Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  *

  Within the Jegol, walking along the main street, the Andegna Menguet, which leads to the square. On either side are two-story buildings with shops in every doorway: sellers of fabrics, jewelry, dresses and gifts, grocery stores. Also butchers’ shops where camels and goats are cut up and the pieces hung on the door. This is purely local trade. There are no souvenir shops or anything like that.

  On the ground are people chewing qat, the green leaf with natural amphetamine properties. Old women, squatting, sell bundles of it for a dollar fifty. There are skeletal men, with leafless branches all around, sleeping on the dusty sidewalks. Qat relieves pain and replaces food. Those who are not asleep look up at the sky and drink water, their red eyes fixed on a point in the air: it isn’t clear if they are trying to see into the future or simply watching insects swarming round a street-lamp.

  *

  Harar is a succession of narrow alleys lined with one-story houses, built of earth and stone, with painted walls of colored stucco. There are eighty-two mosques, most of wood. The tutelary fathers of the city are Sheik Abadir, who arrived from Arabia in the tenth century, and the sixteenth-century Emir Nur, who built the wall.

  But our strange quartet, including a child who knows nothing but understands everything, is here because of a poet.

  *

  Rimbaud’s original house was demolished. Today it is a modest hotel called Wesen Seged, on Feres Megala Square. A two-story building, with two blue windows.

  There it is, although the building is different.

  Up there, in the blue windows! (I point it out to Manuelito.)

  There is a very dark bar on the first floor. The day drinkers look at us and are upset. What their reddened eyes see has to advance through the optic nerve and cross a dense layer of lukewarm beer before reaching the brain. I go to the back of the room, where a rotted wooden staircase leads to the rooms on the second floor. There is a smell of urine. Standing by the ramshackle staircase, I think of Rimbaud’s desire to distance himself from Europe and live forever in sordid places, where the only memorable thing is the smile of the people. It is not a small thing.

  People make the dirtiest and most remote places seem beautiful, that’s why there is a great beauty in the ugliness of these impoverished cities.

  *

  Dusty cities, dark at night; cities of the red night inhabited by crazed creatures who chew qat and drink water, foul-smelling beggars, crazy, toothless old women, lepers. This is what cities must have been like in the Middle Ages. To return to Harar is to return to the past, to something basic that hasn’t changed with time. Rimbaud had been dreaming of it since he was young and had already written before coming: “I liked the desert, the scorched earth, the shriveled bars, the warm drinks. I crawled through foul-smelling alleys, with closed eyes, and offered myself to the sun, to the God of fire.”

  An ideal place for people haunted by dark memories. It was only in that atmosphere that we could heal.

  *

  The Ras Hotel has a small bar at the entrance. After dinner, the women went to sleep and I stayed there for a while, drinking a gin in silence. Then I went up to my room. I was about to switch off the light when I heard knocking at the door. It was Juana.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Of course.”

  She walked across the room to the bed, without looking at me. She lifted the counterpane and got in, but before doing that she dropped her robe and her very white panties on the floor.

  “Enough of this, Consul,” she said sadly. “I’m tired of waiting for you to make the first move. I’ll give you thirty seconds to tell me you don’t want it, otherwise take off your clothes and come here.”

  I hadn’t kissed anyone with such pleasure and desire since my teenage years. I licked her lips and neck, passed my tongue over her tattoos, sucked her breasts and the lined skin below her navel; I parted her legs and filled myself with her smell and her juices. Her body was starting to slacken, but it was full of a life I longed for. In a moment I had the butterfly tattoo in front of me.

  Madame Butterfly.

  I could swear it was beating its wings.

  *

  Rimbaud lived with Oromo or Harari women, mostly Muslim, dressed in wide skirts of printed cotton and colored veils, with fine features. He saw slender youths, the abeshás, as thin as sculptures by Giacometti, strolling in the darkness with their linen hoods, looking at him with curiosity and doubtless calling him faranyi. Tichaka, the young man at the bar, says to me: “Rimbaud stayed with us because he found a life that was rough and wild.” He pronounces it Rambo and only knows “The Drunken Boat,” which is printed on a banner in the cultural center that bears his name: a three-story wooden house that used to belong to an Indian merchant and has been restored.

  *

  Rimbaud spoke Amharic and Arabic and had friends among the local population, even lived with a woman for just over a year, and traveled, finding in this dusty, rocky place the perfect setting for his restless soul. Perhaps he was searching in this remoteness and solitude for a chimerical encounter with his father, who had always been far from him in his childhood, always there in the deserts, in distant garrisons. Simply, Rimbaud opted to leave.

  As the writer and traveler Paul Theroux says, Rimbaud is the patron saint of all of us, the travelers who throughout the world have repeated over and over his unanswerable question, the one he uttered for the first time in Harar: what am I doing here?

  *

  One morning, at breakfast, Manuela said to me:

  “Last night, hearing the cries of the wild animals, I felt that the revenge hurt me, too, although in a different way. My anger is still there, but I’ve stopped crying: now I can read and remember. Very soon I’ll be able to write.”

  It struck me that I should be grateful to the beasts of the night and the remoteness of the world.

  *

  Outside the hotel we can hear the howling of the hyenas and the barking of the dogs. It’s an infernal din that comes from the mountains around Harar, which are full of animals. A strange madness overcomes this city at night. The wild hyenas approach the walls and a man feeds them (“the son of Yusuf,” Tichaka tells me), gives them bones and pieces of meat he collects during the day from the butchers’ shops. There is a legend of a hyena man who comes to destroy the city. Giving them food is a way of preventing them from attacking the peasants. That rough night concert of dogs and hyenas makes us feel protected.

  *

  Juana searched for a while on her computer and finally gave me a strange text to read.

  “Look,” she said to me, “this is from when I also read Rimbaud. A crazy invention. Let’s see if you like it.”

  Today, Death paid me a visit.

  Before, my life was a feast at which all hearts opened, and all wines flowed from glass to glass, from mouth to mouth.

  One of those nights, I felt Death on my knees and found him bitter. I cursed him.

  “Oh, Death, come and take away the thought of Death,” I read in an old book.

  “When me they fly, I am the wings,” he replied, from another poem.

  I summoned all my strength. I planted myself in front of him and rejected his terrifying fury. Then I escaped.

  Death had a thousand faces.

  Sometimes, he had blue eyes and was a young poet gazing at the twilight, in the port of Aden.

  Death is here, and oh so punctual. Lord, your guest is waiting for you in the drawing room. Entrust my most precious treasures to the witches, to the spirits of poverty, to hate. I have succeeded in banishing any human hope from my soul.

  As I already said: today, Death paid me a visit. Death, the Grim Reaper. Death who never rests from his labors, from his sleeplessness. Who loves us and passes between us like a wind, a venticello, a slow, dense music, a dark cloud.

  I called to my execut
ioners to raise their rifles, I summoned all the plagues to drown me in their sand or their blood.

  Everything is merely proof that I can still dream.

  Then I lay down on the dusty soil of Harar and saw the young poet again.

  He was writing letters, looking southward. Every now and again he sank his hand into the red earth and let it run between his fingers.

  We played with madness (were we fantasizing?) until the afternoon gave my mouth the terrifying smile of the idiot.

  But I recovered my appetite, and went back to the parties, to the wine. Death was still there, I couldn’t ignore him.

  Everything is merely proof that I can still dream.

  I read it twice, surprised.

  “Did you write this? I mean, did you . . . ?”

  “Don’t ask me these questions, Consul.”

  *

  Listening to the howling of the hyenas on the terrace of the Ras Hotel, I go over the correspondence linked to Rimbaud and find a letter from 1887 written by the French vice-consul in Aden, in which he asks for information about a fellow countryman named “Raimbeaux, or something similar,” who has been handed over to him by the police. The individual has no papers, his appearance is slovenly, and he is unsteady when he walks. I feel envious of that description, and hope that one day I can live up to it.

  *

  Manuela prefers not to leave the hotel at night and stays with the boy. She writes and writes. Juana and I go for a drink at the National Bar, an old, dark, and, above all, empty place. Once my eyes get accustomed to the darkness, I see the music is coming from a humble duo: a female singer and her organist. They perform romantic songs and, in the darkness, she waves her arms, moved by her own words, trying to enliven an audience of ghosts. We ask for two beers. When they finish the song, there is no applause at all, of course, but the woman, in her evening dress, makes a solemn bow to the gallery.

  I think it’s the saddest, most heartbreaking, but also most beautiful gesture I have seen in my life.

  *

  The next day we return to Addis.

  1In 1974 Lieutenant-Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam seized power in a coup and assassinated Selassie, Tibabu tells me. He was the leader of a military junta known as the Derg. In 1987, he established the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, allied with Moscow. It lasted until 1991. Mengistu escaped in a plane filled with gold, sacks of dollars, and jewelry. Today he lives in Zimbabwe, protected by his friend Robert Mugabe. He is accused of genocide and has already been sentenced to death. He cannot return to Ethiopia.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Novelist, short story writer, and journalist, Santiago Gamboa was born in Colombia in 1965. His American debut, published by Europa in 2012, was the novel Necropolis, winner of the Otra Orilla Literary Prize. He is also the author of Night Prayers (Europa, 2016).