A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

by Gil Courtemanche

  “What about Rwanda?”

  “Easy power and impunity. Here, there’s total disorder. To someone who has a little money or power, everything that seems forbidden elsewhere looks permissible and possible. All it takes is to dare it. Someone who’s simply a liar in my country can be a fraud artist here, and the fraud artist gets to be a big-time thief. Chaos and most of all poverty give him powers he wouldn’t have elsewhere.”

  “You’re talking about Whites who think all they need do is lift a finger and I’ll go up to their room even if they’re ugly, and rich Rwandans who tell me I’ll lose my job if I don’t sleep with them. You’re not like that.”

  “But that’s what I did with Madame Lamarre. I used my power to play with her life. When people come here, they catch the power disease. I’m a bit like them. Look at them, all the small-time embassy advisers, the brawny or pimply paratroopers, the dull plodders of the international community, the two-bit consultants who don’t spend a single evening without the city’s most beautiful women on their arms, and later in bed. All of us turn into little chiefs when we get here.”

  Gentille smiled. A little chief maybe, but a rather nice, respectful one. She didn’t try to reassure him about himself.

  “Keep talking,” she said, “even if I don’t like what I hear sometimes. All those people you mention aren’t as bad as you say. I have trouble explaining things in detail the way you do. But keep talking, I like it when you talk to me, I like it when anybody talks to me. Apart from my grandfather, and my father too sometimes, nobody ever talked to me more than a few minutes. My whole life, all I’ve ever heard is orders, advice, forbiddings, litanies, hymns and sermons. I’ve never been part of a conversation. I’ve also heard insults and roars from men showing they were pleased or frustrated, but the only long sentences meant just for me are the ones you’ve said. So talk. I need to know I can be an ear as well as a …”

  There are words a Rwandan woman does not pronounce even though the things they represent are common in her life: ass, fuck, penis, any word for the female sexual anatomy, or anything physically intimate. Nor do prostitutes use these terms. It’s as if saying the word sanctions the sin or humiliation.

  “You could have said ‘body,’ Gentille,” Valcourt said softly. “That’s not too hard to say. Or ‘thing,’ or ‘obJect.’ Or maybe ‘ass’ …”

  Gentille bent her head and closed her eyes.

  “You like them, don’t you, my…”

  She hesitated, then whispered: “… ass, and my breasts and my sex parts? D’you like talking to me as much? ”

  “Yes, Gentille, just as much.”

  “Talk some more, then. Talk to me about you, about home, tell me why you’re staying here, and please, please don’t tell me it’s because of me. That would be kind but too easy. Talk to me, it’s so good, so sweet.”

  There are people like Gentille to whom you must never tell the truth. It would be so simple it would look more like a lie, because life is supposed to be complicated. Nothing now justified Valcourt’s staying in Rwanda except Gentille. It was all so simple to him, but he sensed that she wanted him to stay also for her country, and his friends, and the steep hills, and above all for himself.

  “Why are you still here?”

  “Because I’m kind of slothful and life here makes me get off my butt. My country is naturally slothful and uncourageous too. It only gets off its butt when catastrophes and horrors get beyond the bounds of understanding. But to be honest, I have to say that both of us, my country and I, behave relatively well once the sloth is beaten out of us.”

  “No, talk to me about your country the way I talk to you about the hills. Tell me about the snow.”

  “I don’t like the snow, or the cold or the winter. I hate winter. But there’s one day in the year, a magic moment that even a movie can’t reproduce. You wake up one morning and the light in your house is blinding. Outside, the sun is shining twice as bright as at the height of summer, and everything that for weeks has been dirty, grey, brown, dead leaves, mud mixed with faded flowers, everything that autumn has enveloped in gloom, all of it that morning is whiter than your whitest shirt-dress. What’s more, this whiteness sparkles with billions of stars that make you think someone has scattered diamond dust over the white earth. It lasts a few hours, sometimes a day. Then this fragile purity is soiled by the dirt that cities give off like sweat from bodies. But in our wide open spaces far from the cities, on our hills that are only little bumps compared to yours, the whiteness of the snow makes a bed that lasts for months. And silence settles in this bed. You don’t know what silence is. You can’t imagine how it wraps around you and clothes you. Silence dictates the beating of your heart and the pace of your steps. Here, everything talks. Everything chatters and howls and sighs and shouts. There’s not a second that isn’t punctuated with a sound, a noise, a bark. Every tree is a loudspeaker, every house a sounding box. So there’s this mystery in my hills, and it’s silence. You’re afraid of silence, I know, you’ve told me. But it’s not empty the way you think. It’s heavy and oppressive, because there’s not a birdsong, not a footstep, not a note of music or a word to distract us from ourselves. You’re right, silence is frightening, because you can’t say untruths in silence.”

  Gentille would never hear silence. Paradoxically, real silence exists only in the torrid heat of the desert and the glacial cold of the far north. Try as he might, Valcourt could not imagine Gentille in the Sahara or the tundra. Why not remove Gentille from the hell of her life here and transplant her into his winter, which would be a lot more comfortable than the benign, permanent summer of the land of a thousand hills? He could do it, today, tomorrow, with no trouble. But far from home in a strange place, with no money of her own and no skill except at serving and being admired, without either of them wanting it she would soon be merely a slave. Being with him would no longer be the fruit of a delicious and lasting conquest but a case of dependence, no matter how tolerable and accepted it might be. Here in this room she might be living in a gilded, comfortable cage, but the door was always open. She knew the roads and pathways around the hotel, as well as ten or twenty refuges that would take her in if ever she decided she had had enough and must return to the pleasures and ambitions natural to someone her age. And this she would do one day. Valcourt had been resigned to it since that first leap of his heart. To think he could hold such beauty prisoner was more than he could bear. He must not steal life from life.

  When he tried to explain why he would never take her to Canada, she didn’t believe a word of his noble speech. Another woman would have wept, screamed, hurled insults, kicked and pummelled. Not Gentille. It was much worse. She said in a voice worthy of judges and hangmen, “You lied to me!” And went and lay in the other bed. In their whole short life together, ninety-seven nights, this was the only one when Valcourt did not know “the ecstasy of Gentille.” This was the name he gave to the blending of their bodies.

  Chapter Seven

  The morning after this conjugal spat, the only one they ever had, Valcourt got up very early, with the mists and the ravens, before the dogs and the children. Sitting on the balcony which gave him a view of the city, dazzled by the fig tree shining as though a fairy gardener had waxed each of its leaves during the night, he wrote in a careful hand on hotel letter paper:

  “Gentille, if I go back to Canada and you want to come, I’ll take you with me. But I don’t want to go back there. My real country is the country of the people I love. And I love you more than anything in the world. My country is here. We’re father and mother now but we must make this adoption official. It would be easier if we were husband and wife. We must also find a name for our daughter. I don’t really know what order we should do these things in. So as a start, I’m asking you to marry me. And if ever we had to leave this country, it would be for some place neither of us knows. Then each of us would be as lost as the other, each as poor and dependent.”

  He crossed the room on tiptoe and put the
letter, folded in three, on Gentille’s hip. She was not asleep.

  “Wait.” She read it and wept softly.

  Ten years earlier he had been playing the tourist in Paris with his sixteen-year-old daughter. At the Musée de l’Orangerie, they gazed at Monet’s Waterlilies unbelievingly, they were so astonished, so overcome by the beauty, nuances and subtleties of the painting. “Oh my, papa, it’s so lovely,” said a choked little voice. Anne-Marie had wept with tenderness at the beauty of life, as Gentille was weeping now. The way a woman weeps, with torn, exhausted muscles and hurting belly, when a red, wrinkled newborn is placed in her arms. For a fleeting moment, Valcourt wanted to tear up the already rumpled sheet of paper, erase the words, go back in time, turn back the clock, start again without yet having succumbed to Gentille’s beauty. Her happiness terrified him. He was no match for this young woman’s passion for life. He was so much older, inevitably he would be the first to die if life unfolded in the normal way. He could only promise her a tiny window of happiness, he knew, he was now convinced, then a plunge into a horrible, lonely void filled with the emptiness he would leave behind, an emptiness crammed only with memories impossible for her to recreate alone. Men who feel loved to distraction are easy prey to complacency, forgetting how much strength and patience women put into forging happiness. In this, Valcourt was a very ordinary man.

  And there was something else. The killers were becoming less inhibited, less cautious and less anonymous every day. They proclaimed their extermination plans on the radio. They laughed about them in the bars. Their ideologues, like Léon Mugasera, were inflaming whole regions with their speeches. After every rally, militiamen hurled themselves like Huns onto the hills, burning, raping, crippling, killing with their Chinese machetes and their French grenades. International commissions came to take note of the damage, dug up bodies from common graves, gathered eyewitness testimony from survivors of the pogroms.

  Valcourt would have a drink in the fourth-floor bar with the eminent jurists and experts while they told him ten times more than they would put in their reports. He took notes as he listened, discouraged and each time a little more terrified by the enormity of the revelations, but it was the pepper-and-nutmeg taste of Gentille’s sex, the sharp points of her nipples and the trembling of her buttocks at his least caress that really occupied his mind at these times. And he didn’t forgive himself for it. For any left-leaning Christian like himself, even if he didn’t believe in God, happiness was a kind of sin. How can we be happy when the earth is falling apart before our eyes and humans are turning into demons, and extortions and unspeakable abominations are all that come of it?

  One night when he was ruminating this way, alternating between thoughts of Gentille’s breasts and what Raphaël was saying about the terrifying death threats he had just received at work, Gentille appeared with the sleeping child in her arms. Raphaël said:

  “Happiness has come looking for you, my friend. Gentille, your future husband is an imbecile. You should dump him. He won’t make the most of his happiness. He listens to me, pities me, racks his brain to find a way to help me, even though he knows he can’t do anything. Tell him. No, I’ll tell him, this fool of a White, but not before we’ve drunk a little champagne. Like Méthode, I want to die happy and in luxury.”

  Raphaël invited the maître d’hôtel to come and drink with them. The Belgian cook also came to join them, along with a second bottle, and Zozo who was passing by to check on something. Then Émérita, the taxi driver, who was coming to sleep on a banquette in the bar because militiamen were prowling round near her sister’s house where she was living. A third bottle arrived with the barman. He had closed up his cash register and had hopes of getting into the buxom Émérita, who had eyes only for Valcourt who had always talked to her like one of the guys at work and never looked at her the way a man looks at a woman.

  Raphaël talked without stopping, about AIDS, about corruption and about massacres. He repeated what he had said a thousand times before. Valcourt didn’t need to listen closely. He knew what every sentence was going to be before it passed Raphaël’s lips. But can you blame people threatened with death for talking about it and repeating themselves? With his naive, permanent smile, Zozo was agreeing: “Yes, Monsieur Raphaël, yes, you’re right.” Approval and the art of flunkydom were synonymous in Zozo’s mind. One never knew if it was the friend or the flunky who was nodding approval.

  Then Raphaël said, “Let’s talk about more cheerful things.” He began telling his raunchy stories, each more far-fetched than the last—he was a bit of a braggart, and quite convinced of his irresistible charm. The tales of his adventures brought knowing laughs, especially when he talked about White women. Then he described being locked up in the soccer stadium in 1990 with eight thousand other rebellion suspects. He didn’t remember so much the hunger and the beatings on the soles of his feet, he remembered all the friends he made, and the women who were sweet and obliging so the men would forget their misery.

  There were bellows of laughter and conspiratorial looks in the half-darkness of the bar. Faces wore luminous smiles. The little girl slept through all the racket. Gentille squeezed Valcourt’s hand. Since the beginning, Valcourt had only smiled occasionally, not laughing, and not joining in with his own stories. Zozo, who turned into a gleeful clown with a single glass of alcohol, was in rapture over all the tales of resilience and survival, for, as at late-night gatherings of war correspondents, there was always a story following hard on the heels of the last. An exploit by one, embellished of course, would make way for another’s mortification, promptly to be buried under an even spicier anecdote. Epics were swapped the way children swap marbles or Nintendo cassettes. Incredible deaths, asses rounder and smoother than a full moon, eyes deeper than the ocean, soldiers more barbaric than the Huns and Nazis put together, all vied mightily for listeners’ attention. These minutes of intense life shared among friends were all saying the same thing in the same language, using doom and horror to rea firm life.

  Valcourt was not saying anything, guilty once again of being happy in the midst of barbarity, but feeling lighter, as if freed of a dark mass by Gentille’s index finger delicately and patiently, as soft as down, stroking its way along the paths of life traced in his hand. Now it was she who was urging him:

  “Tell a story, a good one. It’s your turn.”

  He told of a morning in November 1984 at Bati, in the desert of the Tigris in Ethiopia. The great famine, which later aroused all the singers on the planet and left the West the memory of “We Are the World” rather than of its hundreds of thousands of victims, had descended on the north of the country with a gigantic sandstorm that buried everything and turned the desert into a common grave. He had heard tell of the early mornings when the rising sun is preceded by a pink and violet glow along the horizon. Over a pizza in the Addis-Ababa Hilton, a French doctor had told him how there came a moment in this dreamy tableau when groanings began at the same time as long, mysterious incantations intended to keep death at bay, punctuated by strident little cries and the barking of stray dogs. Then, when the pink and violet turned to orange, when the orange was pierced by the sun’s first rays and the cadavers on reprieve were waking, you would begin to hear all the sounds of death to come. Lungs exploding, mothers crying, infants wailing, air passages struggling to clear. “A mortuary symphony against a picturepostcard background.” That’s what the doctor had said.

  Valcourt, with Michel, his cameraman, a Vietnam survivor, set up near a small hole in which three or four people seemed to be sleeping, wrapped in goatskins, to watch this Wagnerian sunrise. It was bitter cold. Six hours later, the stony soil would burn any feet laid bare on it. Twenty-five thousand living skeletons, half naked, already broken by hunger, illness and exhaustion, each day endured the shock of heat and cold. And, as the doctor had told him, the full light of day and the doleful symphony began together, for these people of the heat and the desert discovered their dead or their new a flictions in the
minutes that followed the cold of the night.

  The woman who was waking in her hole while Valcourt recited his introduction to the camera thought perhaps that he was a doctor, nurse or priest. He had a knee on the ground and she laid before him a tiny body wrapped in a goatskin. The baby no longer had enough breath to move a blade of grass, only a whisper, a soft, slow death rattle that Valcourt could hear better than his own words describing the death all around him. He was tempted to finish by saying he had just seen a baby die there by his knees, then to pick it up and hold it for the camera. What a great piece of television it would have made, for Michel, hearing these words, would have slowly turned the lens down to the tiny, emaciated head and closed in to focus on the huge, deep, dark eyes, staring, accusing humanity. Then he would have followed Valcourt’s motion, lengthening the focus and stepping slightly to the right. The baby would have been in the foreground, with Valcourt saying, “This is Bernard Valcourt in hell at Bati.” To his left, the haggard but dignified eyes of the mother would have been clearly seen, and, in the background, the high clouds streaked with orange and purple heralding the morning and the start of a gruesome accounting.

  This accounting at the morgue, a round shed of roughly assembled eucalyptus logs, was the exercise of most concern to Valcourt. He could not show all the little bodies, of course, but for six hours he filmed each of them, noting their names and ages, while they were washed before being laid on beds of eucalyptus branches. They would enter paradise clean and sweet-smelling.

  Back in Montreal, nothing was the way it had been before. He began by trying, when he talked, not to use the coded language and objective distancing that stifle and falsify reality. A small, thinking mine exploded in his brain, muddling the right and left hemispheres, scattering the neurons of reason and feeling, transforming an efficient old order into a kind of boiling magma that mixed up everything—smells, memories, things he had read, ideas, principles, desires. He had thought about nothing but work before, and now his thoughts were occupied only with love, abandon in love, and anger. He wanted to shout out loud all he had seen, experienced, discovered, but had only half said because he’d been sticking to the cautious language of journalism that turns a lying prime minister into a man making progress and a slimy financier into an astute businessman. He tried to make a few people uncomfortable and had some success. Without realizing, and especially without wishing to, he’d fixed himself on the fringe of society that matters and does not forgive those that leave it. He discovered this little by little, one disappointment after another, one rebuff after another, then, what was worse, one evidence of indifference after another. And now on this night of dire happenings turned to laughter, Gentille’s finger as soft as down was tracing life in the palm of his hand, and the little girl’s head was warming his thigh, and Raphaël said to him: