Ono: Rambo as a coffee merchant

Coffee online Ono column

The French symbolist poet Altier Rambo is undoubtedly a talented poet. by the time he was less than 20 years old, he had already written the vowels, drunken Boat and the season of Hell. He has also had a sensational same-sex relationship with Verlaine, another symbolist poet ten years older than him. At the age of 20, Lambo officially closed his pen and began to self-exile for the rest of his life.

What impressed me about the poet Rambo was his life as a coffee trader in Ethiopia for more than a decade from the age of 26 to his death from cancer at the age of 37. Europe is a place with a large number of masters, including Balzac, who has drunk 30,000 cups of coffee in his life, Voltaire, who can drink 40 cups of coffee a day, and Flaubert, who says, "I'm not in a coffee shop, I'm on my way to a coffee shop." but no one has traveled to the coffee origin like Lan Bo to deal with yellow sand, camel droppings, and various speculators and brokers.

At the end of the 19th century, due to the growing demand for coffee in Europe, Rambo volunteered to go to Ethiopia to search for gold. He wanted to make money, and he wanted to return as a successful businessman and wash away the stigma he had gained from his entanglement with Verren when he was young. During the eight years when Haller lived on and off, Rambo was not only a coffee merchant, but also in arms and furs.

Before the age of 20, Lanbo's poetic style was gorgeous and bright, and he was what Wei Erlun called "a man walking on the wind." after the age of 20, Lanbo, with a textured black complexion and sharp eyes, said nothing about literature, but knew the business of coffee beans like the back of his hand. In Haller, Rambo was cautious, lonely and unhappy. He made a small fortune for a time, but ended up with nothing.

It is said that Rambo himself does not like coffee. Haller is a major trading city in Ethiopia and one of the best coffee producers in the world, but Rambo is full of what he calls "just fecal, horrible, disgusting stinks" in his letters to friends.

What makes me feel sad is not that Rambo is indifferent to coffee, but that the life of this talented poet seems to have gone from bad to worse as if he had really been entangled by his own fate. His life has nothing to do with happiness and happiness. He doesn't love anything he is gifted with-literature, business, love.

Today, Rambo's former home in Haller has been converted into a coffee museum, called "Rainbow House", which is a must for tourists. People who do not know this period of history only see legends and romance, but I often think that he is really the man who wrote "hit the road, desperate to hit the road" written by Haizi. Maybe he won't even give himself time to stop and enjoy a cup of coffee.

China Coffee Trading Network: www.gafei.com