A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (11 page)

“Valcourt, you love Gentille? ”

“Yes,” Valcourt replied calmly as if he had known it for years and it was right and natural that it should be so. “Yes, I love her,” he repeated, as if the three were dining together at a quiet, favourite restaurant, as though they were the same age and there was nothing they could not talk about.

Gentille had not moved, not even quivered, but already she was tumbling into another world, the world of movies and novels, because all her life she had never heard these words except in movies or read them except in the works of romantic novelists she had studied at the Butare Social Service School.

“Valcourt, you love her to sleep with or you love her to live with? ”

“Both, Cyprien, both.”

Gentille laid her head on Valcourt’s shoulder, and Valcourt bent his so that their hair mingled. As if in eruption, all the juices of life ran between her trembling thighs. An orgasm from tenderness and words.

“You’re not feeling well?” Valcourt asked gently, feeling her shiver.

“Oh yes, maybe too well. For the first time in my life, I know I’m living real life. When they taught me poetry at school, they told me words could lead to ecstasy. Here, feel.”

For her this life was different anyway, for not minding Cyprien’s presence, she took Valcourt’s hand and guided it to the wetness of her crotch. Valcourt was alarmed by all this energy, these mysterious forces of body and soul that he had unleashed. It was not the joy of having said
I love you
that gripped him at this moment, but despair of keeping her. For she would leave, of that he was certain.

“Valcourt, your Gentille is Tutsi, even if you swear she isn’t. Her death’s already written in the sky. So if you love her, you’ll pack your bags, you’ll forget the film and the television station that’ll never make any television because we’re too poor, you’ll forget Rwanda and tomorrow you’ll take the plane.”

Gentille protested. She was not a Tutsi.

“You can tell me that and it’s okay, I won’t go and repeat it to anybody. You’ve got a nose that’s as straight and sharp as a knife, skin the colour of café au lait, legs as long as a giraffe’s, breasts so pointed and firm they stick through your blouse, and buns, buns … that drive me wild. I’m sorry, but there it is. You’ve got a Hutu card because you bought it or you slept with an official, but at a roadblock, when you’re intercepted by a gang of little Hutus as black as night, they’re not going to look at your card, they’ll see your buns, your legs, your breasts, your pale skin, and they’re going to bang that Tutsi and call their friends so they can bang her too. And you’ll be lying in the red mud with your legs spread and a machete against your throat, and they’ll have you ten times, a hundred times, till your wounds and your pain will have done with your beauty. And when the wounds and bruises and dried blood have made you ugly, when there’s nothing left but a memory of a woman, they’ll throw you in the swamp and, while you lie there dying, insects will eat at you and rats will nibble at you and buzzards will tear at you. I want to terrify you, Gentille. We have to stop living like we can keep on living normally.”

A bus careened down the hill with squealing brakes and rattling sides. Men were singing off-key in chorus and laughing like hooligans coming home from a football match.

“That’s our killers going by,” said Cyprien. “Militiamen arriving from the North to do ‘the work’ in the capital. You hear what they’re singing? ‘We’re going to exterminate them.’ Gentille, they’re talking about you and anyone who touches you, knows you or loves you. Get away from here. Not from my house. Get away from this lousy country. Hate comes to you with birth. They teach it to you in the cradles they rock you to sleep in. At school, in the street, at the bar, at the stadium, the Hutus have heard and learned only one lesson—the Tutsi is an insect that has to be stamped out. If not, the Tutsi will steal your wife, he’ll rape your children, he’ll poison the water and the air. The Tutsi woman will bewitch your husband with her backside. When I was little, they told me the Tutsis would kill me if I didn’t kill them first. It’s like the catechism.”

From the Remero district, near Lando’s, the echo of a grenade, then of a second and a third, rolled down one hill to the next, punctuating Cyprien’s words as if to amplify them.

Gentille, although she was hearing, was not listening. She was feeling like a woman at last, honoured, admired and loved, no longer merely a body, an object found to be beautiful, a bauble to be bought or a desire to be satisfied. A few words had brought her here, only a few words. And this place was as frightening to her as it was enchanting. The man who had brought this wetness to her thighs with just his words would surely leave her. It was written in the sky, in life. After he had had his pleasures and orgasms, once he had explored her breasts and ass and legs and private places, when he knew his way by heart around them with his fingertips and impatient penis, he would realize that he’d fallen for a poor little country negress who didn’t know anything, who couldn’t talk about the world, or about life, or especially about love. She was convinced he would not be able to put up much longer with this hysterical country where madness was settling in as the normal condition of life. She knew he would leave her, in a few weeks, a few months at best. It was inevitable.

Cyprien’s wife had made brochettes of chewy goat’s meat, which they ate slowly with tomatoes, onions, green beans and warm Primus. They didn’t talk much, content to be together and sharing the same destiny for a few hours. After the meal, Cyprien insisted on going with Valcourt and Gentille as far as the hotel because the militia had already set up roadblocks and Gentille could have problems. Some young girls had already disappeared.

The first roadblock was less than a hundred metres from Cyprien’s house. A tree trunk across the road, a brazier, a dozen men under the command of a policeman who had swapped his gun for a machete. These were neighbours who respected Cyprien even if they distrusted him. They let the three pass without causing problems. The policeman was a cousin. Another one.

Just before the downtown area, a second roadblock. The men guarding it seemed more excited and more dangerous. They were dancing in front of two tree trunks that they had thrown across the road, waving machetes and clubs with enormous spikes driven through the heads. Valcourt stopped the car several metres before the roadblock. Cyprien got out and went to speak to two young men who were weaving about unsteadily. He brought them back to the car. The two militiamen would look at nothing but Gentille. They made her get out of the car and pranced around her making obscene gestures and calling their companions. Valcourt got out, holding his Canadian passport and his government press card. Cyprien kept arguing, his identity papers in his hand.

“Look, they’re friends of mine, going home. She’s Hutu, he’s Canadian, not French or Belgian.”

There were now a dozen around them, all drunk or stoned on hash. A little bearded fellow in a Chicago Bulls sweater with Michael jordan’s name on the back spoke to Valcourt.

“The Canadian likes Tutsi hookers with phony Hutu cards. That’s not good for you, chief. Not good. This is a Hutu country, chief. If you don’t want to end up in the Kagera River with all the Tutsis, get yourself a Hutu woman. I’ll let you through tonight, but you’ll have to pay a little money for the training and patriotic education of militias.”

Valcourt handed over a sum and the bearded fellow gave him back his passport but not his press card or Gentille’s identity card. To recover these cost the entire five thousand Rwandan francs Valcourt had on him.

Valcourt tried to persuade Cyprien to spend the night at the hotel, but Cyprien said he would rather leave the two of them alone together and did not want to leave his wife and children unattended in these troubled times.

“And then, a thirty-minute walk under a full moon is a great joy. Don’t worry, I know everybody. Give me a beer for the walk.”

He could avoid the roadblocks by taking some of the footpaths that wove about the hills like a complex circulatory system. But he hankered to follow the paved main road and meet up with people he’d call cheery greetings to, asking what was new in their neighbourhood, or how a distant cousin was doing. Clutching his big bottle of Primus from which he’d taken only a single swig, Cyprien was looking for a fling. Surely he’d find a free woman along the way who, for a share of his beer, would burst out laughing and spread her big, warm, moist thighs for him. Sex had done him in, but that was all he lived for. And after that woman, he’d wake up his own and maybe have another accident with her because it had been a long time, and because he threw away the condoms he was given every time he had a medical exam, or handed them round to children to use as balloons. He was so afraid of dying without having slept with all the women he could have in a normal life that he thought of nothing else. His day was organized around sex. He had plundered literally half the marketplace without ever a thought that he could infect the tomato or tilapia vendor of the moment. This country was doomed, he figured. What was the difference if a machete or an infected cock did the job? Yes, there was a difference. A cock was kinder than a machete.

One day Élise had raged at him because he had been sleeping all over without a condom.

“You’re a murderer!” she shouted in her small office beside the hospital. “You’re killing all those women!”

He was killing them maybe, but they laughed and squealed when he patted their bums and slipped his hand up their skirts. And they gave great cries of pleasure when he penetrated them while massaging their breasts. That was a much more beautiful death, he said, than death by machete.

Cyprien had not found a free woman on the road homeward. He was even thinking of turning back to the city, he needed so badly to relieve his aching balls and persistent erection. I’m not dead yet, he told himself, laughing. Then he thought of Fabienne, his friend Virginie’s sister, who kept “a bar under the bed” Just beyond the roadblock. A nitwit who yakked non-stop like a magpie, even with her legs in the air and you wearing yourself out on her belly, trying to make her shut up or come. You never knew. But since she always asked for more and the second time you didn’t pay, she enjoyed a certain renown. In the neighbourhood she was called the Glutton because she was always hungry for a man and took them all, even on credit, unless they were Tutsis.

They were having a ball at the roadblock. A radio with the volume on full was diffusing disco to the farthest corners of the neighbourhood. Shadows danced and leaped crazily, silhouetted against the lurid light of two fires lit in big metal barrels. The militiamen were singing of the glory of the president’s party, the eternal superiority of the Hutus. The refrain went: “We’re starting the work, and the work’s going to be done right.” “Work” was the term always used in the propaganda. It also referred to the
corvée collective
, an annual community service when the residents of each commune were supposed to take part in the work, the
corvée
, which consisted of cutting down weeds and cleaning up along the sides of the roads. No one nowadays understood the word to mean overgrown weeds. But as long as the calls to violence remained in the realm of parable or poetic hyperbole, friendly countries would not be worried about the inhumanity France was condoning and feeding with its arms and military advisers. In the designs of the great powers, these Rwandans were of negligible weight, people outside the circle of real humanity, poor, useless types whom the glorious French civilization, with monarchical arrogance, was ready to sacrifice to preserve France’s civilizing presence in Africa, a presence already threatened by a major Anglophone plot.

Cyprien wanted Fabienne, right here and right now, as the great French chief might have said, the president of France who had armed and trained these men—men who were separating Cyprien from Fabienne and his pleasure. When they caught sight of him laboriously climbing the hill, the militiamen began shouting and gesticulating.

“Come party with us, Cyprien, come on. Move it, Hot-Nuts, your wife’s back here, she’s waiting for you and wants you.”

Just beyond the two tree trunks blocking the road, his wife was lying with her skirt pulled up onto her belly. Two young militiamen, laughing hilariously, were holding her legs apart and a third was holding her head still. A breast was hanging out of her torn, bloodstained T-shirt. The roadblock commander held a revolver to Cyprien’s temple and led him to Georgina’s side.

“We’ve tried everything but nothing works. Your wife has no pleasure. Even I’ve been on and women like me. Nothing, not even a little sigh of pleasure. She can’t be normal. We’ve had her two at a time, one by the front, the other by the back door. And we did it hard. Big bangs with big cocks, then we used a stick. Nothing, just crying and horrible screaming, even insults, not one little bit of pleasure to thank us for finding her so beautiful and appetizing. Now, you know all the secrets of the Whites and Tutsis you hang out with, so you’re going to show us, Cyprien, you’re going to show us what a man’s got to do to make your wife come.”

As the first effects of shock began to fade, Cyprien was relieved. He was not going to die in sickness, but in pleasure.

“I’ll show you how to do it,” he said.

He undressed completely. The militiamen holding his wife stood aside, intimidated by the nakedness of this man who stared them straight in the eyes and bent calmly toward Georgina.

“Wife, better to die of pleasure than of torture,” he said to her.

Slowly and most of all with a delicacy he did not recognize in himself, he removed her skirt, then her T-shirt in the colours of Rwanda. On his knees between her thighs, he looked at her at length while the militiamen howled their impatience. He lay down on her and began to kiss her, in the curve of her neck, on her ears, on her eyes, her cheeks, the corners of her lips, delicately, only the tip of his tongue expressing his desire, while the militiamen booed the dreary spectacle. The little bearded fellow came up and slashed him savagely across the back with his machete. Cyprien felt his blood running down like a hot river between his buttocks and wetting his testicles. Never had he had such an erection. He sat up and, for the first time in his life, plunged his head between his wife’s thighs and sucked, kissed, ate. He had almost no strength left. He penetrated her, and just as he was about to come, the policeman fired. His body gave what seemed like a hiccup and he fell on his back beside his wife. Sprayed with semen, the policeman began to bellow.