned through a series of confusing interactions followed by the relief of Alem’s explanation at the restaurant) ran six hours ahead of conventi
onal Western time. This would put their meeting at 9:00 that evening, a reasonable time to eat. It was 5:15. Surely this was the plan Hanna meant to make.