Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  “Monsieur!” comes the voice that breaks him from this reverie. It’s Djami. Shading his eyes, Djami is pointing across the street.

  “Monsieur, don’t you see? Look. It is Monsieur Bardey! All the frangis. See? They come to see you go.”

  9 The Poet Who Didn’t Know It

  A proper send-off it is, too. For across the road, Rimbaud sees a very welcome sight. In his freshly stropped boots, tweeds, and tie, it’s Bardey, the so-called lord mayor of Harar. It’s Bardey and the “chaps,” his confreres, a dozen or more all turned out, having drunk all night to fuel themselves for Rimbaud’s not-so-fond bon voyage. And all of them, to a man, are now blocked—blocked rather conveniently—by the rising headwaters of the mob. Thank God. How men dread good-byes.

  “A proper send-off,” Bardey had told the chaps earlier. “I mean, after ten years, the least we can do is bloody see him off.”

  As Rimbaud’s employer, benefactor, and frequent apologist, Bardey is perfect in the role of the father-wise, merchant-diplomat savior, and not just for Rimbaud but for a whole host of castoffs from Europe and America, why even one poor fool, a cowboy soon deceased, who had arrived sporting an American Stetson hat and twin six-guns. In the case of Rimbaud, most observers would have said that Bardey was heaven-sent, his deus ex machina—when, for example, the rash Rimbaud royally pissed off the king. Or again, when he, a white man, struck a black man, the sort of thing that easily could have triggered an honor killing. But just what has rubbed off? What exactly has Rimbaud learned in ten long years in this country? This remains unclear.

  One thing is for sure, though. Save for Cecil Rhodes with his diamonds, Alfred Bardey is the best cared-for chap in Africa: best fed, best rested, best turned out, and far and away best manicured in his Van Dyke beard and Panama hat. Bald but nobly so, with two slick curls that twirl, Disraeli-like, around his small, white ears.

  Never ruffled. Never in a bad temper. Never—almost—on the losing end. Even more unnerving, while all others stomp about drenched in the heat, the fellow never seems to break a sweat. Then again, why should he, with two handsome mistresses on either end of town, not to mention an unquestioning wife very nicely set up in Mayfair. No sir, no clap for Mr. Bardey! His life is one vast tent pole, all set up for him, wherever he goes. One does not see Mr. Bardey slouching and sneaking (unlike Rimbaud) into the town’s two bordellos. And equally unlike Rimbaud, Bardey takes regular annual holidays. By contrast, in his ten years here, the poet has set a world submersion record. Except for a brief trip to Cairo, never once in that time has he approached the fires of European civilization. And for several interminable years before this time, he rusticated in Crete as a troubled construction foreman, then in Aden as an ill-paid clerk. In short, serving an apprenticeship to nowhere—that is, until Bardey gave him a go.

  In fact, it was Bardey who, one year ago, had heard (quite accidentally from a traveler) about Rimbaud’s growing and indeed extraordinary poetical reputation, then taking shape in Paris. As Rimbaud was all too well aware, he was already something of a legend, the subject of rumor, fantasy, and ridiculous speculation, and yet far from being flattered, he found it all tremendously irritating. Had he asked to be published? Had it ever been his aim to be famous? Had he ever cared what people thought? And so when Bardey asked him about these reports, Rimbaud did not deny them. He just refused to discuss the matter. Fame. Poetry. Any of it.

  “Oh please,” the once-poet protested. “Every French boy writes. Let us not waste our time with seventeen’s frothings.”

  “Slops,” “frothings,” “inanities”—Rimbaud utterly rejected his literary leftovers, even as Bardey pressed his Paris bookseller to locate all writings existent. As a lover of Coleridge, Byron, Wilde, Hopkins, Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Tennyson, and, provisionally, even the shocking and shamelessly great Whitman, Bardey nevertheless despaired, where Rimbaud was concerned, of finding any known path in. And yet, he had one word for Rimbaud’s poems: undismissable.

  Far from birds and herds and village girls,

  I would drink, kneeling in some heather

  Surrounded by soft woods of hazel trees,

  In an afternoon fog warm and green.

  What could I drink from this young Oise,

  Voiceless elms, flowerless grass, cloudy sky?

  What did I draw from the gourd of the colocynth

  Some golden liquor, insipid, which brings on sweat.

  Such, I would have been a bad inn sign.

  Then the storm changed the sky, until evening.

  They were black countries, lakes, poles,

  Colonnades under the blue night, railway stations.

  What did he drink? Why? How then did he become a sign for an inn? An inn! Before Rimbaud, poems rhymed, certainly had a certain number of syllables and stresses and caesuras and such, but essentially they were versified prose. They didn’t mystify or take wild leaps, they were not obscurantic, they did not thumb their noses at the reader.

  “Oh, I don’t know that I understand it,” lamented Bardey to the chaps, “and I would be hard pressed—save for Baudelaire—to say where on earth it came from. Much less where it fits. Which leaves me with my original word—undismissable. Unexplainable. Ranting and obscure in parts. Even nonsensical at points. Throw in jejune, too. Yet, through it all—and I shall say it again—powerfully, inexplicably undismissable.”

  “Ah,” said one of the wits, “and what do you think dismissed Frère Jacques to this hellhole?”

  “I told you,” groused another. “Rumor has it he killed someone.”

  “Come now. People think we’ve all bloody killed someone.”

  “Or we’re all brokenhearted. Jilted.” This got a small laugh.

  “All right,” said the heavy one, Mercer, to Bardey. “We’re thickheaded. So read the bloody thing again. Not that one with ‘bad sign on the inn’ or whatever the hell it was. I mean the other one. You know, the one with the ABCs.”

  “Very well,” said Bardey, who then intoned:

  A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,

  One day I will tell your latent birth:

  A, black hairy corset of shining flies

  Which buzz around cruel stench,

  Gulfs of darkness; E, whiteness of vapors and tents—

  “E!” cried one. “As in E-nough. If he hates his own bloody work, why’s it our job to bother with it?”

  “But,” remonstrated Mr. Bardey, who in his mild way could get heated about such matters, “the trouble is, it is not nonsensical. Fantastical and willful, yes. But—”

  “—Give me Tennyson,” chuffed Mr. Beet, blowing smoke from a well-chewed cheroot. “Theirs is not to make reply, theirs is not to reason why, theirs is but to do or die. I love tub-thumping, bleedingly obvious stuff like that.”

  Of course it turned fractious. Exegesis—Jesus! Here Bardey found no known landmarks and indeed no compass whatsoever, or not according to the known knowns of other great poems. Which, however obscure at points, were—as Bardey reminded them again and again—poems that could be gotten, unpacked, and readily puzzled out.

  Well, for a gadfly and puzzler like Bardey, this was torture, having in their midst a literary man who sat quite mute on the topic—quite willfully so, as if he had been taken prisoner. It was impolite, it was boorish, not to mention unwise to stiff one’s employer. Indeed, it matched Rimbaud’s equally stubborn refusal to play chess, cribbage, poker, charades—games of any kind. Still, Mr. Bardey tried.

  “You know, Rimbaud,” he ventured one day, “I’ve always said that poems are like oysters to be winched open and drunk for their liquor. So different from novels, I think. Novels are more brute force. More excavatory. Well, don’t you think?” With some impatience he waited, then added heatedly, “Well, might you at least bloody agree with that?”

  “Bardey”—and Rimbaud sighed one of his long sighs, as if the world would then bore and frustrate him out of existence—“as I have told you, I do not think. Yes, I wr
ote them, I suppose, but so what? I cannot help them now. They are like children, or rather, estranged children, and I think that is quite enough. Today I do not write poetry. Nor do I read poetry. Or novels. Any of that creative nonsense. And, if you will kindly indulge me, I do not discuss poetry, something, incidentally, that I almost never did.” The poet sat with his thoughts, then allowed, “In any case, I don’t think any artist can rightfully explain what he did. And anyhow—well, so what?”

  “But, Rimbaud,” begged Bardey, “at least be so good as to talk to me about past poetry, other poets, or poetry in general. I’ve no one here with whom I can discuss such matters. Oh, when I took you on, I knew, of course, that you are well educated and even classically trained, much as you have sought to disguise it. But I had no idea you were literary, or thoroughly literary, or not to such a degree.” Winching open an oyster, indeed. Again Bardey waited—to no avail—then exploded, “Oh, come on now! It’s as if some famous singer arrived here, then refused to sing.”

  Rimbaud just sat there.

  “Very well, then,” thundered Bardey. “But answer me this. Why, in your ‘Vowels’—so why should the letter U be green? Why not black? Or blue? Or red?”

  “What!” said Rimbaud indignantly, in mock alarm. “Do you mean to tell me that U is not green?”

  And famous, too, said Bardey. Well, growing fame. This brought howls of disbelief from Rimbaud’s colleagues. Famous? This mercantile monk yanking recalcitrant camels and counting rank hides? Famous? This tightwad sweating every sou?

  And hardheaded? God! Even before this discovery, Bardey had repeatedly come to Rimbaud’s rescue—why, even as recently as last week, when, as a mercy, Bardey had bought him out. Good terms, too. Scrupulous to a fault, Bardey. Extraordinary man, really. And only now, as Rimbaud glimpsed Bardey across the street waving to him—only now in his tardy way did he see it!

  “Ah, me,” said Bardey almost fondly as he waved, “I mean, gentlemen, how very fortunate we are, unlike our departing friend, to have no definable talent. No defining passion. No real vocation in life.” For such an indefatigably cheerful man, Bardey loved twilights.

  Let’s see. Besides Digby, there is Tucker, the erstwhile telegrapher. There is Buckey, whose fiancée fobbed him off. And Duchamp and Ancelli, the Italian, most amusing chap. He and his brother Marcello—Marcello the Unlucky—who had been stabbed and later shot, then poisoned unsuccessfully by a disgruntled servant. Eleven in all. And, with the exception of Bardey, they all showed too clearly what results when bachelor oddballs are left, by the fairer sex, to roam unshorn, unwashed, and sartorially unsupervised.

  “Well, gents,” said Tucker, unlimbering himself to squirt the wall. “I shall say this for our poet. He could step in shit. In that, none was his equal.”

  “God, could he! The girl! Or Menelik, ready to boil him in oil!”

  This was Menelik the warrior king, a sort of modernizing Yahweh buying Gatling guns and steam trains while smiting villages and armies with the rifles Rimbaud smuggled and finagled for him—despite rather pro forma European efforts to eradicate slavery and pacify the place. How naïve, thought Rimbaud. Pick your chaos. Someone had to establish order here, and it might as well be Menelik. For a born cynic, Rimbaud was nothing if not swaddled in naïve hope.

  “Well,” said Mercer, who, rumor had it, was about to be cashiered, “my personal favorite was when Rimbaud publicly slapped the camel man. Never forget how Rimbaud stood there, actually indignant, when the mob came for him. Wronged, you know—misunderstood. As if he was upholding justice.”

  “There it is,” intoned Bardey, nodding soberly, ever the apologist for his unfortunate protégé. “He was too mentally … astringent. Too … aesthetic. As I told him so many times, of course these people shilly-shally. Of course they pilfer, and so would you, were you in their shoes. But no! He held them to a standard. Had these high moral … theories. ‘Come now,’ I told him once, ‘no need for a scalpel where a butter knife will do.’ ”

  But before they can more fully dissect this, Digby blurts out:

  “Lord, look who’s coming. It’s Friar Hopeless!”

  “Late to the dance, as usual.”

  “Shoeless.”

  “Still clueless.”

  It’s a white man in his thirties. Pulling on his shirt and stamping into his shoes, he is being followed by an imposing, exasperated woman pulling by the wrists two distraught children. White children. Almost unheard of here.

  “Daddy,” cries the girl, “Daddy, wait for Mummy!”

  “Come on,” trumpets the man. Dropping his knapsack, the man ties one boot, leaves the other untied, then starts off again, bellowing, “Mr. Rimbaud! Monsieur Rimbaud!”

  Forget it. Rimbaud can’t hear him. Blocked by the crowd, Rimbaud is still oblivious to this family of four chasing after him. As for Bardey and the chaps, Digby raises an invisible glass.

  “Gentlemen, a toast!”

  “Here, here!”

  “To the poet! Who didn’t know it!”

  10 Old Maid

  Mme. Rimbaud meantime is hardly alone in chafing at the prospect of Arthur’s impending return. With every passing day, Isabelle feels a similar anxiety tinged with resentment that she should be stuck with her mother in this mooing, feeding, forever-needing manure factory near the Belgian border. And not just stuck but hopelessly unmarried when here her female contemporaries have long moved on.

  It is an old and humiliating story, and yet in Isabelle there burns the hope, albeit languishing, that if she is freed from the queen’s clutches—freed to live somewhere, perhaps to work in town—that some good man, even a considerably older one, will find her. This remains Isabelle Rimbaud’s survivor’s creed. I will be found.

  And yet this trap in which she finds herself, it is not just her mother’s doing. In Isabelle’s mind, her undoing is very much Arthur’s doing as well.

  For after all, if Arthur returns, he will return with money and then, having money, likely he will marry. As any man can, especially if he has money. But will he marry and leave? Guiltily, Isabelle worries about this, for if he leaves she will be trapped at Roche as before. What most upsets her, though, is that her mother, the traitor, claims to have a wife all picked out for Arthur. A wife! Like a suit of clothes. It’s all set, Mme. Rimbaud claims, even as she refuses to divulge the name of the lucky lady.

  “But, Maman,” says Isabelle, doing her best to sound calm and reasonable, even as inwardly she trembles with rage, “why won’t you tell me her name?”

  “Don’t worry,” snaps the mother, who now hears herself being called a liar, “I have someone. All picked out, too. Don’t you worry on that account—oh, I have the girl. If indeed that is what he wants—never mind the leg.” The mother nods. “And that, daughter, is all you need to know.”

  “Girl, you say?”

  “Woman. A woman. And none of your tricks! You heard me. I refuse to discuss it.”

  “But Maman, honestly, who on earth would I tell? The cows?”

  “Does the priest share the secrets of your confession? Does the doctor tell the town your troubles? Eh?”

  At this, the mother looks immensely vindicated, the poaching cat padding off with a mouse. As for Isabelle, now spinning around, her eyes blurt up, Why? Why not me? Because I’m an old maid?

  There in the hallway, by the front door, hangs a dull, time-spotted old mirror. Round like a face and hung with old hats, it seems to Isabelle like a little old lady friend, a wise, sweet old lady veined with age and slowly losing her silver, bit by bit, like sand sifting through an hourglass. And so, every morning before Mass, once Isabelle shucks her heavy India rubber boots and cleans herself up—in those precious seconds before the mother’s hammerlike heels hit the stairs—Isabelle consults her lady friend, the mirror. Who now is asking Isabelle what she feels—really feels—since the day before, and the day before that.

  Well? thinks Isabelle, plucking a chicken feather from her hair and flicking it. Pfffth.
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br />   You are too skinny, observes Mme. Mirror. Granted, a bit plain, but certainly pert and pretty enough. There are men out there for you.

  So why not me? Why won’t Mother help me find a man?

  Don’t be foolish. Why ever would she? Only a fool would lose her only daughter to marriage. Especially an old woman with a farm to run!

  Finding her a man. Rationally, Isabelle knows this is an absurd expectation. Clearly, matchmaking is the last thing her mother would have the guile, the patience, or the female connections to contrive—never mind the motivation. Still, if she tried, thinks Isabelle—well, her mother could make her daughter’s desires known to the right gentleman. For example, to M. Dumont, the telegrapher, a widower with four children. Or even to the town recorder of deeds, the wordless, never-married M. Chaumas, who walks as if on two erasers, gliding between the shelves.

  Mme. Mirror stares back at her. Then try Sunday.

  Sunday? Even if Isabelle wants to go to town, to stroll and, frankly, troll the bandstand (where the mustached soldats patrol, hands stuffed in their brass belt buckles), well, how is she to broach the question with Maman? How?

  Mother, I think I’ll go see the band this Sunday.

  Sunday, Mother, I might just go for a visit in town.