A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali Read online

  Gentille, who was shy already, now walks like a woman in mourning.

  Valcourt orders “a tall Mutzig, ma petite Gentille.” He almosts says something to comfort her, but she is too beautiful and he feels stupidly inarticulate. And soon it will be six o’clock and around the pool all the actors in the daily cocktail-hour ritual will have taken their places on stage in the same production as yesterday. And Valcourt will play his role, like all the others. The Mont Blanc fountain pen moves: “Now a fade-out to Blacks.”

  There’s Raphaël and his bunch of pals who work at the People’s Bank of Rwanda. They’ll leave at midnight when the fourth-floor bar closes. And there’s Monsieur Faustin, who will be prime minister when the president bestows democracy upon the children of his republic. Other opposition members of the government will join him—Landouald, minister of labour, who went into politics to please his wife, a liberated Québécoise, and a few others who will bow and scrape to right and left as they go back and forth three times to the buffet table. A Belgian embassy counsellor stops for a few minutes, diplomatically a fecting an air of discretion in order to avoid saying anything about the peace accord and the transfer of power that the president accepts every six months and never signs, claiming he can’t because it’s the rainy season, or his wife is in Paris, or the last arms shipments have not arrived from Zaïre, or his secretary’s husband is sick.

  Every day for the past two years there has been endless talk around the pool about the change that is brewing; it’s going to come tomorrow or Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest, they say. But this time it’s true and the regulars are caught up in a great ripple of excited whispering. The husband of the president’s secretary died of AIDS two days ago in Paris, where he had been in hospital for six months. Émérita, taxiwoman, businesswoman, who pays the best black-market rate for the Rwandan franc, came to tell Monsieur Faustin. A doctor from Val-de-Grâce Hospital had arrived this morning and told the first secretary at the French embassy, who repeated it to Émérita—who runs little errands for him—knowing full well she would waste no time announcing the news to Monsieur Faustin. The late husband was a perfect fool, content just to make money with his exclusive Michelin tire import licence, but rumour has it that his wife does not owe her stunningly fast rise through the civil service ranks to her typing skills. The intelligence branch of the embassy, contacted by a brother of Madame La Présidente a few months ago, reassured this “neutral enquirer” that these things were all malicious gossip originating in the camp of the opposition.

  No matter. In half an hour, when Émérita has finished her Pepsi after talking to Zozo the concierge, a swarm of taxi drivers will leave for the city. Tonight, from Gikondo to Nyamirambo, not forgetting Sodoma, the well-named hookers’ quarter, they’ll be imagining— then saying outright—that the president is dying of AIDS. Tomorrow they’ll be saying it in Butare and the day after in Ruhengeri, the president’s own fiefdom. In a few days when the president is the last to hear he’s dying of AIDS, he’ll fly into a rage and heads will fall. Here, rumours kill. They’re checked out afterwards.

  On the same plane with the doctor and his fatal news there arrived ten copies each of L’Express and Paris Match which will be swapped around for a month, and French cheeses in slightly over- or underripe condition which will be consumed amid great trimestrial pomp and circumstance in the hotel dining room.

  Around the pool, two important subjects are being discussed. The Whites are consulting the list of cheeses and writing their names on the reservation sheet. People will come from as far away as the Gorilla Sanctuary on the Zaïrean border for the traditional cheese tasting, at which the first wedge will be cut by the French ambassador himself. At the tables occupied by Rwandans, the majority of whom are Tutsis or Hutus of the opposition, the tone is hushed. The subject of conversation is the president’s illness (which is already taken as acknowledged fact), the probable date of his death, and who will succeed him. André, who distributes condoms for a Canadian NGO and as such is an expert on AIDS, calculates busily: according to rumour, the president has been fucking his secretary for three years; if he’s been doing it often and his secretary’s husband is already dead from AIDS, and the gods are with us, then President juvénal has at most a year left. His listeners applaud wildly.

  Only Léo is not joining in the applause. Léo is a Hutu who says he’s a moderate so he can get to screw Raphaël’s sister. Léo is a journalist at the television station that doesn’t exist yet, that Valcourt was supposed to set up. Léo is not a moderate, it’s just that he’s got a bone on for Immaculée, Raphaël’s sister. Though he comes from the North, where the president was born, Léo recently joined the Social Democratic Party, the party of the South. At the pool bar this act of courage has impressed quite a few and Léo is making the most of it. Mind you, the very thought of undressing Immaculée would instill conviction in many small minds. But Léo is also a Tutsi through his mother. With the simmering conflict in mind, Léo is seeking the camp that will save his precious skin and let him realize his dream of becoming a journalist in Canada. Rwandans are good at putting on a front. They handle concealment and ambiguity with awesome skill. Léo is a caricature of all this: Hutu father, Tutsi mother. Tutsi body, Hutu heart. Social Democratic Party cardholder and speech-writer for Léon, the Hutu extremist ideologue, known as the Purifier or Avenging Lion. Country talk, clothes of a fashionable Parisian. Skin of a Black, ambitions of a White. Fortunately, thinks Valcourt, Immaculée feels only scorn and disdain for Léo though he zealously plies her with flowers and chocolates.

  Valcourt has not joined his Rwandan buddies as he normally does in the evening. Gentille’s distress is keeping him at his own table. The stupidity of the Rwandan just back from Paris disgusts him. But he has become a bit weary of the obsessive conversation of his friends and even more of their overblown, florid, pretentious, often old-fashioned language. They do not speak, they declare, declaim, not in verse but in slogans, formulaic dicta, press releases. They talk of massacres they foresee with the certainty of weather forecasters, and of the AIDS eating at them as if they are prophets of the Apocalypse. Valcourt knows plenty about massacres, brutality and AIDS, but sometimes he’d like to talk about flowers or sex or cooking. He hears Raphaël announcing, “We have come to the end of time, eaten away by two cancers, hatred and AIDS. We are a little like the Earth’s last children …” Valcourt covers his ears.

  The Canadian ambassador arrives and without so much as a nod to anyone goes and sits at the table nearest the buffet; Lucien is wearing his favourite T-SHIRT again, the one sporting the legend, “Call Me Bwana.” Lisette, the consul, is in despair since having her golf bag stolen and is in a grouchy mood. Imagine her distress. She is left-handed, the only left-handed player among the members of the Kigali Golf Club, whose ill-kept fairways wend through the little valley overlooked by the arrogant high-rise of the National Council of Development, the luxurious villas of the regime’s favourites, the Belgian Club, and the ambassadors’ residences. Golf is her only pleasure, her only civilized activity in this godawful country she abhors. An appointment to Kigali when one has been in the Canadian Service for seventeen years is an invitation to hand in one’s resignation. But some people are blind, deaf and pigheaded. The embassy here is only a branch, in fact, a dependency of Kinshasa, which is an even more unbearable city than Kigali. But when one doesn’t know anything but the art of lying politely, one is better off living in Kigali than answering the phone in departmental offices in Ottawa. Lisette suffers in luxury.

  The laughter from Raphaël’s crew is short-lived. The president’s three brothers-in-law appear, followed by the hotel’s Belgian assistant manager and five soldiers of the presidential guard. But all the tables are taken. The former minister of justice scurries, still dripping water, to invite them to sit with him, but his table is in the sun and the gentlemen wish to sit in the shade. All the suitable tables are occupied by Whites, or by Raphaël’s friends, who of course will not budge. For
the assistant manager, a tricky situation. It is saved miraculously by the manager, who happens along at this moment and displaces his own wife and in-laws to make way for the three pillars of the Akazu.1

  And now Canada’s presence is complete: the commander of the UN troops has just arrived. The major general is a miracle of mimesis, a perfect incarnation of his country and his employer too, rather the way masters who adore their dogs end up looking and behaving like them. Unassuming, apprehensive, ineloquent and naive, like Canada. Meticulous, legalistic, a civil servant and exemplary bureaucrat, as virtuous as “le Grand Machin” itself (as General de Gaulle was pleased to call the United Nations). What he knows of the world is airports, the grand hotels of Brussels, Geneva and New York, and strategic studies centres. Of war, he knows what he has seen on CNN, read in a few books and experienced through military exercises he has directed, and invasions of several countries he has conducted on paper. About Africa finally, he knows its colour and several of its smells to which he has still not become accustomed, although he dexterously wields canisters of “Quebec spruce” deodorant and douses himself with Brut, an eau de cologne highly prized by the military and the police. Yet behind his salesman’s moustache and sad eyes, the major general is an honest man and a good Catholic. He is deeply touched by the obvious piety of the dictator and his family and the frequent company they keep with bishops. These are upright people. Their few excesses ought to be ascribed to a certain African atavism rather than the insatiable venality and bloodthirsty cruelty they are so maliciously accused of by all those ambitious Tutsis who pretend to be playing by the rules of democracy but in fact aspire only to set up a new dictatorship. This was explained to the major general at length by the archbishop of Kabgaye one morning after the solemn high mass which Canada’s UN commander had attended with his new personal secretary, a nice young man named Firmin who had studied in Quebec and who enjoyed the valuable advantage of being a nephew of the dictator. On the way back, Firmin confirmed what the archbishop had said, forgetting to add that the rotund representative of His Polish Holiness was personal confessor to the dictator’s family, the Habyarimanas, as well as a member of the executive committee of what had been the only political party before the international community imposed the Arusha peace accord, and with it an official opposition.2

  A man of duty, the major general is an unprejudiced man, and he is not displeased about being in central Africa. He could have been sent to Somalia or Bosnia. Here there’s no peace but at least there’s no war, for all the sporadic fighting on the Ugandan border. It’s almost as restful as a posting to Cyprus. In fact, he views this mission as eighteen months of well-deserved rest, far away from all the UN paperwork and bootlicking. In New York they ordered him to interpret his mandate as narrowly as possible. He has been given minimal military resources, in case he should be tempted to show too much initiative. On account of which the major general has already forgotten—or almost—that the United Nations forces are expected not only to ensure respect of the peace accord but also maintain order in the capital.

  A grenade explodes. Just far enough from the pool for it to be somewhere else. Only the major general is startled. He is not yet used to this peace that kills on a daily basis. He has spilled a little soup on his uniform and looks anxiously around him. No one has noticed his nervousness. Reassured, though sweating profusely, he dips his spoon back into his black bean soup.

  Twelve French vultures dive into the pool all at once; three women have just slipped into the water. Sometimes vultures turn into crocodiles.

  Valcourt closes his notebook. The vaguely surrealistic play being acted out at the pool day after day ceased to interest him some time ago. The plot is heavy-handed and the characters behave as predictably as in a TV soap opera. He wonders if he hasn’t put in enough time here in Kigali. He wanted to live somewhere else; he’s done it. He feels this evening as though he’s swimming round and round in an aquarium.

  He orders another beer from Gentille whose head is still bowed, though the Rwandan from Paris is no longer there.

  Chapter Two

  One tenth of April, when Montreal had begun to celebrate spring but was still buried under forty-five centimetres of snow, all Bernard Valcourt knew of Rwanda was where it was on the map and the fact that two ethnic groups, the Hutus, the majority by far, and the Tutsis, about fifteen per cent of the population, were locked in an undeclared civil war. He was drinking in the bar of a hotel after attending a conference on development and democracy in Africa. The snow might stop after a few beers and he could walk home. And then, there was nothing to go home for. Since his daughter had left, the way all daughters do when they fall in love, and since Pif, his cat, so named because he was the brother of Paf, had died like his sister of simple, stupid old age, loneliness was all his apartment had to offer him. A few nice women had unhooked their bras, one or another had slept over and had breakfast, but none had passed the morning test. Since his wife died five years ago, he had known only one great passion—and it was so mad, so all-consuming and magnificent that he hadn’t known how to handle it. Passion feeds on abandon. He had not yet reached that state of total freedom that obliterates fear of the unknown and allows one to soar. As for his work as a Radio-Canada producer, it was looking increasingly like a monotonous chore, a tedious burden.

  A tall, good-looking man with a beard, who had babbled some platitudes about the media in Africa, came over and introduced himself.

  “Claude Saint-Laurent, director of democratic development for the Canadian International Development Agency. May I sit down?”

  And he ordered two beers. He explained that Canada, a country of small importance in the concert of nations, nevertheless exerted an influence in certain regions of the world that could determine their future and above all their access to democracy. This was the case with Rwanda. With other partners, the Canadian government had agreed to finance the establishment of a television station in Rwanda. Its primary mission would be educational, particularly in community health and AIDS.

  “We begin with hygienic necessities, with programs on prevention, on dietary matters, then the information gets into circulation, and information is the beginning of democracy and tolerance.”

  Bullshit, thought Valcourt.

  “Would you be interested in being co-director of this television station?”

  Valcourt said yes without thinking it over even two seconds.

  He gave his furniture to the St. Vincent de Paul Society and his pictures to his daughter, sold his apartment and all but two of his books, keeping only Camus’ Essais and the Oeuvres complètes of Paul Éluard, the Pléiade edition. Two months later he was drinking a Primus beside the pool in the middle of Kigali.

  He had been living two years now in this heterogeneous, excessive city. He no longer had much faith in the television station project. The government kept finding reasons for putting off its launch. When closed-circuit programs were shown there was always the same complaint: “There’s not enough stress on the government’s role.” When the government was satisfied with the propaganda inserts, it was the donor countries, Canada, Switzerland and Germany, that balked. Valcourt and the station had come to a dead end. But one thing had impassioned Valcourt. He had discovered with horror that over a third of Kigali’s adults were HIV positive. The government was denying its own statistics. Those stricken with AIDS were living in infamy, shame, concealment and delusion. Only a few people were trying to face up to the disaster and, paradoxically, they were parish priests and nuns. Devout, virginal nuns from Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec City and the Beauce were gathering in prostitutes and teaching them about the virtues of condoms. Parish priests, and lay brothers too, had the pockets of their cassocks bulging with plastic packages, which they handed out beneath the photograph of the Pope watching protectively from the walls of their offices. In his spare time on weekends and holidays, when he could quietly bring out a camera, Valcourt was making a documentary film on AIDS and these heroic, p
ious transgressors.

  From the moment of his arrival in Kigali he had been deeply moved by the landscape, the hills sculpted by thousands of gardens, the mists caressing the valley floors, and by the challenge he was being handed. At last he was going to be useful, was going to change the course of things. My real life is beginning, he said to himself.

  But Gentille’s life? When does that really begin?

  The story of Gentille—who still has her head bowed and is drying her tears, watched inquisitively and lustfully by the barman—has two beginnings.

  The first was in a time when her country was called Ruanda-Urundi. Germans had settled there, but a war that no one in her country had heard of changed the Germans into Belgians. Kawa, Gentille’s great-great-grandfather, had been told that these soldiers, these civil servants, these teachers and these priests gowned all in white were coming to the land of a thousand hills to make it a protectorate. An important league, which no one had heard of either, a league of kings, ministers and other powerful people, had asked the Belgians to protect Ruanda-Urundi. They had brought with them the Great Protector, a mysterious and invisible god divided into three, one of which was a son. To shelter their god, the Great White Robes had built huge houses of red brick and smaller ones for themselves, and other houses too where people could learn to read and also learn about the life of the son of the Great Protector. Kawa, who was Hutu and wished to obtain a position for his eldest son at the court of the Tutsi king, enrolled his son at the school but would not have him baptized because the king, the mwami Musinga, was resisting the pressure from the Great White Robes. However, the Belgians did not want a mwami who believed in Imana the creator and in Lyangombe, and who practised kuragura, or divination and ancestor worship. Monseigneur Classe, the head of the Great White Robes, arranged for the son of the mwami, Mutara III, to become king on condition that he abandon his old beliefs. Mutara III was baptized on a Sunday in 1931. On Monday Kawa went to the school with his son and asked the priest to baptize him Célestin, which was the name of the Belgian burgomaster of his commune. This was how Célestin, several days before his death, had recounted the story of his conversion to his own son, Gentille’s grandfather.