Death of a Hotel Manager

Because he served the tourists too well, we threw the hotel manager into the pool. It was a warm, beautiful night. Spanish guitars played on the radio and a hibiscus-drenched wind slid down the side of the mountain. You’d never even know that there was a revolution happening if it weren’t for all the machetes and the sound of panicked thrashing in the water.

The hotel manager had been found wearing his crisp suit jacket, the color of mosquito netting or perhaps an autumn moon. His chief concern, even as he’d been dragged toward the sun deck, was that our filthy monkey hands might soil it. Even now, treading water, he had yet to take it off.

Naturally, he was angry with us. Had always been angry with us. Had warned tourists against leaving the resort out of fear of running into people like us, who look just like him but without straightened teeth or manicured nails or crisp suit jackets. He was terrified, of course, that some unwitting foreigner might be fooled by the lies that the taxi drivers tell. That they might be taken up into the valley lands, past hurricane wreckage, past screaming chickens, past logging camps and tin-roofed shacks until they found the one that he, the hotel manager, had been raised in. This, of course, before the UN school, when there still was a UN school, before the École Culinaire, before the shared apartment in the capital and the glittering hoard of pirated DVDs that taught English as spoken by Tom Cruise and Matthew Perry.

He had still not removed his jacket. His name tag glinted brassily against the lights. There are generators hidden in the basement of the hotel. Many, many generators that keep the air conditioning roaring and the wifi at full strength, even in storm season, which now lasts all year. The hotel manager swam toward the shallow end but was struck in the head by someone using a long, metal pole. It broke the skin. The hotel manager gasped, glared at us, tried wiping away the shockingly-red blood before it could stain any of his clothes. His motions, however, were sluggish. He had begun to sink lower in the water.

How often had he driven away beggars who’d gathered by the gates to the resort? How often had he swung the handle of a rake at some loitering urchins, and how often had his aim been true? How often had he paid for the privilege with a sweaty banknote folded into a handshake with the gendarme who came to investigate the complaint, on the days when the gendarme could be bothered?

It was difficult to say. Difficult, even though many of us circled around the pool, swatting with our machetes, had been those same beggars. And urchins. And yes, even gendarmes, too. It may have been the late evening light, or the distracting scent of hibiscus on the early summer wind, but we were not entirely certain that the figure—beginning his final thrashes down in the water—was indeed that selfsame hotel manager or merely one of his staff.

For a moment, someone in the crowd knelt down on the wet concrete and began extending a hand. He was pulled back by someone else and told not to be a coward or even worse, a fool. There are, on this island and in this world, no shortage of men with straightened teeth, manicured nails, and crisp suit jackets the color of the autumn moon who are ashamed of you, who hate you, because they are the same as you, who of course we must all hate back.

The mood had changed. It was quiet as the hotel manager slipped under the surface.

We would have let him go, I think, if he’d have taken his jacket off.