greed, with the slowness of delight, my mistress assembled the decorations and ornaments-the dab of antimony on each eyelid, the manacles of gold about her wrists, the heaped necklaces of fine beads tightly strung on zebra-tail hairs-allowable to the dictator's concubine. As a perquisite of this position, my waif set her jaw to give advice. Removed from the shadows of the tents and ditches of the north, Kutunda appeared older than when I had seduced her. Determined creases in her brow and about her pursed mouth betrayed some previous years of taking thought; vexations had worn their channels; perhaps a decade had passed since her first uncleanness. She had a squint; perhaps she needed glasses. "Tell me about this king," she said. "He is feeble but clever, my captive and yet my protector, in some sense that made me reluctant to order his execution when L'Emergence broke forth, and when his violent death would have seemed unexceptional. All of Edumu's political and cultural conditioning tended to estrange him from the working classes and the peasantry. His regime was corrupt, in regard both to his personal tyranny-he was carelessly cruel in the antique, sensuous manner-and to the bourgeois ideology of his ministers, who to maintain their own prosperity within the pathetically unrepresentative elite were selling to the Americans what their fathers had sold to the French, who for that matter thought they still owned it. Their only maneuver, in the nation's war against misery, was to solicit, with much incidental bribery, another foreign concession, to build another glass hotel to function as a whorehouse for the kafirs. The difficulty with government in Africa, my dear Kutunda, is that in the absence of any considerable mercantile or industrial development the government is the only concentration of riches and therefore is monopolized by men who seek riches. The private vices of Edumu would have been trivial had his political orientation been correct, that is, had he offered in any way to overthrow the ancient patterns of adventurism and enlightened self-interest which were tolerable when moderated by the personal interplay of the small tribal unit but which are sheerly brutalizing when that interplay is outgrown. His conservatism, which I would rather describe as a feckless impotence, was masked by considerable personal charm, even kindliness to his chosen intimates, and by the smiling obscurantism of the hopeless cynic." "The king," Kutunda said, her squint drawing her cheek-scars up, underlining what I perceived as a recalling of me to the business at hand, away from the rhetoric of "Poli Sci," with a seriousness that made me shudder in fear for Edumu, for this wanton woman (her odorousness now enriched by the spices and perfumes of the black-market shops) had a hard head for men's affairs, "the king is old?" "Older than anyone knows, but not likely, I fear, to do us the favor of dying." "That would be no favor," Kutunda said. "It would deprive the government of whatever appearance of incentive might be gained by his execution as a sky-criminal." She used here a technical Sara term referring to an offender not against his fellow men but against the overarching harmony of common presumptions: "political criminal" might be our modern translation. Naked but for the bangles and unguents of beautification, Kutunda began to strut with the importance my ears lent her words. Her heels firmly struck the floor; her toes seemed to prolong her grip; her stride, back and forth in the little room, gave me cause to remember that her grandmother had been a leopard. Her legs were thick and slightly bowed; her buttocks had that delicious wobble of maturity. I began vaguely to long for sex. It stretched my bones, to think how much of my life had been spent listening to naked women talk. "One must look for the center of unhealth," she explained. "This center lies not, I think, within the king, who cannot help being the type of man he is, but
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