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mosaic.
    “
¡Caramba!
” the
escritor norteamericano
wanted to exclaim, but he was afraid of mispronouncing. He was pleased to perceive, through the surges of his terror, that his cool guide was terrified also. Her olive face looked aged, blanched. Her great silky eyelids closed in nausea or prayer. Her hand groped for his, her long fingernails scraping. Bech held her hand. He would die with her. The plane dived and smartly landed, under a romantic full moon just risen in the postcard-purple night sky above Monte Avila.
    The Ambassador held a dinner for Bech and the Ghanaian elite. They were the elite under this regime, had been the elite under Nkrumah, would be the elite under the next regime. The relative positions within the elite varied, however; one slightly demoted man, with an exquisite Oxford accent, got drunk and told Bech and the women at their end of the table about walking behind Nkrumah in a procession. In those days (and no doubt in these), the elite had carried guns.“Quite without warning or any tangible provocation,” the man told Bech, as gin-enriched sweat shone from his face as from a basalt star, “I was visited by this overpowering urge to kill him. Over
powering
—my palm was itching, I could feel the little grid of the revolver handle in my fingers, I focused hypnotically upon the precise spot, in the center of his occiput, where the bullet would enter. He had become a tyrant. Isn’t that so, ladies?”
    There was a soft, guarded tittering of agreement from the Ghanaian women. They were magnificent, Ghanaian women, from mammy wagon to Cabinet post, wrapped in their sumptuous gowns and turbans, their colorful, broad-patterned prints. Bech wanted to repose forever, in the candlelight, amid these women, like a sultan amid so many pillows. Women and death and airplanes: there was a comfortable triangulation there, he drowsily perceived.
    “The urge became irresistible,” his informant was continuing. “I was wrestling with a veritable demon; sweat was rolling from me as from one about to vomit. I had to speak. It happened that I was walking beside one of his bodyguards. I whispered to him, ‘Sammy. I want to shoot him.’ I had to tell someone or I would have done it. I wanted him to prevent me, perhaps—who knows the depths of the slave mentality?—even to shoot me, before I committed sacrilege. You know what he said to me? He turned to me, this bodyguard, six foot two at the minimum, and solemnly said, ‘Jimmy, me, too. But not now. Not yet. Let’s wait.’ ”
    In Lagos, they were sleeping in the streets. Returning in a limousine from a night club where he had learned to do the high-life (his instructress’s waist like a live, slow snake in hishands), Bech saw the bodies stretched on the pavements, within the stately old British colonnades, under the street lamps, without blankets. Seen thus, people make a bucolic impression, of a type of animal, a hairless, usually peaceful type, performing one of the five acts essential to its perpetuation. The others are: eating, drinking, breathing, and fornicating.
    In Seoul, the prostitutes wore white. They were young girls, all of them, and in the white dresses, under their delicate parasols, they seemed children gathered along the walls of the hotels, waiting for a bus to take them to their first Communion. In Caracas, the whores stood along the main streets between the diagonally parked cars so that Bech had the gustatory impression of a drive-in restaurant blocks long, with the carhops allowed to choose their own uniforms, as long as they showed lots of leg, in several appetizing flavors.
    In Egypt, the beggars had sores and upturned, blind eyes; Bech felt they were gazing upward to their reward and sensed through them the spiritual pyramid, the sacred hierarchy of suffering that modern man struggles with nightmare difficulty to invert and to place upon a solid material base of sense and health and plenty. On an island in the Nile, the Royal