A Good Death

CRITICAL PRAISE FOR
A Good Death:

“It is a wonderfully simple story told by a writer who shows great acuity in stripping feelings bare…
A Good Death
bears the signature of a truly free voice, the voice of a real writer. Say it. And read it.” —
LE DEVOIR,
Montreal

CRITICAL PRAISE FOR
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali:

“A fresco with humanist accents which could easily find a place next to the works of Albert Camus and Graham Greene.” —
LA PRESSE

“Elegantly written… A moving depiction of love and humanity struggling amid the violence, hatred and ignorance of the Rwandan massacre of 1994, it also serves as a critique of global apathy towards Africa.” —
GUARDIAN

“When your first novel is compared to the works of Albert Camus, André Malraux and Graham Greene, it’s a pretty good start. The book is set in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, just before the genocide of the Tutsis at the hands of the Hutu-led government. There is a sense of disaster foretold as these men and women, white and black, play out their last days around a hotel swimming pool in a city that will soon become a graveyard. Courtemanche’s novel is guided by a strong moral presence: that of the author. He has an astringent personality, and he puts it to good use in this book.” —
THE GAZETTE

“Courtemanche has written a novel that contains the kind of social criticism that still, almost ten years after the terrible events, is sharp and pertinent… The journalist in him has, thankfully, emptied himself, heart and all, into a love story full of real people that demand to be remembered.” —
QUILL & QUIRE

“Brilliant, anguished and righteous… There are many unsettling qualities to Courtemanche’s extraordinary novel. But above all, it is his insistence on love, and the right to live one’s life passionately and well, even in the face of
AIDS
and the genocide, this double helix of devastating African tragedies, that make this book great.” —
NATIONAL POST

“A few pages are enough for you to be swept away into the terrifying madness of a country… Exceptional.” —
JEAN-PAUL DUBOIS,
Le Nouvel Observateur

“Those who read this novel—and I hope they will be numerous—are in for some astonishing pages on the subject of love and death.” —
DAVID HOMEL,
Books in Canada

“A captivating first novel… Courtemanche’s fine writing and refined style… weave together a love story full of beauty and tenderness.” —
VOIR

“A first novel whose story hits hard, very hard.” —
LE DROIT

“A tremendous novel.” —
RENÉ HOMIER-ROY,
Radio Canada

“A strong, assured voice… speaking of present day and tragic realities:
AIDS
and the Rwandan genocide—sicknesses of body and spirit with which men and women live, love, die and triumph… A novel stuck on reality that nevertheless transcends it. You will recognize places and characters. You will recognize the mugginess of the climate. But Courtemanche’s fiction transmits the depth of the real better than any objective documentation.” —
RELATIONS

“A voice that evokes humanity in all its depth and breadth, where executioner and victim are brother and sister, where death is a daily occurrence. A voice I implore you to listen to… Through a felicitous mix of reportage and fiction, Courtemanche has powerfully portrayed a lucid character deeply engaged in a humanist quest… The many facets of Bernard Valcourt’s eye constitute the richest prism of the book since he so ably expresses the complex malaise that can be the fate of a western white man faced with Rwandan culture in full decline.” —
LE JOURNAL DE MONTRÉAL

“A blunt, vividly visual account of a human cataclysm that has left a scar on the psyche of us all. At the same time it is a testament to love, its durability and frailty in the face of annihilation. Do not expect it to leave you untouched.” —
JONATHAN KAPLAN,
author of
The Dressing Station

a good death

a good death

GIL COURTEMANCHE

translated by wayne grady

D
OUGLAS &
M
CINTYRE

Vancouver/Toronto

Copyright © 2006 by Les Éditions du Boréal, Montréal, Canada
Translation copyright © 2006 by Wayne Grady
Originally published in 2005 as
Une Belle Mort
by Éditions du Boréal

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada
V
5
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www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN
978-1-55365-215-1 (pbk.)
ISBN
978-1-926706-87-0 (ebook)

Editing by Mary Schendlinger
Cover design by Jessica Sullivan
Cover photograph © Jane Yeomans/Getty Images

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (
BPIDP
) for this translation.

To France-Isabelle

TO WRITE A NOVEL IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN
ACT OF IMPUDENCE. TO COMB ONE’S HAIR IS
ALSO AN ACT OF IMPUDENCE, especially when
it’s done to try to cover a scar running across the top of one’s forehead. But combing one’s hair is an act of minor impudence, whereas writing is a more serious affair. We mask reality, we hide our fears, we reinvent things that have been said and, above all, the people who said them. Writing a novel implies a certain perversity. It’s not something one can do with a tortoiseshell comb. It is perhaps for that reason that they take away my pen at night. Not, as they pretend, to prevent me from accidentally stabbing myself in the throat with it—but to prevent me from killing anyone else.

Paco Ignatio Taibo
II
,
We Come Back as Shadows

MY MOTHER IS SHRINKING. MY FATHER
IS GETTING BIGGER.
MOTHER PECKS AT HER
FOOD AND SPENDS MORE TIME TALKING THAN
eating. My father pretends to be listening to her deluge of chatter, but he isn’t really following the conversation. He’s stuffing his face, shovelling down his food like an ogre, not uttering a word. It occurs to me that my mother began shrinking when she had to do all the talking, whereas my father began swelling up when Parkinson’s stopped his tongue with his words still resonating in his head. I don’t find the thought amusing.

The doctor explained it to me. “It’s called rigid Parkinson’s, plus there’s his recent stroke. I’ll spare you the scientific details; let’s just say there’s been a communication breakdown among his neurons. The brain gives the order to walk, but the neurons don’t receive the command in time and so the patient falls down. The patient wants to talk, but his vocal cords and mouth react too late. They don’t receive the electric impulses soon enough. He knows how to walk and talk, he’s conscious, he understands everything. But he falls down, or he babbles like a baby, and you get the feeling he isn’t there and doesn’t hear you. It’s not that complicated… I forgot to mention, it’s a degenerative disease. You do understand what that means?”

Yes. Thank you, doctor. And does it go on for a long time? Years. Can anything be done, I mean in terms of medication? No. We try to control it. Thank you, doctor.

So my father is busily conceiving words, sentences, whole paragraphs, in his head. He has always spoken in complete paragraphs. He hears and understands everything we say, wants to discuss, explain, demolish his children’s arguments, is delighted with the withering riposte he has thought of, the demonstration he is about to make, but then he doesn’t hear his mouth deliver them. He hears all those lovely words in his head, but they remain there, clogged like sewage in a blocked sink. And so he rages, or curses, or sometimes lowers his head and weeps, or, to pass the time while the white noise of my mother’s words stretches off into faraway lands, he eats. Sometimes he comes out with a swear word that strikes the assembled children dumb and halts my mother’s aimless chirping in its tracks, as the shadow of a hawk frightens a bird. Then back he goes to his plate, using his knife, which he can still handle well enough, to make little piles of food and push them onto his fork, and then shoving the whole thing into his mouth. Bits of food ooze from the corners of his lips. As he well knows. He can feel the grease dripping down his chin and onto my mother’s spotless tablecloth. Of course it embarrasses him. He doesn’t enjoy behaving like a boor. He’s always been proud and haughty, like Caesar in the
Astérix
books. But in the moment between realizing he’s drooling and reaching for his napkin, my mother has already taken hers and wiped the gravy from his glistening chin.

Nothing makes sense to him anymore. He has words, he has thoughts, but no one hears them. He knows how to move his feet and hands, but he falls down or drops his glass. And so I sit to his left at every family meal, trying to anticipate his rages and his defeats. I prefer the rages. They tell me that the man I once knew, the man I do not love, still exists.

All his life, with blows from his hands as well as his mouth, my father drilled good manners into us, taught us to say please and thank you, how to hold a knife and fork, keep our backs straight, our elbows off the table. To this day his children obey the basic rules of civility and pass them on to their own children, though I hope with a little more human kindness. We were never a wealthy family, but we were proud, not to say arrogant. Proud of what, I don’t know. As for arrogance, it’s a virtue and a fault shared by most men of his generation. He wanted us to be better than everyone else, better even than himself, which is saying a lot. This obsession of his with polite behaviour and proper table manners always intrigued me. It couldn’t have come from his reading, nor from his own background or my mother’s; in her family, as in the neighbourhood in general, elbows were planted firmly on the table, cutlery clattered noisily and meat was held in the mouth like a soother. Now we wipe his lips for him with little delicate, respectful attempts to make him laugh.