56 Poppy Tea

It’s hard enough to face a death and death’s fears, let alone death’s demotion and defeat. Isolated and secretive, the three Rimbauds expressed these fears in different ways.

Mme. Rimbaud, of course, assumed the worst. And yet, deep down, she felt about her son the same public shame and wish for secrecy that she had during his poet days. Hence her fear of having certain things—never mind what things—“get out,” inviting vulgar inquiry and further tarnishing the name Rimbaud.

As for Isabelle, having found her calling, she could not imagine her brother doing such a thing as dying, especially now, when they were just getting reacquainted. Why, even to think such a thing seemed to her disloyal, gloomy—unsisterly.

But, of the three, it was Rimbaud himself who was the most curious. In Harar, after all, death was the face one saw everywhere. And yet once home he could not see, or let himself see, the now obvious fact that he was dying. And quickly, too.

As for the mother, even estranged from her son, she could not fail to monitor his decline or to marvel at how her two children could be so utterly oblivious to reality.

But why don’t you just tell them? said Mme. Shade.

They’ll only blame me for being pessimistic. My fault. As if I had wished it.

Then call a doctor. That way he can tell them the truth.

And so the next day a local physician, Dr. Colin, paid a visit. A humble, agreeable country doctor of fifty, Dr. Colin had heavy-lidded eyes and a well-tended paunch that strained the buttons of his fraying vest, from which he fished a clam-sized silver pocket watch. Popping the protective silver cover, he looked at the dial, took the patient’s pulse, then did some obligatory prodding and ahhhing and such. Theater, purely. It was obvious the man was dying. But as Isabelle hovered and looked on, the question was, Did they know? Could they not know?

“And what does your mother think?” asked the doctor. Odd, he thought, that Veuve Rimbaud was not present.

Isabelle blinked. “My brother, you should know, is entirely in my care. Not my mother’s. Mine.”

“Well, then, if I may inquire, Mademoiselle,” said Dr. Colin, now thoroughly mystified. “Well, what do you think?”

She blinked. “About what?”

“Well … about your brother’s condition.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, my dear, quite simply, how do you think he is doing?”

“He has pain, he needs something for pain.” She sat there very blank and straight. What was he getting at?

Hopeless. Dr. Colin then turned to the patient.

“And you, Monsieur Rimbaud, have you been walking on your crutches?”

“No.” Rimbaud betrayed a look of irritation. “Quite unnecessary.”

“Unnecessary, Monsieur?”

“I have a new wooden leg waiting for me in Marseille. I won’t need crutches.”

“Ah,” said the doctor agreeably. Why even go into it? The fellow wasn’t his patient, and he didn’t need the old woman complaining. Or suing him. And so with a smile, as he left, mild Dr. Colin offered a do-no-harm prescription:

“Poppy tea. An old wives’ remedy. Try it, Monsieur. One pinch of seeds in a cup of hot water. I promise you will feel much, much better.”

Dr. Colin was quite correct about the dreamy properties of the poppy seeds steeped in boiling water. The broth was thin and bitter but when mixed with a quantity of honey, once Rimbaud gulped it down, the effects were not long in coming. Like slow rings in a pool, his eyes dilated; his face relaxed, and, to Isabelle’s shock, her taciturn brother turned talkative, even loquacious.

He talked about the orphanage in Abyssinia and how the little children sang for him because he had given the orphanage money—in truth, very little money and more as a kind of political favor. But still …

He talked, too, about the wonderful priests there, Father Abou and the sagacious Monsignor Morélou. “Your confessors?” asked Isabelle hungrily. Not quite. These were worldly men with powerful trade and tribal connections who expected, whatever else, to see their hands greased. In Abyssinia the Lord took His cut, too.

Under the influence of the freeing poppies, Rimbaud likewise talked without exaggeration and with evident emotion about how he had saved Djami from a beggar’s fate. About how much he missed him and what a fool he had been not to take him to France. He talked, too, about the terrible famines and how he had helped feed the people—true, to avoid being looted and burned out, and yet, he thought to himself, were people not saved, well, a few? Indeed, he talked about a subject that Isabelle immediately resolved to forget: Tigist, about whom he spoke at length, often extravagantly, telling of his love for the girl and his valiant attempts to keep her—that is, until her troublesome family sent armed men to take her back. Clearly, the poppies were not a truth serum.

Wonderful stories. And in the hands of his future hagiographer, they would be that much more ennobling. Proof, for example, against the liars and sensationalists claiming that her brother was debauched and an atheist, when in fact he had been a sort of mercantile missionary much beloved by the little noir children. Who would flock around him, children by the dozens, much as the birds did around Saint Francis of Assisi.

“And why did you stop writing?” she asked one day, when he was particularly woozy and talkative.

This woke him up. “I did not stop anything.” His irritation was immediate. “Writing stopped me.”

“Because you found it evil, yes?”

“Evil?”

“Yes, evil.”

“Isabelle, dear sister. Sophistry, truly. Useless, certainly. But I would not dignify it with the word evil.”

“Unchristian, then.”

“What are you doing?” he demanded suddenly. “And what does Christianity have to do with it? Are you writing down all this nonsense?”

“For myself. For the family,” she protested. But he had heard enough.

“No more poppy tea,” he said the next day when she brought him a cup.

“But, Arthur, your pain.”

“I’ll manage. Now enough. I am talking too much.”