A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

by Gil Courtemanche

  “Look, they’re friends of mine, going home. She’s Hutu, he’s Canadian, not French or Belgian.”

  There were now a dozen around them, all drunk or stoned on hash. A little bearded fellow in a Chicago Bulls sweater with Michael jordan’s name on the back spoke to Valcourt.

  “The Canadian likes Tutsi hookers with phony Hutu cards. That’s not good for you, chief. Not good. This is a Hutu country, chief. If you don’t want to end up in the Kagera River with all the Tutsis, get yourself a Hutu woman. I’ll let you through tonight, but you’ll have to pay a little money for the training and patriotic education of militias.”

  Valcourt handed over a sum and the bearded fellow gave him back his passport but not his press card or Gentille’s identity card. To recover these cost the entire five thousand Rwandan francs Valcourt had on him.

  Valcourt tried to persuade Cyprien to spend the night at the hotel, but Cyprien said he would rather leave the two of them alone together and did not want to leave his wife and children unattended in these troubled times.

  “And then, a thirty-minute walk under a full moon is a great joy. Don’t worry, I know everybody. Give me a beer for the walk.”

  He could avoid the roadblocks by taking some of the footpaths that wove about the hills like a complex circulatory system. But he hankered to follow the paved main road and meet up with people he’d call cheery greetings to, asking what was new in their neighbourhood, or how a distant cousin was doing. Clutching his big bottle of Primus from which he’d taken only a single swig, Cyprien was looking for a fling. Surely he’d find a free woman along the way who, for a share of his beer, would burst out laughing and spread her big, warm, moist thighs for him. Sex had done him in, but that was all he lived for. And after that woman, he’d wake up his own and maybe have another accident with her because it had been a long time, and because he threw away the condoms he was given every time he had a medical exam, or handed them round to children to use as balloons. He was so afraid of dying without having slept with all the women he could have in a normal life that he thought of nothing else. His day was organized around sex. He had plundered literally half the marketplace without ever a thought that he could infect the tomato or tilapia vendor of the moment. This country was doomed, he figured. What was the difference if a machete or an infected cock did the job? Yes, there was a difference. A cock was kinder than a machete.

  One day Élise had raged at him because he had been sleeping all over without a condom.

  “You’re a murderer!” she shouted in her small office beside the hospital. “You’re killing all those women!”

  He was killing them maybe, but they laughed and squealed when he patted their bums and slipped his hand up their skirts. And they gave great cries of pleasure when he penetrated them while massaging their breasts. That was a much more beautiful death, he said, than death by machete.

  Cyprien had not found a free woman on the road homeward. He was even thinking of turning back to the city, he needed so badly to relieve his aching balls and persistent erection. I’m not dead yet, he told himself, laughing. Then he thought of Fabienne, his friend Virginie’s sister, who kept “a bar under the bed” Just beyond the roadblock. A nitwit who yakked non-stop like a magpie, even with her legs in the air and you wearing yourself out on her belly, trying to make her shut up or come. You never knew. But since she always asked for more and the second time you didn’t pay, she enjoyed a certain renown. In the neighbourhood she was called the Glutton because she was always hungry for a man and took them all, even on credit, unless they were Tutsis.

  They were having a ball at the roadblock. A radio with the volume on full was diffusing disco to the farthest corners of the neighbourhood. Shadows danced and leaped crazily, silhouetted against the lurid light of two fires lit in big metal barrels. The militiamen were singing of the glory of the president’s party, the eternal superiority of the Hutus. The refrain went: “We’re starting the work, and the work’s going to be done right.” “Work” was the term always used in the propaganda. It also referred to the corvée collective, an annual community service when the residents of each commune were supposed to take part in the work, the corvée, which consisted of cutting down weeds and cleaning up along the sides of the roads. No one nowadays understood the word to mean overgrown weeds. But as long as the calls to violence remained in the realm of parable or poetic hyperbole, friendly countries would not be worried about the inhumanity France was condoning and feeding with its arms and military advisers. In the designs of the great powers, these Rwandans were of negligible weight, people outside the circle of real humanity, poor, useless types whom the glorious French civilization, with monarchical arrogance, was ready to sacrifice to preserve France’s civilizing presence in Africa, a presence already threatened by a major Anglophone plot.

  Cyprien wanted Fabienne, right here and right now, as the great French chief might have said, the president of France who had armed and trained these men—men who were separating Cyprien from Fabienne and his pleasure. When they caught sight of him laboriously climbing the hill, the militiamen began shouting and gesticulating.

  “Come party with us, Cyprien, come on. Move it, Hot-Nuts, your wife’s back here, she’s waiting for you and wants you.”

  Just beyond the two tree trunks blocking the road, his wife was lying with her skirt pulled up onto her belly. Two young militiamen, laughing hilariously, were holding her legs apart and a third was holding her head still. A breast was hanging out of her torn, bloodstained T-shirt. The roadblock commander held a revolver to Cyprien’s temple and led him to Georgina’s side.

  “We’ve tried everything but nothing works. Your wife has no pleasure. Even I’ve been on and women like me. Nothing, not even a little sigh of pleasure. She can’t be normal. We’ve had her two at a time, one by the front, the other by the back door. And we did it hard. Big bangs with big cocks, then we used a stick. Nothing, just crying and horrible screaming, even insults, not one little bit of pleasure to thank us for finding her so beautiful and appetizing. Now, you know all the secrets of the Whites and Tutsis you hang out with, so you’re going to show us, Cyprien, you’re going to show us what a man’s got to do to make your wife come.”

  As the first effects of shock began to fade, Cyprien was relieved. He was not going to die in sickness, but in pleasure.

  “I’ll show you how to do it,” he said.

  He undressed completely. The militiamen holding his wife stood aside, intimidated by the nakedness of this man who stared them straight in the eyes and bent calmly toward Georgina.

  “Wife, better to die of pleasure than of torture,” he said to her.

  Slowly and most of all with a delicacy he did not recognize in himself, he removed her skirt, then her T-shirt in the colours of Rwanda. On his knees between her thighs, he looked at her at length while the militiamen howled their impatience. He lay down on her and began to kiss her, in the curve of her neck, on her ears, on her eyes, her cheeks, the corners of her lips, delicately, only the tip of his tongue expressing his desire, while the militiamen booed the dreary spectacle. The little bearded fellow came up and slashed him savagely across the back with his machete. Cyprien felt his blood running down like a hot river between his buttocks and wetting his testicles. Never had he had such an erection. He sat up and, for the first time in his life, plunged his head between his wife’s thighs and sucked, kissed, ate. He had almost no strength left. He penetrated her, and just as he was about to come, the policeman fired. His body gave what seemed like a hiccup and he fell on his back beside his wife. Sprayed with semen, the policeman began to bellow.

  “Kill me now,” Georgina implored. “Kill me now, please.”

  The policeman, furious, pulled down his pants and lay on her. He gave an initial thrust and then a lot more as if trying to ram all the way through her. Georgina expressed neither pain nor pleasure. Not a sound, just staring with eyes empty and already lifeless. The policeman got up in disgust. They executed the wom
an without enthusiasm, swinging their machetes from the shoulder as if to finish off a dull job. The two bodies looked like abattoir refuse, carcasses clumsily cut up by unskilled butchers. The men had had their fill of pleasure and violence. As they left the roadblock, after putting out the fires and pulling aside the two tree trunks until tomorrow, hungry stray dogs crept in and feasted on this flesh that the humans were offering them with such casual generosity.

  Chapter Six

  I speak from the depth of the chasm

  I speak from the depth of my abyss …

  We are the first cloud we two

  In this absurd expanse of cruel happiness

  We are the future freshness

  The first night of rest

  Gentille and Valcourt lay under the great fig tree that shaded both terrace and pool. The magic tree, Valcourt called it; it must have been shaped by the gods because it was a perfect sphere. He had been gazing at it since he first arrived at the hotel, appealing to it at times, as we do when we stand before a painting that makes us feel bigger than life size, or a religious picture that reduces us to our puny, real dimensions. This enormous fig tree stood four storeys tall, so that even from the dining room on the fourth floor you couldn’t see the top of it. To Valcourt it was fascinating, reassuring and exotic. In Quebec they sold tiny fig trees as decorative plants. They weren’t trees, they were small shrubs. The only reminder of African luxuriance was the dark, lustrous green of their leaves. Here, this giant tamed the wind, organized the landscape. Not a day went by when Valcourt failed to go to the tree, and sit or lie briefly under it. He loved its beauty, its smooth roundness bristling with irregular little spikes, and the vibrant colour of its leaves, which the sun’s bright rays and the moon’s soft caresses alike would explode into a thousand fireflies. During the great rains that washed all the lands of the country, he would settle himself under this gigantic living umbrella. Not a drop would reach him. At such moments, he had feelings of immortality. This tree was a friend, a protector and a refuge. When he was drunk, he even found himself talking to it and was surprised not to hear it answer.

  When she came into the room, Gentille had said, “Make me come again with words.” Valcourt had picked up his copy of Paul Éluard’s Oeuvres complètes and led her under the fig tree. She had lain on the warm grass like a woman waiting to be possessed. Though he had never desired a woman so much, Valcourt hung back. He was still afraid of becoming immersed in the necessity of living. He was making one last stand. Reading would be easier than talking, so that is what he would do.

  He read in a gentle, serious voice, unpretentiously but with feeling. He did not really differentiate the lines. He heard the sounds they made as his brain grouped the letters that formed the words that created the sentences. He was speaking to Gentille and living what he was saying more than reciting.

  At first the young woman was more charmed by the voice of the man she loved than by the words. At school she had been used to reading Lamartine, Hugo and Musset to a rhythm that made a poem more like a cradle song or ballad, and she felt jostled by this cascade of images and the complicated allegories. But when she heard, “I speak from the depth of the chasm,” she asked Valcourt to repeat it, then took his hand.

  “It’s you, it’s me, here. We’re speaking from the depth of the chasm.” And to herself she repeated, “‘I am not afraid, all doors are open,’” for this was how she had been coping these past few days. And Valcourt had to repeat three times, “‘this absurd expanse of cruel happiness.’” Gentille was discovering that poetry speaks about life at its worst and its most magnificent. This man, this Paul Éluard, whose name she had never even heard before, was becoming a trusted friend, a kind of guardian angel. He had such a way with all the words of love and all the words of death. And she was at home with these words.

  A smile challenged

  The gathering night for each star

  A single smile for us two

  “I want to read everything your Monsieur Éluard has written.”

  Valcourt lay back on the grass beside her. He did not close his eyes because the fig tree was protecting him from whatever light and reflection there was.

  “I didn’t know a woman could come with so much gentleness and so little caressing,” Gentille said.

  Had she come? Valcourt hoped so. He had made love to her delicately, shyly and with restraint, as if not to crush a costly fabric. She had said “yes” a hundred times, never closing her eyes, quivering slightly, until her back arched and then subsided.

  “Thank you for being so gentle.”

  She had fallen asleep the way small children do, with their little fists clenched, thinking they’re going to heaven and they’re floating on clouds. Valcourt watched her until the first barkings of dogs rose from the valleys and the first curls of smoke penetrated the pockets of morning fog lying like fleecy lakes between Kigali’s still-dark hills. All this time, he was haunted by something Gérard Depardieu had said to Catherine Deneuve in Truffaut’s film Le Dernier Métro: “Yes, I love you. And you’re so beautiful it hurts to look at you.” Valcourt had slept for an hour perhaps.

  The gardener appeared and waved nonchalantly when he saw the half-naked couple lying under the tree, as though all things were normal in this chaotic world. He was not wrong.

  The canine cacophony yielded progressively to the human cacophony. The buzzards took flight in search of the fresh refuse produced by the night. When the buzzards had flown over the city at length and staked out their territory, the jackdaws left the lower branches of the eucalyptus trees around the hotel garden to go and make do, humbly as befits an inferior and obedient race, with places the buzzards had scorned. The croaking of all the city’s ravens was drowned out by horrid clumpings of French boots as a squad of presidential guardsmen jogged around the hotel, as they did every morning. The noise had wakened Gentille.

  “You don’t know what they’re singing as they run. They’re singing that they’re going to kill them all. Your friends, they mean.”

  “They mean you too, Gentille.”

  They had breakfast on the terrace, in the protective shade of the fig tree. Gentille was still in her very rumpled waitress’s uniform with the golden badge bearing her name. The waiters avoided Valcourt’s eye and his signals, but Zozo, who was delighted with their happiness, came quickly to end the discrimination.

  “You have chosen well, Monsieur Bernard, she is the most beautiful, and without wishing to make a pun, the most gentille, the nicest young lady I know, and all those waiters are only jealous or afraid.” Zozo even went to the kitchen himself to make sure Monsieur Bernard and Madame Gentille’s fried eggs would not be overcooked. They were perfect.

  Valcourt and Gentille went back to the marketplace. It was after seven o’clock but Cyprien was not in his usual place and no one had seen him. They drove up to the hill where the tobacco seller lived. The remains of a fire still smouldered in one of the two metal barrels that had lit up the militiamen’s night. Beside the highway, a flock of ferocious, squawking birds were fighting over the mutilated and disjointed bodies of a man and a woman, which appeared to have been thrown one on top of the other. Valcourt recognized Cyprien’s red shirt, then the long rugged face with the narrow moustache that he used to trim with such care. A few metres to the right, a dead-drunk militiaman lay snoring on a filthy mattress, clutching a bloodstained machete.

  We can all turn into killers, Valcourt had often maintained, even the most peaceful and generous of us. All it takes is a certain circumstance, something that clicks, a failing, a patient conditioning, rage, disappointment. The prehistoric predator and the primitive warrior are still alive beneath the successive varnishings that civilization has applied to mankind. All the Good and Evil of humanity is in our genes. Either one can emerge at any moment, as abruptly as a tornado can appear and destroy everything where minutes before only soft, warm breezes blew.

  For several seconds, a killer’s genes rose up in Valcourt’s blood
and a flood of proteins invaded and jangled his brain. Only a firm “No, Bernard!” from Gentille prevented Valcourt from becoming a killer. He had seized the machete from the militiaman’s hands and brandished it over his head as the young man woke and with haggard eyes perceived his own imminent death. Flinging the weapon into the ditch, Valcourt returned to the car, appalled to think that if it had not been for Gentille he would have butchered the fellow remorselessly, the way Cyprien and Georgina had been butchered.

  At the police station a few hundred yards from the roadblock, the police officer and militia leader in charge of operations recounted that Cyprien had fallen blind drunk on the road in front of a passing unidentified vehicle. Cyprien’s wife, after being advised of the accident, had been knocked down by another unidentified vehicle. Marinating in the banana beer he was drinking, and belching between sentences, the police sergeant added that the bodies had been left in the road to allow relatives to come and take them and give them a decent burial, and if no one came today he would take care of it himself because he was a good Christian.

  “And the children?”

  The sergeant continued to lie with an assurance and contempt for veracity that reminded Valcourt of his spells in Communist countries. He did not know where the children were, perhaps with relatives or friends.

  What about the machete wounds on Cyprien’s skull, and his wife’s belly slashed open, and her right breast cut o f, and Cyprien’s arm that several ravens were feasting on two or three metres from the tree trunk? The unidentified vehicles did all that? Was it reckless drivers coming home from a wedding, in vehicles with machete-clad tires?