Dances with Hyenas #6
“It’s known that he died almost at the same time as his master, but nobody knows how.
He might have been one of many victims of the famine that ravaged Harar in that time.
Or maybe he passed away in an attack by savage tribes.
Or he could have fallen ill, left out on the street to be devoured by hyenas.
He was very young and wasn’t sick, so he must have suffered one of those tragic deaths.
All three were common in Harar,” says Mr. Crocodile Shoes, shrugging in a gesture of, I’m sorry, friend, that’s life, what can you do.
In the third or fourth round of French coffees, the explosive mix of alcohol and caffeine has a strange effect on me: I come close to dozing, then wake in a flash with all neurons firing.
Jean-Blaise is dead set on getting a tip out of me at any cost, and with that sole aim he lets loose with more and more stories about Rimbaud.
Revelations, he calls them, and they come in droves, each one more dramatic than the last. He’s been spinning them on the way to a supreme revelation of the third degree, a thing that borders on metaphysical and leaves me gobsmacked.
His tale takes a vertiginous turn when I tell Jean-Blaise, to jab at him, that I don’t plan on giving him the whole ten euros, first because a good amount of it is paid in French coffees, and second because I’m disappointed.
“I came here seeking a lady muse, and you gave me a boy.”
“I see, I see. So you demand a female muse. Well, let’s cure your disappointment, if what you want to know is who Rimbaud’s feminine muse was.”
“Let’s say I want to know who Rimbaud’s Queen of Sheba was.”
“I know where you could find her. In the brothels of Harar.”
“Brothels? But Rimbaud has been compared to Trappist monks, they say he became abstinent, chaste, and ascetic.”
“People will say anything, but the truth is that Rimbaud was no stranger to the low places in this city. If you wish, we could go to the whore’s street together.
Ask any of them, they all know the story, from the oldest to the youngest among them.
Even today they revere his memory and recall his anecdotes.
Rimbaud, abstinent and ascetic and chaste?
Come on, give me a break. For starters, you should know that when he first arrived in Harar, the poet Arthur Rimbaud caught a case of Treponema pallidum that gave him chancres on his penis and red stains on his face.
The fearsome syphilis, the burning curse, the French evil.
He healed spontaneously in the first phase, at least in appearance; beneath the skin, the disease kept invading little by little, undetected, until it rotted his leg and forced its amputation.
The first syphilis reached a second phase, and then, after latency, burst into a third phase that finished him off.
Scholars like to say that cancer caused his damaged knee, physical paralysis, mental confusion, incurable sadness, unbearable pain, loss of appetite, cholera outbreaks, rivers of tears, crises of remorse, and senile states.
All of that they blame on cancer. A lie to end all lies, one among so many lies used to hide the truth.
Rimbaud died of syphilis, which he caught in a Harar brothel.
Or maybe a little earlier in one in Java. It’s the same.”
“Listen, Jean-Blaise, don’t disrupt the story. Let’s leave it there, I was enjoying the Myriam/Djami version. And now you’re coming at me with the idea that Rimbaud’s true love was a whore?”
“Whore yes, love no. They called her the Hyena, and he was wild about her, or maybe she was a he, you never know for sure. But it wasn’t out of sexual interest, it was for her gifts as a witch and healer. Healer and witch, she (or he), the Hyena, Amharic hetaera of the Ankober region.”
To this day no one knows any other name for her, it’s only known in the taverns that people called her the Hyena, that she passed through death and lost all fear, that she chanted reckless spells she learned in the volcanic lands of Danakil.
And that only she was able to calm the horrific pain in Rimbaud’s diseased leg.
And if she couldn’t cure it, she at least could alleviate it, and with her hair she dried the drops of his vast grief and sadness: spilled tears or liquid diamonds that burned like acid.
The Hyena, idol, black eyes and yellow mane,11 slave, prostitute, midwife, or healer, neither man nor woman but instead something else entirely, he or she, Queen, Enchantress who .
. . will never want to tell us what she knows.
12 When suffering overcomes him, he cries out for her, curses her if she doesn’t come, blesses her when she does.
She sedates him with poppy tea. With khat leaves she keeps him in a permanent dream state.
She takes him out in blackest nights and prays over him between graves.
In a deep, slow voice she summons souls, hypnotizes hyenas: My sisters, she says to them, my sisters, come, I’m lost, I’m lost, save me, my love, come here, come here, if you don’t want to cry, come to me.
They say that then the hyenas approach and watch the whore and the poet whose round pupils spark with light. The hyenas bend down, retreat, watch them, with hate, hunger, sweetness?
“Cure me, my sisters,” murmurs Jean-Blaise, imitating the Hyena. “I entered the house of life through a false door and can’t escape.”
The Hyena enters the night and calls her sisters, the wild, eager-jawed pack, thick-haired, stinking of carrion, with their multivalent sexes and flesh-eating teeth.
They approach, suspicious. The Hyena gives them scraps, entrails, organs, bones: She feeds them, maternally.
She, prostitute and healer. They call her the Hyena of Harar, she knows ancient arts, techniques of ecstasy, cures.
She offers herself for money under the curve of sycamores.
In a limber voice she sometimes sings or bellows, sometimes spits.
She teaches the sick poet how to rise up and leave himself through a practice of silent meditation.
If his cheap cotton clothes tear, she sews them for him on an old pedaled machine.
If the pain in his swollen knee is killing him, she dresses it with khat poultices.
It’s said of the Hyena that she casts spells on misfortune to tame it, and feeds hungry death to keep it from killing.
She calls the hyenas to the fireside, Oxi, Calhumi, a name for each one, Tajura, Zeilah, Berbera, Oxi, Alalis, Alalai, that’s how she calls them and come, Calhumi, Undor, her warm voice strokes them and they arch their backs, Adatamur, Tibor, Ebi .
. . they arrive one by one, suspicious but docile, baring their teeth but without a bite.
She calms their hunger with goat entrails, camel scraps, organs, bones.
“Calhumi, Oxi, Alalai, my sisters,” she tells them, “heal him, he is lost, listen to him, he’s sinned for love, he’s taken blood from his own blood, he entered the house of pain, comfort him, Adatamur, Ebi, Alalai.
” Her voice soothes the beasts and relieves the poet’s pain.
She comforts him over the loss and together they mourn in the Aden hospital when a British doctor diagnoses cancer and says it’s time for amputation.
In her presence he wails and weeps, sings in torment.
13 I’m lashed by suffering, he says, pain is crushing me, dragging me, wrapping me in a sea of flames.
And she, the Hyena, accompanies his litanies, I’m lost, drunk, impure.
I’ll heal your ills, put an end to the virus of your rage.
I nestle you at my breast, you, sweet creature, just born into torment.
“Enough, enough.” I beg Jean-Blaise for a pause.
I’m unhinged by the French coffee, or maybe by this man’s mesmerizing chatter, the winding threads of story that snare and trap me. I give him his ten euros, well earned. He thanks me with a bow.
“You really made me work for these, huh?” he mutters. With his mission accomplished, he walks away with long strides in those fake crocodile shoes.
Back in Aden, I ask Zahra Bayda questions.
“You did this too? You also arrived from Somalia in a boat, like all of them?”
“But that was more than twenty years ago, when the trip wasn’t yet suicidal,” she replies.
“I crossed the Gulf with fishermen. For a few coins, they took me in their boat, the kind the United Nations had donated to foster fishing in the region. You’ve probably seen that they still exist; today smugglers use them for human trafficking.
Twenty years is a long time, Bos, Bosi, and yet at the same time, they’re nothing.
And you? How was Harar, did you find what you’re looking for? ”
“I invested ten euros in revelations and came back drunk.”
Yemen burns at midday. Near the shore, Rimbaud’s figure glimmers; he too is part of these devastated landscapes.
We’re not surprised to find him aged and sick.
He’s had countless sleepless nights. He’s on crutches, missing a leg.
He’s joined the court of the mutilated, of goat feet, the web-footed legion who’d become known as the pédauques.
The tireless walker, rider of great distances, caravan driver, migrant, now in pain, afflicted, forced to stop moving.
His voice blends with the pale thoughts of the drowned.
Over his head vaults a very white sky, and at his feet the sea, which today seems calm, free of fish.
On the other side of the Gulf, the intense heat reverberates in Bosaso and the hyenas laugh in Harar, Save me, my love, come for me, I’ve entered the house of pain and I can’t get out.