A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (20 page)
“The Belgians insult us while they shoot their wad and tell us we don’t deserve any better, that we’re all sluts, then after they’ve put their pants back on they haggle over the price. The Canadians are nice. They tend to tell us what’s good for us. They seem to worry about our future as they fondle our breasts. They insist on a lot of kissing before they get inside us. When they pay, they’re always embarrassed. They try to disguise a fuck as a love story. Probably because they’re as afraid of losing themselves in the fuck as in love. The Canadians are okay—even drunk, they’re reasonable.”
Bernadette, who was telling Gentille all this, would have liked all her clientele to vanish into thin air. She didn’t want to work any more, but what else was she going to do? In the beginning, even when she was exhausted, she never refused a john. Not for the money, just for the pleasure and chance of fulfilling her dream. The pleasure of surprising caresses and kisses. A tongue playing in her ear while a deft finger set a nipple quivering. Well, yes, the johns were all in a hurry and got into her faster than she would have liked, generally dispensed with amorous demonstrations and cut short their tenderness. But she was getting more pleasure here than when she was working at Sodoma, and then at the Hôtel des Diplomates.
And she still had her dream. A hundred, two hundred johns had had relations with her. There were some who were regulars and wanted to pay less or else get her into sexual activities that Rwandan tradition forbade, or would show affection by bringing her little gifts that she knew were inexpensive and insignificant. Tiny bottles of alcohol and sets of toiletries given away on airplanes, old magazines (she couldn’t read, or barely anyhow). The most generous went so far as to offer a few cheap bits of jewellery from the Nairobi airport duty-free shop. But all her sexual prowess, her beauty, her total availability and her vigour (she was a good lay, she wanted no doubt about that) were not enough for them. They were not content with her body, which she gave without reserve (except for tradition’s requirement), and all her caresses, which she’d learned to refine and adapt to the various tastes of Whites—no, besides all this, and for the same price, she had to admire and love them, transform johns into heroes, into supermen, and most of all into men amorously desired. And they would tell her a girl as intelligent as she was (funny, they never said “woman,” though she was nearly thirty), a girl as beautiful as she was, could remake her life with a little help. Bernadette, who was sterile, dreamed of owning a children’s clothing shop and had asked one of her first rich johns to lend her a small sum of money. The rotund and paunchy German almost died laughing his deep, coarse laugh. He hadn’t been talking about that kind of help, which she would squander in any event, knowing nothing about business, but a recommendation or sponsorship for the kind of employment she was capable of, such as cleaner at the embassy, or maid in a family of aid workers, and later, perhaps, a recommendation for a visa. Others, even more impatient to take her love as a trophy, went further still with the rape of her soul. After the trinkets might come a little cotton dress worth less than the price of the fuck, and only occasionally flowers worth half the price of the dress but demonstrating depth of feeling and perhaps even commitment. She would find herself someone, even if he was ugly, bald and adipose with one foot in the grave, who would get her out of here and take her to Belgium or Australia, Canada or Italy. Anywhere.
To that nice, shy French accountant who in just a few days had progressed from nylon stockings to a bouquet of irises, from talk about her intelligence to the new life she could make for herself with his help if he could swing it, and finally how happy it would make him to spend a lot of time with her, to this nice gentleman—who set the alarm so he’d be back in his room by four o’clock—she had suggested going to spend the weekend in Kagera Park to see the giraffes and lions and zebras roaming free. The man’s skinny limbs had stiffened, and his complacent smile, the smile of a male who’s just ejaculated, became an accountant’s or diplomat’s smile held at the corners with paper clips.
“I could never explain to the embassy my being away.”
The hungriest for love, she continued, was a Lebanese businessman who controlled several interests in the Ruhengeri district and who came to Kigali on business every Monday. In four Mondays he went straight from caresses to sudden declarations of love. Not a single gift, not a single flower, nothing. But he could not, he realized, live without her. He hadn’t made love to his wife for as long as he’d known Bernadette. And Bernadette was fond of him, enough anyway to marry twice, as she put it. He made her laugh all the time and caressed her the way she imagined it was done in Europe, where Lebanon was located. He spent the night with her, encircling her with his arms, engulfing her with his huge, hairy torso and—ah, supreme proof of devotion—having Tuesday morning breakfast with her in public on the main terrace, being bold and open enough to touch her hand between two mouthfuls of bacon. This was a real lover.
On the fifth Monday morning, she left Kigali with him. At first she would be a nursemaid looking after the children and would have her own room in the main house. They mustn’t rush things. His wife was the official owner of a large share in his companies, but in a few months, with his lawyers, he would manage to change the situation. She understood and squeezed his hand. He smiled at her. When they came to the crossroads at Base, the three great volcanoes, Muhabura dominating, appeared on the horizon, each with its coronet of milk-white clouds turned rosy by the sun. At last she’d be able to visit the National Volcano Park, to see and almost touch the famous gorillas that she knew only from photographs. The Lebanese businessman’s Mercedes cruised as if on a carpet along the highway financed by the Chinese so that the president might return in all comfort to his native region. Bernadette smiled. This was what happiness must be.
Unfortunately, a cousin of the Lebanese man was occupying her room. She slept in a former pigsty converted to a dormitory for domestics. Her lover’s wife, an enormous, faded woman whose oily skin was perpetually stained by the kohl carried down from her watery eyes, terrorized her relentlessly. Selim, after a week, forgot about the tender words. He no longer caressed her and took just a few minutes to have her wherever he came across her in the house or garden, without even a kiss or a fondle for her breasts. He had asked her never to wear panties so as not to delay things in case his wife might be nearby. When Mourad, his twenty-year-old son, woke her to say his father wanted to speak to her, she got up without a word. On the muddy path leading to the garden, the boy, who was walking behind her, pushed her into the red clay.
“My father doesn’t want you any more. He’s given you to me.” He lay on her and held her hard by the wrists. “If you fight me, I’ll kill you. So many bodies are found along the roads first thing in the morning that nobody’ll ask any questions, you dirty whore!”
He was right and she didn’t want to be hurt. Slowly, she spread her legs and tried to turn over. This wouldn’t be her first rape. A hand shoved her head into the mud, which filled her mouth when she opened it wide to scream in pain. A hard penis pierced her in that dirty, secret, forbidden place. It was as if a single knife thrust had severed her muscles. This penis was raping the last part of her body that belonged to her. Dirty perhaps, impure, forbidden as tradition maintained, but intact. One day, a man she loved might perhaps have asked her to yield this secret place to him, and she would have done it with joy. Now she no longer had anything pure to offer.
At long last, with no tears left to shed, she fell asleep in a ditch beside the Chinese highway. In the morning she walked several hundred metres, but the pain was paralyzing. She sat on a big stone and waited to die, for she would not stir from that stone unless someone came and took her from it. A truck stopped and a young man gestured to her to get in. He was wearing the militia cap and was bouncing on his seat to a Michael jackson cassette.
“You’re going back to Kigali at the right time,” he said. “In time for the great day. I’ve got a truck full of tools for the work, for the job to be done. In a few weeks the Tutsis won’t be stopping us from living any more.”
The truck driver’s hand came to rest on her thigh. Again she knew she was trapped, that it would do no good to resist. If she said no he would beat her, or worse, leave her by the road and another truck driver would come along, or a soldier.
“D’you want me by the front or the back door?”
He braked so hard the truck skidded several metres before coming to a stop almost against the mountain.
“You’re a White’s whore, talking like that. You’re not going to give me Whites’ sicknesses in your ass, like AIDS and all the rest. I’m a Rwandan, a real one. We don’t do things like that.”
Then he climbed on top of her, cigarette butt between his lips. It only lasted a few short minutes. Bernadette closed her eyes, relieved not to have suffered more, and slept all the way to Kigali.
Since she’d been back at the hotel, all the girls were jealous of her. She was beautiful, of course, with her great firm breasts and thighs as sturdy and round as pillars. The first night, an Italian from the World Bank, discouraged by the effects of politics on his organization, was dancing the tarantella in the fourth-floor bar. He was singing horribly off-key, with a bottle of whisky in his hand. He tripped and crashed laughing to the floor at the feet of Bernadette, who was still feeling desolate.
“What’s your act? ” demanded the laughing Italian.
Bernadette ran her hand through her hair and replied that her act was anything men wanted, stressing, “Anything the other girls here don’t want to do.”
It was true. Very soon a large segment of the White city knew it and from then on Bernadette had only steady Johns. They came alone or in pairs. Others brought their wives. These johns respected her. They paid without argument. They didn’t suggest she change her life—on the contrary. They praised her competence and generosity. Now that she no longer belonged to herself, she was able to give herself to all, men and women both. She no longer even dreamed of getting away and accumulated money without knowing exactly what she would do with it. And if by mischance a john talked to her of love, she would say:
“For that, it will cost you double.”
Élise, who was in the habit of interrupting conversations, had listened to Bernadette without a word. She was holding an envelope bearing Bernadette’s name and a five-digit number. Bernadette had not kept her appointment at the Detection Centre and Élise had been hunting all over for her since she had gone to Ruhengeri. Now Élise held out the envelope, whose contents she did not know. Bernadette froze. What did the number mean, she wondered. Nothing, it didn’t mean anything. And no, Élise didn’t know the result of her test. Bernadette looked a long time at the envelope before speaking again.
“Let’s say I’ve got AIDS. I’ll have to make my johns put on condoms, won’t I? Let’s say they all put on condoms, I’ll get sick soon anyway, won’t I? And I’ll start getting thin, like you’ve told me. I’ll have diarrhea and fever, then maybe TB and sores in my mouth. Well, the TB I can take care of, the medicines are free. The sores too, with Nizoral that’ll cost me fifteen johns’ worth. But even then I won’t be cured. The sores will be back and the fever too, and my breasts will start to droop like wilting leaves. I’m right, Élise, aren’t I? And there are medicines to control the sickness that the rich people in your country can afford. You’ve told me about them. So I need two or three thousand johns a year to buy me your medicines. Can you imagine two or three thousand sicknesses a year to cure only one? Not to cure, just to take longer to die, die with dignity, as you say. But dying’s dying. You’re all here like immortal angels to hold our hands till we’re in our coffins. I don’t need you to help me die. I took the test because I was in love, Élise. A dream. A man and children. In my dream the woman couldn’t have the sickness. A dream, Élise, to leave, just leave. For anywhere, your icy cold, your snow that blocks the streets, the poor district of Brussels or the sidewalks of Paris. Anywhere except here. Élise, Valcourt, you’re nice but useless. I don’t want to know what the envelope says. HIV positive, I’ll die. HIV negative, I’ll die. You watch us, you take notes, you write reports, you write articles. While we die with you watching us all the time, you live, you thrive. I like you both, but don’t you get a feeling, sometimes, that you’re living off our death?”
Bernadette tore the envelope into tiny pieces and scattered them to the wind, then spat on the ground. She went and took her place at the big table at the far end of the pool bar.
Night fell as always here, by surprise, an enfolding wave of darkness that melted over the red earth. And in perfect synchrony, the buzzards and ravens hushed their clamour, the johns began to whisper, the girls prepared themselves. Upstairs on the fourth floor, the dining room was filling with experts and wise consultants, meticulous, exemplary recorders of all woes and all impoverishments.
Zozo had set up a table under the fig tree with a starched white tablecloth from the dining room. “Émérita would have liked that,” he said, letting a big tear roll down his full-moon face. Tomato salad, fillets of tilapia in lemon butter, overripe Camembert, overpriced and slightly corked Côtes du Rhône. Émérita, thought Valcourt, to sustain her corpulence would rather have had steak and french fries, or some chicken legs. Élise, who was normally a real chatterbox, had not yet said a word. Valcourt and Gentille were half-heartedly talking about preparations for their wedding.
“Bernadette’s right,” said Élise, poking her tilapia fillet with a restless fork. “We save one but watch ten more die. When I arrived here three years ago, only ten per cent of the tests were positive. But even if Bernadette’s right, even if we’re just powerless voyeurs, even if we’re kind of living off their deaths as she says, she hasn’t convinced me I should leave. I’m going to stay, I’m going to carry on. With my little lectures and my condoms, maybe I’ll persuade only one per cent, but that one per cent won’t die. That’s enough for me. And then hope, goddammit, what about hope! Christ, that counts!”
