A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

by Gil Courtemanche

  On the fifth Monday morning, she left Kigali with him. At first she would be a nursemaid looking after the children and would have her own room in the main house. They mustn’t rush things. His wife was the official owner of a large share in his companies, but in a few months, with his lawyers, he would manage to change the situation. She understood and squeezed his hand. He smiled at her. When they came to the crossroads at Base, the three great volcanoes, Muhabura dominating, appeared on the horizon, each with its coronet of milk-white clouds turned rosy by the sun. At last she’d be able to visit the National Volcano Park, to see and almost touch the famous gorillas that she knew only from photographs. The Lebanese businessman’s Mercedes cruised as if on a carpet along the highway financed by the Chinese so that the president might return in all comfort to his native region. Bernadette smiled. This was what happiness must be.

  Unfortunately, a cousin of the Lebanese man was occupying her room. She slept in a former pigsty converted to a dormitory for domestics. Her lover’s wife, an enormous, faded woman whose oily skin was perpetually stained by the kohl carried down from her watery eyes, terrorized her relentlessly. Selim, after a week, forgot about the tender words. He no longer caressed her and took just a few minutes to have her wherever he came across her in the house or garden, without even a kiss or a fondle for her breasts. He had asked her never to wear panties so as not to delay things in case his wife might be nearby. When Mourad, his twenty-year-old son, woke her to say his father wanted to speak to her, she got up without a word. On the muddy path leading to the garden, the boy, who was walking behind her, pushed her into the red clay.

  “My father doesn’t want you any more. He’s given you to me.” He lay on her and held her hard by the wrists. “If you fight me, I’ll kill you. So many bodies are found along the roads first thing in the morning that nobody’ll ask any questions, you dirty whore!”

  He was right and she didn’t want to be hurt. Slowly, she spread her legs and tried to turn over. This wouldn’t be her first rape. A hand shoved her head into the mud, which filled her mouth when she opened it wide to scream in pain. A hard penis pierced her in that dirty, secret, forbidden place. It was as if a single knife thrust had severed her muscles. This penis was raping the last part of her body that belonged to her. Dirty perhaps, impure, forbidden as tradition maintained, but intact. One day, a man she loved might perhaps have asked her to yield this secret place to him, and she would have done it with joy. Now she no longer had anything pure to offer.

  At long last, with no tears left to shed, she fell asleep in a ditch beside the Chinese highway. In the morning she walked several hundred metres, but the pain was paralyzing. She sat on a big stone and waited to die, for she would not stir from that stone unless someone came and took her from it. A truck stopped and a young man gestured to her to get in. He was wearing the militia cap and was bouncing on his seat to a Michael jackson cassette.

  “You’re going back to Kigali at the right time,” he said. “In time for the great day. I’ve got a truck full of tools for the work, for the job to be done. In a few weeks the Tutsis won’t be stopping us from living any more.”

  The truck driver’s hand came to rest on her thigh. Again she knew she was trapped, that it would do no good to resist. If she said no he would beat her, or worse, leave her by the road and another truck driver would come along, or a soldier.

  “D’you want me by the front or the back door?”

  He braked so hard the truck skidded several metres before coming to a stop almost against the mountain.

  “You’re a White’s whore, talking like that. You’re not going to give me Whites’ sicknesses in your ass, like AIDS and all the rest. I’m a Rwandan, a real one. We don’t do things like that.”

  Then he climbed on top of her, cigarette butt between his lips. It only lasted a few short minutes. Bernadette closed her eyes, relieved not to have suffered more, and slept all the way to Kigali.

  Since she’d been back at the hotel, all the girls were jealous of her. She was beautiful, of course, with her great firm breasts and thighs as sturdy and round as pillars. The first night, an Italian from the World Bank, discouraged by the effects of politics on his organization, was dancing the tarantella in the fourth-floor bar. He was singing horribly off-key, with a bottle of whisky in his hand. He tripped and crashed laughing to the floor at the feet of Bernadette, who was still feeling desolate.

  “What’s your act? ” demanded the laughing Italian.

  Bernadette ran her hand through her hair and replied that her act was anything men wanted, stressing, “Anything the other girls here don’t want to do.”

  It was true. Very soon a large segment of the White city knew it and from then on Bernadette had only steady Johns. They came alone or in pairs. Others brought their wives. These johns respected her. They paid without argument. They didn’t suggest she change her life—on the contrary. They praised her competence and generosity. Now that she no longer belonged to herself, she was able to give herself to all, men and women both. She no longer even dreamed of getting away and accumulated money without knowing exactly what she would do with it. And if by mischance a john talked to her of love, she would say:

  “For that, it will cost you double.”

  Élise, who was in the habit of interrupting conversations, had listened to Bernadette without a word. She was holding an envelope bearing Bernadette’s name and a five-digit number. Bernadette had not kept her appointment at the Detection Centre and Élise had been hunting all over for her since she had gone to Ruhengeri. Now Élise held out the envelope, whose contents she did not know. Bernadette froze. What did the number mean, she wondered. Nothing, it didn’t mean anything. And no, Élise didn’t know the result of her test. Bernadette looked a long time at the envelope before speaking again.

  “Let’s say I’ve got AIDS. I’ll have to make my johns put on condoms, won’t I? Let’s say they all put on condoms, I’ll get sick soon anyway, won’t I? And I’ll start getting thin, like you’ve told me. I’ll have diarrhea and fever, then maybe TB and sores in my mouth. Well, the TB I can take care of, the medicines are free. The sores too, with Nizoral that’ll cost me fifteen johns’ worth. But even then I won’t be cured. The sores will be back and the fever too, and my breasts will start to droop like wilting leaves. I’m right, Élise, aren’t I? And there are medicines to control the sickness that the rich people in your country can afford. You’ve told me about them. So I need two or three thousand johns a year to buy me your medicines. Can you imagine two or three thousand sicknesses a year to cure only one? Not to cure, just to take longer to die, die with dignity, as you say. But dying’s dying. You’re all here like immortal angels to hold our hands till we’re in our coffins. I don’t need you to help me die. I took the test because I was in love, Élise. A dream. A man and children. In my dream the woman couldn’t have the sickness. A dream, Élise, to leave, just leave. For anywhere, your icy cold, your snow that blocks the streets, the poor district of Brussels or the sidewalks of Paris. Anywhere except here. Élise, Valcourt, you’re nice but useless. I don’t want to know what the envelope says. HIV positive, I’ll die. HIV negative, I’ll die. You watch us, you take notes, you write reports, you write articles. While we die with you watching us all the time, you live, you thrive. I like you both, but don’t you get a feeling, sometimes, that you’re living off our death?”

  Bernadette tore the envelope into tiny pieces and scattered them to the wind, then spat on the ground. She went and took her place at the big table at the far end of the pool bar.

  Night fell as always here, by surprise, an enfolding wave of darkness that melted over the red earth. And in perfect synchrony, the buzzards and ravens hushed their clamour, the johns began to whisper, the girls prepared themselves. Upstairs on the fourth floor, the dining room was filling with experts and wise consultants, meticulous, exemplary recorders of all woes and all impoverishments.

  Zozo had set up a table under the fig tree with a s
tarched white tablecloth from the dining room. “Émérita would have liked that,” he said, letting a big tear roll down his full-moon face. Tomato salad, fillets of tilapia in lemon butter, overripe Camembert, overpriced and slightly corked Côtes du Rhône. Émérita, thought Valcourt, to sustain her corpulence would rather have had steak and french fries, or some chicken legs. Élise, who was normally a real chatterbox, had not yet said a word. Valcourt and Gentille were half-heartedly talking about preparations for their wedding.

  “Bernadette’s right,” said Élise, poking her tilapia fillet with a restless fork. “We save one but watch ten more die. When I arrived here three years ago, only ten per cent of the tests were positive. But even if Bernadette’s right, even if we’re just powerless voyeurs, even if we’re kind of living off their deaths as she says, she hasn’t convinced me I should leave. I’m going to stay, I’m going to carry on. With my little lectures and my condoms, maybe I’ll persuade only one per cent, but that one per cent won’t die. That’s enough for me. And then hope, goddammit, what about hope! Christ, that counts!”

  Well, La Québécoise was coming back to life, it appeared.

  “To Émérita, who believed in hope!” They drank to Émérita. “But seriously, Valcourt, you must leave with Gentille and the child. For now, this isn’t a country for lovers, it’s a country of madmen and fighters. Get away from here. Give the little girl a nice place to grow up in, you two. A normal place.”

  Softly, Gentille asked Valcourt if he wanted to leave; nothing was keeping her here.

  “What about the morning mist in all the valleys of Kigali, Gentille, and the sun lifting those fluffy mushroom-like clouds, and the concert from the children running down the hills to school? And the slow pace of Sunday morning, when you walk almost ceremonially in your blue dress to the Church of the Holy Family. And the songs and dances of the mass, which are more easygoing folk songs than canticles, more love songs than hymns of adoration. Then the goat’s-meat brochettes at Lando’s and the fresh tilapia from Lake Kivu. The lean dry chicken that’s had the run of the hills. The tomato display in Kigali market, with thirty women back of it arguing and chuckling and hiding their poverty behind picturepostcard smiles. The Ruhengeri highway, with those Cinemascope volcanoes. The steep flanks of the hills that your ancestors tamed and turned into thousands of fertile little terraces, which millions of people are still cultivating like quiet, efficient ants. The rainy season’s midday storms that are wiped away in minutes by the sun. The cool of the breeze in the hills when God rests, because, as the saying goes, it’s to Rwanda that he comes to sleep. You want to leave all that?”

  For over twenty years Valcourt had earned his bread and butter from wars, massacres and famines. For all this time, he had had a house but no country. Now he had a country to defend and it was Gentille’s, Méthode’s, Cyprien’s and Zozo’s. He had come to the end of a long road and could say at last, “Here is where I want to live.” This is what he was explaining to Gentille, purposely avoiding her eyes, weighing each word, keeping his own eyes fixed on his empty plate so that hers would not distract him further, so that each sentence would describe as precisely as possible the monumental discovery he had made—the discovery of a woman he wanted to die with, and of a country. What is a country for someone who is neither a soldier nor a rabid patriot? A place of subtle a finities, an implicit understanding between the land and the foot that treads it. A familiarity, an agreement, a secret sharing with the colours and smells of it. The impression that the wind is with us and is sometimes carrying us. A renunciation that does not imply acceptance of the idiocy and inhumanity that the country nurtures.

  Leaving, even temporarily, did not appeal to him at all. He knew by now that once you’ve found the place that makes you feel at peace, you can’t leave it without ceasing to live, becoming a zombie, an empty body walking around in the barren space of a dreary diaspora. He had walked so far and hesitated, faltered and backtracked so many times before finding his own hill.

  “If you asked me to leave I’d do it reluctantly, knowing that one grey autumn day we’d miss the sweet, warm breath of the eucalyptus so much that each of us would be blaming the other for the choice. Gentille, we’re not leaving here unless you really want to go, or unless they throw us out.”

  Élise, who, for all her recriminations, threats and anger, had decided long ago that she too was going to stay, stood up and declared:

  “Valcourt, you’re crazier than I thought.”

  Gentille wanted to kiss him but instead, under cover of the table, put a toe on her future husband’s foot.

  Élise kissed and hugged them both harder than usual, then left carrying away what remained of the Côtes du Rhône, “for the road.”

  That night, Valcourt woke with a start, covered in sweat. Gentille was not there. The child was asleep in the other bed. He turned on the bedside lamp, then saw the young woman on the deckchair on the balcony, her nakedness outlined by the twofold reflection of moonlight and a candle. A yellow light on her delicate shoulder, a whitish touch on her angular hip. She was reading. She turned when she heard his step.

  “I was worried when I didn’t see you.”

  “Next time I want to read then, I’ll turn on the light even if it wakes you,” she said teasingly.

  She was reading Éluard.

  “You don’t know how much I’m discovering reading this book, Bernard. You talk so well, as if you were born knowing how to talk. You find words for all your emotions and people can understand you. I was taught not to talk about all the commotion inside of me. I’m not used to it and can’t find the words. So sometimes at night when you’re fast asleep and I’m lying awake, I come here and learn to give words to my love and my life. Even if they’re someone else’s words, they’re mine too. Listen: ‘We are the first cloud we two / In this absurd expanse of cruel happiness.’ That’s just like us, don’t you think?”

  They didn’t sleep. They lay quietly on their backs, breathing calmly and steadily, content with the peacefulness and serenity in them.

  When the first pink glow touched Gentille’s slender foot, Valcourt whispered, “What are we going to call the child?”

  She murmured, “Émérita.”

  Chapter Ten

  Some stony land on the heights above Nyamirambo had been cleared for a new cemetery. There were as many militiamen and uniformed and plainclothes policemen in attendance as family and friends of Émérita. Lando had not come. He had spent the last few days shut in at home and the evenings at his restaurant, surrounded by a dozen armed men. Monsieur Faustin rather nervously delivered a short speech to fit the occasion. When he spoke the word “democracy,” he dropped the volume of his voice so far that only his immediate neighbours heard it. Then it was Émérita’s mother’s turn. Before speaking, she walked slowly round the hole, kicking angrily at pebbles. Then she turned to the whole gaggle of cops standing ten or so metres off.

  “Look at me, you little shit-ass murderers, scum of the hills. Look at my wide face and flat nose, my deep-set eyes, my broad hips and big behind. There’s no mistaking me, I’m a real Hutu. Not a single Tutsi in my family to slim us down or lighten our skin. Émérita had my nose, my face and my butt. Like me, she was a real Hutu. More real than any of you. I’m telling you, when a Hutu chops his sister up in little pieces that won’t even fill a coffin, I’m telling you, that Hutu’s sick. You killed her because she was a friend to Tutsis. You didn’t understand what that meant. She just wanted to be a Rwandan, to have friends on all the hills. And you, Gaspard, playing with your machete and looking stuck-up, you ought to understand because you’ve been coming to my brothel twice a week for jasmine, who’s more Tutsi than I am Hutu, jasmine from Butare, who’s been getting lots of beer and flowers from you, and who you keep proposing to and who keeps turning you down because you don’t give her any pleasure. Émérita’s losing nothing losing you. She’s with the angels.”

  Gaspard had taken to his heels but he knew they would find him
and kill him for having loved and courted a Tutsi prostitute. Émérita’s mother knew it too. She came back to the grave and threw in a small bouquet of roses.

  “I’ve killed one, my darling. I’m going to kill some more.”

  Gentille and Bernard had sent their regrets because they were leaving that day to announce their marriage to Gentille’s family, especially her father, Jean-Damascène, who was living in Butare. They joked together that this would be their honeymoon trip, 175 kilometres of peaceful roads and contrasting landscapes, sharp rises and sometimes giddying descents. They would stop to visit her friend Marie at Rundo, just outside Kigali, and at Mugina thirty kilometres farther on where Gentille’s cousin Stratton was living now.

  Just before the modern brick factory, which wasn’t working because the minister had sold the German machines to a Zimbabwean colleague, they came to the usual roadblock but had no trouble passing through. After crossing the placid Nyabarongo River, the road began to twist and turn and climbed steeply all the way to Rundo.

  Gentille wanted Valcourt to meet Marie, who had been her teacher. Marie was thirty-five and had nine children. She was a teacher at Rundo’s elementary school and had married the assistant burgomaster. With their two incomes they were able to afford the family that their religious convictions dictated. But Marie had not been paid for six months and her husband Charles had lost his job several weeks before because he had refused to draw up a list of all the Tutsi families in the commune. Since then he had been in hiding with Hutu friends. Charles didn’t know if he was really a Tutsi although he had the Tutsi physique and a Tutsi identity card, and yes, although his grandfather had been a dignitary at the mwami’s court. With her head bowed and her eyes almost closed, Marie apologized for Charles’s not being there, as if the man’s absence was an a front to her guests.