Hectoring vectors

Pneu's body (a.k.a. Plummer's) acted as a magnet for the mosquitoes, his body odor attracting the vectors, the air resonating with his odor under the moustiquaire. The mosquito's surgical sucking tube is like the proboscis of a tapir or the trunk of an elephant, though it is not prehensile. In fact, Pneu was living in On-the-back-of-an-elephant, as the town was called by the locals. He had begun to occupy the town against his will and in full compliance with his velleities. The townspeople were merely indifferent. He was just another francais even though he was not French. He wagered all, didn't hedge his bets, had put them on being there, not having been before in such a place of contradictions, not really a polis, not really a suburb, not really countryside, not even jungle but with elements of all of them. So the mosquito was not merely a flying syringe that drew blood, it was a heat seeking missile, though his body's temperature was probably less than the surrounding air.
Il pleut des cordes. That is the rain in Africa, always applauding and reverberating through the flummoxed air. It took Pneu's breath away. It cools suddenly and you are mired in the red mud, yellow dirt from desert dryness turned to some old southern back road in the US down which old Crawford limps along. A drumming and a rapid report of a machine gun when it hit the corrugated, galvanized iron roof of Pneu's villa. The ropes of rain like miniature Bernini columns alive and moving, falling down in communion with the earth gone awry, sounding like Elvin Jones or Sunny Murray playing drums multiplied tenfold. It was a relief for Pneu, a relief from the oppressive humidity.
Sometimes the clouds were pregnant with rain for a few days before they burst without warning.
Moussa, Pneu's boy, kept the yard free of vegetation, as a mosquito likes to lurk under leaves during the day before she becomes active at night, attacking with the surgical precision of a drone, her long proboscioid mouth injecting into the dermis of her victim her saliva that contains the malaria parasite after sucking blood like nectar. Pneu did not want to get acquainted with her, the female of the particular species that carries the fever inducing plasmodia, called by the French, le palu. So he religiously took the prophylactic prescribed by the nurse in the form of a pill. He took it weekly like Holy Communion. That was his first line of defense. His second was the moustiquaire, the mosquito net, above his bed, sort of like a defective condom, the fine mesh that let the air in.