Disaster Was My God (15 page)

“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.”

T
oo 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 the 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 …

S
o
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.

So many children there were in these old poems!—
O Childhood days—wasn’t the body a treasure to spend?—wasn’t love the peril or strength of the Psyche?…
Children laughing, children running; a troupe of child actors and children at dawn, waving their arms at the sky, thrilled to be alive,
freed
, in the first air and rainbows after the Flood, which had wiped clean away the old, dead world of ogreish parents and their pious falsities. Here, confounding and confabulating, were new fables, tales of many things, including love:

So ran the fugitive phantasmagoria of the now old prince’s thinking. Now, many years later, having fallen into the well of love—and with no recourse to magic swords—the prince was trying to think of an honorable
way, of
any
way, out. When, with great prescience, matched by his equally great experience in such matters, much like writing, Arthur Rimbaud, trader, simply forgot. Quite simply, he … forgot.

13
Amnesia Anesthesia

That was it, forgot. It wasn’t a conscious or a cruel thing; it was a kind of thing, a mercy, really, to forget. A powerfully powerless male kind of thing, forgetting until one morning when at last he told her
—out
.

As in
OUT
.

Arrogant man. Did he think he could just rid himself of her by saying biblically, three times,
I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee
? Explaining didn’t work. Coaxing didn’t coax. And when she again became hysterical, grabbed for the knife, and threatened to cut her throat, well, that settled the matter. Proved his whole point—the girl had to go. With money and all amenities, obviously—but go. Out. So spoke the prophet who once foretold the time when the endless servitude of woman would be broken.

A
h
, but his canny mother five thousand miles away—who somehow had her suspicions about all this—for some time, like a soup, Mme. Rimbaud had been stirring her son with specious claims about having “someone in mind” for him. Honestly now, Mme. Rimbaud casting herself as
l’entremetteuse
—the go-between—the doyenne of New Romance! She knew her son was distractible, and on this point she was correct. For her ridiculous offer, this bluff, produced in Rimbaud even more fantasy and drift and ambivalence, especially when the French-learning Tigist found the letter and exploded. At Ice Woman, as she called her prospective mother-in-law. At her and his stupid, silent sister, barren
cow
!

“You lie with me now,” the girl ordered, spreading her tasty yam for him. “Come! Yes, you come, and I will make you hard. Stupid Ice Woman. Ugly woman. Now be a man. Be hard for me. What is wrong
with you? Look at you hanging like a dead chicken. Do you want people to talk? To call me barren?
Give me child.
”

But now as he is being carried out of town on this great gurney, this seems so long ago. Ages ago. And who am I now to you, a cripple
—who
, he thinks in shame.

Fool!

Waving her horsehair flyswatter, Tigist, with those spidery dark pools of eyes, Tigist just fans him away like bad smoke
—go
. Then she, too, turns away, while he, lying on his back, transported as through the afterlife, passes under the great gate, then down the sun-pounded road, down the great Harar massif, past staring wooly-haired men holding tall spears. Vacant-eyed men. It was they who owned the night, and they who would be watching, intensely, as Rimbaud’s party pushed east toward the sea.

14
Sticky Burrs