Oliver Benjamin
deserted upon arrival in Java, mere kilometers from Yak’s home in
Solo. After wandering a month through Javanese jungles and villages
he returned briefly to France, then took work in Cyprus. There he
killed a man in a fight and was forced to run from the law. Moving on
to Aden in Arabia and finally Harrar in Abyssinia, he embarked on a
long career as a coffee trader.
It was there, in Harrar, where he would live out the last years of
his life, trafficking in coffee, guns and some said, slaves. He strode on
foot through the fierce Danakil, alongside caravans for hundreds of
miles to supply Menelik II for Ethiopia’s successful struggle against
Italian imperialism. With his feet Rimbaud mapped out parts of the
territory the Abyssinians themselves were afraid to go.
He was thirty-four when he died from a cancer that started in his
upper thigh, a result either of syphilis or simply too much walking.
According to Jewish and Islamic legend, Lucifer was an angel
cast down from Heaven for loving God too much. His overflowing
excess of desire then infected man, spreading corruption over the
earth. Hell, like civilization, sprung from a surplus of want. Rimbaud
was a literary giant who tried to avoid this error by becoming an
ascetic merchant in arid Ethiopia. But the hell he tried to walk away
from in France followed him down to the abyss: The source of the
Nile, the original source of coffee, the very source of man. Ethiopia
had always been a prime candidate for the location of the Garden of
Eden—and though it may have been once, Abyssinia proved no
paradise for Rimbaud. In time he grew attached to this land and his
fate, however, dying like Conrad’s Kurtz, with Harraron his lips.
The modern name of Abyssinia, Ethiopia, came from the name
the Greeks called the inhabitants of that land—Aethiops, or “burnt-
faced.” The Greeks thought the reason they were black was that they
had been burned by the sun. By the time Rimbaud arrived home from
Abyssinia to face amputation and death in a French hospital, his own
face had become so sunburned that no one recognized him. When the
fifteen-year correspondence with his family was published years later
it became evident that his heart—that great evangel of the
adolescent—had also been scorched beyond recognition. His season
in hell never ended because he had renounced seasons altogether,
exiled to a limbo halfway between horror and Eden.
Yak chased Rimbauds once, worshipping his salty scripture like
ancient scrolls from a once thriving sea. He wondered if he should
never have left Java.
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