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characteristically he had thought, I can fix this. Set her up fresh—in Egypt, perhaps. Find some wealthy man.
Une belle situation
. A governess or mistress position, perhaps.
I’ll fix it
.
    Pack of dogs! Bandits! And after all his generosity to the town, too.
    Anonymous, most of it. Oh, they didn’t know the half of it, ignorant savages. The leper colony, for example. Had he not donated bandages, then even frocks to his friend Father Lambert and the little children in the school adjacent to the quarantined “hot” compound? Quite beautiful healthy children, too, even as their parents, earless, noseless, fingerless, boiled in their own skins. The children! Among whom he would sit, as if among wild monkeys, when he was feeling low. Voices raised in song—remember? On his birthday? How they had sung to him so beautifully!
    But it wasn’t just the orphans to whom he had been so kind. Thanks to him, ten, twenty, probably thirty men had been inoculated—alive merely because they worked for him. And the food! Piles of food he had given away during the famines, why, openly in the streets, stopping thewildfire of hunger before mobs sacked his store, or worse. Could they, could any of them, appreciate his generosity, his sacrifice?
    No more. Tomorrow, after long years of comings and goings in the region, he will leave it, all of it, the reputation he wants and manly competence as he knows it, and all in the hope that his mother and Roche, even France—that this time it will be good, or at least better than it was before. For a man with the pride of Lucifer, it is a point of particular pride that he himself has organized his rescue, himself and his gold, kilos of the gold protected by a dozen gunmen, wild Yemenis and Somalis, mostly, bound to him through a local chief whom he had long supplied. Ruthless, efficient men. Blooded horsemen personally armed by Rimbaud himself—five of them with the Remington lever-action repeater rifles so prized—he loves to point out—by the American cowboys. Rimbaud was proud indeed that he could procure such weapons. And tomorrow at dawn they will come for him, a dozen men with guns and spears and bandoliers of ammunition. A trotting armory, each man carrying, athwart his hip, the long Danakil dagger, a heavy, J-shaped rip of steel that curves like a sideways smile. Reaper men. And reliable men. Or so he hopes, carrying all his gold.
    Before dawn, they will be off, with him leading the caravan. And not walking or on horseback but carried—carried on a stretcher. This will be his ordeal, broiling in the trackless desert under the unending sun. Twelve days later, ten if they are very lucky, they will arrive in Zelia by the cobalt blue sea. Then away he will go—away on the first steamer smoking back to France. Away from these vulturous women keening, “Ayyyy​yeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eeeee​eee!”

2What the Night Said to the Night
    But it isn’t just the women at their well who have their eye on him. Later that night, awaking from a bad dream, Rimbaud realizes that, once again, his mother is right about him. Right about the leg, right about hisneeding to marry, and right about his crawling back home—hatefully right about everything.
    In this dream, he is four or five. It’s a winter night, freezing cold, and they are in the barn at Roche—the birthing pen. The lantern smokes. His breath smokes, and before his five-year-old legs, fat as a rain barrel, lies a dying cow, Marie. Her calf is stuck,
something’s
stuck, and he is frantic, crying, “
Maman
, get up, she’ll kick you.” But, lying on her side in the straw, rolling up her sleeve, his
maman
is all concentration, peering up Marie’s black bum.
    A witch. The boy has heard it so whispered. People in the town say so and, as for Paul, the hired hand, he knows so. “The cow’s as good as dead,” he says. “The calf, too.” “Enough,” says his mother, slicking her arm with the cow’s own butter. “Now hold up the