Death in the Rainy Season by Mary Martin Devlin

Author:Mary Martin Devlin [Devlin, Mary Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Africa, Zaïre, 1980s, American expatriates, U.S. Foreign Service
ISBN: 9781944453053
Publisher: Cuidono Press
Published: 2018-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

When the plane landed in Kinshasa, Guy Marceau was so delirious that he had to be carried off the plane. For the veteran Swiss Air crew, Marceau’s comatose state on arrival was an intriguing novelty. Given the absence of medical treatment available in most African cities, they had become accustomed to handling sick and dying passengers desperate to reach the hospitals of Europe and South Africa. Even after the airlines adopted stricter measures prohibiting those passengers unable to walk to board planes, determined friends and relatives could always manage to get on each side of the sick or injured person and “walk” him or her on board. So Europeans who went out of their heads and raved incoherently during the flight or who were dead on arrival in Zurich or Brussels or Frankfurt or Lisbon or Paris or Johannesburg were still more routine than the airlines and their crews would have liked.

After Guichard left the room in Paris, Marceau had fled to the bathroom to relieve himself. That was when the vomiting started. He stood over the swirling water of the toilet until the retching gave way to dry heaves. His whole body felt bruised and sore. Even the weight of his shirtsleeve against his arm was painful. The pain at the back of his neck radiated down his shoulders. He lost an hour collapsed in a feverish sleep on the bed. He woke in a panic, grabbed his bag, leaving his shaving kit behind in the bathroom, and boarded the plane to Geneva. In the first class Swiss Air lounge in Geneva the hostess was convinced that Marceau, shaking uncontrollably and mumbling to himself, was high on some drug and considered picking up the phone and calling the police to get him out of the lounge. On the plane en route to Kinshasa the young wife of a Citicorp executive returning from summer vacation complained to the stewardess that Marceau had pawed at her back and tried to crawl between her and her seat. To get warm, that’s what he kept saying over and over, the woman told the stewardess. The indignant young woman moved to another seat, and the stewardess collected all the blankets she could find and piled them on Marceau. Before he became delirious, Marceau struggled to the bathroom where he stood weaving unsteadily over the toilet. Steam from his urine rose from the toilet bowl. Jesus Christ, he said, Jesus Christ Almighty.

Afterwards, he could not remember how he got back to his seat. He could not remember landing at Njili or the drive up to the Villa San Diego, where his cook took one look at him, lying in a soggy heap on the bed, and ran next door to borrow a bottle of quinine pills from the Minister of Transportation’s cook.

Two days later when Nicole came back to the house, the worst of the malarial fevers had passed, and Marceau was so overjoyed to see her that he forgot to ask her why she had not been there when he returned from Paris.

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