HAMILTON IS TALKING about all the things he will have when he gets across the border. He will have a red car, long and thin and low to the ground, with a leather interior (he says he already knows what the leather will smell like). He will have a television with a screen like this, he says, and stretches his arms out wide, like someone pinned to a cross. He will have a house with more rooms than he has a use for and a kitchen with a fridge that dispenses chilled water and crushed ice at the push of a button. Hamilton smiles, showing his teeth. He will get his teeth fixed, he says, and wear tailored suits and aftershave from a tiny bottle.
All of us in the hotel have heard this before. We have all seen the collage of pictures stuck to the wall above Hamilton’s bed, pictures he has cut carefully from the magazines provided by the owner of the hotel. We could all add to the list of things he will have when he gets across the border: a girl with blonde hair and a wide, white smile to sit beside him in his long low car; a garden with a swimming pool; Cuban cigars.
Hamilton is not his real name. It is the name of a character in a television show from across the border. At first some of the other people in the hotel mocked him. They called him the names of famous people, movie stars or revolutionaries, or made up insulting nicknames. When he did not respond they would call him by his real name. Then his head would come up and he would make a great show of looking around. ‘Who are you talking to?’ he would say. ‘Is there a new guest in the hotel? Won’t someone introduce us?’ Soon they tired of their teasing and now no one remembers what he is really called. Sometimes they argue about it but no one is sure. Perhaps the hotel owner knows, but he does not say.
The hotel is not far from the border. This is one of the reasons that the rooms are always full. Also, the hotel is three storeys high and there are views from the roof. The hotel owner has provided plastic chairs up there and calls it ‘the roof garden’. To the east, the west and the south you can see a long way, for miles, to where the names of political candidates and their parties are painted in giant white letters across the cracked hills. We do not look that way. The chairs are pulled up to the side that faces north towards the border. You can look towards the border although you cannot see clearly to the other side. The town crowds in on our view. There are billboards, buildings sprouting with poles and waiting for another floor to be added, a spider’s web of aerials, spires and cranes. You cannot see much, but it is enough. Looking across the street in front of the hotel there is a gap between two government buildings. Through the gap and past the dome of a church, an advertisement for a soft drink stands on posts on the top of a factory. Between the top of the factory and the brash colours of the advertisement is a window of blue sky. I think this sky must be on the other side. I watch it, day by day, and tell myself that it is. I can see it better if I squint.
The hotel owner calls us his guests. In the mornings he joins us on the roof. ‘Why do I bother to purchase chairs for my guests to sit on?’ he says, though no one has asked him why. ‘Because it is good business. Because I am selling a dream. And it is good business to let people see what they are buying.’ He laughs. It is for the same reason that he provides the magazines.
Sometimes he talks about life across the border. He encourages Hamilton’s fantasies. ‘Everything is different over there,’ he says. He sniffs the air. ‘Even the air is different across the border. Cleaner, cooler.’ We do not believe much of what he says but that does not mean we do not listen. Occasionally someone will tire of his talk and ask him why, if life across the border is so good, he is here and not there. He enjoys answering this question. ‘Because my guests are here,’ he says, ‘and business is business.’
The guests sit up on the roof in the morning, before it gets too hot and before the dust begins to sweep in from the east. We are there in the evening too, when the heat and the dust have passed. There is little talk, except for Hamilton. Some play cards, or smoke. Most of us sit in the plastic chairs and look for ways through the buildings and aerials, the billboards and spires, north towards the border.
Often, when he comes to my room at night, the hotel owner tells me that I will do well across the border. His hair is long and lank, his face pitted like the land to the east. More hair erupts from his ears and nostrils. His teeth, like everyone’s, are bad. He wears flip-flops, grubby white shorts and a torn flannel shirt. And yet his hands, when he places them on my leg, as he always does, are soft, delicate, feminine even. The fingernails are immaculately clean, perfectly trimmed and polished. He begins nervously, like a too excited child, like a man used to being denied. He traces his finger slowly, softly along the peaks and troughs of my spine. He touches my breasts. He tries to caress. Then he pulls me from the bed and turns me against the wall. He holds my hair from behind and when he tells me I will do well across the border, that there are ‘opportunities’ for a girl like me, I think of the window of sky I can see from the rooftop. I think of the window of sky and my mind goes blue.
He came to the dormitory for the first time a few days after I had arrived. He said that he was lonely, that his wife was cold and ruined by too many children. ‘I have been watching you,’ he said. ‘Is there any shame in feeling desire for a woman?’ He sat on the bed and splayed the fingers of his hands against each other. He rested his elbows on his thighs and his pushed-together forefingers pulled at his lip, in the manner of a man trying to solve a difficult problem. ‘Let us think of it as a business arrangement,’ he said. ‘Mutually beneficial. I will help you in exchange for the only thing you have to sell.’ The following day I moved my few things from the dormitory into a small room at the back of the hotel.
The other hotel guests treat me with contempt. They pretend to resent me for having a room to myself, for preferential treatment by the hotel owner. But I believe they are humiliated by their powerlessness to intervene. They would rather think me a whore than admit to their own cowardice.
‘I saw the Barracuda again today,’ says Hamilton. We are sitting on the roof in the evening, after the worst of the dust and the heat have passed. Hamilton turns the pages of a magazine as he speaks. The guests sit facing in the direction of the border. They may or may not be listening. ‘He crossed twice. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon.’
Every day Hamilton walks across town to the checkpoint to watch the people coming and going. Sometimes I go with him. He is very quiet at the border. Quiet and intense. He stands in the shade of a billboard, his eyes darting from person to person. The wispy moustache that he has grown makes him look younger, not older as he intends. He lights cigarettes, dropping them to the ground when they are half smoked, grinding them into the dust with his foot and then lighting another. He pretends not to know me.
Eventually he will spot the Barracuda, christened by Hamilton for his sharp face, the long fins of his car. He wears a cream Stetson and suits too heavy for the heat. Hamilton does not know his name or what business brings him to the town so often, but imagines him to be a man of some importance. The border officials greet him with smiles, shake his hand, and then wave him through without looking at his documents. Once Hamilton has spotted him coming across the border, or leaving, he relaxes. His mood improves and he will talk to me about this or that, his latest scheme to get across the border perhaps. He keeps a tally of how many times the Barracuda crosses each week.
Hamilton has tried many times to get across the border. ‘From now on my bed will be free,’ he announces before leaving the hotel in the middle of the night. A few hours later, or maybe at noon, he returns, limping from some injury, or with cuts to his face or legs. Unchastened, he relates the story, citing some detail or piece of poor luck but for which he would have succeeded. The hotel owner listens in. ‘You will never succeed,’ he tells Hamilton, ‘your methods are too primitive.’ Hamilton has tried many different methods. He has tunnelled under the border fence. He has climbed over it and cut through it. He has stolen a uniform and disguised himself as a border guard. Once, he dressed all in green and hid for a night among a truckload of bananas. Overnight the fruit ripened and the border guards picked him from the yellow cargo like a grub.
He has been caught so many times that he is known to all the officials at the checkpoint. That is why often, when he stands under the billboard looking out for the Barracuda, they will grin at him and tip their hats. They do not take him seriously.
‘Soon,’ says Hamilton to no one in particular, ‘I will cross the border as easily as the Barracuda does. I will cross backwards and forwards many times a day.’ He takes out the tiny pair of scissors that he keeps in his pocket and carefully begins to cut around a picture in the magazine. Another guest, a big man named Kelman with a scar running down his cheek, gets to his feet. ‘And you will wash with champagne,’ he says, ‘and eat caviar and wipe your arse with silk handkerchiefs.’ A couple of the other guests laugh, dry, hard laughs, like stones. Most of us do not. We do not have the heart to mock Hamilton as the border officials do.
‘His methods are primitive,’ the hotel owner says to me. ‘There are better ways,’ he says, ‘easier ways.’ Sometimes, when he is finished with me, he stands at the small window of my room and talks about the town. ‘There are opportunities in a town like this, opportunities for a businessman.’ He puts his hands together. ‘People are like dogs,’ he says. ‘When a dog is hungry enough it will fight over anything, a crust of bread, a pool of water. And when they fight, they fight each other. They are too stupid to fight the thing that feeds them.’ He is right. This is a town of desperate people. People of different skin colour or religion, people who speak different languages, people who are cousins, brothers even, they will argue and fight over small things, a pair of shoes, cigarettes. Sometimes people are killed. The hotel owner turns away from the window. ‘This town is full of dogs,’ he says.
He has excited himself with this talk and comes back towards the bed. ‘But this is different,’ he says. ‘We have an arrangement, an arrangement that suits us both.’ I shiver as his hands trace along my spine. He laughs. ‘And I will miss you when you are gone.’
‘Please,’ said Hamilton, ‘please help yourselves to my bed. Soon I will be sleeping on a mattress as soft as water, on pillows stuffed with goose down.’ He has been gone for three days. On the evening he left, he boasted of his plan to hide in the trunk of the Barracuda’s car. He would follow the Barracuda when he came into town. When he parked and went to do his business Hamilton would pick the lock, he said, no problem, and shut himself in. ‘There will be a carpet in there,’ he said, ‘and I will lie with my hands behind my head. I will hear the greetings of the officials as they wave us through the border. The Barracuda is lucky for me,’ he said.
We believe that Hamilton is dead. One man talks hopefully of him having made it to the other side, but the fact of his saying it means he believes it even less than the rest of us. He has finally been killed crossing the border, as we all expected he would be, as perhaps he also expected. Up on the roof there is little talk of it and what there is is casual, unconcerned, callous even. ‘Thank God,’ says Kelman, ‘that I no longer have to listen to his wretched voice.’ But the atmosphere is subdued, the silences long and thick. The heat and the dust of the middle of the day seem less tolerable.
The visits of the hotel owner to my room have become more frequent, his caresses bolder. He is uninhibited now in his demands. It is both less and more terrible because he expects it, I expect it, it is usual. His talk about how and when he will honour his part of our arrangement has become vague, cryptic. ‘You will do well across the border,’ he repeats instead, and now when he says it, it is not desire in his voice, I think, but mockery. He takes satisfaction, also, in Hamilton’s death. ‘His methods were too primitive,’ he says, and reaches for me with his appalling hands.
On the fourth day Hamilton returns. He sits silently on the roof. He will not say where he has been or explain the burn-like wounds on his hands and arms.
The hotel owner does not linger on the roof to make comments as has been his habit. Perhaps he does not want to acknowledge Hamilton’s return. After all, he does not like to be contradicted. ‘You,’ is all he says, speaking to me, ‘I would like to see you downstairs.’
He does not wait to trace his finger along the line of my spine, but pulls me from the bed and turns me against the wall. The wall is cool. Paint has flaked off at the level of my eyes, revealing a piece of plaster the shape of an unknown country or continent. Above is the sound of footsteps and chairs being dragged across the roof garden. The hotel owner’s breaths, warm and meaty, come quickly. He is sour today and eager, too eager, to degrade me.
‘I am unhappy with our arrangement.’ I have twisted round to face him. His face is close to mine, his mouth open a little, strands of spittle hanging between his lips. ‘I am unhappy with our arrangement and I would like to renegotiate.’ Circumstances have made me reckless. But he does not speak and I go on. I tell him that he must provide me with the documents necessary to get across the border, that his visits will be fruitless until he makes the arrangements. I am uncertain if he is listening, if he is able to listen. Still he does not speak. Not of dogs, or business, or how well I will do across the border. He cannot think past the satisfaction that is being denied to him. His need is pitiable, his homeless erection absurd.
Hamilton has not been himself since he returned to the hotel. He makes no boasts. He no longer smokes. He is up on the roof at all times. He is there when I go up in the morning and there still when I return to my room in the evenings. Those who share the dormitory say that he does not sleep in his bed. He does not walk to the checkpoint to watch the people crossing back and forth.
Hamilton’s silence is oppressive. We all feel it. The guests face north, towards the border, but Hamilton’s presence presses in on us. His silence is corrosive to our fantasies and our hopes. You can sometimes read it in the faces of the other guests, you can tell that they would have preferred him dead.
It is one week since the hotel owner last summoned me down from the roof of the hotel. Now, instead, he visits me at night with the pretext of discussing the progress of my documentation. He has something else in mind too. He is lustful, frustrated, his delicate hands twitchy and covetous. But I am inflexible. I tell him we must stick to our arrangement. I see him contemplating coercion more direct than before, violent scenarios, but he has lost the initiative and anyway does not have the character for it. He leaves, resentful, with nowhere to put his anger.
It is morning and the heat and the dust are rising. For days now no one has left the hotel to try and get across the border. ‘You are vandalising hotel property,’ the hotel owner tells Hamilton. A magazine is balanced on Hamilton’s knees. Its colours are grainy, aged prematurely by the sun. Hamilton is cutting carefully through one of the pages. He does not respond to the hotel owner. ‘They are provided for the enjoyment of all my guests. I can no longer tolerate it.’
Someone pushes back a chair and there is the unsympathetic sound of plastic on concrete. ‘It is true,’ says the big man, Kelman, who stands behind Hamilton. He points at the magazine. ‘What if I want a car like this? A house like this? A woman like this?’ He leans over and takes the magazine from Hamilton’s knees. He holds it by its spine and waves it in the air, as if trying to shake loose something caught between the pages.
‘Where are your expensive suits? Your Cuban cigars? Your crushed ice?’ Kelman continues to shake the magazine, the dismembered pages hanging in tails and crescents. There is a long time when nothing happens and there is no sound but for the flapping of the pages of the magazine. Then Hamilton bites Kelman’s bare leg, just above the knee, and Kelman goes down heavily making a strange noise, something like a sigh. Hamilton picks up the dropped magazine and sits back down in the plastic chair.
Kelman stabs him first in the back of his neck. Then, as Hamilton falls to the floor, again in the back. Kelman rolls him over and I can see each time as he withdraws the tiny shafts of the scissor blades and then drives them back into Hamilton’s chest, stomach and face. There is no struggle and it is surprisingly quiet, just Kelman’s concentrated grunts, like that of a man chopping wood, and the muted, banal sound of steel pushing into flesh.
There is a thin layer of dust covering Hamilton by the time his body is moved. The hotel owner says something about the heat and the smell and tells two of the guests to carry it down to the street. Someone is flicking vaguely through Hamilton’s magazine. The man next to him is wearing Hamilton’s shoes. Soon it will be time to go back downstairs. For now I adjust my chair and look across the street in front of the hotel. I look through the gap between the government buildings, and on, towards the blue sky across the border.