Slaves to Fortune - Tom Lanoye

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and Mrs. Bo Xiang should come here more often. A few weeks, a few months, the whole summer. Maybe they could buy a pied-à-terre. Mrs. Bo Xiang had enough money, and he no longer had any objections. Why shouldn’t he pursue the only thing he seemed to do well without too much difficulty? All right, he and Mrs. Bo Xiang would never be a perfect match. They hadn’t had a real conversation yet; he didn’t know what her interests were; this lack of understanding was clearly mutual, and the sex bordered on the problematic. But the same went for even the most straightforward marriages. If the frequency isn’t too high, anything is bearable.

      Why shouldn’t he do it—become her permanent male companion? A male geisha offering her a lot of fun, and all kinds of titbits of information, plus the occasional furtive gratification. What was wrong with that? There were worse professions and crueller pacts with the devil. At his age and with his prospects, it wouldn’t be that hard to adapt to profound servitude. And it would amaze him if Mrs. Bo Xiang vetoed the plan. He knew her well enough, by now. He turned towards her.

      She lay with her head turned away from him. The poor woman must be recovering, Tony thought. Not that crazy, is it? She had seemed like a mustang trying to throw off its rider. It would take a while to catch your breath after that. At the same time, a terrible presentiment was creeping up on Tony.

      He could no longer hear her breathing.

      He quickly rolled her onto her back, facing him. She felt clammy but already cold, brushed from top to toe by the cool breath of the fan, which continued to rotate its wings of death above them.

      Tony called her name and shook her thoroughly. She didn’t respond at all. The layer of foundation had indeed disappeared. Her face, paler than ever, had a bluish sheen. The lipstick and the mascara had left red and black streaks around her mouth and her eyes. It hadn’t made her ugly or macabre. Her face seemed frozen in deep, delirious ecstasy. Never before had Tony seen anyone radiate such intense happiness. It felt like a betrayal.

      He shook the happy corpse once again. He refused to believe what was happening to both of them, and the irrepressible smile on her lips made him angrier and angrier. It was as though she were laughing at him, yet again, once more. As though she’d planned this all from the start. Not just the trip to Buenos Aires, not just the dinners, the tango lessons, the Renoirs, the Jackson Pollocks, El Afronte—but this, too. Especially this. She had used him, tricked him.

      He had to refrain from punching her in the face with his balled fists. Again he shook her, as furious as he was impotent.

      But all of a sudden, the happy corpse moved. It belched out a cough that was more of a rattle. For a moment, Mrs. Bo Xiang opened her eyes—two strips of shining white were all that was visible, then they closed again. What she did do, without losing her disconcertingly blissful expression, was raise one hand. The trembling claw moved slowly towards Tony, but fell halfway onto the clammy sheet.

      Quick, Tony thought, fumbling for his smartphone in panic. To hospital with her! Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe he wouldn’t have to call his creditor, the most famous entrepreneur from Macau to Guangzhou, and tell him his wife had just died.

      -

      2

      Mpumalanga

      Tony Hanssen couldn’t bring himself to press the trigger. He didn’t know what was holding him back the most: his fear of failure, his fear of being caught, or his realization that he—yes, he!—was about to kill another living being.

      Three times, already, he’d had the rhinoceros’ right eye in the exact centre of his cross hairs while the creature was barely moving. It stood there chewing lazily, staring into space with the slow, short-sighted gaze common to all herbivores. ‘The rhino is an armoured bovine’ a blogger had written on one of the sites Tony had consulted—a site that, ironically, warned against the scourge of poaching—“an armoured bovine with two unfortunate weak spots: its eyes.”

      It was these virtually blind, unprotected peepers, deeply embedded in a vortex of skin folds, that unsettled Tony and caused his finger to freeze around the trigger. He saw innocence in that gaze, and a heart-rending plea for mercy. Horses looked like that when they had just been wounded or beaten, as Tony had once been forced to witness in Provence, not far from his former holiday home. Two men were flogging a worn-out draught horse that stoically put up with the rain of blows. All of a sudden, they’d had enough, and raced off, arguing.

      Tony had been so aghast that he hadn’t tried to stop the brutes, something he would feel guilty about for years. At crucial moments, he was clearly less decisive than he would have expected himself to be. He’d walked guiltily up to the horse, which had remained rooted to the spot, only its flanks quivering. He spoke soothingly to the animal without touching it, so as not to frighten it even more.

      The horse neither started nor moved. It gave Tony a sad, human look. He felt doubly conscience-stricken. Would anyone—would he?—be capable of braving such torment without collapsing in pain, or going crazy with anger? This broken, tortured nag embodied something so noble, it was almost offensive. A sober heroism that Tony doubted he would ever be capable of.

      Now, in Krokodilspruit, placing his finger back on the trigger, he tried to convince himself that such considerations were just mere projections, based on a deep longing for kinship. Show a man a stray cat, a cumulus cloud, or a weeping willow, and he will find something of himself in each of them. And each time it will be baloney.

      And a rhinoceros was especially far from being human. A sea lion’s brain was a hundred times more sophisticated than the grey matter of this stinking colossus, which should have become extinct thousands of years ago, along with the dinosaurs and the mammoth. It was an oversight of nature that it was still wandering around, serving the tourist industry. In the Middle Ages, knights had scoured the Old World looking for unicorns—elegant white stallions that could charm virgins with the twisted horn on their foreheads. In the modern Middle Ages, the era of globalization, Joe Sixpack could lay his eyes on the unicorn’s cumbersome grey kinsman in any zoo in the world. Few people, virgins or otherwise, fainted at the sight of its squat double horns. If the rhinoceros possessed any charms, they were hidden beneath its robust hideousness, its surprising girth, its threatening, primordial strength. A primitive tank on four legs; it was hard to believe it would let itself be taken out by a single person with the right gun and a steely set of nerves.

      Before the arrival of men with guns, rhinos hadn’t even had any natural enemies. Wherever they weren’t hunted, they thrived and flourished. They were the only species of tropical animal not to suffer from the Arctic winters and eternal nights of the menageries in the Far North, as long as they had creature comforts and a decent roof above their heads.

      In that respect, they were only too human. All the rest was sentimental fantasy.

      Tony had no time for sentiment. There was a knife at his throat. He had to bring off this appalling job or go under, himself, dragging everything he loved down with him. He wanted his family back, his reputation, and his old life. That creature, there, was the key. Backing out was no longer possible anyway. He was already guilty of fencing, breaking and entering, and attempted poaching, plus illegal arms possession and forgery. And that was just the South African stuff.

      It wasn’t fair, though. This animal was simply unlucky enough to be the first rhinoceros to turn up at the watering hole. ‘But hey, that’s life! Things are tough for everyone!’ The head of the trading floor had shouted that at the first furious clients who had telephoned to complain about Tony, and the inexplicably falling prices of the stocks recommended to them on the basis of his prognoses.

      ‘When the prices inexplicably rise, you lot never call. Drop dead, you bunch of losers!’ For a whole week, he’d had to maintain his defensive line of scorn and threat.

      Then he’d begun to telephone Tony himself to complain about his own shrinking portfolio. He, too, called Tony a conman and a leech. Another week later, something happened that no investment fund, ministry, or rating agency had wanted to consider. The bank went bankrupt and pulled all its foreign affiliates down into the black hole with it. A fortune larger than the budget of some European industrial

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