Outside, lions roam, and the laughter of hyenas—iiyaaa, rihiyiii, rihiiihiya!—rings out. Light glimmers in the beasts’ eyes.
Later, when Rimbaud leaves Harar to die in his native France, Ras Makonnen will send a handwritten note to Isabelle, the poet’s sister, saying,I am ill of the death of your brother and it seems to me that my soul has left me.6
Rimbaud also strikes up dealings with the big boss, the one and only, most direct, notable, and memorable scion of the Solomonic and Sheban dynasty, the reborn embodiment of the sovereigns of Jerusalem and Sheba: Menelik II, Emperor of Abyssinia; Negus of Shewa; future executioner of the invading Italian army, which he defeats in the Battle of Adwa; hero of the only African nation that throughout its history has stayed free of imperialist chains.
A magnificent figure, this Menelik II, survivor of smallpox and countless conflicts and attacks, crowned monarch in a feather headdress, hero festooned with insignias and legends, with a bejeweled mantle of animal skins and a wide-brimmed hat that hides his face, pocked by the variola virus. Menelik the dreadful, the powerful, original and authentic. After vanquishing all his rivals, unifying the empire, and modernizing the land, Menelik II the Fierce sits on a gold throne with a living lion at his feet that is as splendid and bored as the emperor himself. In the midst of the apathy of power, the great negus suffers fits of melancholy that are eased by the company of that young, foreign ex-poet who insists on making absurd business propositions. The trust between them, however, doesn’t stop the negus negussie, the negus among all neguses, from taking the French pup down a notch when he tries to be too clever for his own good. Rimbaud—a newbie trafficker—endures hellish conditions in the months it takes him to cross the desert in a caravan bearing a load of obsolete weapons he wants to sell to Emperor Menelik. But he tries to charge too much for them in hopes of making a fortune, or at least of paying off the exorbitant cost of the journey, which has wiped out his savings. Menelik, who has a powerful and well-equipped army, shows little interest in acquiring those relics, let alone for a high price. What do I have power for? the monarch saysto himself, and he orders the weapons seized from Rimbaud, forcing him to sell them for cheap.
Little to nothing is known about the woman or women who may have lived with Rimbaud during those years. No more than gossip, speculation, a few photos, nothing certain. On the fly, I take the first chance I get to cross the strait and visit Harar in Ethiopia, that place Rimbaud loved; I’ve heard people there might know something. So I head for Harar in search of a highly improbable, slippery Queen of Sheba: the Abyssinian lady of Arthur Rimbaud.
Harar, in the heart of old Ethiopia:hic sunt leones, “here there are lions,” a signal on maps of a land not trodden by Christians; in fact, for centuries, they were forbidden entrance to the city, which enclosed its mysteries in a high round wall. At an elevation of two thousand meters—sixty-five hundred feet—on a high plateau swept by winds and ringed by mountains turned blue by the air, the Amharic, Oromo, Somali, Tigrean, Muslim, Christian, Harari, Sidama, Gurage, and Wolayta people all coexist. Harar, the utopian and mystical city, place of gnosis, a hundred mosques, Christian crosses, Sufi spirituality, hermetic philosophy... in the end, it may indeed be true that the center of the world is not Paris, but Harar.
I enter through the Shewa door and reach a great market, and there my eyes immediately fill with colors. Every wall has been painted with dyed lime in a different color; every woman is wrapped in four or five cloths, each cloth printed in four or five shades; every basket brims with red fruits and yellow vegetables, piles of raw or roasted coffee, shining leaves of khat. At the spice stands, the smells pique the senses with their bracing colors: brown ginger, orange turmeric, golden fenugreek, black cardamom, green sacred basil, ocher nutmeg, bronze cinnamon, purple dried chilies, red-gold saffron, fire-red paprika.
A brilliant chaos and visual cacophony I’d only seen in two otherplaces: Oaxaca, Mexico; and Chichicastenango, in Guatemala. Here, in Harar, the hundred and twenty pencils from the Faber-Castell box seem to come to life. That was the best gift I ever received, given by my mother on my tenth birthday, that box of one hundred and twenty Faber-Castell colored pencils, as if I were saying Ferrari, or Hermès, the Cartier of colored pencil boxes, a black wood case wrapped in red felt with two layers inside to house the noble court, sixty precious pencils on top and sixty pencils below in a perfect descending sequence, black to white.
What a memory, I never drew a thing with them, why would I, when they were already a work of art all on their own? It was enough for me to open the box and be hypnotized by the many hues and names: cadmium red, dark chrome yellow, scarlet red, magenta, pale geranium lake, middle purple pink, permanent carmine, mauve, ultramarine, cobalt blue, emerald green, van-Dyck brown, burnt sienna, Venetian red, to name just a few. I liked to scatter them across the table, all one hundred and twenty of them, like a game of pick-up sticks, to see the combinations created by chance: ultramarine making anHover burnt sienna and eggplant, or dark wine forming anXwith chartreuse. I’m amazed in a similar way now in the luminous alleys of Harar, to see, standing against a rust-colored wall, an old woman in a blue tunic with pink and mauve arabesques, a green-and-purple-striped coat, and a gray headdress with burgundy trim, and let it be known that the results are perfect: Nothing clashes, it all works together, nothing is too little or too much.
She must have been like one of the many slender young women moving through this market with large wares on their heads, the one Arthur Rimbaud chose for himself.
Now I dream of getting married, he writes to his mother, you’d like being a grandmother, I want to have a child, to be a good son and a good father, forgive my sins, dear mother, blah, blah, blah. I hate those letters, I already said it but I’ll say it again. What I see in them is anguish’s last resort, which consists in trying to pleasesomeone else by describing your own misery and seeking forgiveness through penitence. If you ask me—not that anyone does—I’d say I find it pathetic for those letters to form the testimony of Rimbaud’s time in Abyssinia, and that I wish we could read letters from Rimbaud, not to his mother or sister, but to himself; I sense they’d be something else entirely, more interesting, less goody-two-shoes, more true.
It seems his mother isn’t the only one who wants to see him settled and married off; so does the small French community that surrounds him overseas, and that refers approvingly to the existence of a certain woman accompanying him, supposedly called Myriam. They describe her as Christian, tall, thin, docile, and so light-skinned she looks European, though she’s not very pretty, which, in those people’s opinion, is a shame, given how many women around here are.
I visit the Rimbaud Museum, in the center of the old quarter. In the back there’s a great window, Faber-Castell-style: Each pane is dyed a different color, contrasting with the dull objects exhibited inside. Next to the dozen blurry photographs Rimbaud himself took, there appears one of Myriam in three-quarters profile.
So this is Myriam, the woman I’m seeking? A first impression, not clearly justified, says no. I don’t think it’s here. Though who knows; you never know. How to describe this Myriam in the photo? She’s a young, gentle, dark-haired woman, dressed in white like a Teresian nun. The deep black irises of her eyes make it hard to read her mood, which must be somewhere between confusion and resignation. The sign beside the photograph suggests she was probably a slave, which would explain her air of absence, someone who’s neither left nor fully arrived. Someone with a predetermined, gloomy destination. A fine, straight nose. Full lips that are the only sensuous feature in a figure that’s otherwise innocent, even monastic. A white kerchief hides half her forehead and all her hair, leaving part of her left ear visible, a small ring in its lobe. This young woman is a personwho’s been told: Stay still, we’re going to take a photo of you, and she stays still, used to obeying. Is she tall and thin, as has been described? Only her torso appears in the photo, but the width of her shoulders would indicate a large body. Either she has tiny breasts, or her loose clothes blur them. Her skin isn’t white, of course, nor does she seem European. Caucasian, no, not remotely. One thing is clear: If this is the wife Rimbaud wants his mother to approve of, he’s headed for failure.
There’s something gentle and passive in this enslaved Myriam, the only Harari wearing all white while the others drape themselves in color. So, is this Rimbaud’s Abyssinian lady? The more I stare, the less I can decipher her, the more her identity clouds.
“That’s Myriam.” A voice from behind speaks to me in French.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard from this guy, he’s been bothering me for a while, trying to get me to hire him as a guide.
“I already know it’s Myriam,” I shoot back. “It says so on the sign.”
He makes me uncomfortable, this man, he’s cocky. Plus he smokes, right here in the museum, he throws the cigarette butts to the floor and crushes them with pointy fake crocodile shoes.
“It’s Myriam, but her name isn’t Myriam,” he says, and now he’s got my attention.
“It’s Myriam but her name isn’t Myriam? That sounds like baloney.”
“It’s not. If you buy me a coffee, I’ll explain.”
We agree to meet in half an hour.
Meanwhile I keep gathering pieces of a puzzle. Alfred Bardey, a French businessman, owns the coffee export company that hires Arthur Rimbaud. This Bardey, a good guy despite offering a small salary, appreciates Rimbaud and values his work, above all because he knows he can’t get a replacement, where would he find another sharp and presentable young European man desperate enough for a gig that he’ll accept the low pay? It’s easy to imagine Bardey’s reasoning: He wants his slippery employee, this young, roaming manwho dreams of leaving, to settle down in the best possible way in Aden or Harar, the two cities where the company is housed. Bardey, the boss, needs Rimbaud to put down roots; Rimbaud,l’homme aux semelles de vent, “the man with soles in the wind,” as Verlaine put it, or with the seven-league boots, according to Michon.7 This goal, or business strategy, would propel Bardey to arrange for Rimbaud a house, a marriage, a family life.
At the end of the nineteenth century, how did a European find a wife in the East? There’s no information in Rimbaud’s case, but Gérard de Nerval narrates a similar experience four decades prior, in Cairo, when he had to marry to comply with local laws. His story could serve as a reference.
“I don’t have enough dowry to take a [wife]... They say slave women are much less expensive... I’ve been advised to buy one and bring her to my house,” says Nerval, consulting with the French consul.
“It’s a good idea,” the consul approves.
I was a little astonished at the ease with which Christians are permitted to acquire slaves in a Turkish land, Nerval comments in a text.It was explained to me that the practice is confined to slaves of more or less color, though Abyssinian women may be had who are almost white. The majority of the businessmen settled in Cairo have them.8
This custom must have also been common in the Harar of Rimbaud’s time, and would explain Myriam’s arrival as well as her skin color. Though she’s far from looking white, as an Abyssinian she’s less dark than others, has finer features, and also is Christian: In accordance with the abysmal parameters of racism and sexism in the nineteenth century—in the East as in the West—they couldn’t have found a better candidate for Rimbaud. Back to Nerval, visiting the slave market, speaking of his disgust for Black women:As a type of beauty, very unlike that which suits our taste. Prominent jaws, low foreheads, and thick lips put these poor creatures into a class almost like that of the beasts.9
Once Myriam is hooked in, the marriage plot is underway. The company offers the new couple free housing, but Rimbaud prefers to rent his own place. Myriam is enrolled in the French missionary school so she can study and learn French. From that moment forward, what happens or does not happen is only known through the testimony of Françoise Grisard, the Bardey family servant, who is tasked with visiting them every Sunday to train Myriam in her role as wife and housekeeper, teaching her to sew and cook. This woman assures us that all goes well between them. She finds only one single defect in the girl: She’s slow to learn French, sewing, or cooking. Aside from that, she shows herself to be docile, silent, and timid as a bird. She glides soundlessly through the house, which she never leaves except in Rimbaud’s company. She’s not known to have any friends or family, and her whole world revolves around her master, whom she attends to without losing sight of him for an instant, running to satisfy all his needs and appetites. To the eye of Mrs. Grisard, he is good and kind to her and treats her affectionately, they seem happy when they’re together, and he remains firm in his intentions to make her his wife, procreate, and make a home together.
