A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (17 page)
Chapter Seven
The morning after this conjugal spat, the only one they ever had, Valcourt got up very early, with the mists and the ravens, before the dogs and the children. Sitting on the balcony which gave him a view of the city, dazzled by the fig tree shining as though a fairy gardener had waxed each of its leaves during the night, he wrote in a careful hand on hotel letter paper:
“Gentille, if I go back to Canada and you want to come, I’ll take you with me. But I don’t want to go back there. My real country is the country of the people I love. And I love you more than anything in the world. My country is here. We’re father and mother now but we must make this adoption official. It would be easier if we were husband and wife. We must also find a name for our daughter. I don’t really know what order we should do these things in. So as a start, I’m asking you to marry me. And if ever we had to leave this country, it would be for some place neither of us knows. Then each of us would be as lost as the other, each as poor and dependent.”
He crossed the room on tiptoe and put the letter, folded in three, on Gentille’s hip. She was not asleep.
“Wait.” She read it and wept softly.
Ten years earlier he had been playing the tourist in Paris with his sixteen-year-old daughter. At the Musée de l’Orangerie, they gazed at Monet’s
Waterlilies
unbelievingly, they were so astonished, so overcome by the beauty, nuances and subtleties of the painting. “Oh my, papa, it’s so lovely,” said a choked little voice. Anne-Marie had wept with tenderness at the beauty of life, as Gentille was weeping now. The way a woman weeps, with torn, exhausted muscles and hurting belly, when a red, wrinkled newborn is placed in her arms. For a fleeting moment, Valcourt wanted to tear up the already rumpled sheet of paper, erase the words, go back in time, turn back the clock, start again without yet having succumbed to Gentille’s beauty. Her happiness terrified him. He was no match for this young woman’s passion for life. He was so much older, inevitably he would be the first to die if life unfolded in the normal way. He could only promise her a tiny window of happiness, he knew, he was now convinced, then a plunge into a horrible, lonely void filled with the emptiness he would leave behind, an emptiness crammed only with memories impossible for her to recreate alone. Men who feel loved to distraction are easy prey to complacency, forgetting how much strength and patience women put into forging happiness. In this, Valcourt was a very ordinary man.
And there was something else. The killers were becoming less inhibited, less cautious and less anonymous every day. They proclaimed their extermination plans on the radio. They laughed about them in the bars. Their ideologues, like Léon Mugasera, were inflaming whole regions with their speeches. After every rally, militiamen hurled themselves like Huns onto the hills, burning, raping, crippling, killing with their Chinese machetes and their French grenades. International commissions came to take note of the damage, dug up bodies from common graves, gathered eyewitness testimony from survivors of the pogroms.
Valcourt would have a drink in the fourth-floor bar with the eminent jurists and experts while they told him ten times more than they would put in their reports. He took notes as he listened, discouraged and each time a little more terrified by the enormity of the revelations, but it was the pepper-and-nutmeg taste of Gentille’s sex, the sharp points of her nipples and the trembling of her buttocks at his least caress that really occupied his mind at these times. And he didn’t forgive himself for it. For any left-leaning Christian like himself, even if he didn’t believe in God, happiness was a kind of sin. How can we be happy when the earth is falling apart before our eyes and humans are turning into demons, and extortions and unspeakable abominations are all that come of it?
One night when he was ruminating this way, alternating between thoughts of Gentille’s breasts and what Raphaël was saying about the terrifying death threats he had just received at work, Gentille appeared with the sleeping child in her arms. Raphaël said:
“Happiness has come looking for you, my friend. Gentille, your future husband is an imbecile. You should dump him. He won’t make the most of his happiness. He listens to me, pities me, racks his brain to find a way to help me, even though he knows he can’t do anything. Tell him. No, I’ll tell him, this fool of a White, but not before we’ve drunk a little champagne. Like Méthode, I want to die happy and in luxury.”
Raphaël invited the maître d’hôtel to come and drink with them. The Belgian cook also came to join them, along with a second bottle, and Zozo who was passing by to check on something. Then Émérita, the taxi driver, who was coming to sleep on a banquette in the bar because militiamen were prowling round near her sister’s house where she was living. A third bottle arrived with the barman. He had closed up his cash register and had hopes of getting into the buxom Émérita, who had eyes only for Valcourt who had always talked to her like one of the guys at work and never looked at her the way a man looks at a woman.
Raphaël talked without stopping, about AIDS, about corruption and about massacres. He repeated what he had said a thousand times before. Valcourt didn’t need to listen closely. He knew what every sentence was going to be before it passed Raphaël’s lips. But can you blame people threatened with death for talking about it and repeating themselves? With his naive, permanent smile, Zozo was agreeing: “Yes, Monsieur Raphaël, yes, you’re right.” Approval and the art of flunkydom were synonymous in Zozo’s mind. One never knew if it was the friend or the flunky who was nodding approval.
Then Raphaël said, “Let’s talk about more cheerful things.” He began telling his raunchy stories, each more far-fetched than the last—he was a bit of a braggart, and quite convinced of his irresistible charm. The tales of his adventures brought knowing laughs, especially when he talked about White women. Then he described being locked up in the soccer stadium in 1990 with eight thousand other rebellion suspects. He didn’t remember so much the hunger and the beatings on the soles of his feet, he remembered all the friends he made, and the women who were sweet and obliging so the men would forget their misery.
There were bellows of laughter and conspiratorial looks in the half-darkness of the bar. Faces wore luminous smiles. The little girl slept through all the racket. Gentille squeezed Valcourt’s hand. Since the beginning, Valcourt had only smiled occasionally, not laughing, and not joining in with his own stories. Zozo, who turned into a gleeful clown with a single glass of alcohol, was in rapture over all the tales of resilience and survival, for, as at late-night gatherings of war correspondents, there was always a story following hard on the heels of the last. An exploit by one, embellished of course, would make way for another’s mortification, promptly to be buried under an even spicier anecdote. Epics were swapped the way children swap marbles or Nintendo cassettes. Incredible deaths, asses rounder and smoother than a full moon, eyes deeper than the ocean, soldiers more barbaric than the Huns and Nazis put together, all vied mightily for listeners’ attention. These minutes of intense life shared among friends were all saying the same thing in the same language, using doom and horror to rea firm life.
Valcourt was not saying anything, guilty once again of being happy in the midst of barbarity, but feeling lighter, as if freed of a dark mass by Gentille’s index finger delicately and patiently, as soft as down, stroking its way along the paths of life traced in his hand. Now it was she who was urging him:
“Tell a story, a good one. It’s your turn.”
He told of a morning in November 1984 at Bati, in the desert of the Tigris in Ethiopia. The great famine, which later aroused all the singers on the planet and left the West the memory of “We Are the World” rather than of its hundreds of thousands of victims, had descended on the north of the country with a gigantic sandstorm that buried everything and turned the desert into a common grave. He had heard tell of the early mornings when the rising sun is preceded by a pink and violet glow along the horizon. Over a pizza in the Addis-Ababa Hilton, a French doctor had told him how there came a moment in this dreamy tableau when groanings began at the same time as long, mysterious incantations intended to keep death at bay, punctuated by strident little cries and the barking of stray dogs. Then, when the pink and violet turned to orange, when the orange was pierced by the sun’s first rays and the cadavers on reprieve were waking, you would begin to hear all the sounds of death to come. Lungs exploding, mothers crying, infants wailing, air passages struggling to clear. “A mortuary symphony against a picturepostcard background.” That’s what the doctor had said.
Valcourt, with Michel, his cameraman, a Vietnam survivor, set up near a small hole in which three or four people seemed to be sleeping, wrapped in goatskins, to watch this Wagnerian sunrise. It was bitter cold. Six hours later, the stony soil would burn any feet laid bare on it. Twenty-five thousand living skeletons, half naked, already broken by hunger, illness and exhaustion, each day endured the shock of heat and cold. And, as the doctor had told him, the full light of day and the doleful symphony began together, for these people of the heat and the desert discovered their dead or their new a flictions in the minutes that followed the cold of the night.
The woman who was waking in her hole while Valcourt recited his introduction to the camera thought perhaps that he was a doctor, nurse or priest. He had a knee on the ground and she laid before him a tiny body wrapped in a goatskin. The baby no longer had enough breath to move a blade of grass, only a whisper, a soft, slow death rattle that Valcourt could hear better than his own words describing the death all around him. He was tempted to finish by saying he had just seen a baby die there by his knees, then to pick it up and hold it for the camera. What a great piece of television it would have made, for Michel, hearing these words, would have slowly turned the lens down to the tiny, emaciated head and closed in to focus on the huge, deep, dark eyes, staring, accusing humanity. Then he would have followed Valcourt’s motion, lengthening the focus and stepping slightly to the right. The baby would have been in the foreground, with Valcourt saying, “This is Bernard Valcourt in hell at Bati.” To his left, the haggard but dignified eyes of the mother would have been clearly seen, and, in the background, the high clouds streaked with orange and purple heralding the morning and the start of a gruesome accounting.
This accounting at the morgue, a round shed of roughly assembled eucalyptus logs, was the exercise of most concern to Valcourt. He could not show all the little bodies, of course, but for six hours he filmed each of them, noting their names and ages, while they were washed before being laid on beds of eucalyptus branches. They would enter paradise clean and sweet-smelling.
Back in Montreal, nothing was the way it had been before. He began by trying, when he talked, not to use the coded language and objective distancing that stifle and falsify reality. A small, thinking mine exploded in his brain, muddling the right and left hemispheres, scattering the neurons of reason and feeling, transforming an efficient old order into a kind of boiling magma that mixed up everything—smells, memories, things he had read, ideas, principles, desires. He had thought about nothing but work before, and now his thoughts were occupied only with love, abandon in love, and anger. He wanted to shout out loud all he had seen, experienced, discovered, but had only half said because he’d been sticking to the cautious language of journalism that turns a lying prime minister into a man making progress and a slimy financier into an astute businessman. He tried to make a few people uncomfortable and had some success. Without realizing, and especially without wishing to, he’d fixed himself on the fringe of society that matters and does not forgive those that leave it. He discovered this little by little, one disappointment after another, one rebuff after another, then, what was worse, one evidence of indifference after another. And now on this night of dire happenings turned to laughter, Gentille’s finger as soft as down was tracing life in the palm of his hand, and the little girl’s head was warming his thigh, and Raphaël said to him:
“It’s fascinating. It follows, there’s a kind of justice. You find happiness with the derelicts of the earth. So make us feel good, there isn’t much that does. Tell us you like the happiness you’ve found here. Make us feel good, tell us that for all the machetes and cut-off arms and raped women we can give beauty and gentleness too. And your own happiness, Bernard, stop hiding it, live it with us. It’ll reassure us about ourselves.”
Valcourt, a little drunk, but as emotional as when his daughter was born, stood up with his glass in his hand.
“I, Bernard Valcourt, expatriate tolerated in your country, have the honour of asking you for the hand of the most beautiful woman in Rwanda.”
His friends exploded. The maître d’hôtel hugged him. Raphaël climbed up on the stainless steel bar and began to dance. Gentille let a few salty little pearls run down her satiny cheeks. Zozo tripped over an empty bottle left lying on the floor. The child began to howl, frightened by the din. Émérita, a member of a fundamentalist Baptist church, dropped to her knees and intoned several verses from the Bible. The barman leaned down and passed his hand over her buttocks, sure of getting his usual slap since he had already had five. She interrupted her prayer.
“Célestin, God has brought us a great blessing tonight. He’ll surely forgive us all the sins you and I will commit later.”
Célestin, who had been waiting three years for this moment, was seized with great anxiety. Would he be able to honour the woman of his dreams? He rushed behind the bar, broke six eggs into a shaker, added beer and a whole bottle of pepper sauce, and drank it all down at one go. Émérita drank alcohol for the first time in her life that night, and the champagne’s effect sent wayward, wandering little ants through her head and bosom, making her tingle and tremble. This was her first real sin after twenty-seven years of shunning the pleasures that her mother sold in her Sodoma brothel. Célestin’s huge hands took possession of her breasts.