Slaves to Fortune - Tom Lanoye

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roar changed into a bellow, softer and yet warlike, triumphant. It sliced through Tony like a knife. The chutzpah of it—the man daring to use a chainsaw rather than an axe! You could hear the racket for miles. And he sawed deeper than necessary, too, not wanting to miss a scrap of horn. Drops of blood and bits of bone flew into the air. Tony loathed the man from the bottom of his heart. A faint smell of burning hair and hot bone reached him. He felt his teeth grate; he gagged in disgust. The man got ready to remove the second, smaller horn.

      And then it happened. Still clearly visible despite the looming darkness—half of the sun had disappeared now—the rhino calf charged.

      Tony had lost sight of the animal. It had probably run off with the zebras and only just returned. In any case, it charged desperately, with its still-virgin nose low to the ground. This was how it reached the giant, sideways from behind, not head-on. But it was still enough to send the man with the bad leg pitching forward.

      Deafened by the roar of his saw, the giant hadn’t heard the calf approaching. In order not to fall, he had to make a clownish jump, chainsaw in his hands, over the mutilated head of the rhino cow. His swearing was audible above the singing of the saw.

      He regained his balance and turned around angrily to face the calf, who began a second charge from close by. Then the giant did something he shouldn’t have. He raised the chainsaw, ready to mow down the calf. And Tony shot him.

      In a fraction of a second, he had aimed and pulled the trigger, all signs of paralysis gone, and just as accurate a shot as ever. It was a gift, and Tony possessed it, even though he was a programmer and number cruncher by trade. He could see the result through the gun’s sights. His shot had hit the giant below the neck, not far above his heart. Interrupted in his counter-attack, the man let out a gurgling scream, head back, mouth and eyes wide open in pain and astonishment. The chainsaw slipped out of his hands and fell across his knee, separating his thigh from his lower leg. Blood spurted out, mixing with that of the rhino cow. The man himself toppled theatrically, away from his amputated limb. For the second time that evening, the crack of a shot echoed deeper and deeper through the rocky crevice.

      The howling of the chainsaw had stopped. It stood upright in the loose sand, like a knife in a tabletop.

      The remorse would come later, along with the shame and the permanent dent in his self-image. (‘Am I really capable of something that monstrous?’)

      For the time being, Tony felt none of that—aside, perhaps, from the adrenaline coursing through his veins. The only thing he did think was: I should have done this much sooner.

      -

      3

      Buenos Aires

      THE HAPPY CORPSE HADN’T made it, after all. It had died a second time. No one could really accuse Tony Hanssen of not trying hard enough to bring Mrs. Bo Xiang back, though. Cautious pats on her cheek, repeating her name ten times with his lips pressed to her pierced earlobe, shaking her, imploring, crying, and cajoling, he’d tried it all and nothing had worked. Mrs. Bo Xiang had entered the Kingdom of God and flatly refused to come back.

      Tony had been advised in his resuscitation attempts by the pension owner—a towering, extravagantly-dressed fake blonde with a face of granite and permanently raised eyebrows, both the result of plastic surgery. Her full lips enjoyed the benefit of the doubt—her mouth was the only thing on her face that seemed able to move easily. And yet she was still attractive in a wilful kind of way, Tony judged, like most of the women in this city. It didn’t matter where Eva Perón was buried, the actress and first lady’s spiritual legacy had not gone to the grave with her. The Porteñas, young and old, still had fiery temperaments and rock-solid self-esteem. And they continued to have just as many problems with their men—men whose domineering nature they criticized while refusing to tolerate any sign of weakness in them.

      Tony had called her, the pension owner, in panic because she was the only person in Buenos Aires whose number he had saved on his smartphone. She interrupted him after his first sentence, ordered him to stay where he was, snapped at someone in Spanish—probably the cleaner—to alert the emergency services, and rushed to the scene herself. All of this without hanging up. She lived two floors above them. There was a good chance, Tony thought, when she entered still clutching her mobile phone, that the sounds of he and Mrs. Bo Xiang going at it had reached her upstairs.

      She kept a straight face, but that could have been the Botox. Her gaze, though, directed at the mortal remains of Mrs. Bo Xiang, betrayed contempt, if not ridicule—as though she considered it typical of a Chinese woman to kick the bucket at the moment suprême. While they waited for the ambulance, she stood at the foot of the bed and gave Tony more orders than advice. Her father, she had told him when he’d checked in, had been a general during los Años Dificiles. Tony hadn’t dared ask more. He had read in the Rough Guide that Argentina had had many difficult years. The difficult years outnumbered the easy ones. Her name was Mercedes. Her father had not only been a general, he’d also had a lot of German friends.

      ‘Slap her face again,’ Mrs. Mercedes commanded, looking down her nose at Tony and his happy corpse as if they were two street fighters down for the count. Her English wasn’t bad for a Spanish speaker. From her tone, she wasn’t too pleased that death had paid a visit to her casa de turistas. She managed two small hotels and twenty guest rooms, spread out over rustic San Telmo and hip Palermo, but this house was her headquarters and the jewel in her crown. A former architecture student, she had supervised the renovations herself, and lived on the only floor that was never rented out. ‘Have you already put a finger down her throat?’ She sounded more and more sincere and more and more concerned, looking down with her arms folded across her stiff bosom. ‘Maybe she’s swallowed her tongue.’ After that, she didn’t say anything else.

      What a difference from the first time they’d met, at check-in. Then, Mrs. Mercedes had monopolized the conversation in record time, as though she were worried her two wealthy guests might escape to her competitors if she stopped talking. Tony was forced to think about this now, in her mute presence, as he tried to lure Mrs. Bo Xiang out of her new-found homeland of the smile. The poor woman was naked under the damp, thin sheets. Only her head stuck out, with its shocking grin, open and bared. Tony began to massage her heart through the sheets even though he knew it couldn’t be coaxed to beat again. He didn’t want to do it, but he did it all the same. Again, he bridged the gap through dissociation. By reflecting on a trivial event from two days earlier, he could avoid thinking about the cruelty of the present.

      The three of them had stood waiting in the entrance hall, next to a desk on which Mrs. Mercedes’s laptop rested.

      Mrs. Bo Xiang was supposed to pay for their three-day stay in advance by internet banking, using this laptop and not her own smartphone. This was a strict condition imposed on all guests, Mrs. Mercedes had apologized. It was just a precaution. She’d been ripped off too many times in the past. She’d added that her bank was in the Virgin Islands, so it would take a while for confirmation of their payment to come through.

      This is the kind of thing you have to deal with these days, Mrs. Mercedes sighed—as they still stood there waiting—all these long distances and passwords and devices you’d never have dreamed of in the past. My God! She still had vivid recollections of the tube radio of her childhood. Her hard face now showed a grimace of happiness, which she further improved on by rolling her eyes and shrugging coquettishly. Dios mío! The tube radio of her childhood! She was so caught up in her story, she missed Mrs. Bo Xiang’s confused expression.

      Her family, Mrs. Mercedes had cooed, was the first in the village to acquire one of those hulking great things. It was nearly the size of a cabin trunk, and you had to wait two minutes for all the lamps to warm up. Only then did the scratchy music come out, or the news, or hours of background noise. You could pick up Montevideo when the weather was bad. The neighbours gathered once a week for the radio play. She had shrugged coquettishly again, her voice taking on a languorous tone. The weekly radio play! My goodness! Everyone had crammed into their old drawing room around that one appliance, the way you’d gather around a preacher, all thirty of them hypnotized, half of them bursting into tears during the final episode because of the injustice of the heroine’s death. And

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