The Comedians by Graham Greene Page B

now?’ Those were the last words she ever said to me, and I am not sure to this day what exactly she meant by them.
    I took a taxi to El Rancho and stayed there for dinner. The place was crowded, a buffet of Haitian food carefully adapted to American tastes was laid by the swimming-pool, a bony man in a conical hat performed lightning taps upon a Haitian drum, and it was then, on my first evening, I think, that the ambition was born in me to make the Trianon successful. For the moment it was too obviously a hotel of the second class. I could imagine the small tourists’ agents who included it in their round-trip programmes. I doubted whether the profits could possibly satisfy both Marcel and myself. I was determined to succeed, in the biggest possible way: I would have the delight one day of sending the surplus guests uphill to El Rancho with my recommendation. And the strange thing was that my dream did come true for a short time. In three seasons I was able to transform the shabby place into the bizarre high spot of Port-au-Prince, and through three seasons I watched it die again, until now there were only the Smiths upstairs in the John Barrymore suite and Monsieur le Ministre dead in the bathing pool.
    I paid my bill and took a taxi back down the hill and entered what I had already begun to regard as my sole property. Tomorrow I would go through the accounts with Marcel, I would interview the staff, I would take control. I was already planning how best to buy Marcel out, but that would have to wait until my mother had gone on to her further destiny. They had given me a big room on the same landing as hers. The furniture, she said, had all been paid for, but the floorboards needed renewal, they bent and creaked under my feet, and the only thing of value in the room was the bed, a fine large Victorian bed – my mother had an eye for beds – with big brass knobs. It was the first time I could remember that I had lain down to sleep in a bed I had not paid for with breakfast included – or had not been in debt for, as was the case at the College of the Visitation. The sensation was an oddly luxurious one and I slept well – until a jangling hysterical old-fashioned bell woke me, while I was dreaming – God knows why – of the Boxer Rebellion.
    It rang and rang, and now I was reminded of a fire-alarm. I put on my dressing-gown and opened my door. Another door opened at the same moment from the same landing and I saw Marçel emerge, with a half-asleep look on his wide flat negro face. He wore a pair of bright scarlet silk pyjamas and he hesitated just long enough for me to see the monogram over the pocket: an M interlaced with a Y . I wondered what the Y stood for, until I remembered that my mother’s Christian name was Yvette. Were the pyjamas a sentimental gift? I doubted that. More likely the monogram was an act of defiance on my mother’s part. She had very good taste, and Marcel had a fine figure to swathe in scarlet silk, and she wasn’t petty enough to mind what her second-rate tourists thought.
    He saw me watching him and he said in a tone of apology, ‘She wants me.’ Then he went slowly, with what seemed reluctance, to her door. I noticed that he didn’t knock before he went in.
    I had an odd dream when I got back to sleep – odder than the Boxer Rebellion. I was walking by the side of a lake in the moonlight and I was dressed like an altar-boy – I felt the magnetism of the still quiet water, so that every step I took was nearer to the verge, until the uppers of my black boots were submerged. Then a wind blew and the surge rose over the lake, like a small tidal wave, but instead of coming towards me, it went in the opposite direction, raising the water in a long retreat, so that I found I walked on dry pebbles and that the lake existed only as a gleam on the far horizon of the desert of small stones, which wounded me through a hole in my boots. I woke to