Mornings when I first arrived, I sat with my coffee on the café balcony across the street, six floors up in my hotel, waiting for the sunrise and watching the newly-arrived roll out through the arch of the old colonial building like a wind. Train stations are one of the last wonders of defeated Imperialism – hated and gone – still they provide the gateway to a new world.
The newspaper seller with his three-legged dog loitered at his stall dispensing broadsheets in the breeze. I thought how good it was to see a free press and how great it would be to see a free election. With unsoiled minds and hungry bellies and will to work – the city breathed the immigrants in, lungs of the emergent world.
“A penny for your thoughts,” someone said one morning.
I turned. The accent was faintly French; its owner looked at me from behind a glass of clear liquid. She – it took me a moment to become gender aware – was sitting at the next table. She wore a crumpled black suit and tie, her hair short and dark, blue eyes puckered into a slight squint.
“I have sat in London, Paris, even Grand Central in New York,” I told her, “watching the people. Trains – it’s how a city gets fed.”
“How profound,” she said, as if she didn’t mean it. “And all I was thinking was that I’d like to have a camera, to capture you capturing them.”
“I’m not capturing them,” I said. “I’m here with the Election Commission. We’re here to see fair play.”
“Really? A UN man?” she said. “We call them un-men. You’re the ones telling them they can be free, if they just drink your Kool Aid.”
“What Kool Aid?”
“Democracy. That’s what you’re selling, right? Industry and banking and cities and drinking water and a place to crap that isn’t a hole in the ground – the great Western promise. ‘Having conceived Babel, yet unable to build it themselves, they had thousands to build it for them’”.
“Sorry,” I said, “I’m not familiar with the quote.”
“FritzLang. I think the girl… Maria, she says it. It’s from ‘Metropolis’.”
“You’re a cynic,” I said with a smile.
“Ha! That Africa should have its great cities, then it can be the same as everybody else. If it’s the view that fits, then yes, I’m a cynic. It’s my third visit here; you get to know. Do you think we would have to bring the army with us if your peachy view were true?”
She shuffled over to my table. Looking out over the balcony rail, she said, “I can’t see squat without my contacts, but let’s hope this all stops before it’s too late. You never know, these guys might be like the Borg. Turn one back home and they all go, and this whole ‘urbanize or die’ thing stops dead.”
She was smiling. Her hand was extended. I shook it, her fingers lost in my palm. Her bone structure was as light as a bird, and her suit dwarfed her as if she had misread ‘XL’ for ‘XS’ on whatever second-hand rack it came from. She smelt vaguely flowery. And I was smitten.
“Monique,” she said. “MoniqueDuBarry, Canadian, artist. Do you know anything about machetes?”
“Machetes?”
“You need to know about machetes, if you’re going to run an election.”
* * *
Monique knew about machetes. She watched them rise and fall in price. Gangs from the cities took their machetes out on the back of pickup trucks, twenty or thirty to a village – that’s all they needed. Each man paid a dollar. A hungry man from a city will buy you a lot of village votes for a dollar and a machete.
My team (there were a hundred of us, hand-picked) worked twenty-hour days. We wrote the perfect papers, the perfect rules, but it didn’t make a difference. Sure, we watched the polling stations in the cities, and anywhere else we could reach, but outside our gaze there were thousands more, such is the fabric of democracy. Outside our gaze, only the machetes mattered.
By the week after the election, prices were falling, or so Monique said. I was getting drunk with the new inner family I’d adopted in this dark-hearted city – me, my Canadian lover, a Harvard lawyer and a deputy commissioner whose name was Clive.
We sat in Clive’s embassy drawing room, candle-lit, for the power had gone with the nine-o’clock curfew, the air sticky as melting toffee, a whole liquor cabinet of diplomatic privilege stood before us. Drunker and drunker.
The Harvard lawyer – a straight-up JackDaniels shooter, who was shooting his sixth or seventh – said, “I don’t know quite why we bothered.”
Clive laughed as if his brains had just departed through a straw, traces of white powder clinging to his right nostril.
“Does it not make you ashamed? You all did a big mistake here. You were supposed to make it right,” Monique said. Half cut, her Frenchness spread into her every word, and I was close enough to fully cut that she seemed kind of fuzzy round the edges.
Lying on the chaise longue, my head cocked sideways in Monique’s lap. It was my last evening in the city.
“Come on, we did what we could. We’ve all slaved like dogs and now it’s over. Time to kick back and have a drink, what?” Clive said.
“I’ll have another with you, bud,” said the lawyer.
“You’re all pathetic. You promise something and you deliver nothing,” she said. She looked down at me. “All of you.”
I hadn’t the energy to disagree. Let me lie with the warmth of this woman. I’m done.
As I rested, our host under-armed the bottle towards the lawyer. In the feeble light, the lawyer was incapable of catching anything that wasn’t a disease. The bottle hit him on the head and bounced off the arm of his chair, smashing on the wood panel floor.
“Ah, now ain’t that a sad, sad sight?” he said, staring at the broken glass and pools of liquid.
“Don’t worry, John, old boy, I have another bottle,” the deputy ambassador said.
“I cannot stand this anymore,” Monique said.
She stood up. Too fast for me. I rolled off onto the floor. My nose hit hard.
“Shit,” I said, clasping my hand to my face. Blood wet my fingers. I delved into my pocket with my other hand, finding an old handkerchief to staunch the flow.
“It wasn’t free and fair,” she said.
“What wasn’t?” John said.
“The election,” she said.
“The election?” John said, as it were a distant memory, half forgotten.
“Fuck you,” she said.
And that was Monique gone, her rear end disappearing out of the deputy ambassador’s drawing room, while my blood dripped slowly onto his polished floor and I had nothing to say that might stop her.
* * *
She packed her bags and called in a favour with an English army captain who’d been her lover one and a half visits before me. She took a transport plane to another country.
In the morning, I sat alone on the hotel balcony and looked again at the train station. I saw the newspaper seller with his three-legged dog dispensing the promises of a new government while keeping an eye out for the young girls. That was his real job. A pretty one will bring a pretty penny at any of the whorehouses. And don’t think the young boys will fare any better, or suffer less dangers. They won’t.
The unwashed flooded out through the arch of the old colonial building, wonder of the lost Imperialism – hated and gone and sorely missed, a disease never recovered from. Today the flood carried a new message from village to city, the news of an election fraud, of men with long knives.
Monique liked quotations. She said, “‘The best of times, the worst of times’ – that’s how you judge cities.” And she was right. I looked harder. I looked into the flow. For just a moment, I imagined some ragged strangers carrying their bags, turning back home. I imagined the city exhaling the breath it had held too long.
