A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (16 page)

The next morning Lamarre brought a long face and a dragging step to the breakfast buffet. It was not being cuckolded that was getting him down; he didn’t know about that yet. Or his new fatherhood, which he was quite indifferent to, except for thinking its timing pretty bad. He’d never wanted to be a father and couldn’t understand how, in spite of all the precautions they’d taken, Marie-Ange had got pregnant. Probably a forgotten pill. Women are so absent-minded.

A patient and methodical civil servant, Jean Lamarre was at thirty following a precise, realistic career plan, because his modest ambition more or less matched his capacity to rise through the ranks. A few years in Africa in a country that caused no problems, like Rwanda. Return to Ottawa as section head. Then consul in a small Asiatic country (he loved Chinese food) and finally cultural attaché in Paris, having to choose among all those invitations to cocktail parties, book launches, exhibition openings and first nights.

But sitting across from Valcourt, who was talking happily about his new daughter while swilling a big Primus and putting away three fried eggs with bacon and sausage as if he hadn’t eaten for days, Lamarre knew his still non-existent career was hanging by a thread. Lisette, the skilled tactician, pleading her absence and lack of knowledge of the case, had wakened him at six in the morning to place a great responsibility in his hands, an indication of her confidence in him: he was to write the report on Brother Cardinal’s death. The minister, who had heard worrisome rumours about the identity of the murderers and hoped they were untrue, was waiting for his report.

Lamarre sat staring at the scrambled eggs congealed on his plate, saying nothing. He pushed a nervous fork around in the yellow mash.

“You see, I have to write the report on Brother Cardinal’s death. And I’d like to know …”

“No, you wouldn’t really like to know that Cardinal was fighting with what little he had against great injustices. You don’t want to know, and even less write, that members of the president’s entourage probably ordered his death. You don’t want to know, you want to get out of this looking good. I understand and I feel for you. But you won’t get away with it. The dead we hide away turn into ghosts and come back to haunt us. You’re screwed. Another victim of this shitty country. If you tell the truth, your career’s down the drain. If you back the version the minister wants so his chummy relations with Rwanda can carry on as before, I’ll get after you. All we both know will be published one of these days in a Canadian or Belgian or French publication. I swear it. I’ll be after you. I’ll be a thorn in your side. You’ll be my enemy number one. About the murderers I can’t do anything, I have no weapons, I’m hopeless on that score, but little accomplices like you, I can fight with words. Monsieur Lamarre, you’re an enemy I can handle.”

Lamarre pleaded. He didn’t deserve to be harassed. Valcourt, full now, shook his head as he sipped a strong espresso. He understood Lamarre’s distress. He was even sorry for him. Choosing between the rigours of truth and the shame of mendacity is not easy. He was sorry to have to threaten him but could not do otherwise. The young diplomat had not touched his scrambled eggs. When he got up to go to his room and write his report, he walked with heavy steps and his back bowed as though he had aged thirty years in two days.

The report he wrote conformed to the preliminary conclusions drawn by the French secret service: Brother François Cardinal had been murdered by thieves who were perhaps Tutsi rebels. The embassy and also the Department of External Affairs endorsed this version, which was circulated throughout Canada. Valcourt succeeded in having an article about it published in Belgium. This did nothing to a fect Lamarre’s career. Three days after their conversation, Lamarre left the hotel for his villa, his houseboy, his cook and his gardener.

Even emptied of her baby, Marie-Ange definitely did not attract him any more, which was not of too much concern to her, for she was now trying out the gardener, thinking all the while of justin. The young couple were not seen again in diplomatic circles or restaurants. Lamarre watched kung fu videos and his wife fucked the staff, striving to attain the ecstasy and abandon to which justin had transported her. She had pursued the young man, who rejected her scornfully every time.

Five weeks after the couple’s arrival in Rwanda, she was taken to the Belgian physician who had been following her since the childbirth. She was HIV positive. She began to scream. When she stopped screaming, after clawing the doctor in the face, she hissed, “I’ll kill him!” She did nothing of the kind, of course. Justin kept on transferring his country’s death to White women until his own death. Lamarre, with an eye still on his career, and perhaps compassionately, organized Marie-Ange’s return to Canada mere days after the inevitable announcement. Nadine, she who was conceived in a parking lot and ejected in a tiny shack, he kept with him. He became a father by obligation, and then for pleasure. Through the child, who became the only object of his attention, he discovered a side of life that he had totally denied himself: silly, spontaneous laughter, funny faces, nursery rhymes, anxiety over the first fever when a child turns as red as a glowing ember. To redeem himself in his own eyes, he wrote a second report, more hypothetical than the first, in which he spoke of rumours going round in Cardinal’s village that pointed at soldiers or presidential henchmen as the killers. He sent this report directly to the minister’s office, saying nothing to his superior, who had sent a fax praising the work of her French colleagues over this distressing incident and was patting herself on the back for having closed the case so quickly, with good relations between the countries involved kept intact. Lamarre was no longer interested in playing politics or planning a career. He would be satisfied to be a good father, a dull one perhaps but a present and respectful one. And when he lay on the hard, damp grass in front of his little villa above the Kigali Night and gazed at the stars, this uncontemplative man felt light as he had never done before, certain of having found an occupation that was right for him, and he kissed his sleeping daughter and went to bed with a modicum of self-esteem.

When Valcourt learned of Marie-Ange’s illness and departure, he realized how little he still understood about this country he had thought he could explain to people, or about the contagion at work here. Justin, the pool boy, had infected Marie-Ange. And it was he, Valcourt, who had thrust her into justin’s arms. Around the pool, sex was just a game. As if unconsciously he had led Marie-Ange to sex with justin, who admitted without shame or remorse that he was giving White women back an illness that had been inflicted on Black men. Valcourt didn’t spend even a second trying to convince the young man of his error and idiocy. He simply told him that if he saw him lure another woman to his shack he would tell the whole truth to the hotel manager who, with all his contacts in the government, would certainly succeed in having him clapped in prison.

He told the entire story to Gentille, who was less shocked than he feared she would be. She reproached him only (was it really a reproach?) for having hastened a meeting that would have happened anyway, since this woman was “a gift woman,” to use her expression. Feeling responsible nevertheless, he had to make his thinking clear to her.

“You see, each country has a colour, a smell, and also a contagious sickness. In my country the sickness is complacency. In France it’s arrogance, and in the United States it’s ignorance.”

“What about Rwanda?”

“Easy power and impunity. Here, there’s total disorder. To someone who has a little money or power, everything that seems forbidden elsewhere looks permissible and possible. All it takes is to dare it. Someone who’s simply a liar in my country can be a fraud artist here, and the fraud artist gets to be a big-time thief. Chaos and most of all poverty give him powers he wouldn’t have elsewhere.”

“You’re talking about Whites who think all they need do is lift a finger and I’ll go up to their room even if they’re ugly, and rich Rwandans who tell me I’ll lose my job if I don’t sleep with them. You’re not like that.”

“But that’s what I did with Madame Lamarre. I used my power to play with her life. When people come here, they catch the power disease. I’m a bit like them. Look at them, all the small-time embassy advisers, the brawny or pimply paratroopers, the dull plodders of the international community, the two-bit consultants who don’t spend a single evening without the city’s most beautiful women on their arms, and later in bed. All of us turn into little chiefs when we get here.”

Gentille smiled. A little chief maybe, but a rather nice, respectful one. She didn’t try to reassure him about himself.

“Keep talking,” she said, “even if I don’t like what I hear sometimes. All those people you mention aren’t as bad as you say. I have trouble explaining things in detail the way you do. But keep talking, I like it when you talk to me, I like it when anybody talks to me. Apart from my grandfather, and my father too sometimes, nobody ever talked to me more than a few minutes. My whole life, all I’ve ever heard is orders, advice, forbiddings, litanies, hymns and sermons. I’ve never been part of a conversation. I’ve also heard insults and roars from men showing they were pleased or frustrated, but the only long sentences meant just for me are the ones you’ve said. So talk. I need to know I can be an ear as well as a …”

There are words a Rwandan woman does not pronounce even though the things they represent are common in her life:
ass, fuck, penis,
any word for the female sexual anatomy, or anything physically intimate. Nor do prostitutes use these terms. It’s as if saying the word sanctions the sin or humiliation.

“You could have said ‘body,’ Gentille,” Valcourt said softly. “That’s not too hard to say. Or ‘thing,’ or ‘obJect.’ Or maybe ‘ass’ …”

Gentille bent her head and closed her eyes.

“You like them, don’t you, my…”

She hesitated, then whispered: “… ass, and my breasts and my sex parts? D’you like talking to me as much? ”

“Yes, Gentille, just as much.”

“Talk some more, then. Talk to me about you, about home, tell me why you’re staying here, and please, please don’t tell me it’s because of me. That would be kind but too easy. Talk to me, it’s so good, so sweet.”

There are people like Gentille to whom you must never tell the truth. It would be so simple it would look more like a lie, because life is supposed to be complicated. Nothing now justified Valcourt’s staying in Rwanda except Gentille. It was all so simple to him, but he sensed that she wanted him to stay also for her country, and his friends, and the steep hills, and above all for himself.

“Why are you still here?”

“Because I’m kind of slothful and life here makes me get off my butt. My country is naturally slothful and uncourageous too. It only gets off its butt when catastrophes and horrors get beyond the bounds of understanding. But to be honest, I have to say that both of us, my country and I, behave relatively well once the sloth is beaten out of us.”

“No, talk to me about your country the way I talk to you about the hills. Tell me about the snow.”

“I don’t like the snow, or the cold or the winter. I hate winter. But there’s one day in the year, a magic moment that even a movie can’t reproduce. You wake up one morning and the light in your house is blinding. Outside, the sun is shining twice as bright as at the height of summer, and everything that for weeks has been dirty, grey, brown, dead leaves, mud mixed with faded flowers, everything that autumn has enveloped in gloom, all of it that morning is whiter than your whitest shirt-dress. What’s more, this whiteness sparkles with billions of stars that make you think someone has scattered diamond dust over the white earth. It lasts a few hours, sometimes a day. Then this fragile purity is soiled by the dirt that cities give off like sweat from bodies. But in our wide open spaces far from the cities, on our hills that are only little bumps compared to yours, the whiteness of the snow makes a bed that lasts for months. And silence settles in this bed. You don’t know what silence is. You can’t imagine how it wraps around you and clothes you. Silence dictates the beating of your heart and the pace of your steps. Here, everything talks. Everything chatters and howls and sighs and shouts. There’s not a second that isn’t punctuated with a sound, a noise, a bark. Every tree is a loudspeaker, every house a sounding box. So there’s this mystery in my hills, and it’s silence. You’re afraid of silence, I know, you’ve told me. But it’s not empty the way you think. It’s heavy and oppressive, because there’s not a birdsong, not a footstep, not a note of music or a word to distract us from ourselves. You’re right, silence is frightening, because you can’t say untruths in silence.”

Gentille would never hear silence. Paradoxically, real silence exists only in the torrid heat of the desert and the glacial cold of the far north. Try as he might, Valcourt could not imagine Gentille in the Sahara or the tundra. Why not remove Gentille from the hell of her life here and transplant her into his winter, which would be a lot more comfortable than the benign, permanent summer of the land of a thousand hills? He could do it, today, tomorrow, with no trouble. But far from home in a strange place, with no money of her own and no skill except at serving and being admired, without either of them wanting it she would soon be merely a slave. Being with him would no longer be the fruit of a delicious and lasting conquest but a case of dependence, no matter how tolerable and accepted it might be. Here in this room she might be living in a gilded, comfortable cage, but the door was always open. She knew the roads and pathways around the hotel, as well as ten or twenty refuges that would take her in if ever she decided she had had enough and must return to the pleasures and ambitions natural to someone her age. And this she would do one day. Valcourt had been resigned to it since that first leap of his heart. To think he could hold such beauty prisoner was more than he could bear. He must not steal life from life.

When he tried to explain why he would never take her to Canada, she didn’t believe a word of his noble speech. Another woman would have wept, screamed, hurled insults, kicked and pummelled. Not Gentille. It was much worse. She said in a voice worthy of judges and hangmen, “You lied to me!” And went and lay in the other bed. In their whole short life together, ninety-seven nights, this was the only one when Valcourt did not know “the ecstasy of Gentille.” This was the name he gave to the blending of their bodies.