duty-free shop.
A grenade explodes, probably the last for the night because the mist is dissipating. This is the hour when killers go home to bed.
A man so young and handsome should die fulfilled, if only through his eyes. For only his eyes and ears (his friends would have to think of music) might still bring him some pleasure. He wanted to fly away with the memory of “a real woman.” Agathe—who wanted to change her first name because it was the same as the president’s wife’s—would do the trick. She had bigger breasts than jayne Mansfield and more ass than josephine Baker. Plus a smile like a billboard permanently positioned on her face, laughing eyes, unruly hair, and a mouth as juicy as grenadine. A capable woman, Agathe, proprietor of the hotel hairdressing salon—proprietor, yes, and also madam, for while women did come here to have their hair done, generally in a European style, it was also here that the girls’ territory and prices were negotiated, and many other things too, like the marijuana that came directly from the forest of Nyungwe, the private domain of the president, brought weekly by a libidinous colonel who required payment in kind and without a condom. Agathe, in whom a terror of poverty and contemplation of the “wealth” of Whites had implanted a firmly entrenched capitalist sensibility, called this “risk capital.” She was obeying the laws of the marketplace.
From the Avenue of the Republic encircling the hotel came sounds of hotel staff approaching, soon to begin their sixteen-hour day, footsteps already heavy. In a few movements repeated for the thousandth time, they would slip into a white shirt, a bow tie and a smile too broad that must stand up to sixteen hours of temperament, condescension, impatience, ill-concealed mistrust and sometimes a kind of third-worldism so pleasantly warm that the employee would paint his situation the blacker to please the lonesome White. To start a real conversation, the latter would do better to ask, “How are your children?” than, “Do your children have enough to eat?”
No one ever wondered why the employees’ smiles showed so many teeth and so little in their eyes. Valcourt called this “the dichotomous smile.”
There was a knock at the door. Raphaël was snoring. Méthode’s breath was rattling in his throat. Zozo, who was just beginning his day, knew everything. He had come to see the patient and also to warn everybody that the hotel management would not be pleased to have a respectable hotel room turned into a hospital room for a guest suffering from a shameful sickness and one furthermore so contagious. He liked Méthode, but not to the point of letting him die in his hotel. The other staff might refuse to work on this floor and certainly wouldn’t do the room. The hospital would be a better place. He offered to put Valcourt in touch with a cousin who worked at the hospital and reminded him that hotel policy, with which he himself disagreed profoundly, was now very strict.
“An additional night must be paid for every person not registered who spends the night in the room of a guest, even if the guest is a good guest like you, Monsieur Bernard. Unless, of course, the additional night is occasioned by a lady friend of yours, Monsieur Bernard. And my cousin is a graduate nurse and has a lot of influence.”
Zozo was always anxious to be of service because he had to feed a great many children and could not manage it on the pay of a minor flunky. Only his clientele’s generosity enabled him to keep the whole brood alive. And so, as a result of his love for his family and a few thousand francs slipped to him by Valcourt “for the children,” the Kigali Hospital Centre was relieved of several bags of aqueous solution and a bedpan. The cousin was not in fact a graduate nurse but a stock keeper in the pharmacy. He wielded no influence but, resourceful and wily, kept his extended family supplied with medicines and bandages.
Élise, a
A grenade explodes, probably the last for the night because the mist is dissipating. This is the hour when killers go home to bed.
A man so young and handsome should die fulfilled, if only through his eyes. For only his eyes and ears (his friends would have to think of music) might still bring him some pleasure. He wanted to fly away with the memory of “a real woman.” Agathe—who wanted to change her first name because it was the same as the president’s wife’s—would do the trick. She had bigger breasts than jayne Mansfield and more ass than josephine Baker. Plus a smile like a billboard permanently positioned on her face, laughing eyes, unruly hair, and a mouth as juicy as grenadine. A capable woman, Agathe, proprietor of the hotel hairdressing salon—proprietor, yes, and also madam, for while women did come here to have their hair done, generally in a European style, it was also here that the girls’ territory and prices were negotiated, and many other things too, like the marijuana that came directly from the forest of Nyungwe, the private domain of the president, brought weekly by a libidinous colonel who required payment in kind and without a condom. Agathe, in whom a terror of poverty and contemplation of the “wealth” of Whites had implanted a firmly entrenched capitalist sensibility, called this “risk capital.” She was obeying the laws of the marketplace.
From the Avenue of the Republic encircling the hotel came sounds of hotel staff approaching, soon to begin their sixteen-hour day, footsteps already heavy. In a few movements repeated for the thousandth time, they would slip into a white shirt, a bow tie and a smile too broad that must stand up to sixteen hours of temperament, condescension, impatience, ill-concealed mistrust and sometimes a kind of third-worldism so pleasantly warm that the employee would paint his situation the blacker to please the lonesome White. To start a real conversation, the latter would do better to ask, “How are your children?” than, “Do your children have enough to eat?”
No one ever wondered why the employees’ smiles showed so many teeth and so little in their eyes. Valcourt called this “the dichotomous smile.”
There was a knock at the door. Raphaël was snoring. Méthode’s breath was rattling in his throat. Zozo, who was just beginning his day, knew everything. He had come to see the patient and also to warn everybody that the hotel management would not be pleased to have a respectable hotel room turned into a hospital room for a guest suffering from a shameful sickness and one furthermore so contagious. He liked Méthode, but not to the point of letting him die in his hotel. The other staff might refuse to work on this floor and certainly wouldn’t do the room. The hospital would be a better place. He offered to put Valcourt in touch with a cousin who worked at the hospital and reminded him that hotel policy, with which he himself disagreed profoundly, was now very strict.
“An additional night must be paid for every person not registered who spends the night in the room of a guest, even if the guest is a good guest like you, Monsieur Bernard. Unless, of course, the additional night is occasioned by a lady friend of yours, Monsieur Bernard. And my cousin is a graduate nurse and has a lot of influence.”
Zozo was always anxious to be of service because he had to feed a great many children and could not manage it on the pay of a minor flunky. Only his clientele’s generosity enabled him to keep the whole brood alive. And so, as a result of his love for his family and a few thousand francs slipped to him by Valcourt “for the children,” the Kigali Hospital Centre was relieved of several bags of aqueous solution and a bedpan. The cousin was not in fact a graduate nurse but a stock keeper in the pharmacy. He wielded no influence but, resourceful and wily, kept his extended family supplied with medicines and bandages.
Élise, a
Similar Books
