The price of rifles was something else he studied. The Arabs in Harar were never so curious. Faranjis came and went but this one stayed off and on for ten years, living in modest houses. He hated the food. No one knew what was in his heart, nor heard his muttered ironies, nor understood his gift for concealment. He denied his wealth, claiming he was cheated, while chinking tall stacks of thick silver Maria Theresa dollars and rustling bank notes from the king.
Later, Menelik’s emissaries sought him out, pleading for guns and ammo, which he brought in caravans from the coast. He knew Makonnen, the father of Haile Selassie. The king bargained with him personally and helped make him rich.
His worst day went like this: on a visit to Aden he was confronted by his employer, a Frenchman he despised. The man was gloating with astonishing news. A traveling French journalist had told him that he recognized the name of his employee. He had been a boy genius in France and was famous as a decadent poet.
This revelation was like a horrible joke, the diligent and dull and rather sulky trader being the toast of literary Paris. Absinthe, drunkenness, buggery, free verse! The employer needled him for the travesty of it. The sour coffee merchant in the African outpost a poet! At last the boss had something on him.
The exile denied it. I is someone else, he had also once written, loving its enigma. But exile was a condition in which wordplay was frivolity. Finally he admitted who he had once been and said it was ‘absurd’ and ‘I’m through with all that.’
You go to the ends of the earth to begin a new life, and think you have succeeded, and then the past breaks in, as it does to the fugitive in disguise spotted by an old enemy. He had been happy in his anonymity, just a white man in the bush. He was naked now.
Thus, Rimbaud in Harar.
I said to Mr Nyali Tafara, ‘I want to see Rimbaud’s house.’
‘The real house or the other one?’
‘Both.’
In fact, none of the many houses Rimbaud occupied in Harar now exist. The house advertised as Rimbaud’s was built after his death, an old three-story Indian trader’s villa, mostly of wood, Islamic gingerbread in style, with colored glass windowpanes and shutters and wide verandas. As Rimbaud’s latest, and best, biographer, Graham Robb, has demonstrated, Rimbaud’s irony and self-mockery and deliberate deceptions created the myth of Rimbaud as a ruin, a bankrupt, a desperate failure, a discontented exile.
In fact, he was a resourceful traveler, an imaginative trader, a courageous explorer — his report on his discoveries in the Ogaden was published by the Société de Géographie in Paris — an accomplished linguist (he spoke Arabic and Amharic) and something of a botanist and ethnographer. He enjoyed living in Harar. He was a clever businessman, and though he had given up poetry he planned to write a book about Abyssinia. Posterity, unsmiling as always, took his mordant wit, his sarcasm and self-mockery literally. Robb’s description of him is apt, ‘a contented misanthrope.’
In one of my favorite self-portraits, grimly jeering at his life Rimbaud wrote home:
I still get very bored. In fact, I’ve never known anyone who gets as bored as I do. It’s a wretched life anyway, don’t you think — no family, no intellectual activity, lost among negroes who try to exploit you and make it impossible to settle business quickly? Forced to speak their gibberish, to eat their filthy food and suffer a thousand aggravations caused by their idleness, treachery and stupidity!
And there’s something even sadder than that — it’s the fear of gradually turning into an idiot oneself, stranded as one is, far from intelligent company.
Though he denied it, he was the happy captain of the drunken boat. Like many of us, he made a meal of his suffering — complained even as he was rather enjoying it, thrived on adversity and grumbled dishonestly about savagery and bad food, discomfort and poverty. Contemporary accounts prove that he lived well in Harar, made money, and felt at home in the town.
It was impossible for me to imagine Rimbaud in this villa, though various French cultural agencies had raised money to beautify the supposed Rimbaud residence. Around the turn of the century the building housed a French school, and the young Haile Selassie had conjugated irregular verbs in its classroom.
Now the building was devoted to the memory of Arthur Rimbaud, patron saint of all of us travelers who have echoed his unanswerable question, first uttered by him in Harar, What am I doing here?
Many of the photographs in the house had been taken by Rimbaud himself in the 1880s and were the more evocative for being crude blurred snapshots, like mug shots of a castaway — Rimbaud squinting in the sunshine, Rimbaud in his white suit, Rimbaud looking ill, scenes of huts and mobs in the 1880s that looked the same as the huts and mobs out the window this morning. Rimbaud had sent the snapshots home to his sister and mother. In these pictures he is not the anarchic youth anymore deliberately ‘encrapulating’ himself (as he put it) but a self-mocking Frenchman in his mid-thirties, referring to ‘the filthy water I use for my washing’ and ‘This is only to remind you of my face.’
Banners with quotations from ‘The Drunken Boat’ (‘Le Bateau ivre’) which he wrote at the age of sixteen, and ‘A Season in Hell’ (‘Une Saison en en enfer’) decorated the walls. Although both these poems were written by the time he was nineteen, when he abandoned poetry for good, they were appropriate to the pitching and tossing of his life in Aden and Harar.
‘I drifted on a river I could not control,’ he had written as a sixteen-year-old, in ‘The Drunken Boat,’ and in a later stanza the line, ‘I’ve seen what men have only dreamed they saw.’ In ‘A Season in Hell,’ in the section ‘Bad Blood,’ he wrote, ‘The best thing is to quit this continent where madness prowls … I will enter the true kingdom of the sons of Ham.’
These precocious insights were also prescient, for many Ethiopians are described as Hamitic, and in Africa Rimbaud’s life imitated his art. The hallucinatory imagery of Rimbaud’s greatest poems became the startling features of the landscapes of his life in Yemen and Abyssinia. As a youth in Charleville he produced poems of genius, seeking exoticism in his imagination; in Africa, wishing for the exotic, he took up with an Abyssinian woman, led camel caravans for weeks across the Danakil desert, traded with the King of Shoah, and in his most heroic venture he was the first European to explore and write about the unknown Ogaden region.
Another house much meaner than this trader’s villa was the real Rimbaud house, Nyali said. He told me that his father and grandfather had called it Rimbaud’s house. Hawks drifted over it, as hawks drifted all over Harar; the town’s skies were filled with raptors as its nighttime streets were full of predatory hyenas. Probably they were not hawks, but black kites, for the true hawks and harriers were in the bush.
This ‘real’ house was on one of the main squares near the west gate of the town, a small two-story stone and stucco building with a porch and two blue-painted windows above it, and a sign in Amharic lettered in that ancient script ‘Wossen Saget Bar.’ I went inside and was stared at by drunken Hararis — or perhaps not Hararis since these Muslims would not be drinking alcohol — but drunks all the same. The place had low ceilings and the darkness and dampness of a thick-walled shop-house.
Going in I was pestered by beggars, and leaving I was screamed at in the square by grinning boys. Hurrying away from them I was attacked by a black kite — that is, a kite swooped down and snatched at my cap, grazing my scalp with its talons. The grinning boys screamed again at me and called attention to my alarm, for the hawk had been on my head just moments before and I was even more the butt of their joke. ‘Faranji!’ the boys cried in Amharic. (In Oromo, Nyali said, the word was ‘Faranjo.’) Though the teenaged boys tended to jeer and the men sometimes howled at me, I received many searching looks from women huddled in doorways.