A tall, thin, very black man, with the iridescent sheen of a grackle’s plumage, looked at me from behind the reception desk. He was probably Senegalese. The stare of his biased eyes glided like a wraith through the cool air-conditioned space of the foyer towards me, an intruder into his serene oasis. Then it skipped back to his indifferent pose behind the reception desk. Qu’est-ce que c’est ce faux type la? he thought. Who is this guy? He tells me he doesn’t know for how long, so I give him three nights. This American’s French isn’t too bad. His pronunciation is good.

After checking in I climbed the steps to my room. At the top of the stairs I looked to my right and a woman's gaze met my eyes. The confused look on her face looked like the reproduction of that pencil or charcoal sketch of Arthur Rimbaud’s face in my Collected Poems of Rimbaud. The resemblance was fleeting. Her face was more like a mask with a grimace. One of disgust or disdain. Her hair was piled high, and not straightened, as was the custom of the bar girls who straightened their hair chemically to make themselves look like a white woman. In other words, it was not braided in corn rows following the curve of the head or in numerous thread-bound pigtails arranged in a regular pattern all over the scalp. Not the usual Ivorian hair style. Her unkempt hair gave her a disheveled look. Her nondescript dress hung on her body like a slip, as if she were ready to retire for the night. She was the bartender of the Hotel Monhessia’s upstairs bar[i]. Her name was Helene. Later I learned she was half Lebanese and was married to a Frenchman who had jilted her.  

I reveled, however anxiously, in the hiatus before my work would begin at the secondary college, after the country orientation I was required to attend at the C.A.F.O.P. in Daloa. Philippe the Peace Corps driver had taken me to Djokwe. The hotel room for now was like a quiet sanctuary. I ate in the hotel restaurant and then visited the disco. I began to lead the life of an expatriate, however much to my chagrin. I wanted to go native. The color of my skin would belie any attempt, so I tried to find a comfortable compromise, which was to withdraw into myself—not a compromise at all I found out in the end.

Djokwe was what the French called a bled, a small town in the bush (en brousse). The Hotel Monhessia was located at the top of a gradual rise of ground, the highest vantage point of the town, with the quartier Jean Bosco behind it, where I was subsequently to be accommodated with my own villa. The hotel looked down on the marketplace. I had a horrible case of indigestion the first night of my stay in the hotel. I had the strange sensation of being upside down[ii].

My hotel room was white, clean, cold and antiseptic. It did not have the seediness I experienced in le Cottage, the hotel in Gagnoa where I had gone to make the first trip by myself into the country, as part of my orientation at the C.A.F.O.P. In Gagnoa I withdrew myself, as if I were a squirrel high in the tree tops looking down. I observed from afar, effacing myself.

I entered the restaurant bar at le Cottage. There were two middle-aged French men with a pregnant African woman. All of a sudden both of them got up from the table and one of them said to the old platinum blonde woman with long black, fake eyelashes behind the bar, J’arrive. One was partially bald with long wisps of hair at the front of his head combed back in duck tails. He was wearing the proverbial shorts of the expat. The glasses he wore were thick and attached to a chain around his neck. These were signs of no small vanity. The other wore glasses, too, and his hair was short in a flat top haircut (en brosse). The tufts of hair at the edge of his forehead stood up in a defiant manner. The pregnant woman waited until they returned, which was shortly.  

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[i] The verisimilitude of an upstairs bar was considered questionable by a reader in a fiction-writing workshop I attended once. However, verisimilitude is a matter of relativity and thus an upstairs bar is a moot question, i.e., relatively true or false depending on the reader’s experience or knowledge of alternate worlds or Weltanschauungs. Indeed the Hotel Monhessia had a bar on the “first” floor, i.e., one floor above the ground floor in the French system of numbering stories beginning with the rez-de-chausse, which is zero. Why the bar was located on the second floor is a matter of conjecture. It could have been located there for religious reasons of a prohibitive nature. The Ivory Coast’s inhabitants are largely Muslims, with some Christians and animists. However, there was a disco attached to the hotel with its entrance on the ground, which contradicts this reasoning.

[ii] The feeling of being upside down is associated with dying and its planar opposite of ascension. According to Levi-Strauss, “[t]he squirrel enjoys a high reputation because of its silky coat, its long tail, its agility, and more especially for a further reason: the squirrel is said to be one of the very few animals […] able to come down from the highest trees head first” (p. 555). Furthermore, the role of psychopomp is often attributed to the flying squirrel and that it was even a cannibalistic monster for the Okanagon. “The Coeur d’Alene believe in the existence of supernatural dwarfs who climb up and down trees with great celerity, and always head-first […] People whom they approach lose their senses and, when they come out of their stupor, they find themselves leaning upside down against a tree” (p. 556).