A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

by Gil Courtemanche

  “It’s fascinating. It follows, there’s a kind of justice. You find happiness with the derelicts of the earth. So make us feel good, there isn’t much that does. Tell us you like the happiness you’ve found here. Make us feel good, tell us that for all the machetes and cut-off arms and raped women we can give beauty and gentleness too. And your own happiness, Bernard, stop hiding it, live it with us. It’ll reassure us about ourselves.”

  Valcourt, a little drunk, but as emotional as when his daughter was born, stood up with his glass in his hand.

  “I, Bernard Valcourt, expatriate tolerated in your country, have the honour of asking you for the hand of the most beautiful woman in Rwanda.”

  His friends exploded. The maître d’hôtel hugged him. Raphaël climbed up on the stainless steel bar and began to dance. Gentille let a few salty little pearls run down her satiny cheeks. Zozo tripped over an empty bottle left lying on the floor. The child began to howl, frightened by the din. Émérita, a member of a fundamentalist Baptist church, dropped to her knees and intoned several verses from the Bible. The barman leaned down and passed his hand over her buttocks, sure of getting his usual slap since he had already had five. She interrupted her prayer.

  “Célestin, God has brought us a great blessing tonight. He’ll surely forgive us all the sins you and I will commit later.”

  Célestin, who had been waiting three years for this moment, was seized with great anxiety. Would he be able to honour the woman of his dreams? He rushed behind the bar, broke six eggs into a shaker, added beer and a whole bottle of pepper sauce, and drank it all down at one go. Émérita drank alcohol for the first time in her life that night, and the champagne’s effect sent wayward, wandering little ants through her head and bosom, making her tingle and tremble. This was her first real sin after twenty-seven years of shunning the pleasures that her mother sold in her Sodoma brothel. Célestin’s huge hands took possession of her breasts.

  “Émérita’s becoming a woman!” cried Zozo, observing as always. Then, with a loud laugh that everyone heard, he added, “Let’s hope Célestin’s a man.”

  Normally Célestin, who had no sense of humour at all, would have strangled the little gnome publicly daring to cast doubt on his virility, but Émérita laughed harder than all the others while groping him clumsily, not really knowing how to show and act out this desire to be a woman that Valcourt had unconsciously aroused in her. For she would never cease to be in love with the crusty older man who was doing less and less to hide his smiles. But it was God’s will to make her fat, round and heavy, and Valcourt would have needed both hands to caress a single breast, and then some. It was also in the mysterious ways of the Creator that she would be giving herself up to sin in the arms of a man who could lift her and surround her with his giant’s body. Nothing escapes the Almighty, she thought, nearing ecstasy, with a hand feeling its way between her thighs. She was ready, in spite of all these friends around her. But the big moist hand paused just before touching her privates and withdrew slowly.

  “Wait a while longer,” said Célestin. “It will be better.” This was how, even before discovering pleasure, Émérita discovered the torture and impatience and finally the dream of desire which leads to total abandon.

  “Look,” Célestin continued emotionally, “for people who’re going to be dead soon, we’re not doing too badly.”

  The taxiwoman cast a long look around the rollicking bar. The children of God could be magnificent, she thought. All her friends, threatened, frightened, ruined, sick, all her friends were celebrating life. In this racket where tears were being shed amid the laughter, and as many bad jokes as gentle words were being exchanged, no one was drowning in alcohol. They were all drunk but perfectly lucid. No one was dancing any wild, theatrical fandango to exorcise the abomination spreading outside, that clings to bodies and souls like a second skin.

  Gentille was trying to put the child back to sleep. Valcourt stopped looking at her and he too turned to watch his friends in admiration. In one of those surges of humanity that seem to grasp people when the only way out seems to be flight or death, they were betting on life.

  And at last Valcourt was able to say, without ifs, ands or buts, “I’m happy.”

  And Émérita found pleasure, after everyone had left the bar.

  Chapter Eight

  Normally, Émérita avoided the potholes of Kigali’s streets with a skill that made all the other taxi drivers jealous. Not this morning, while she was driving Valcourt to arrange the wedding and baptism with Father Louis. The rusted, ramshackle Honda took the full brunt of every hole and fissure. Émérita whistled tunes, jeered at men for driving like women, blew her horn needlessly, and shouted greetings at people she knew, which meant almost all the working adults. There was no holding her. For an evangelical churchwoman, the jokes she was cracking were in questionable taste.

  “I committed my first real sin by having a glass of champagne last night, Valcourt, and I won’t tell you what others I committed with Célestin after you left. I’ve made up for lost time. You know, I found out why making love’s a sin, so it’s forbidden. Making love’s dangerous, it gets you wanting more, it gets you wanting to live forever. Making love blows your mind. I found out why my mother’s so rich and why the truck drivers love her so. She provides them with beautiful girls, delicious, spicy brochettes (the best in town after Lando’s), cold beer and comfortable beds. Freedom, that’s what making love is. And last night, with my legs wrapped around Célestin’s body, nearly squeezing the breath out of him, and with his sweat on my breasts, I felt freedom. And I thanked God for letting me sin. I told him I loved him even more than before, but I’d keep my distance from his pastors who tell us all our troubles are part of the divine Order. I told God—I was talking to him while Célestin was tearing my little veil and torturing me, before giving me pleasure like I’d never had before—I told him his churches were using his divine Word to make us accept the injustices being done to us and the death being planned for us. But you know, Valcourt, I found out too that I didn’t want to die. Before, dying meant going to paradise. Now, it means the end of life. And life, Valcourt, it’s life that’s paradise.”

  There was a mixture of sadness and tenderness in Valcourt’s smile. His friend’s abundance of energy worried him, in fact. For weeks, she had been accusing friends and relatives of taking everything lying down, simply watching the great black night approach. They knew the people who were planning it, had contact with them, sometimes even had a beer with them, but never spoke out. Stoically, they would predict each other’s death, then in a swell of ultimate confidence in humanity, in the international community, in life and in God, they would demolish their own ironclad and inarguable analyses. And before turning in to sleep off their last beer, they would conclude that the Hutu extremists, who were human like themselves, would never go beyond the point of no return; nobody wanted to believe what a familiar hand was writing on the wall.

  The opposition must be more visible and more active, Émérita told Valcourt. All opposition supporters must speak up loudly and clearly—individually, in their families, in their sections—and denounce every violent act. The guilty were known, she said. They must be identified, isolated, expelled from their neighbourhoods; they must be barred from the churches unless they confessed their crimes; their names must be published in the newspapers.

  The taxiwoman’s first night of love had turned her into a pasionaria. It was awesome, but suicidal. Valcourt knew she would do exactly what she preached once she got home to her neighbourhood that night. She would plant her massive body resolutely before a militiaman and order him to go home, lecturing him and quoting several verses from the Bible, convinced that the Word of God would edify the most dull-witted and convert them, the way Paul was converted on the road to Damascus.

  Valcourt briefly considered pointing out to her that the tissue-thin pages of the Scriptures would do little to protect bodies, even saintly bodies, from the steel of machetes. But to w
hat end? The words of mere men are as naught against the Word of God. He decided to hold his tongue. He was ill-placed to be giving advice to this happy woman considering he was getting himself into all kinds of trouble for more or less the same reasons, out of a pure, overwhelming passion for life as it is, instead of talking about life as it might be. Each moment stolen from fear is a paradise.

  Father Louis pulled several times on his pipe before reacting. His position was never easy. In this country, even the most normal of things, like a marriage or baptism, could without apparent reason become a calamity or a provocation. As the head of Caritas, a major French Catholic aid organization, he was also administrator of the World Food Program in Rwanda. Caritas had established a pharmacy for the benefit of the poor, which was in competition with the regime’s favourites who held medication import licences. And the Caritas crafts shop sold handmade goods at a fifth of the prices charged in the tourist traps but paid their peasant suppliers five times better than the gangster friends of the government. The women who served as his social assistants did more than set a good example and distribute powdered milk. They taught self-sufficiency to abandoned women. They distributed condoms, organized community kitchens. With thousands of little everyday acts they challenged ethnic discrimination, the exploitation of women and profiteering in essential goods. They knit small community loyalties that were noticed in high places and found suspect if not subversive.

  In his meetings with ministers, Father Louis kept urging tolerance, moderation and equality. He did it discreetly and politely, for he was convinced that whatever disaster occurred, whichever side won, he must stay, not to save souls (souls save themselves), but to help.

  Father Louis was not taken in by his own argument. For nearly forty years he had chosen to consort with bandits and murderers, some of whom had had the gall to come and confess to him. He kept walking a fragile tightrope, alone, protecting the dissenters as best he could and keeping company with their stalkers because he had to. Each side wanted to appropriate him and kept insisting he had to choose. He had chosen long since but could not carry on the work he considered essential without denying himself the luxury, or conceit, of giving voice to the growing horror he had been feeling since coming to Rwanda. God knew it—that was enough. Sometimes, lying awake, he did some figuring, adding up the number of lives he was probably saving by keeping silent. He didn’t know how many exactly, but some. If he had talked, would he have saved more?

  One night he had confided in Valcourt, who was writing an article on the rumours of massacres in the South. The two of them had been drinking all evening and with champagne bubbles going to his head the old priest revealed some appalling facts. Yes, he could prove that over several days ten thousand Tutsis had been massacred in Bugesera. A kind of dress rehearsal for the genocide the Hutu extremists were lusting after. At six in the morning he had knocked at Valcourt’s door and Valcourt had agreed not to publish what he had told him.

  Now he put the old briar pipe he had owned for forty years in the ashtray and bowed his head with a sigh.

  “Monsieur Valcourt, you know the friendship I feel for you, and also how highly I think of Gentille. I can’t deny your love. The word around Kigali is turning you into Romeo and juliet. Have you thought about the difference in your ages, however, and the enormous cultural gap between you? To be frank, I don’t want to see this marriage happen. And if I had the power, I’d even force you to leave, for your own good and Gentille’s too.”

  He picked up the pipe and took a long draw on it.

  “I’ve got an old-fashioned streak, you know, Valcourt,” he said. “The priest’s turns of phrase come to me easily, the clichés that the Church and its blind followers feed on because they live in the Scriptures, not in real life. What I’ve said to you I’ve said with the voice of reason, you’ll admit. It’s a perverse trap I’ve been thrashing around in for years. What does reasonable reason say? That the young don’t go with the old. That misfortune is part of life. That where there are men you’ll have all the faults of men. It also says there must be obedience. To parents, to bosses, to governments. It adds that rebellion is an adolescent thing and acceptance of order marks the passage to adulthood. It tells us too that war is inevitable and massacres are part of the nature of things. Reason tells us to accept the world around us. I have never been reasonable. I’ve always thought I could fight the world around me. How? By saving a hungry child, washing a patient with AIDS, distributing medicines, preaching what is called the Good Word, saying mass, which is the completely unreasonable sacrifice of the Son of God. Yes, I believe in him, don’t frown your atheist’s frown. And then I think of what all those reasonable people have accomplished. They got us into two world wars. They organized the Holocaust, the way economists and businessmen plan regional economic development or the expansion of a multinational corporation. They were also responsible for Vietnam, Nicaragua, apartheid in South Africa, and the hundred or more wars that have ravaged this continent since the colonizers left. Those killers weren’t out of their minds. There were a few neurotics, like Hitler, but without reasonable people, without hundreds of thousands of believers, good, reasonable Christians, none of these sores of humanity would have worsened to the point they did. People who butcher human beings by spearing and slashing with bayonets are all upright, respectable folk. And when circumstances don’t lead them to war they close their eyes to injustice—no, they organize injustice. And when they don’t organize it, they tolerate it, encourage it, abet and finance it.

  “Valcourt, ever since I asked you not to publish what I told you about last year’s massacre, I haven’t felt like a Christian any more. I’ve had enough of being reasonable. Forget what I just said about your marriage. I don’t know if that was a bad joke at my own expense or just the knee-Jerk of a priest. Of course I’ll marry you and Gentille, and I’ve forgotten you told me you were divorced. You don’t know what a pleasure it’s going to be to bless the union of two people who really love each other, even if Gentille is much too young for you. I won’t change my mind about that. We’ll celebrate the marriage Sunday of next week, April the ninth. The baptism too.”

  Valcourt was about to rise when the old priest put his hand on his and squeezed it and asked him to stay. He relit his pipe, then opened a small sideboard and took out a bottle and two tiny, finely cut glasses.

  “A brandy from Champagne, my home turf.” He drank his in one draft and poured himself another. “The glasses are too small.

  “I can’t keep quiet any longer. There are thousands of us missionaries in Africa who have chosen the path of silence, staking our faith on our presence and endurance. We maintain that God is above the struggles between men. In these confrontations we almost always opt for the perpetuity of the Church. We’re not the only ones who think this way. Your humanitarian organizations would rather collaborate with a dictator than denounce him. Us too. We do it for the same reasons, essentially. If we speak out— because that’s the issue—we’ll have to leave and the poor people will be worse off than ever. It’s often true. Not all this continent’s keepers of souls, the missionaries and humanitarians, should be dumped in the same trash can for complicitous silence. But we of the Church of Christ have less reason to be excused, precisely because our teaching and our faith speak of the dignity of man, of respect, justice and charity. Magnificent preaching, which is empty of meaning and reality because for decades we have been condoning the worst imaginable crimes, in the name of an improbable future and an abstract eternity. If I could testify before a court, I would have all the members of this government put in prison, plus at least half the international experts from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank who, without the slightest scruple, feed the insatiable appetites of all the dictators of Africa. Valcourt, I’m about to commit the most dreadful sacrilege.”

  The old priest bent his head until it was almost resting on his knees. Then abruptly raised it again.

  “For nearly thirty years, Colo
nel Théoneste—you know him—has been coming to confession once a week. He’s a good father and a good Christian. He came yesterday and his first words were: ‘Father, I admit to preparing a great massacre, the final massacre.’ It was not God’s representative he was speaking to, it was a man he was confiding a secret to. No, not a secret—information, tons of information. It wasn’t a confession, Valcourt, it was a tipoff. I did not give him absolution. Take notes.”

  Valcourt took out his notebook.

  “Elimination of the president, who has decided to accept free elections … List of fifteen hundred names … all the leaders of the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party … priorities: Lando, Faustin, the prime minister’s wife, Agathe … the moderate Hutu civil servants and professionals … all Tutsis in important positions. Work to be carried out by the presidential guard … then mobilization of the militias in all neighbourhoods of the capital, set-up of roadblocks … checking of identities … all Tutsis identified at checkpoints to be eliminated by the militias, supported by police elements … Systematic combing of the city by soldiers and militiamen, street by street … each section head will give them a list of persons to be eliminated and houses to be destroyed … no women or male children to be spared … once Kigali is cleansed, the presidential guard will start organizing the cleansing in Gitarama, then Butare … not one Tutsi must survive.”