The Devil's Cup Read online

  To my Mother

  Contents

  Introduction: The First Cup

  A Season in Hell

  Ethiopian Prayer

  Sailing to al-Makkha

  An Evil Sister

  Java

  Monkey Droppings

  Mother Calcutta

  The Man in the Red Hat

  War

  The Revolution

  Paris

  The Sultan’s Earache

  At Sea

  Africa in Chains

  Preto Velho

  Officer Hoppe

  White-Trash Cocaine

  Introduction

  The First Cup

  As with art ’tis prepared so you should drink it with art.

  Abd el Kader (sixteenth century)

  Nairobi, Kenya

  1988

  “ETHIOPIA IS THE BEST.” BILL’S EYES BRIGHTENED. “FINEST GRUB in Africa, mate. And those Ethiopian girls…”

  “No girls,” I said. Bill, a Cockney plumber/Buddhist monk, was obsessed with finding me a girl but lacked discretion; his last bit of matchmaking had ended with me fending off a Kenyan hooker, twice my size, who’d kept shouting, “I am just ready for love!”

  “No girls,” I repeated, shuddering at the memory. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “You don’t have to bonk them.” He gave me his most charming leer. “But you’ll want to.”

  “I sincerely doubt it.”

  “And the buna, ahhh! Best buna in the world.”

  “Buna? What’s that?”

  “Coffee,” he said. “Ethiopia’s where it came from.”

  So it was settled. We were off to Ethiopia for lunch. Buses are rare here in northern Kenya, so we hitched a ride in the back of a rickety “Tata” truck loaded with soda pop. It was a desolate trip, twenty hours of sun-blackened rock and pale weeds. The main indication of human habitation was the machine-gun-riddled buses abandoned on the roadside. We were not particularly worried about bandits (there were two armed guards on our vehicle), but about seven hours into the trip we passed a truck whose offer of a ride we had earlier declined. Its axle had been snapped in two by the unpaved road, flipping the vehicle over and killing the driver and half the passengers. Those who had survived, all seven-foot-tall Masai warriors, with traditional red robes and elongated earlobes, were standing about weeping, and shaking their spears at the sky. One of the Masai lay crushed to death under a pile of shattered Pepsi bottles.

  When we arrived at Ethiopia, the border was closed. The sole guard was friendly but adamant—no foreigners allowed into Ethiopia. Bill clarified our position. We didn’t want to go into Ethiopia, he explained. We only wanted to visit the village of Moyale, half of which just happened to be in Ethiopia. Surely, Bill reasoned, that was allowed?

  The guard considered. It was true, he said, foreigners were allowed to visit Moyale for the day. Then he wagged his head: but not on Sunday. Ethiopia, he reminded us, is a Christian nation.

  Bill tried another approach. Was there an Ethiopian Tourist Guesthouse in Moyale? he asked. Of course, said the soldier. Did we wish to visit it?

  “Owwww,” said Bill, giving the Ethiopian language’s breathy affirmative.

  “No problem,” said the guard. “Go straight ahead and just left.”

  The government hotels are always overpriced, so we located a local restaurant—a shack, to be exact, with dirt floors and a dry grass roof. The food was excellent: doro wat (spicy chicken stew with rancid butter), injera (fermented crepes), and tej (honey mead). Then came coffee.

  Ethiopians were drinking coffee while Europeans were still taking beer for breakfast, and over the centuries a ceremony has developed around sharing the brew. First, green beans are roasted at the table. The hostess then passes the still-smoking beans around so each guest may fully enjoy the aroma. A quasi-blessing or ode to friendship is offered, and the beans are ground in a stone mortar, then brewed.

  That was how the restaurant owner prepared our coffee that day and, while I’ve had it performed many times since, never has it seemed so lovely. She was a typical Ethiopian country woman, tall, elegant, and stunningly beautiful, wearing orange and violet wraps that glowed in the darkened hut. And the coffee, served in handleless demitasses with a fresh sprig of ginger-like herb, was excellent.

  In the full-fledged ceremony, which can last up to an hour, you must take three cups: Abole-Berke-Sostga, one-two-three, for friendship. Unfortunately, our hostess had only enough beans for one cup each. Come back tomorrow, she said, there will be more. Evening curfew was approaching, so we hurried back to the Kenyan side of the border. The next day, however, the guards refused to let us back into Ethiopia. We stood arguing at the border for hours, but nothing, neither reasoning nor bribes, convinced them to let us back in for that promised second cup.

  During the next ten years Ethiopia fell to pieces. Millions died in famines, civil war broke out, and eventually the country split in two. My life was hardly better run. I lived on four continents and in eleven cities, sometimes moving five times in a single year. The only thing that made it bearable was the knowledge that at the age of thirty-five I would drop everything and return to the road—“go for a walk,” as I was fond of saying, never to return. Consider it a passive-aggressive death wish. If I were a wannabe Buddhist, I could have claimed it was a desire for “Loss of Self.” Whatever. Instead, I accidentally fell in love (another type of death wish) and headed to Australia to get married, an ill-fated scheme that, by means too complicated to explain, ended with me working at Mother Theresa’s Calcutta hospice for the dying.

  Calcutta is the world’s greatest city, and I’ll tell you why: unendurable suffering, arrogance, benevolence, intelligence, and greed thrive side-by-side, face-to-face, twenty-four hours a day, with no apology. On one bus ride I watched a woman fall dead of starvation, while across the street children in immaculate white school uniforms shrieked with pleasure over a game of croquet; two blocks earlier I’d seen a woman immersed up to her neck in a muddy pond, intently praying to the sun.

  It’s also a bibliophile’s delight, and it was here, while prowling the city’s innumerable bookstalls, that I discovered a curious manuscript. The print was almost illegible, and the prose the quaintly archaic, singsong English of the subcontinent. I have no idea what it was called, since the cover had long ago rotted off. I suppose it was typical stuff, just another half-crazed Hindi rant about how dietary imbalances in the West were creating a race of hyperactive sociopaths hell-bent on destroying Mother Earth. Most of the tract kvetched about meat eaters (Hindus are vegetarians) and cow killers (Holy Beast, that). But the section that caught my eye was the one lamenting the evils of “that dark and evil bean from Africa.” I paraphrase:

  Is it any wonder, I ask the reader, that it is told how the black-skinned savages of that continent eat the coffee bean before sacri ficing living victims to their gods? One need only compare the violent coffee-drinking societies of the West to the peace-loving tea drinkers of the Orient to realize the pernicious and malignant effect that bitter brew has upon the human soul.

  You-are-what-you-eat fruitcakes are as common in India as in California. But what struck me was the contrast to an eighteenth-century French book I’d happened upon in Hanoi, Vietnam. The book, Mon Journal, was written by social critic and historian Jules Michelet, and in it he essentially attributes the birth of an enlightened Western civilization to Europe’s transformation into a coffee-drinking society: “For this sparkling outburst of creative thought there is no doubt that the honor should be ascribed in part to the great event which created new customs and even changed the human temperament—the advent of coffee.”

  How French, I’d thought at the time, to attribute the birth o
f Western civilization to an espresso. But Michelet’s notion is curiously similar to modern research indicating that certain foods have affected history in previously unsuspected ways. Specialists in the field, called ethnobotany, have recently theorized that eating certain mushrooms can alter brain function. Others have reported that the sacred jaguars depicted by the Mayans are actually frogs that the priests consumed en masse for their hallucinogenic properties. Recent research has indicated that the sacred violet of the pharaohs was considered holy because of its intoxicating powers. These foods are all drugs, of course. But so is coffee—as an addict, I should know. Perhaps Michelet had been on to something. When had Europeans started drinking coffee, and what had it replaced? I was clueless. I Certainly had no idea that finding the answer would take me three quarters of the way around the world, roughly twenty thousand miles, by train, dhow, rickshaw, cargo freighter, and, finally, a donkey. Even now, penning this page, I don’t know what to make of what I’ve written. At times, it seems like the ramblings of a hypercaffeinated hophead; at others, a completely credible study. All I knew in Calcutta was that the logical place to start looking for confirmation of Michelet’s proposition was in the land where coffee had first been discovered over two thousand years ago, the country I’d been waiting to revisit for a decade.

  It was time to head to Ethiopia and get that second cup.

  A Season in Hell

  Abole, Berke, Sostga—one, two, three cups, and we are friends forever.

  Con artist in Addis Ababa

  Harrar, Ethiopia

  “YOU LIKE RAM-BO?”

  My questioner was a wiry Arab-African squatting in the shade of a white clay wall. Sharp eyes, wispy mustache, white turban. Not your typical Sylvester Stallone fan.

  “Rambo?” I repeated uncertainly.

  He nodded. “Ram-bo.” He adjusted his filthy wraparound so the hem didn’t drag in the dirt. “Ram-bo,” he repeated with infinite disinterest. “Farangi.”

  “Are you really a Rambo fan?” I was surprised—Charles Bronson had been more popular in Calcutta. I flexed my biceps to clarify. “You like?”

  The man looked at me in disgust. “Ram-bo,” he insisted. “Ram-boo, Ram-boooo. You go? You like?”

  “No go,” I said, walking off. “No like.”

  I’d just arrived in Harrar, a remote village in the Ethiopian highlands, after a grueling twenty-four hour train journey from the capital, Addis Ababa. I already preferred Harrar. Its winding alleys were free of both cars and thieves, a big improvement over Addis, where pickpockets followed me like flies and my one night out had ended in an attempted robbery after a “friendship coffee ceremony.” I also liked Harrar’s Arabic flavor, the whitewashed mud buildings, and the colorful gypsy-African clothes worn by the girls. Rambo Man had been the only hustler so far, and he seemed reasonable enough.

  I found a suitable café and grabbed a table in the shade. The coffee, brewed on an old handpulled espresso machine, was a thick black liquor served in a shot glass. The taste was shocking in the intensity of its “coffeeness,” a trait I attributed to minor burns incurred in the pan-roasting technique common in Ethiopia. Harrarian coffee beans are among the world’s finest, second only to Jamaican and Yemeni, but this… I suspected local beans had been mixed with smuggled Zairean Robusta, which would account for the fine head of crema (called wesh here), as well as the fact that after one cup I felt like crawling out of my skin.

  I ordered a second. Rambo Man had come to stare at me from across the road. Our eyes met. He shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands suggestively. I scowled.

  Harrar is one of the legendary cities of African antiquity. It was closed to foreigners for centuries because an Islamic saint had prophesied its fall the day a non-Muslim entered the walls. Christians who attempted to enter were beheaded; African merchants were merely locked outside and left to the tender mercies of local lion packs. Not that inside was much better. Hyenas roamed the streets, noshing on the homeless. Witchcraft and slavery flourished, particularly the notorious selling of black eunuchs to Turkish harems. By the 1800s, the walled city had become so isolated that a separate language had developed. It is still spoken today.

  This reputation drew Europe’s most intrepid adventurers to Harrar. Many tried, many died, until Sir Richard Burton, the Englishman who “discovered” the source of the Nile, managed to enter the city in 1855 disguised as an Arab. It fell soon afterward.

  The most intriguing of Harrar’s early Western visitors, however, was the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud had come to Paris when he was seventeen. After a year of pursuing his famous “derangement of the senses” lifestyle, he’d established a reputation as the most depraved man in the city. By nineteen, he’d finished his masterpiece, A Season in Hell. Having reached his twentieth year, he renounced all poetry and disappeared off the face of the earth. Rimbaud…

  “Rambo!” I shouted, jumping out of my chair. That’s what the fellow had been going on about—Rimbaud, pronounced “Rambo.” He’d wanted to take me to Rimbaud’s mansion. The poet had not “disappeared off the face of the earth” when he’d abandoned poetry in 1870. He’d merely come to his senses and become a coffee merchant in Harrar.

  Rambo Man, however, had vanished.

  Rimbaud’s reason for coming to Ethiopia was more complicated than a desire to enter the coffee trade. He was actually fulfilling a passage from A Season in Hell, in which he predicted going to a land “of lost climates” from which he would return “with limbs of iron, bronzed skin, and fierce eyes.” He wanted action, danger, and money. He got at least the first two in Harrar. The emir had been deposed only twenty years earlier, and tensions were still high. The French coffee merchants needed someone crazy enough to risk his life for a bean (albeit one going for one hundred dollars a pound). Rimbaud was their man.

  The importance of the Harrar Longberry, however, goes beyond the fragrant cup it produces. Many believe it is here that the lowly Robusta bean evolved into the civilized Arabica, potentially making the Harrar Longberry the missing link of the genus Coffea. To understand the importance of this you must first know that there are two basic species of coffee beans: the luscious Arabica from East Africa, which prefers higher elevations, and the reviled Robusta from Zaire, which grows just about anywhere.

  That being understood, we must now go back to that mysterious time before the dawn of civilization, the Precaffeinated Era.

  Back then, fifteen hundred to three thousand years ago, the world’s first coffee lovers, the nomadic Oromos, lived in the kingdom of Kefa.1 The Oromos didn’t actually drink coffee; they ate it, crushed, mixed with fat, and shaped into golf-ball-size treats. They were especially fond of munching on these coffee-balls before going into battle against the people of Bonga, who generally beat the pants off the Oromos. The Bongas also happened to be first-rate slave traders, and sent about seven thousand slaves each year to the Arabic markets in Harrar. A fair number of these unfortunates were Oromos coffee chewers who had been captured in battle. It was these people who accidentally first brought the bean to Harrar. Ethiopian rangers say the old slave trails are still shaded by the coffee trees that have grown from their discarded meals.

  But the important thing is the difference between the regions’ plants. Beans from relatively low-lying Kefa grow in huge coffee jungles and are generally more akin to the squat, harsh Robustas that probably came out of the jungles of Zaire thousands of years before. Harrar’s beans, by contrast, are long-bodied and possess delicious personalities like the Arabicas. In adapting to Harrar’s higher altitude, something wonderful seems to have happened to them. No one knows what, but we should all be grateful that it was the evolved Arabica beans of Harrar that were later brought to Yemen, and then to the world at large.

  So Rimbaud’s risking his life for the bean (in fact, it killed him) is perhaps not so unreasonable. It’s worth noting, however, that the poet/merchant did not seem to hold Harrar’s coffee in high regard. “Horrible” is how h
e describes it in one letter; “awful stuff” and “disgusting.” Oh well. Perhaps all those years of absinthe had dulled his taste buds. The fact that the locals were fond of selling him beans laced with goat shit probably didn’t help matters.

  After a few more cups, I checked into a hotel and set out in search of Rimbaud’s home. Harrar is a small place of about twenty thousand inhabitants; a maze of alleys lined with lopsided mosques, mudhuts. It is noticeably lacking in street names. Rimbaud’s house is probably the easiest thing to find in the city, since any foreigner who approaches is mobbed by wannabe tour guides. I had no intention of paying anybody for guiding me to a house, and eventually, by taking the most obscure route imaginable, I managed to reach what I knew was Rimbaud’s neighborhood undetected, only to find myself in a dead-end alley.

  There was nobody in sight, so I yelled a cautious hello.

  “Here,” came a familiar voice.

  I crawled through a jagged crack in one of the walls, and there, squatting on a pile of rubble, was Rambo Man.

  “Aha!” he shouted. “You have come at last.”

  He was sitting in front of one of the oddest houses I’d ever seen. At least it seemed so in the context of Harrar’s one-story mud huts. It was three stories high with twin peaked gables, all covered in elaborate carvings. The shingled roof was fringed with fleur-de-lis decorations and the windows were stained red. Straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, I thought. The oddest thing, though, was how the mansion was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high mud wall with no opening other than the crack that I’d just crawled through.

  The man was looking at me in surprise. “You have no guide?”

  “Guide? What for?”

  “No problem.” He waved a yellow piece of paper at me and demanded ten birra.

  “What are these?” I asked.

  “Tickets.”

  “Tickets? Are they real?”