An
accurate biography on Rimbaud and his African period has been written by
Charles Nicholl. Its title is Somebody Else. Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91
(published by Jonathan Cape). The biography provides the fierce lovers
of Une saison à l'enfer's author with two or three relevant elements:
once and for all, it reappraises, and does so by using a large number of
documents, the belief claiming that Rimbaud was a slaver, puts forward
reliable doubts about the truthfulness of the Rimbaud House at Harar in
Ethiopia, obstinately reconstructs journeys, earnings, hatred relationships
and friendships. It represents the most exhaustive and faithful document
of the African period. Even mere readers will find pure mirth in it because
Nicholl is very good with reportage and successfully manages to mingle
data and narrative inventions, descriptions and feelings.
Wandering Chief was the
name of the ship that in 1876 took Rimbaud from Java, where he deserted
after enlisting in the Dutch Foreign Legion, back to Europe. A prophetic
name for someone who had stayed in Germany and Italy the previous year
and who would have gone to Sweden, Denmark and Norway the following, before
moving on to the African ports. Alfred Barday, Rimbaud's employer at Aden,
claimed: “Trying to keep him was like trying to stop a falling-star”.
His poetic adventure lasted
about five years. “The other”, that he would have loved to be, will have
a decade available. Enough to create a double existence but not to make
the “I” of the past fade away, at least for the others. While Une saison
à l'enfer was left rotting in a Brussels' printing house, Illumination
was published, edited by Verlaine and without Rimbaud's knowledge, while
he was dying of boredom at Tagiùra, in Abyssinia. It was 1886
and the African Rimbaud had grown up. He had business dealings and trade
relationships, he lived with a gorgeous Abyssinian woman.
Was he happy? Had he found
what he was looking for? Judging by the letters he wrote home, the answer
is no. He hated working, he loathed the forced company of “wild or imbecile
people”, places revolted him. “It's a real nightmare. I'm about to turn
thirty (half of a life!) and I got fed up with travelling around the world
with no results”. In the letters he wrote to his mother and sister, however,
an admission allows his life to resume a balance: “I am now accustomed
to all sorts of troubles. And if I whine, somehow it's like a litany”.
One relieves oneself in this way, too. One exorcises the disease that Baudelaire
had diagnosed: “L'horreur du domicile”, the horror of residing in just
one place. In fact, the more he reassured his family about the normality
of his future projects - getting married, coming back, setting up house
- the more he thwarted home-style fads: “If I do come back, don't
think my mood will be less vagabond. To tell the truth, if I could travel
without being forced to earn my living, I wouldn't stay in the same place
more than two months. The world is big and full of wonderful places that
the existence of one thousand men would not be enough to visit. I wouldn't
like to wander about in poverty, though...”. In reality, Rimbaud was not
a misfit, as those who knew him as a merchant and adventurer claimed. He
knew Arabic perfectly, he appreciated the Arabic culture, he had friends,
and if his “rage was as grey as luxury” and made him have a hard time,
he was also sociable, nice and charming. In his biography Nicholl highlights
two elements pertaining the African experience. The first is extremity,
that is always putting oneself physically to the test. The expeditions,
the journeys, the caravans he headed were tiring, utterly fatiguing...
The second is his particular ability to hide, to disguise, to disappear.
If the first aspect is not new, but rather a constant element (already
as a boy and later as a poet, Rimbaud often broke down because he was too
tired, because he had walked too much, slept too little, and eaten nothing),
the latter somehow represents the keystone of his new life experience.
In October 1887, Aden's French consul received a resentful letter from
a fellow-countryman, Monsieur Emile Deschamps, who was looking for Rimbaud
because, he claimed, he owed him money. It was obvious for Rimbaud to hide,
but it wasn't even so easy to hide in a city where a European could be
clearly spotted. Rimbaud did it with great naturalness. Alfred Bardey,
his most important employer in Africa, described the departure of a caravan
captained by Rimbaud: “Rimbaud put a turban around his head, like the Arabians,
and wore a red robe over his usual clothes. He wanted to look like a Muslim.
We are now laughing of this disguise, and he would laugh with us. Becoming
Easternized was risky, he knew it, but he wanted to look like a rich local
merchant just for the prestige of his company”. “Dealing in the unknown”
actually allows exactly this, that is being new to the world for a new
world. Rimbaud relished on himself the intoxicating feeling of creating
his own identity. The poet was replaced by the man who made himself, reinvented
his own past, built his own present, dreamt his own future. It was a feeling
of complete, intoxicating, dangerous freedom. “I pulled ropes between campaniles
/ Garlands between windows / Gold chains between stars / And I dance”.
Rimbaud's dance began to
wobble in the summer of 1887. He was 34, “I have a painful rheumatism in
my kidneys, another in my left thigh that sometimes paralyses me, articular
pains also in my knee, an old rheumatism in my right shoulder. My hair
is completely grey and I'm realising that my existence is going to rack
and ruin. I'm tired, I don't have a place, I'm afraid of losing the little
things I have. Just think that I'm always carrying sixteen thousand francs
in gold in my belt: eight kilograms is the weight and dysentery is exhausting
me”. He thinks that it is due to “exploits such as crossing, riding, overland
trips and sea voyages, with no clothes, no food, no water and so on”. In
reality, his sister Vitalie, and their mother later on, will all die of
the same disease: thigh neoplasia. The man whose sole raison d'être
had been a restless wandering, sometimes could not move, other times was
bedridden. He was a big boy, one metre eighty centimetres tall, wore size
41, was accustomed to fatigue. It'll pass, he said to himself. Evil was
playing hide-and-seek with him. It appeared, hit, then disappeared.
Nothing is more painful than seeing youth becoming deformed and bending,
and not understanding, or not accepting, why. And nothing is more discouraging,
for those who used and abused their body, than realising that it doesn't
give signs anymore, that it doesn't belong to you anymore.
At the end of his life, when
he was forced to use a wheel-chair, Bruce Chatwin found himself fond of
the last Rimbaud, as if understanding that death could help him to recover.
A modern narrator and traveller was comparing himself to the prototype
of modernity in writing and in life. The question continued to be the same:
why? Why does a twenty-year-old decide to turn his back on everything and
invent himself from scratch? When he turned his back on Europe and on a
life made of transgression and wildness, Chatwin saw it as a flight towards
salvation, towards physical health. This was the only way in which Une
saison à l'enfer could seem plausible. Travelling meant going away
from madness, disease, and following the straight and narrow path.
The ability some sick people
have to deceive themselves is somehow incredible, their bearing pain and
not yielding is somehow heroic. Six days after the operation, Rimbaud wrote
to Harar's governor: “I'll recover in twenty days. I will resume my trading
business in a couple of months”. He was deceiving himself and he knew it,
but always postponed the moment of disappointment. He tried to walk with
crutches, he sweated and found a very hard time, thought of an artificial
limb, postponed the extreme decision: “Maybe bad luck would fall again
upon me then. But in that case I would know how to get rid of a miserable
existence”.
A heartbreaking agony: “He
suffers when he is moved to an armchair or when he is taken back to bed.
Making his bed means filling an empty space in one side, flattening bumps
in another, fixing the drawsheet, the blankets. He cannot bear pleats,
his head is never in the right position; the stump is too high or too low;
his right arm has to be laid completely inert on layers of cotton-wool,
his left arm must be wrapped by flannels...”. Isabelle, a good Catholic,
thought of his soul and wanted him to convert. She called a priest. God
does exist, but how mean he is... When he finally died, on November 10,
1891, the best epitaph about him was written by a worker of the Marseille's
hospital where Rimbaud was staying. When writing Rimbaud's profession,
the worker put “Trader”, and put “passing through” as his address. “I was
going away, the fists in my worn out pockets / and among fantastic shadows
/as if they were lyres, I pulled the elastics / of my wounded shoes, /
and I had a foot near my heart”.
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