A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (3 page)

And now Canada’s presence is complete: the commander of the UN troops has just arrived. The major general is a miracle of mimesis, a perfect incarnation of his country and his employer too, rather the way masters who adore their dogs end up looking and behaving like them. Unassuming, apprehensive, ineloquent and naive, like Canada. Meticulous, legalistic, a civil servant and exemplary bureaucrat, as virtuous as “le Grand Machin” itself (as General de Gaulle was pleased to call the United Nations). What he knows of the world is airports, the grand hotels of Brussels, Geneva and New York, and strategic studies centres. Of war, he knows what he has seen on CNN, read in a few books and experienced through military exercises he has directed, and invasions of several countries he has conducted on paper. About Africa finally, he knows its colour and several of its smells to which he has still not become accustomed, although he dexterously wields canisters of “Quebec spruce” deodorant and douses himself with Brut, an eau de cologne highly prized by the military and the police. Yet behind his salesman’s moustache and sad eyes, the major general is an honest man and a good Catholic. He is deeply touched by the obvious piety of the dictator and his family and the frequent company they keep with bishops. These are upright people. Their few excesses ought to be ascribed to a certain African atavism rather than the insatiable venality and bloodthirsty cruelty they are so maliciously accused of by all those ambitious Tutsis who pretend to be playing by the rules of democracy but in fact aspire only to set up a new dictatorship. This was explained to the major general at length by the archbishop of Kabgaye one morning after the solemn high mass which Canada’s UN commander had attended with his new personal secretary, a nice young man named Firmin who had studied in Quebec and who enjoyed the valuable advantage of being a nephew of the dictator. On the way back, Firmin confirmed what the archbishop had said, forgetting to add that the rotund representative of His Polish Holiness was personal confessor to the dictator’s family, the Habyarimanas, as well as a member of the executive committee of what had been the only political party before the international community imposed the Arusha peace accord, and with it an official opposition.
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A man of duty, the major general is an unprejudiced man, and he is not displeased about being in central Africa. He could have been sent to Somalia or Bosnia. Here there’s no peace but at least there’s no war, for all the sporadic fighting on the Ugandan border. It’s almost as restful as a posting to Cyprus. In fact, he views this mission as eighteen months of well-deserved rest, far away from all the UN paperwork and bootlicking. In New York they ordered him to interpret his mandate as narrowly as possible. He has been given minimal military resources, in case he should be tempted to show too much initiative. On account of which the major general has already forgotten—or almost—that the United Nations forces are expected not only to ensure respect of the peace accord but also maintain order in the capital.

A grenade explodes. Just far enough from the pool for it to be somewhere else. Only the major general is startled. He is not yet used to this peace that kills on a daily basis. He has spilled a little soup on his uniform and looks anxiously around him. No one has noticed his nervousness. Reassured, though sweating profusely, he dips his spoon back into his black bean soup.

Twelve French vultures dive into the pool all at once; three women have just slipped into the water. Sometimes vultures turn into crocodiles.

Valcourt closes his notebook. The vaguely surrealistic play being acted out at the pool day after day ceased to interest him some time ago. The plot is heavy-handed and the characters behave as predictably as in a TV soap opera. He wonders if he hasn’t put in enough time here in Kigali. He wanted to live somewhere else; he’s done it. He feels this evening as though he’s swimming round and round in an aquarium.

He orders another beer from Gentille whose head is still bowed, though the Rwandan from Paris is no longer there.

Chapter Two

One tenth of April, when Montreal had begun to celebrate spring but was still buried under forty-five centimetres of snow, all Bernard Valcourt knew of Rwanda was where it was on the map and the fact that two ethnic groups, the Hutus, the majority by far, and the Tutsis, about fifteen per cent of the population, were locked in an undeclared civil war. He was drinking in the bar of a hotel after attending a conference on development and democracy in Africa. The snow might stop after a few beers and he could walk home. And then, there was nothing to go home for. Since his daughter had left, the way all daughters do when they fall in love, and since Pif, his cat, so named because he was the brother of Paf, had died like his sister of simple, stupid old age, loneliness was all his apartment had to offer him. A few nice women had unhooked their bras, one or another had slept over and had breakfast, but none had passed the morning test. Since his wife died five years ago, he had known only one great passion—and it was so mad, so all-consuming and magnificent that he hadn’t known how to handle it. Passion feeds on abandon. He had not yet reached that state of total freedom that obliterates fear of the unknown and allows one to soar. As for his work as a Radio-Canada producer, it was looking increasingly like a monotonous chore, a tedious burden.

A tall, good-looking man with a beard, who had babbled some platitudes about the media in Africa, came over and introduced himself.

“Claude Saint-Laurent, director of democratic development for the Canadian International Development Agency. May I sit down?”

And he ordered two beers. He explained that Canada, a country of small importance in the concert of nations, nevertheless exerted an influence in certain regions of the world that could determine their future and above all their access to democracy. This was the case with Rwanda. With other partners, the Canadian government had agreed to finance the establishment of a television station in Rwanda. Its primary mission would be educational, particularly in community health and AIDS.

“We begin with hygienic necessities, with programs on prevention, on dietary matters, then the information gets into circulation, and information is the beginning of democracy and tolerance.”

Bullshit, thought Valcourt.

“Would you be interested in being co-director of this television station?”

Valcourt said yes without thinking it over even two seconds.

He gave his furniture to the St. Vincent de Paul Society and his pictures to his daughter, sold his apartment and all but two of his books, keeping only Camus’
Essais
and the
Oeuvres complètes
of Paul Éluard, the Pléiade edition. Two months later he was drinking a Primus beside the pool in the middle of Kigali.

He had been living two years now in this heterogeneous, excessive city. He no longer had much faith in the television station project. The government kept finding reasons for putting off its launch. When closed-circuit programs were shown there was always the same complaint: “There’s not enough stress on the government’s role.” When the government was satisfied with the propaganda inserts, it was the donor countries, Canada, Switzerland and Germany, that balked. Valcourt and the station had come to a dead end. But one thing had impassioned Valcourt. He had discovered with horror that over a third of Kigali’s adults were HIV positive. The government was denying its own statistics. Those stricken with AIDS were living in infamy, shame, concealment and delusion. Only a few people were trying to face up to the disaster and, paradoxically, they were parish priests and nuns. Devout, virginal nuns from Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec City and the Beauce were gathering in prostitutes and teaching them about the virtues of condoms. Parish priests, and lay brothers too, had the pockets of their cassocks bulging with plastic packages, which they handed out beneath the photograph of the Pope watching protectively from the walls of their offices. In his spare time on weekends and holidays, when he could quietly bring out a camera, Valcourt was making a documentary film on AIDS and these heroic, pious transgressors.

From the moment of his arrival in Kigali he had been deeply moved by the landscape, the hills sculpted by thousands of gardens, the mists caressing the valley floors, and by the challenge he was being handed. At last he was going to be useful, was going to change the course of things. My real life is beginning, he said to himself.

But Gentille’s life? When does that really begin?

The story of Gentille—who still has her head bowed and is drying her tears, watched inquisitively and lustfully by the barman—has two beginnings.

The first was in a time when her country was called Ruanda-Urundi. Germans had settled there, but a war that no one in her country had heard of changed the Germans into Belgians. Kawa, Gentille’s great-great-grandfather, had been told that these soldiers, these civil servants, these teachers and these priests gowned all in white were coming to the land of a thousand hills to make it a protectorate. An important league, which no one had heard of either, a league of kings, ministers and other powerful people, had asked the Belgians to protect Ruanda-Urundi. They had brought with them the Great Protector, a mysterious and invisible god divided into three, one of which was a son. To shelter their god, the Great White Robes had built huge houses of red brick and smaller ones for themselves, and other houses too where people could learn to read and also learn about the life of the son of the Great Protector. Kawa, who was Hutu and wished to obtain a position for his eldest son at the court of the Tutsi king, enrolled his son at the school but would not have him baptized because the king, the mwami Musinga, was resisting the pressure from the Great White Robes. However, the Belgians did not want a mwami who believed in Imana the creator and in Lyangombe, and who practised
kuragura,
or divination and ancestor worship. Monseigneur Classe, the head of the Great White Robes, arranged for the son of the mwami, Mutara III, to become king on condition that he abandon his old beliefs. Mutara III was baptized on a Sunday in 1931. On Monday Kawa went to the school with his son and asked the priest to baptize him Célestin, which was the name of the Belgian burgomaster of his commune. This was how Célestin, several days before his death, had recounted the story of his conversion to his own son, Gentille’s grandfather.

Once enrolled at the university in Butare, Célestin began to read all that the Great White Robes had written. These people must truly have been communicating with God, for in their books one could discover the story of all humanity. He learned of course that the Earth was round. He was not surprised. If the Sun and Moon are round, why would the Earth be flat or square? Célestin was intelligent and was soon making use of what he learned. From being with them as much as from reading their books, he quickly understood that the Belgians considered themselves superior. He was not upset by this discovery. From the beginning of time, individuals, clans, tribes had paraded their superiority, proclaimed it on the hills and in the valleys. Some used force and others used trade to assert themselves, but always, each in his own way and each on his own hill, the Hutu and the Tutsi had stayed polite but distant, garnering a little of each other’s wisdom and carrying on their business with respect for one another.

Célestin was Hutu, and only the haste of his father to have him baptized had opened the doors of the university to him—this conversion plus the two cows that Kawa, a prosperous farmer, had promised to give the mission every year in thanks for its generosity. Célestin asked his father if his own generous offer had been made first. No, his father replied slowly after reflecting several minutes, the two generosities were born simultaneously.

This was how Célestin received his daily lesson in concealment, a kind of half-lie practised by men of the hills since life began. He who lives on a hill distrusts strangers. He lives in isolation and knows neither friend nor enemy. So he gives himself time to understand and, in the meantime, he pretends. Often he takes a whole lifetime and only says what he thinks on his deathbed. In this country this is sometimes how, after years of keeping company, of cheerful conversation, gifts and being kowtowed to, a White can learn that he has never been liked. Whites say that Ruanda-Urundi is the kingdom of liars and hypocrites. They do not understand the first thing about the permanent insecurity of the men of the hills. The Whites have guns. The Blacks have secret thoughts.

Kawa wanted Célestin to know another life than life on the hill. He wanted him to be an “intellectual.” This is what someone is still called today who can read and pile up paper instead of milking a cow or goat. He would go and live in Astrida,
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the capital, and become rich trading with the colonials. A legitimate plan, which did honour to a loving father, but one whose full complexity was still beyond his grasp. It was Célestin, an insatiable reader, who made it possible for his father to get an inkling of the difficulties that lay ahead in his advance toward prosperity and social prominence.

Célestin had brought home a big book written by a Belgian doctor who was a specialist in indigenous cultures. In his country he was considered a great Africanist. The Belgian king, queen, ministers, high and low civil servants, all learned everything they knew of the mysterious continent from this book. There was no greater authority on Rwanda than this doctor. He knew the history of all the kingdoms of Africa and the characteristics of each of its peoples. He described each scientifically, applying the leading theories of morphology and anthropology, as they had recently begun to do in Europe, particularly in Germany. Célestin’s teacher, Father Athanase, had explained all this to him when placing the precious volume in his hands. If Célestin wanted to become an intellectual, he said, it was time for him to discover which were the pure races so he could model his attitude and behaviour on them. This would do much for his social advancement.