A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

by Gil Courtemanche

  From the Avenue of the Republic encircling the hotel came sounds of hotel staff approaching, soon to begin their sixteen-hour day, footsteps already heavy. In a few movements repeated for the thousandth time, they would slip into a white shirt, a bow tie and a smile too broad that must stand up to sixteen hours of temperament, condescension, impatience, ill-concealed mistrust and sometimes a kind of third-worldism so pleasantly warm that the employee would paint his situation the blacker to please the lonesome White. To start a real conversation, the latter would do better to ask, “How are your children?” than, “Do your children have enough to eat?”

  No one ever wondered why the employees’ smiles showed so many teeth and so little in their eyes. Valcourt called this “the dichotomous smile.”

  There was a knock at the door. Raphaël was snoring. Méthode’s breath was rattling in his throat. Zozo, who was just beginning his day, knew everything. He had come to see the patient and also to warn everybody that the hotel management would not be pleased to have a respectable hotel room turned into a hospital room for a guest suffering from a shameful sickness and one furthermore so contagious. He liked Méthode, but not to the point of letting him die in his hotel. The other staff might refuse to work on this floor and certainly wouldn’t do the room. The hospital would be a better place. He offered to put Valcourt in touch with a cousin who worked at the hospital and reminded him that hotel policy, with which he himself disagreed profoundly, was now very strict.

  “An additional night must be paid for every person not registered who spends the night in the room of a guest, even if the guest is a good guest like you, Monsieur Bernard. Unless, of course, the additional night is occasioned by a lady friend of yours, Monsieur Bernard. And my cousin is a graduate nurse and has a lot of influence.”

  Zozo was always anxious to be of service because he had to feed a great many children and could not manage it on the pay of a minor flunky. Only his clientele’s generosity enabled him to keep the whole brood alive. And so, as a result of his love for his family and a few thousand francs slipped to him by Valcourt “for the children,” the Kigali Hospital Centre was relieved of several bags of aqueous solution and a bedpan. The cousin was not in fact a graduate nurse but a stock keeper in the pharmacy. He wielded no influence but, resourceful and wily, kept his extended family supplied with medicines and bandages.

  Élise, a Canadian nurse more stubborn than a mule and more generous than a field of poppies, administered the perfusion. Méthode would die in a private room at the hotel, as he wished. A steady stream of visitors began to arrive. Immediate then distant relatives, friends, colleagues at work, and finally vague acquaintances. Méthode would smile sometimes. He did not know that so many people loved him. A medical inspector, accompanied by a policeman, had come and seen that no by-law had been infringed, especially having discovered in conversation with Raphaël that he himself was related to the dying man. He was pleased to deliver a certificate attesting that the patient could not be moved. He went through the motions of refusing the five thousand francs offered him, but thought about his many children and the fact that he had not been paid for three months. Worse, his small medicine business was doing badly. The pharmacy had been out of aspirin for a month and had not had a glimpse of an antibiotic for two weeks. He had tried to sell off some of the anti-tuberculosis medicines but without much success, because the missionaries were handing them out free and there were almost as many missionaries as there were tubercular patients.

  The Belgian manager, Monsieur Dik, who had summoned the medical inspector but forgotten to offer him a gift, arrived with his large pustulous nose at the door left open to accommodate the constant coming and going. He was greeted by Agathe, who regularly offered him her mounts and hills of firm flesh in recognition of friendship or rent in arrears. Madame Agathe made use of her opulent body the way others use their cheque-books. He had fondled, caressed, sucked the breasts she had presented to him one after the other the way one offers cakes to a greedy child. He had pawed her buttocks and slipped his hands between her humid thighs. And he had come while doing it. But he had never seen Agathe naked. Frugally, she did not waste her assets and saved some of her capital for grand occasions. When the manager cried, “Monsieur Bernard, this cannot go on … ,” she clasped the little man to her bosom and literally carried him into the bathroom.

  “Monsieur Dik, I’m taking you to paradise.” And she closed the door.

  Five minutes later, still quivering with pleasure, the manager came to speak to Méthode with all the respect and studied compassion that courtesy and circumstance required.

  Then Méthode’s mother arrived and the visitors withdrew. Marguerite Izimana’s face, like an emaciated cat’s, was deeply furrowed, her eyes empty and her gaze fixed. She sat on a straight chair and took Méthode’s hand; he gave a faint smile of recognition. She did not look at him. She alone of the whole hill had known that her son was suffering from “the sickness.” She was not ashamed, no, but she did not wish to be troubled by the gossip, the rejection, the judgments and the scorn. If Méthode was dying of a shameful sickness it was because he was born in shame. The shame of poverty, of discrimination, of university education denied, grants refused, of land and house so tiny that he had soon left for the city, the shame of being unable to marry because of poverty and inadequate housing, then a girl for a few brochettes and a beer, a girl to help forget fear and time in jail, a girl for a quick little orgasm, that’s not a sin, that’s an imitation of happiness. This is what she was thinking as she murmured what ought to have been prayers. And then, to die at thirty-two, or at forty butchered by drunken soldiers, or at forty-two of malaria, or at fifty-five, like her, of weariness and heartbreak … What’s the difference?

  “Dying is not a sin” was the only thing she had come to say to him, and she gently placed her other hand on her son’s glistening forehead, whereupon he closed his eyes and let his last tear fall. The last tear is death’s beginning.

  Finally soothed and free, Méthode repeated, “Dying is not a sin.” Then, slightly raising his head, “We must tell them,” he said. Marguerite Izimana nodded and turned to Valcourt. In her eyes there was neither appeal nor interrogation, just a command. Awed by this dark solemnity, Valcourt stepped forward.

  “You want to speak to me, Méthode?”

  “Yes, but not just to you, to a lot of people … on the television … with the film you wanted to make with me. Let’s make the film. I’m going to rest, build up my strength, then we’ll make the film and you’ll show it to them. And then … I’ll go.”

  Méthode closed his eyes and his mother closed hers. The two settled down calmly to wait.

  Méthode emerged from his sleep, his stupor, his silence or semi-coma—how could anyone tell which?—only in late afternoon, jerked from his limbo by the harsh, strident calls of the jackdaws and buzzards arriving as the Whites returned from their aid work and deal-making. Méthode’s mother, like a seated tombstone figure, had not moved, had not let go of her son’s hand for a second. Only her shoulders, which would hunch suddenly whenever Méthode’s breath became more gasping, showed there was life left in a body made of knots, bones and skin stretched and dry, creviced by thousands of fine wrinkles, like the furrows the country people plow on their hills.

  On the long, low dresser along the wall facing the two beds, Valcourt had ordered food and a bar set out.

  “We’re going to eat, drink and fuck,” said Méthode, adding with the smile of a kid surprised by his own audacity that he was glad his mother didn’t understand French.

  Then in Kinyarwanda:

  “Maman, don’t be sad, I’m going to have a beautiful death.”

  “For a young man, there’s no such thing as a beautiful death. Or a death that makes sense. All children’s deaths are ugly and senseless.”

  André, who had learned in Quebec how to make Rwandans aware of condoms and abstinence, was the first to arrive for this funerary feast, which Méthode called the
Last Supper, though he was quick to add, with a little laugh broken by coughing, that he did not take himself for jesus Christ. Then came Raphaël with some colleagues from the bank, and Élise, her arms full of flowers and her handbag full of morphine, which an understanding and ill-paid friend had obtained for ten dollars American. Finally Agathe, accompanied by three of her girls because a party without free girls is not a party. The girls would not kiss the dying man or even shake his hand. Méthode was too charmed with everything to insist. On the contrary. He was delighted the girls thought they might catch the sickness, even with the merest touch of their lips or fingers. Fear had got to them, and though unjustified, it was a fear, a terror almost, that he and so many of his friends had never felt. His death would not have been in vain.

  When the first fevers had taken him, he had thought of malaria. The first diarrhea attacks had not surprised him. Sick goat’s meat or polluted water. The ten kilos he lost in a few weeks were certainly food poisoning, that rotten goat he had eaten at Lando’s, or maybe the grilled tilapias at the Cosmos that had left an aftertaste. The sores in his mouth hadn’t surprised him either, any more than the tuberculosis that floored him so suddenly. He took a room in the intellectuals’ building at the Kigali Hospital Centre so as not to have to share a bed with someone who had diphtheria or pustulant scabies. The sickness appeared to him along with the face of a Belgian doctor, the head of internal medicine, who knew well that it was penetrating everywhere, multiplying faster than rabbits, and that this was giving him a long head start on his Western colleagues. All these patients, this constantly replenished horde of ignorant people at his disposal, and the sickness progressing at lightning speed but with its own characteristics here—all of it could lead to an important discovery, and even wealth. For example, the almost total absence of Kaposi’s sarcoma in Blacks, and the frizzy hair becoming straight and supple like blades of grass or the hair of Whites. AIDS might hold the secret of a miracle cosmetic product that would make its inventor a billionaire in Belgian francs. Think of all those African women dreaming of having hair like Claudia Schiffer’s! The Belgian doctor, who had never been sick, dreamed of his Mercedes while listening to Méthode describe his latest health problems. He didn’t need to listen, not really. He had already seen enough, from the colour of his eyes, from his thinness, from the sores scattered around the insides of his cheeks because Méthode had only been able to afford one week’s treatment with Nizoral. And then that tuberculosis. “A classic symptom,” the textbooks said. AIDS 101.

  “Perhaps you should have the Test.”

  The Test. There was only one test they were talking about when the tone of voice put a capital on the word. They did the others without telling you and gave you the results if ever you screwed up the courage to ask a question of a KHC doctor. But the Test was not done at the KHC; Québécois aid workers in a building near the hospital were responsible for that. And when the White doctor sent you to them, the reason was clear.

  Élise understood instantly when she saw Méthode sit down painfully in her little office and say in a low voice, “I’ve come for the Test.”

  Two years in Rwanda; hundreds, thousands of AIDS patients. The same cautions tirelessly repeated, the words a thousand times said announcing the end, the encouragements whose effectiveness she doubted, this permanent companionship with the death of people she learned to love day by day as they confided in her— nothing undermined her determination.

  Élise was a specialist in life which she devoured with gusto in order to forget that her routine contact was death. She offered her plump but firm little body to anyone who would remind her of life triumphant. She had loved a South American terrorist, fought for abortion on demand in the 1970s in Quebec, and was convinced that in this far-o f country, in this festering hell, she could make a difference. Back home, everything was so easy. Here, everything had to be started from scratch. With Méthode, this meant finding the words, the phrases, the smiles that would set him comfortably and with dignity on the short path leading to the end. Élise and Méthode had thus become friends, confidants and almost lovers, as ordained by lymphocytes and mycoses, to the tempo of tuberculosis and attacks of diarrhea. Méthode’s disintegration drew them together. Never had a patient moved her this much. Méthode did not know it. He took Élise’s attentions as the bounden duty of the White aid worker come to help the negroes, though he was fond of his nurse, rather as one loves a sister. Until he understood that Élise was ready to commit a crime so that he could die when he was ready, when he had had enough of turning into a skeleton, an imitation mummy.

  She had said to him, “When you’re fed up with being in pain, tell me. You’ll fly away like a little bird. Softly.”

  Élise was there. Heavy-hearted but smiling. With her vials of morphine, her syringes, and a huge glass of whisky in her hand. Méthode would do what he had promised and then leave, borne on the chemical wings she would give him. Méthode, who so loved life, was happy to be able to die this way. He whispered to Raphaël, “Even rich people in the United States don’t have beautiful deaths like this.” And to Valcourt he said, “I’m going to do you a good film that’ll make you rich.” And he dozed off again while Agathe was wondering whether, before going to paradise, he wouldn’t like a last knowing, expert manipulation of that damned member that was now taking him to the grave because it had dipped here, there and everywhere unprotected. Dying without one last orgasm, she said to one of her hairdressers, is like dying alone and loveless. The hairdresser agreed and volunteered to help this young man, who once had driven all the young girls of Kigali wild, get it up. However, she would wear gloves to present her last sexual respects. She was HIV positive and knew it, but she did not want to become twice positive.

  She sat down beside the thin body, next to Méthode’s mother, who was still holding her son’s hand. With her gloved hand she groped under the sheet and found a small penis, all shrivelled up, and began to caress it with skill she had never before used, professional hooker that she was, experienced as she believed herself to be. With a delicacy and unhurried tenderness that was a blend of respect and manual adoration.

  “Give him a nice big one before he leaves for heaven, my girl,” said his mother. But Mathilde knew that a hand was not going to be enough. She would have to do what she had always refused to do for insistent European johns; heaven was not within reach of a hand but of a mouth.

  The friends put down their glasses, Agathe quickly swallowed her canapé. All gathered religiously around the bed, holding their breath and admiring. It was the mother who drew back the sheet and untied the belt of the bathrobe. It was the mother who placed her hand on Mathilde’s head, who pushed it gently between the two bones passing as legs and said, “Suck it, suck it, so a last drop of life can come out of him.” And Mathilde took the inert member in her wide mouth and worked it with her tongue and lips. Slowly, the way clay is thrown on a potter’s wheel, her patient sucking restored a semblance of shape to the penis of the living dead man. Méthode murmured, “I have no penis left, I have no sperm left. Your tongue is like a serpent bewitching me, but my tongue is still alive, let me drink you.” Without a word, Mathilde undressed, and supported by his mother and Raphaël, applied her crotch to Méthode’s mouth. Exhausted, sated, satisfied, fulfilled, trembling, she collapsed on Méthode, who uttered a loud cry of pain.

  The party was over. Élise stayed to administer the death, but most of all to love Méthode all the way to the last second. Méthode’s mother left for her hill. She did not want to see her son die and hoped he would fly away with his mind at peace, without having to bear the additional pain of a final separation.

  Méthode was sleeping. Valcourt set up the camera facing the bed in a position that would film the dying man from above. When he woke, the camera would make a single, slow panning movement. First it would remain fixed on the long-limbed body for five seconds, then for another five seconds would slowly pan up to the face, close in for a further five seconds, slowl
y, very slowly as in a funeral march, and stop. All that would then be seen would be a close-up of the diminished face and the immensity of those eyes, which would speak more eloquently even than the mouth.

  Chapter Four

  Gentille came five minutes before starting work at six in the morning. She did not knock. She came in and went to Valcourt who was sitting on the bed beside Méthode’s corpse.

  “My condolences,” she said, holding out her hand to him.

  “Thank you. You’re not too tired?”

  “No, I’m okay. You know, I think I may be related to Méthode. My parents and his come from the same hill. He’s Tutsi and I’m Hutu, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  Valcourt wasn’t really listening, he was lost in her breasts, which were exactly at eye level. He wanted to say, Gentille, I love you. He wanted to put out his hand, he wanted to stand up and take her in his arms. He did none of these things. She left without another word.