She got dressed in the dark, whispering again and again to him in pidgin her lies of reassurance. Then she asked for money for the taxi. He gave her thirty thousand,* which was the rate for a full night of that work, and she kissed him on the lips and went out. He had already forgotten her face, but there stayed with him the delicious feel of her hair, which she had braided with fibers from some plant so that it felt like hempen rope intermixed with velvet, and he remembered the sugary taste of her nipple and the salty taste of her vulva, the
But she never came back.
He'd known that she wouldn't, but waited just the same, unable to sleep in the sweltering room of rainforest planks whose knotholes let the mosquitoes in, and outside he heard music and dancing and laughing because it was New Year's Eve, so he could not sleep, and finally he went out to see if he could join them but they'd gone into closed houses; and as he stood taking this in, a chalky dog loomed out of the dirt's darkness and he went back upstairs to his room where he sat smelling the stink of his sweat and waiting for the night to be eaten like so many others and listening to the mosquitoes around his head.
Her smell stayed on him — at first a mere pale greenish stalk, but then when for loneliness he pressed his face in the pillow where her head had lain it expanded like a mango tree's cracked and crumbled bark; it became an orchard of palms whose trunks were thickly sprouting everywhere with ferns.
Weeks later he spied her by daylight, a barefoot woman striding rapidly down the road with an immense basket on her head, her arms easy at her sides. He watched, and she didn't see him. And he said to himself: Her cunt is one of those roadside huts in which any can take shade — any of these muddy barefoot men in patched pants! So why won't she shade me? Why won't she shade me?
Then it was night in another town. Night it was, while the two women he'd rented sat over their coffee, and he over fresh white lychee-fruit juice, and his women were swishing flies off their brown arms and laughing, tranquilly scratching insect bites, while motorcycles and pousse-pousses went by and the one who'd made him so lonely went into market across the street, the market which offered pineapples and melons. He could not get away from her, it seemed. He wanted only her. His women chatted. Charlotte
He said to Charlotte: Are you lonely?
She laughed until she cried. Then she said: Always.
She laughed again quickly, so that he wouldn't believe her. Then he knew that she was telling the truth.
And you? he said to the other one.
Not with you, my love. — She for her part tried so hard to be sincere that he knew she must be lying.
So they were both lonely! Imagine that — and him, too! All lost and falling!
The whore who'd left him came out of the melon store, licking fruit pulp from around her lips. He stood and blocked her way.
For a long time she didn't recognize him. Then she said: OK no problem! I sleep under you one more time, you me two ladies? OK I speakee you good! I likee you very good. .
He said: Why didn't you come back?
She gazed at him without answering. Then suddenly she'd wriggled past him, was running down the street so that the other two whores gaped; almost gone in the darkness, she screeched over her shoulder:
* In 1992, 30,000 Malagasy francs was about U.S. $16.
