by Bruce Duffy
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:
I could marry.
I might marry.
Someday I will marry.
I never will be married.
I need a man to marry me.
Some man should marry me.
“Good 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 simm
ered 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.
“What is wrong with your sister? Stupid, I think. I think your mother milks her like a goat.”
He looked at her in horror. “Enough. There is nothing wrong with her.”
“No children! How old is she? Really.” Really: this was her power word, dripping with whatever she wanted to drizzle over it. Really. Really.
“Twenty-five.” He stopped. “Thirty. I don’t know.”
Squealing, Tigist fell back, kicking her feet at the ceiling, she was laughing so hard. “An old goat! That’s what your sister is! And your mother, old cow, ha, she milks her.”
Too much. Finally, it was just too much for him. Too much noise. Too much arguing. Too much rutting and spewing. And too much of what he found so unfamiliar and even scary—happiness. Even the possibility of happiness.
And it was confusing. In his poet days at sixteen and seventeen, he had been the top man with a poet a full decade his senior, a grown man whom he could make cry like a girl. Here, bitch. Jutting, the boy clutched the man’s balding head to his groin. He rammed him from behind, slapped him, and stole his money, then, worst of all, refused to talk to him, sometimes for days at a time. Youth was a special skin, and cruelty, alchemy, especially if you had been sent to earth to change life and revolutionize love. As a boy, however, he had been beautiful, even angelic, in a way problematic to achieving these ambitions. Hence his need to render himself unkempt and obnoxious—ugly and disturbing, dissonant. And so men feared him. Of course they feared him. Such is the fascination of the scorpion. Its sting can be fatal but it cannot sting itself.
Alone now, Rimbaud almost never thought about the past or who he really was, but then that was half the problem with the girl. She raised too many expectations, too many of those answerless life questions that he had so brilliantly ducked for a million years. Notions like love, forever, tomorrow, and Tigist’s now desperate issue of when. When will you marry me? When, when, when, to the point he would fly the coop. Grab his rifle, slam the door, then head off, ready to explode.
“But, Monsieur,” Djami would cry, running down the street after him, “Monsieur, you cannot go alone! They will hurt you, these people. Are you crazy?”
“Go!” he ordered, driving Djami away like a dog. So off he went, out through the north-facing gate into the land beyond the walls. Down the road, any road. Up the mountain, any mountain. God damn them all.
By then, he fled almost daily in long, punishing, knee-jarring marches. Anything to exhaust himself. Anything to quell his jabbering brain in this great race of acquisition, in which his every sou and second, his every move, counted and was counted. It was not mere greed propelling this relentless self-scrutiny. It was, rather, the unfolding of the destiny in which once again he, the changeling, would be another, just as, as a poet, he had declared, I is another. Rebaptized, he would be that new man, le capitaliste dynamiting mountains, diverting rivers, and charting new seas. Anything but that useless, impoverished wretch the poet.
And he was not a cripple, not then. He was ruddy and hard and heedless, his lever-action, shell-shucking .44-40 Winchester carelessly swung over his shoulder, one round in the chamber and four behind it, asking no man’s permission. When he was feeling out of control, he liked that feeling.
Alone up here and angry with her—swallowed in this hostile vastness—he felt like a water strider, the so-called Jesus bug, walking on water, clinging to the barest membrane of human tolerance and good will. And he liked this, too, the peering-down-the-gun-barrel thrill of it, alone out here, beyond help.
Come. Come kill me. Come on. Why not? He was rich. He was alone. As for this smooth-sliding Winchester, it was priceless to the skinny men. To the skinny, wooly-haired men, the man who could take his balls and this gun, he would be a man of whom songs would be sung around the fire. And so the wooly men shadowed and dogged him, this unbeliever, this white offense. Spears in hand, in robes of raw white cotton, they stood like grim angels, watching this man now taunting them. And all because his woman had shamed him, because they both had failed. Or rather, because in a wave of sudden disgust and fear, once again he had failed in bed.
On one such day, after another failure in bed, he came upon a herd of young camels. Juveniles. Sapling-legged colts, more than two dozen in number—dodging and dust raising, playing—they were joyously running in tight formation, khaki-colored camels covering, like a wind, the khaki-colored hills.
Look, look, said his soaring soul, to see them undulating, flocking like windblown birds, then launching off again en masse. For as ugly and ungainly as the grown camel is, in this world there is almost nothing more lithe or supple or joyous than a colt camel first stretching his long, knobby legs, flying with his camel flock.
When, suddenly, the camels slowed, then snorted at him, E-yaahh. So he stopped. So they stopped, crying, E-yaahh. E-yaahh. E-yaahh. Spooked, they spoke to It, him lying in the bush, smoochy-lipped camels, with those queer stalks for eyes. And then, as suddenly, they forgot about him and Rimbaud saw why.
For down the draw were eruptions, glowing red wounds—water-gorged buds so red and turgid it was almost obscene. It was spring, and the cactus was in bloom. Red, juicy cactus flowers burning in thickets of baize green.
These were great spiny cactuses, masses upon masses protecting equally massive termite mounds, turd-brown, cement-hard cathedrals of regurgitated mud, some fifteen feet high. But none of these obstacles dissuaded the camels, nothing could, as the blooming fruit burst in their maws, oozy and syrupy. It drove the bees mad. The flies, too, but the camels were in no way discouraged, pushing into sticker thickets that would have shredded a man.
The pain. It made him want to eat one of these squishy, juicy red eruptions bristling with steel needles. The pain. Try it, said his mind, for now the camels were frenzied, bleeding from their mouths and flanks, their thorn-studded ears flipping spastically. Yet inoculated, it seemed to him. Protected by th
e vast pleasure that somehow canceled out the pain of all those stabs and prickles. He closed his eyes, half praying, Please, God, please, be silent.
But no, he could not, would not: never could he just be. Be grateful. Be happy. Be in love. It made him feel trapped, stuck. Such that, rearing back, he raised the gun and, almost stupefied, fired it, at the sun, scattering the camels. Anger, a towering, overpowering anger. Up it rose like a pillar in the sky.
Boom!
Again, the sharp punch of the rifle, that sweet, ear-clapping shock as up it streaked, higher, hotter, angrier than the sun. Again, he cocked the demon thing. T-zing, the spent shell flew out and the next round rammed home. And dazedly taking aim, once again the gun hammered back, only to return the echoing roar of answerless answers, off the equally answerless rocks.
His eyes clenched; his heart stopped; the sky shattered and down it plummeted, an avalanche of showering, soul-shattering ruin. Ineluctably connected. Magnetically attracted. To him, to him, to him …
So as usual, he delayed and dithered, bottled up, then shut down, thinking of nothing, absolutely nothing, for days on end.
Tigist, meanwhile, became increasingly suffocating, at times hysterical, screeching and tearing at his now utter passivity, as he dodged and demurred. Or rather, as he endeavored to explain, again, in his very learned fashion, the ways of the inexplicable.
Or rather, to explain himself out of love.
Or rather, to revise. To couch sorrow in a less sorrowful and correspondingly brighter context. Forget it. Screaming, Tigist threw open the shutters, hurled out clothes, then raved to all of the town. So began the saga of the now blighted establishment of A. Rimbaud, Trader.
And so for some downhill months again Tigist’s period would come and, true to the purity laws, she would withdraw. Sweet freedom! Holy peace! In fact, in mood and precise indistinctness, it was reminiscent of those late prose fables he had written at the tender age of twenty or so. Prose poems. Poem tales. Really, a music box of magic words that, when you cranked it, played naïve songs of circuses and gruesome monsters and happy children. Of disconnected things connected with a kind of mad logic, by the magic spit of dreams.
