Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  White teeth, too. Owing to the water, it is said: sweet, sand-washed, free-flowing water, not—according to Djami—the dirty water from the iron rocks, which gives the girls in some nearby villages, even some quite beautiful girls, the brown donkey teeth. Never in Harar.

  Forearms with nut brown skin—skin drawn with spiraling henna tattoos, like fine netting, to snare the merchants and big buyers with the bags of money tied under their tunics. Such is Spice Woman’s job, her spidery, charming specialty—men. Every type of man, too.

  It was with this woman, girl woman, this dark-haired Harari, this Tigist, that Rimbaud made the first of many fatal, and frankly foolish, miscalculations. It began with the idea of taking the girl, any girl, into his house, and it continued with the even more fantastically stupid idea of keeping Tigist and Djami, two teens under the same roof, to quarrel endlessly over how tea was to be served and laundry pressed and who could say what to the cook. And Rimbaud was actually surprised! It was the kind of thing that made his frangi colleagues pound the tables, laughing until the tears ran down their cheeks—his daft and utter surprise. That Rimbaud!

  The outcome, then, was as loud and messy as it was predictable. Yet here, when he had been warned repeatedly—by Djami, by his European comrades, and, above all, by the killing looks he got on the street—here he was, a man in his thirties, moony as a seventeen-year-old over the girl. Mad in a way.

  And why now? This was the other question everyone asked. For here in a town legendary for its beautiful women, for years he had virtually never looked at women other than whores, never until that day in the market when the Spice Woman wiped cardamom on her brown wrist, blinked her pool-dark eyes, then held her beautiful, bespangled wrist out to him. Smiled and said, “Smell, yes. You smell. Smell good, yes?”

  Little flirt. Except for with the town whores, he had no practice or knack with women. Feeling sick, actually frightened, what with the heat and his sweating, he feared that he smelled. Heartsick, he left, slunk off only to sneak back the next day, braving dirty looks from the girl’s mother and the usual phalanx of aunts guarding their prize, staked like a goat in the bazaar.

  But the real shocker came three weeks later, when Rimbaud, now filled with passion and purpose, picked up his lever-action Winchester, called Djami, then, gun draped over his shoulder, marched to the girl’s house to bargain with her father. Poor Djami came along to translate. Or rather, since Rimbaud spoke the language almost perfectly, to confer on what was really being said, as negotiations spun into three mad nights. It was entertainment. Breaking off. Walking off. Called back—was the girl a rug to be sold? Nights of men wildly gesticulating, the dodging father, the silent brothers, the obnoxious uncles, even the neighbors and various menacing cousins who hung around outside with their daggers and long pistols and muskets. One always knew when the deal was about to crescendo. For then, fanning a brazier of red coals, a barefoot slave girl would start the dreaded coffee ceremony, sprinkling on the sharp, woody incense that sent up choking clouds of smoke—smoke that even drove out the flies as Rimbaud stood in the doorway, coughing and runny-eyed.

  As Rimbaud soon divined, however, it was not the men who ran the show. No, it was the women listening in the next room, cackling and second-guessing and muzzling the girl, squeaking with disbelief as she heard her price soar higher and higher—a record! And yet in all those days, never once did Rimbaud see his intended, or any other woman, for that matter. Never in a strict Muslim house.

  Finally, though, after yet another phony walkout, a deal was struck, but at appalling cost. Mortifying, really. In one fell swoop, Rimbaud had all but destabilized the local economy. Five hundred francs! A thousand, some said. Outrageous, groused the Europeans, that these people, these thieves actually thought they could get away with this. And did. And all thanks to randy Rimbaud.

  But there was another reason Rimbaud had paid this premium on top of the ransom, and this was the untidy fact that he stubbornly refused to marry the girl—or not now, or not just yet. The frangi’s stalling, this was the true source of the upset now shared by the family, the well women, and the town. Arrogant frangi! Dishonoring the girl and her family, and here when he had promised. Promised upon his honor to marry her.

  Later, he said. In a few months. By Ramadan certainly—soon.

  And then what? They had a year together, half of it over the moon, that is, until the marriage issue became intolerable. But it wasn’t merely the idea of marriage. It was the notion of permanence. Or really the presumption, the burden, of love, meaning weakness and what weakness said—any weakness—in a very dangerous place. Not to mention what Rimbaud’s mother and sister would say, thinking their Arthur had married the devil and the night. Stalling, Rimbaud came up with a million reasons, but really, for the once freethinker, marriage was only the pretext for something still larger boiling up in him, until summarily and inexplicably—and then in utter rout and panic—Rimbaud told her one night: Out.

  All lovers fight so there was no lead-up, or certainly nothing like this. All at once Rimbaud told her this, then stood there frozen, thinking he deserved it as she screamed and wailed and broke things. At which point, feigning calm as she lay immobilized and trembling with rage in bed, he gathered up her belongings. Then early the next morning, he packed her off, humiliated, with a group of armed hirelings—home with yet more money in an attempt to appease her family’s wrath, with honor certain to be avenged.

  Newspapers, even if they had any, couldn’t have spread the news any faster. Immediately, all that more temperate minds had tried to forestall, especially in the frangi mercantile community, down it all poured upon the faux groom. He had the girl’s family making threats and sharpening their spears against him. He had the howls of his comrades, solid businessmen—the very men who had worked so hard to gain the town’s trust—all painted now as frangi dogs, liars, unbelievers. And of course he had the women by the well, still waiting for justice below his blighted establishment.

  And so, later, when the well women heard about his sick leg, that “stinking goat” hanging off his body, at this news there was great glee, for in fact it explained everything. A jinn in the frangi’s house, one set loose by the girl, had poisoned the leg with all the backed-up man venom. And it was so big! Why, the leg was swollen to the size of a water udder. As for his puny middle leg, it was limp. Limp! laughed the date woman, holding up one little finger.

  Smacking wash and spitting seeds, so said the women at the well.

  And so the night before, in that final frenzy of packing and binding, tossing and deciding, all around the house Djami had followed Rimbaud, twisting on his crooked crutch. Look at Djami now, the insolence of him! Peering around Rimbaud, he stares into his face, as the master tries to look away:

  “What is that word?” demands Djami, waving that finger as they do. “That word you use? Expend—Ex—Expend—?”

  “Ex-pend-a-ble.”

  “Exactly! This is all I am to you now. Nothing. Not even!”

  “Oh, good heavens. Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “No, expendable. Oh, when you are done, for you then it is, Go! I have no further use for you. And this is you.” Making his point, he slaps his hands back and forth. Washed of you—done.

  Rimbaud spins around.

  “You expendable? Good God, I am the one who is expendable here. Must I have you, too—my only family—tormenting me?”

  “Family! Do not insult me, saying we are family! Now you lie, Rinbo! Lie to the girl, lie to her family, to me, to everyone—lie. This is what you do.”

  Look at Rimbaud now, red-faced and humiliated—so vain about his good name and reputation, his iron word. Shooting back, “You see my leg. You see. You know as well as I do that my chances out there are not good. Bad, in fact. So what am I to do? Throw your life away as well? Or have you taken a slave—beggar your wife, and leave your son an orphan? As you were? Would that not be the ultimate selfishness?”

  “That Allah will decide, Rim
baud. Not you, not me.”

  Willfully his employer absorbs himself in another pile of papers. Receipts. Contracts. Keep, keep. Burn. Then, feeling more in control, softening, Rimbaud says in that lofty thespian manner required, and indeed expected, of the frangi, “You know, old friend, some people might say I was doing you a service.”

  “Service!” At this Djami blows up. “I who stood for you. Stood for you. Answered for you against the people. Many people. Who protected you, many times, with my life, and now I cannot go with you? You know how my world works, you know. For me to stay behind, I am a woman, dung—lower even. I have no honor. And when you leave me, I may be killed anyway, throat slit like a goat. All because of you. People angry with you. And all you must do, Rinbo, is what you can never do. Ask, that is all, ask.”

  8 Bad Day

  Something breaks in Djami that last morning, before they face the mob now gathered in the square below. There can be no pretending, not now. Rimbaud will never return, and this will come to no good end. Things should be said, honest things, heartfelt things, but there is no time, thank God. And so in silence Djami straps around Rimbaud’s thinning waist a corset of gold, four kilos’ worth, enough to slow a bullet or endow a village—gold, more dangerous here than dynamite.

  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.

  Well, 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 khats, 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.