A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali Page 4

  No, he was not sick, he heard himself say. Yes, he would like a glass of water. No, she mustn’t go and get anyone. He just had to be left alone. She promised to come back after tidying up the bar, to show him her identity card. Too much life racing through rusty veins and muscles, too much blood in a heart that had forgotten how to handle sudden ecstasies, too much air in lungs accustomed to breathing stingily.

  Gentille really was Hutu according to her identity card. But he still didn’t believe her. She wanted to talk to him, but not at the pool or in his room either. Just going to his room would mark her as a hooker and only worsen the constant harassment, for which her beauty alone was responsible; for there was no more silent, cautious, self-restrained woman than Gentille. It was getting late. Valcourt knew she would have to spend half her day’s pay to take a taxi. Otherwise, she would have a good hour’s walk through a city that the curfew transformed every night into a hunting ground for soldiers and their usually drunken militia acolytes who dispensed HIV like parish priests their indulgences.

  He drank a Primus that was as warm as his burning forehead. What could he do for Gentille? Nothing. Sophisticated as he was, a man of the left and an enlightened humanist who knew all about mixed marriages and the transmission of ethnic origin in Rwanda, he didn’t really believe her. If an anthropologist needed a photograph to illustrate the archetype of the Tutsi woman, he would have shown him Gentille’s. If he, a White who considered himself unprejudiced and free of any preconceived hatreds, did not believe her, what Rwandan would take this piece of cardboard seriously when it declared the opposite of what she showed to such perfection? An accommodating, high-placed lover, a relative or a lecherous civil servant, must certainly have obtained forged papers for her. As for the president’s phony nephew who had planted this anxiety in her, Valcourt promised, if ever he saw him again, to swear to him that Gentille was a real Hutu. In any case, danger was on all sides. A discontented Belgian, a drunk and infatuated German, a passing soldier, a love-struck civil servant. All of them possessed her potentially, and all of them could kill her. Increasingly, in Kigali and even more in the countryside, life hung on a word, a whim, a desire, a nose too fine or a leg too long.

  And her legs, partly revealed by the way she had hitched her blue skirt onto her knees, were perfect, her ankles smooth and graceful. Valcourt ran his eyes slowly over every part of her body, grateful for the semi-darkness that allowed it undetected.

  “You’re nice with me. You listen to me and you’ve never asked anything of me. You’re the only White who’s never asked me … to … you know what I mean. You can stay here tonight if you want. I’d like it.”

  No, she was not afraid to stay alone. She wanted to thank him, and then, there was something else, but she would rather not talk about that now. Thank him for what? What she had just said, for his respect, for never having touched her on the sly, or as if by accident. Especially for not having done what all the other customers did when signing their chits, saying, “I’ll be in my room all evening,” showing her their key to make sure she memorized the room number.

  “Gentille, I’m not completely different from the customers around the pool. I … I want … I want you too, you know.”

  Valcourt felt trapped by his own frankness. For he was firmly convinced that if he did have a chance to lift Gentille’s blue skirt up to her navel, it was because he was not like the others who never hid the way they ate her up, sucked at her with their eyes, touched her on the hand or hip as if by accident, called her over and offered her a drink, protection and all the money she wanted.

  “You want to be with me? You want to sleep with me? As much as all the others?”

  That was it. All her fears were confirmed. Now she understood everything. Like all the others she mistrusted and avoided, he was undressing her, fucking her every time he looked at her. That was it, Valcourt told himself. So why not tell the whole truth? Why keep in what had been tormenting him for these months he had been looking at her?

  Her breasts, her mouth, her ass (this was the word he now used, certain to offend her modesty), her dewy-morning, café-au-lait skin, her eyes, her shyness, her sculptural legs, the way she walked, her scent, her hair, her voice, yes, everything about her drove him a little crazy, even if he’d never dared approach her. Yes, like all the others, he wanted to fuck her. There it was, and he was sorry and swore never to talk about it again and he was leaving now, not just saying he was sorry but asking her to forgive him. He went toward the door without conviction.

  Again the scent of her washed over him. Paralyzed him. A pornographic smell. Not titillating perfumes or powerful and exotic spices, but a dark smell of flesh, heavy hair and warm, moist sex.

  “And I thought you didn’t like me and didn’t want anything to do with me. You can have me whenever you want. I’d like to be loved by a nice White like you.”

  Exactly what she should not have said. She wanted a White, a White like any other. A promise of wealth, maybe a visa for somewhere else; and if the blessed Holy Virgin answered her prayer, marriage with a White and a house in a cold country, a clean one. He could hear Raphaël this afternoon at the pool, saying, “Anything to leave this shitty country.”

  Temporary or permanent mating was a salutary transaction, according to Raphaël. “Forget your White man’s love language,” he kept telling Valcourt. “Sex with a White man is a lifebuoy. A dress from Paris or from Lévis”—Raphaël had done a financial internship at Quebec’s Mouvement Desjardins—“a duty-free piece of jewellery, a little money so you can leave the Muslim quarter and move up the hill into a house with a hedge and a guardian. Then, God willing, liberation, paradise, a shack in Canada or Belgium or France or Tashkent, as long as there are no more Hutus and Tutsis, just Whites who look down on Blacks. Intolerance doesn’t kill. Buy me a beer, I’m broke.”

  “Gentille, I don’t want to be a White who gives gifts,” Valcourt said. “If you want to leave, I can help you get a visa, but you don’t need to sleep with me. Even if it seems ridiculous, all I want is for you to love me a little.”

  He left without looking back, surprised by his own confession. Love was the only feeling he had ceased to hope for and he had been doing fairly nicely without it. And here he was asking for it.

  Chapter Three

  On the way home he had to stop three times at makeshift roadblocks set up by young militiamen of the government party. Beers in one hand, machetes in the other, eyes rolling up in their sockets, legs unsteady. The party had also been distributing a little marijuana to boost militia fervour. Valcourt had heard about these idle young men whom the Rwandan National Movement for Democracy (RNMD) rounded up and trained, but he was seeing them for the first time. Officially, they belonged to a youth movement. Like Boy Scouts, a senior civil servant had told him. For some time they had been turning up extemporaneously in districts of Kigali, particularly Gikondo. They didn’t worry him. “The French are our friends.” Thank you, President Mitterrand, for supporting Franco-Rwandan friendship.

  On her red and green mattress, Gentille cried. He hadn’t understood at all.

  Think Gentille. Draw Gentille. Talk about Gentille. With anybody. But most of all, nurse the sharp pain stabbing his gut. Build up his feeling of absence and loss. Dream. Dream. Or else, so as not to die from delusion, find out that Gentille has been sleeping with all the Whites willing to pay, and then tell himself, I should have known. And yet she lives so poorly. Her shyness seems so real. But here, shyness is an acquired behaviour. How could he be sure she was telling the truth?

  At this hour, Olivier, the dining-room maître d’, was probably casting a dejected and disenchanted eye at his distinguished guests, whom loneliness and Primus or Mutzig were turning into vulgar, aggressive billygoats. Valcourt could confide in him, especially since he was Gentille’s boss. Olivier was gentle and fond of laughter. He did not put on the smarmy lackey obsequiousness so often found amongst the staff of African luxury hotels. He respected his employees more
than his guests— although no guest would have suspected this, and even less the hotel’s Belgian management. Only Bertrand, the chef from Liège, marooned in Rwanda for love of a Rwandan, then love of her hill, then of the whole country, knew this. Olivier always ended the evening in Bertrand’s company. The two had only one subject of conversation, Rwanda, which they both loved passionately but without the blindness of passion. To use an expression that Valcourt prized, they were “men of good counsel,” men worth consulting.

  With them, he could talk about Gentille.

  The hotel bar was shoddy, like a C-grade-movie cocktail lounge in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, or Shawinigan, Quebec. Dark drapes covered the windows. Armchairs in black leatherette, round Formica-covered tables and two U-shaped banquettes facing a television set that was blathering CNN. Finally, six bar stools that were uncomfortable and too high, occupied by the lonely regulars, drunks most of them, and at midnight, invariably, Bertrand and Olivier.

  “Well! The Canadian! A Primus! I’ve kept you the cold meats left from the German embassy reception. What a long face! You know, in Belgium we’d say a ‘mussel face,’ all soft inside the shell. Okay, okay, you don’t look like you’re in the mood for jokes. Take your beer and go see your friend Raphaël. He’s been waiting two hours for you.” Bertrand jerked his head toward one of the U-shaped banquettes.

  Valcourt didn’t want to see Raphaël. He would have liked to devote one little hour to his own personal distress.

  Raphaël and Méthode were asleep on the far banquette. The two of them had been inseparable since their childhood in Butare, then at school, at the People’s Bank, at Lando’s restaurant, and with the girls they shared systematically. Two brothers. Even more inseparable in the last two years, since Méthode had found out he had “the sickness,” as if not naming AIDS kept it farther away.

  Méthode wanted to die at the hotel. In luxury, as he’d said. He especially wanted not to die in the Kigali Hospital Centre’s internal medicine building, where two or three lay dying in a single bed, where they’d run out of aspirin three weeks ago, where the Belgian doctors were using this vast reservoir of patients to prepare the scientific papers that would open doors for them at the annual International AIDS Conference. This year the research had reached an even higher pitch of intensity: the conference was being held in Tokyo.

  For luxury, Raphaël’s small income from his job at the People’s Bank couldn’t be counted on. It had disappeared almost completely as soon as Méthode developed a mycosis that had to be treated with Nizoral (a week’s pay for a week’s medication), and each time he was hospitalized. When he was in hospital, to comply with the dictates of the International Monetary Fund, the prescribed costs plus the cost of food and nursing had to be paid. Raphaël had sold his motorbike. Three mycoses, two perfusions and two hospitalizations later and the value of the handlebars was all that remained of Raphaël’s nest egg.

  Méthode had only a few days left. A week, perhaps two. Raphaël carried him without effort, the way one carries a child, up to Valcourt’s room. Méthode now weighed only about forty kilos. An insubstantial, fragile assemblage of memories and vague evocations of what once had been arms, legs, a neck. Only the immensity of the eyes in a face after Giacometti recalled the gentle, handsome ebony head that women used to love.

  Méthode gave a weak smile when he heard the sound of water filling the bathtub. A hot bath. This was his first wish. “With lots of foam.” The foam was to be found at the neighbour’s in room 314, an Italian consultant by the name of Lisa who dressed from the boutiques on the Via Condotti in Rome and, for a visiting consultant, had the curious habit of spending her days at the pool waiting for the leader of the delegation to return from his work at the World Bank. The latter, a Christian Democratic deputy whom a whiff of scandal had caused to be recycled into international development, was conducting a secret meeting of consultants with Lisa when Valcourt came to ask if she wouldn’t give him a little foaming bath oil.

  “At this hour?”

  “Yes, it’s for a dying man.”

  This kind of reply, which he had been practising for some time with ferocious pleasure, brooked no repartee, provoked embarrassed silence in his interlocutress, and established a healthy distance.

  Méthode wanted to die clean, drunk, stuffed with food and in front of the television. A triumphant end for a life of thirty-two years, an end he was no longer afraid of because he would rather die of AIDS than be hacked up by a machete or shredded by a grenade. “That’s the fate waiting for all Tutsis. We have to leave or die before the Holocaust.” Since the sickness had been keeping him in bed, Méthode had been reading everything he could find about the jews. Tutsis and jews—same fate. The world had known the scientific Holocaust, cold, technological, a terrifying masterpiece of efficiency and organization. A monstrosity of Western civilization. The original sin of Whites. Here, it would be the barbarian Holocaust, the cataclysm of the poor, the triumph of machete and club. Already, in the province of Bugesera, corpses were afloat on Lake Mugesera, drifting toward the Kagera, the legendary source of the Nile. This was the way to send the Tutsis back to where they came from, to Egypt—as loudly declared by Monsieur Léon, who owned a fine house in Quebec and here was behaving like a little Hitler. It would be dirty, ugly, lots of severed arms and legs, women with bellies ripped, children with feet cut o f, so these Tutsi cockroaches could never again walk and fight. Méthode wasn’t sad about dying. He was relieved.

  Raphaël and Valcourt sit on the edge of the bathtub looking away while Méthode talks. A faint, muffled voice that needs a push to begin each sentence. Where he finds the strength for the push, God knows, but he finds it and then hurries as if to arrive before running out of breath.

  “You blind or what? … You can’t see? Everyone’s pissing o f. Before, we pretended, we lived, for a few hours anyway; we talked, for a few minutes anyway.” Silence, breathing that reaches down almost to his feet for its base. Silence, breathing that comes from as far away as the belly of the earth and rumbles like a volcano. “Today, somebody comes in, we say, he’s Tutsi, Hutu, he’s got AIDS … We’re often wrong, but it doesn’t matter. We live so much with fear it makes us feel better to finger the enemy, and if we can’t guess who he is, we invent him.”

  Silence. He tries to continue, but all his friends can hear is the gurgling of an animal being strangled, then his head falls to the side, like a goat’s at the end of a long, broken neck, a comatose head slipping into the foam that fills the bathroom with voluptuous smells and perfumes.

  Raphaël and Valcourt both wish Méthode were dead already.

  It is not to be on this night.

  Méthode whistles, emits some throaty rattles, snores, hiccups, then falls into a sleep that is not far from death. Raphaël settles on the other bed without unmaking it, seated rather than stretched out, his eyes fixed on the television which, with breathless admiration, is giving an account of the latest autumn-winter fashion creations.

  “They’ve all got AIDS, those girls,” Méthode murmurs. “Thin like me, huge eyes like mine, and arms and legs like mine too … I want a real woman before I die, with breasts that bulge out of her dress, and hands and a bum, a real bum.”

  He still has desire, and desire is suffocating him as much as his tuberculosis-riddled lungs. In his throat a rattle says, “A real woman.” Then the rattle falls asleep.

  On the balcony, Valcourt is trying to sleep in a low chair made of plastic like all the others. There’s plastic everywhere in this hotel plunked down in a land full of wood.

  “Claudia Schiffer’s beautiful?” Raphaël asks Valcourt.

  “No, I like Gentille better, now let me go to sleep.”

  “You don’t sleep beside a dying man. You keep watch. And then, we have to find him a real woman … you know, with a negro’s breasts and ass and thighs. He’s not modern like me … he still likes negro women. We’ll go and ask Agathe tomorrow. He’s always wanted Agathe.” In the morning, life wakens as i
f a whole city were emerging from a coma, astonished to be alive even as it counts its dead. Many people in this country have the courtesy or forethought to die during the night, as if they did not wish to disturb the living.

  Before the humans, long before the roosters and the jackdaws, the dogs raise the first cry; a whole clamorous, howling fauna whose wails and lamentations pierce the pockets of iridescent mist that fill the hundred valleys running this way and that through the city. On the balcony of room 312, perched on Kigali’s highest hill, a soul at peace with itself could easily think it was in paradise, looking down on these tattered clouds that hide the thousands of oil lamps being lit, the babies and old people coughing their lungs out, the stinking cooking fires, and corn and sorghum cooking. This mist, which little by little takes on all the colours of the rainbow, acts as a protective Technicolor cushion, a filter that lets only shadows, sparkles, and faint and fleeting sounds pass through from the real world. This, thinks Valcourt, is how God must see and hear our constant activity. As if on a giant movie screen with Dolby quadrophonic sound, while drinking some kind of mead and nibbling on celestial popcorn. An interested but distant spectator. This is how the Whites at the hotel, instant minor gods, hear and figure Africa. Close enough to talk about it, even to write about it. But at the same time so isolated with their portable computers in their antiseptic rooms, and in their air-conditioned Toyotas, so surrounded by little Blacks trying to be like Whites that they think Black is the smell of the perfumes and cheap ointments sold in the Nairobi duty-free shop.

  A grenade explodes, probably the last for the night because the mist is dissipating. This is the hour when killers go home to bed.

  A man so young and handsome should die fulfilled, if only through his eyes. For only his eyes and ears (his friends would have to think of music) might still bring him some pleasure. He wanted to fly away with the memory of “a real woman.” Agathe—who wanted to change her first name because it was the same as the president’s wife’s—would do the trick. She had bigger breasts than jayne Mansfield and more ass than josephine Baker. Plus a smile like a billboard permanently positioned on her face, laughing eyes, unruly hair, and a mouth as juicy as grenadine. A capable woman, Agathe, proprietor of the hotel hairdressing salon—proprietor, yes, and also madam, for while women did come here to have their hair done, generally in a European style, it was also here that the girls’ territory and prices were negotiated, and many other things too, like the marijuana that came directly from the forest of Nyungwe, the private domain of the president, brought weekly by a libidinous colonel who required payment in kind and without a condom. Agathe, in whom a terror of poverty and contemplation of the “wealth” of Whites had implanted a firmly entrenched capitalist sensibility, called this “risk capital.” She was obeying the laws of the marketplace.