Disaster Was My God (11 page)

“No,” insists Rimbaud, hobbling, as Djami nudges the brass chamber pot into place. “Later. Later, do you hear me? I need to bloody
leave.
”

“No,” insists Djami, waving his supple index finger as they do. “Do you want the people to see you in this way? On your last day? Do you?”

God watched
. This is how Rimbaud thinks of the native men, as moral creatures and especially when it comes to their natural functions. Hot shame. The way the dark men will summarily lift their robes, then squat, without a thought, to urinate in the streets. Beneath the all-seeing
gaze of Allah, the Muslim men are forever purifying themselves, horrified to dribble so much as a drop on their faultless robes. Any stain. Squatting, they will take little flecks of mud or rock like burning coals and daub these chalky fragments on their members, blot it up, even a drip, while floating above, like a vast and milky eye in the rising wind, Allah, the all-seeing, Allah hovers like those great-winged birds the kites. And so five times a day they pray. Why, once under threat of attack, Rimbaud’s Abyssinian party dropped their guns and readied their prayer carpets. “Do you want to pray or die?” asked Rimbaud. The men stared at the
frangi
in incomprehension. Pray, but of course.

Dribble tinkles brass. “Lovely,” mumbles Rimbaud, as hot droplets spatter his bare toes and Djami’s, too. “What a memory, huh?”

“No shame, Monsieur, never with me.”

Rimbaud half grins. “Allah won’t mind today? You’re sure?”

This coaxes a smile from Djami. “Not today.
Rabbina yusahhil
, May the Lord make things easy.”

Y
et the truth is, Djami is furiously angry, shamed and humiliated at Rimbaud’s iron refusal to take him with the caravan. Angry that this man, like a father to him, should leave him “soiled like a woman.”

“Soiled,” his exact word, and it carries a history.

Six months before, Rimbaud had done essentially the same to the young Harari woman who—to his way of thinking, anyhow—had gotten him into this mess. Woman, concubine, intended wife, the girl, named Tigist, is now seventeen, perhaps eighteen as best they can calculate such things here—in any case, far too old to marry. Besides, Tigist’s most precious commodity as a young woman, her virginity, this has been stolen by him. Even as he tossed her away.

Beautiful, too. The Spice Woman, this Tigist, she is
the
girl—truly, a flower sprung in the mud. And if you are a man, you can bet she knows that
you
know how beautiful she is. For from all across Africa, from thousands of miles away, men come to Harar to see such girls as Tigist.
Of girls like Tigist songs are written. Around braziers—sparks whisking up into the night—the laughing caravan men, rolling on their haunches, mold their hands to suggest her volumes and movements, the gripping, man-stripping wriggle, when the Harari girl climbs you, oh boy, like a monkey on a tree.

Blended from Arabs and Negroes, and Turks, French, Italians, English, and Greeks, these Harari girls, they are born of everyone and everyplace, with smooth, tea-colored skin, thin noses, and clear, shining eyes—eyes of a pale brown, almost blue. Between, actually. The color
between
.

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.

A
nd 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.

A
nd 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, Rimbaud. 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.