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lantern.”
    Then up the blubbery black lips she slides her fingers. Black pie, it sucks and spurts. The dead cow shudders to life and, like that, his mother is gobbled up, sunk to the shoulder, when,
splat
, out they come
—born together
, his mother and the slick, wet calf, jumbled in thick, wet snakes of umbilical rope. They’re both upside down. The calf’s neck twists around. Brown and wet, he’s like warm clay, smoking he’s so new, and the boy’s ears are clanging, and he is shouting, “Is it is it is it?” Alive, he means. “Of course it’s alive,” says his mother, stirring a piece of sharp straw in the calf’s nostrils, an old farmer trick, to itch her to life. The calf snorts, twitches. Look, the nostrils are smoking. Then Paul hoists the lantern. “Lord, the calf has five legs!”
    And after that, in gigs and wagons, from miles around, people come to gawk at Cinq the cow. It’s a sign, that fifth leg. God’s finger, thinks the boy. Pointing at
them
, the Rimbauds. Warning all against the witch.
    A nd look at him now, still drenched with this dream of a five-legged cow, a boy still floating in the blocked and unknowing soul of a now bitter man. Fine freckles and lines mark his face. His thick boyish hair is gray blond, close-cropped like that of a soldier or convict, and belowthe gray blue eyes and sandy lashes there is the chevron mustache, a Muslim touch, like the fez and his fluency in Arabic, Amharic, and a host of local dialects. How old is he at thirty-seven? Younger than he knows and older than he can possibly be, living in a place where the years are doubled, like prison sentences.
    Truly, to see him lying here in the moonlight, it is hard to know how old this man is. Whatever happened? Who was he once, before too many things happened? We are looking at the face of a man who, having survived himself, now finds himself bobbing in the middle of the desert, the lone survivor, clutching his body like a life preserver.
    A nd yet, even faced with life’s worst, there is in him a wildly optimistic side, times when he will think to himself, But who knows? There are medical miracles, salt cures, and even operations, if it comes to that. And perhaps if you’re courageous, if you don’t panic and you tough it out, you may return to Abyssinia. Perhaps even better than before. For really, who knows?
    All through the downslide of these past few weeks, such optimism has been his mantra, this sunny voice telling him, Who knows, who knows? Look, you can only do so much. Perhaps you will return to Harar, possibly with new investors—bankrolled. Then there is La Société Géographique, which, in its February 1884 bulletin, has published his account of a harrowing three-week trip into the interior region called the Ogadine. True, it was only 150 kilometers, but you didn’t need to go far to find yourself surrounded by hard-muscled, bushy-haired men whose life’s ambition was to spear, then castrate a godless white affront such as yourself. Anyhow, his report upon which he had pinned such hopes, it had gone mostly unnoticed, but it was a start, he thought, the point being he had reinvented himself as Arthur Rimbaud,
explorer, ethnographer, scientist
.
    And quite possibly he
will
, he
might
, he
could
return with this new French wife his mother has been dangling in her letters. All picked out,she claims. Young? Old? Pretty? Not so fast: of course, his parsimonious maman withholds even the most rudimentary details of said maid, even as he, mad with curiosity, holds his breath for months, to spite her by not asking. Desire. Desire withheld. This is their little game, mother and son. One of them, anyway.
    Nonetheless, Rimbaud can picture this woman, a sensible, handsome, and
presentable
woman, bustled in her
embonpoint
, with lyrelike hair carefully arranged with combs and tucked up under a smart hat. A solidly French (but not stupid) woman, with whom he will have a son. Father a son, rather. Fatherhood. As a