A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (6 page)

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 if 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.

From the Avenue of the Republic encircling the hotel came sounds of hotel staff approaching, soon to begin their sixteen-hour day, footsteps already heavy. In a few movements repeated for the thousandth time, they would slip into a white shirt, a bow tie and a smile too broad that must stand up to sixteen hours of temperament, condescension, impatience, ill-concealed mistrust and sometimes a kind of third-worldism so pleasantly warm that the employee would paint his situation the blacker to please the lonesome White. To start a real conversation, the latter would do better to ask, “How are your children?” than, “Do your children have enough to eat?”

No one ever wondered why the employees’ smiles showed so many teeth and so little in their eyes. Valcourt called this “the dichotomous smile.”

There was a knock at the door. Raphaël was snoring. Méthode’s breath was rattling in his throat. Zozo, who was just beginning his day, knew everything. He had come to see the patient and also to warn everybody that the hotel management would not be pleased to have a respectable hotel room turned into a hospital room for a guest suffering from a shameful sickness and one furthermore so contagious. He liked Méthode, but not to the point of letting him die in his hotel. The other staff might refuse to work on this floor and certainly wouldn’t do the room. The hospital would be a better place. He offered to put Valcourt in touch with a cousin who worked at the hospital and reminded him that hotel policy, with which he himself disagreed profoundly, was now very strict.

“An additional night must be paid for every person not registered who spends the night in the room of a guest, even if the guest is a good guest like you, Monsieur Bernard. Unless, of course, the additional night is occasioned by a lady friend of yours, Monsieur Bernard. And my cousin is a graduate nurse and has a lot of influence.”

Zozo was always anxious to be of service because he had to feed a great many children and could not manage it on the pay of a minor flunky. Only his clientele’s generosity enabled him to keep the whole brood alive. And so, as a result of his love for his family and a few thousand francs slipped to him by Valcourt “for the children,” the Kigali Hospital Centre was relieved of several bags of aqueous solution and a bedpan. The cousin was not in fact a graduate nurse but a stock keeper in the pharmacy. He wielded no influence but, resourceful and wily, kept his extended family supplied with medicines and bandages.

Élise, a Canadian nurse more stubborn than a mule and more generous than a field of poppies, administered the perfusion. Méthode would die in a private room at the hotel, as he wished. A steady stream of visitors began to arrive. Immediate then distant relatives, friends, colleagues at work, and finally vague acquaintances. Méthode would smile sometimes. He did not know that so many people loved him. A medical inspector, accompanied by a policeman, had come and seen that no by-law had been infringed, especially having discovered in conversation with Raphaël that he himself was related to the dying man. He was pleased to deliver a certificate attesting that the patient could not be moved. He went through the motions of refusing the five thousand francs offered him, but thought about his many children and the fact that he had not been paid for three months. Worse, his small medicine business was doing badly. The pharmacy had been out of aspirin for a month and had not had a glimpse of an antibiotic for two weeks. He had tried to sell off some of the anti-tuberculosis medicines but without much success, because the missionaries were handing them out free and there were almost as many missionaries as there were tubercular patients.

The Belgian manager, Monsieur Dik, who had summoned the medical inspector but forgotten to offer him a gift, arrived with his large pustulous nose at the door left open to accommodate the constant coming and going. He was greeted by Agathe, who regularly offered him her mounts and hills of firm flesh in recognition of friendship or rent in arrears. Madame Agathe made use of her opulent body the way others use their cheque-books. He had fondled, caressed, sucked the breasts she had presented to him one after the other the way one offers cakes to a greedy child. He had pawed her buttocks and slipped his hands between her humid thighs. And he had come while doing it. But he had never seen Agathe naked. Frugally, she did not waste her assets and saved some of her capital for grand occasions. When the manager cried, “Monsieur Bernard, this cannot go on … ,” she clasped the little man to her bosom and literally carried him into the bathroom.

“Monsieur Dik, I’m taking you to paradise.” And she closed the door.

Five minutes later, still quivering with pleasure, the manager came to speak to Méthode with all the respect and studied compassion that courtesy and circumstance required.

Then Méthode’s mother arrived and the visitors withdrew. Marguerite Izimana’s face, like an emaciated cat’s, was deeply furrowed, her eyes empty and her gaze fixed. She sat on a straight chair and took Méthode’s hand; he gave a faint smile of recognition. She did not look at him. She alone of the whole hill had known that her son was suffering from “the sickness.” She was not ashamed, no, but she did not wish to be troubled by the gossip, the rejection, the judgments and the scorn. If Méthode was dying of a shameful sickness it was because he was born in shame. The shame of poverty, of discrimination, of university education denied, grants refused, of land and house so tiny that he had soon left for the city, the shame of being unable to marry because of poverty and inadequate housing, then a girl for a few brochettes and a beer, a girl to help forget fear and time in jail, a girl for a quick little orgasm, that’s not a sin, that’s an imitation of happiness. This is what she was thinking as she murmured what ought to have been prayers. And then, to die at thirty-two, or at forty butchered by drunken soldiers, or at forty-two of malaria, or at fifty-five, like her, of weariness and heartbreak … What’s the difference?

“Dying is not a sin” was the only thing she had come to say to him, and she gently placed her other hand on her son’s glistening forehead, whereupon he closed his eyes and let his last tear fall. The last tear is death’s beginning.

Finally soothed and free, Méthode repeated, “Dying is not a sin.” Then, slightly raising his head, “We must tell them,” he said. Marguerite Izimana nodded and turned to Valcourt. In her eyes there was neither appeal nor interrogation, just a command. Awed by this dark solemnity, Valcourt stepped forward.

“You want to speak to me, Méthode?”

“Yes, but not just to you, to a lot of people … on the television … with the film you wanted to make with me. Let’s make the film. I’m going to rest, build up my strength, then we’ll make the film and you’ll show it to them. And then … I’ll go.”

Méthode closed his eyes and his mother closed hers. The two settled down calmly to wait.

Méthode emerged from his sleep, his stupor, his silence or semi-coma—how could anyone tell which?—only in late afternoon, jerked from his limbo by the harsh, strident calls of the jackdaws and buzzards arriving as the Whites returned from their aid work and deal-making. Méthode’s mother, like a seated tombstone figure, had not moved, had not let go of her son’s hand for a second. Only her shoulders, which would hunch suddenly whenever Méthode’s breath became more gasping, showed there was life left in a body made of knots, bones and skin stretched and dry, creviced by thousands of fine wrinkles, like the furrows the country people plow on their hills.

On the long, low dresser along the wall facing the two beds, Valcourt had ordered food and a bar set out.

“We’re going to eat, drink and fuck,” said Méthode, adding with the smile of a kid surprised by his own audacity that he was glad his mother didn’t understand French.

Then in Kinyarwanda:

“Maman, don’t be sad, I’m going to have a beautiful death.”

“For a young man, there’s no such thing as a beautiful death. Or a death that makes sense. All children’s deaths are ugly and senseless.”

André, who had learned in Quebec how to make Rwandans aware of condoms and abstinence, was the first to arrive for this funerary feast, which Méthode called the Last Supper, though he was quick to add, with a little laugh broken by coughing, that he did not take himself for jesus Christ. Then came Raphaël with some colleagues from the bank, and Élise, her arms full of flowers and her handbag full of morphine, which an understanding and ill-paid friend had obtained for ten dollars American. Finally Agathe, accompanied by three of her girls because a party without free girls is not a party. The girls would not kiss the dying man or even shake his hand. Méthode was too charmed with everything to insist. On the contrary. He was delighted the girls thought they might catch the sickness, even with the merest touch of their lips or fingers. Fear had got to them, and though unjustified, it was a fear, a terror almost, that he and so many of his friends had never felt. His death would not have been in vain.