A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (7 page)

When the first fevers had taken him, he had thought of malaria. The first diarrhea attacks had not surprised him. Sick goat’s meat or polluted water. The ten kilos he lost in a few weeks were certainly food poisoning, that rotten goat he had eaten at Lando’s, or maybe the grilled tilapias at the Cosmos that had left an aftertaste. The sores in his mouth hadn’t surprised him either, any more than the tuberculosis that floored him so suddenly. He took a room in the intellectuals’ building at the Kigali Hospital Centre so as not to have to share a bed with someone who had diphtheria or pustulant scabies. The sickness appeared to him along with the face of a Belgian doctor, the head of internal medicine, who knew well that it was penetrating everywhere, multiplying faster than rabbits, and that this was giving him a long head start on his Western colleagues. All these patients, this constantly replenished horde of ignorant people at his disposal, and the sickness progressing at lightning speed but with its own characteristics here—all of it could lead to an important discovery, and even wealth. For example, the almost total absence of Kaposi’s sarcoma in Blacks, and the frizzy hair becoming straight and supple like blades of grass or the hair of Whites. AIDS might hold the secret of a miracle cosmetic product that would make its inventor a billionaire in Belgian francs. Think of all those African women dreaming of having hair like Claudia Schiffer’s! The Belgian doctor, who had never been sick, dreamed of his Mercedes while listening to Méthode describe his latest health problems. He didn’t need to listen, not really. He had already seen enough, from the colour of his eyes, from his thinness, from the sores scattered around the insides of his cheeks because Méthode had only been able to afford one week’s treatment with Nizoral. And then that tuberculosis. “A classic symptom,” the textbooks said. AIDS 101.

“Perhaps you should have the Test.”

The Test. There was only one test they were talking about when the tone of voice put a capital on the word. They did the others without telling you and gave you the results if ever you screwed up the courage to ask a question of a KHC doctor. But
the
Test was not done at the KHC; Québécois aid workers in a building near the hospital were responsible for that. And when the White doctor sent you to them, the reason was clear.

Élise understood instantly when she saw Méthode sit down painfully in her little office and say in a low voice, “I’ve come for the Test.”

Two years in Rwanda; hundreds, thousands of AIDS patients. The same cautions tirelessly repeated, the words a thousand times said announcing the end, the encouragements whose effectiveness she doubted, this permanent companionship with the death of people she learned to love day by day as they confided in her— nothing undermined her determination.

Élise was a specialist in life which she devoured with gusto in order to forget that her routine contact was death. She offered her plump but firm little body to anyone who would remind her of life triumphant. She had loved a South American terrorist, fought for abortion on demand in the 1970s in Quebec, and was convinced that in this far-o f country, in this festering hell, she could make a difference. Back home, everything was so easy. Here, everything had to be started from scratch. With Méthode, this meant finding the words, the phrases, the smiles that would set him comfortably and with dignity on the short path leading to the end. Élise and Méthode had thus become friends, confidants and almost lovers, as ordained by lymphocytes and mycoses, to the tempo of tuberculosis and attacks of diarrhea. Méthode’s disintegration drew them together. Never had a patient moved her this much. Méthode did not know it. He took Élise’s attentions as the bounden duty of the White aid worker come to help the negroes, though he was fond of his nurse, rather as one loves a sister. Until he understood that Élise was ready to commit a crime so that he could die when he was ready, when he had had enough of turning into a skeleton, an imitation mummy.

She had said to him, “When you’re fed up with being in pain, tell me. You’ll fly away like a little bird. Softly.”

Élise was there. Heavy-hearted but smiling. With her vials of morphine, her syringes, and a huge glass of whisky in her hand. Méthode would do what he had promised and then leave, borne on the chemical wings she would give him. Méthode, who so loved life, was happy to be able to die this way. He whispered to Raphaël, “Even rich people in the United States don’t have beautiful deaths like this.” And to Valcourt he said, “I’m going to do you a good film that’ll make you rich.” And he dozed off again while Agathe was wondering whether, before going to paradise, he wouldn’t like a last knowing, expert manipulation of that damned member that was now taking him to the grave because it had dipped here, there and everywhere unprotected. Dying without one last orgasm, she said to one of her hairdressers, is like dying alone and loveless. The hairdresser agreed and volunteered to help this young man, who once had driven all the young girls of Kigali wild, get it up. However, she would wear gloves to present her last sexual respects. She was HIV positive and knew it, but she did not want to become twice positive.

She sat down beside the thin body, next to Méthode’s mother, who was still holding her son’s hand. With her gloved hand she groped under the sheet and found a small penis, all shrivelled up, and began to caress it with skill she had never before used, professional hooker that she was, experienced as she believed herself to be. With a delicacy and unhurried tenderness that was a blend of respect and manual adoration.

“Give him a nice big one before he leaves for heaven, my girl,” said his mother. But Mathilde knew that a hand was not going to be enough. She would have to do what she had always refused to do for insistent European johns; heaven was not within reach of a hand but of a mouth.

The friends put down their glasses, Agathe quickly swallowed her canapé. All gathered religiously around the bed, holding their breath and admiring. It was the mother who drew back the sheet and untied the belt of the bathrobe. It was the mother who placed her hand on Mathilde’s head, who pushed it gently between the two bones passing as legs and said, “Suck it, suck it, so a last drop of life can come out of him.” And Mathilde took the inert member in her wide mouth and worked it with her tongue and lips. Slowly, the way clay is thrown on a potter’s wheel, her patient sucking restored a semblance of shape to the penis of the living dead man. Méthode murmured, “I have no penis left, I have no sperm left. Your tongue is like a serpent bewitching me, but my tongue is still alive, let me drink you.” Without a word, Mathilde undressed, and supported by his mother and Raphaël, applied her crotch to Méthode’s mouth. Exhausted, sated, satisfied, fulfilled, trembling, she collapsed on Méthode, who uttered a loud cry of pain.

The party was over. Élise stayed to administer the death, but most of all to love Méthode all the way to the last second. Méthode’s mother left for her hill. She did not want to see her son die and hoped he would fly away with his mind at peace, without having to bear the additional pain of a final separation.

Méthode was sleeping. Valcourt set up the camera facing the bed in a position that would film the dying man from above. When he woke, the camera would make a single, slow panning movement. First it would remain fixed on the long-limbed body for five seconds, then for another five seconds would slowly pan up to the face, close in for a further five seconds, slowly, very slowly as in a funeral march, and stop. All that would then be seen would be a close-up of the diminished face and the immensity of those eyes, which would speak more eloquently even than the mouth.

Chapter Four

Gentille came five minutes before starting work at six in the morning. She did not knock. She came in and went to Valcourt who was sitting on the bed beside Méthode’s corpse.

“My condolences,” she said, holding out her hand to him.

“Thank you. You’re not too tired?”

“No, I’m okay. You know, I think I may be related to Méthode. My parents and his come from the same hill. He’s Tutsi and I’m Hutu, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

Valcourt wasn’t really listening, he was lost in her breasts, which were exactly at eye level. He wanted to say, Gentille, I love you. He wanted to put out his hand, he wanted to stand up and take her in his arms. He did none of these things. She left without another word.

With a yardstick Zozo had brought, he measured Méthode and left for the coffin market, which shared space with the iron market beside a barracks. The coffin makers could no longer keep up with the demand. They had been making beds, tables and chairs until very recently, but the death market, spurred by grenades, guns and AIDS, was growing exponentially. In Kigali, a coffin is a wooden box made of a few badly squared boards, sometimes decorated with a crucifix in a burst of extravagance or folly brought on by the pain of bereavement. Valcourt chose the wood carefully: fine boards that were pale in colour and free of knots. He gave the dimensions and asked that the box be delivered to his room. Next he went to see a sculptor friend who sold multicoloured giraffes and elephants to the two or three tourists a week who still came to Rwanda to see the gorillas and volcanoes.

“Make me a disco cross for Kigali’s best DJ.”

There were around a hundred people in the hotel conference hall. In the aisle separating the two sections of straight chairs was the wooden box, not even varnished. Some relatives and close friends had come, but also colleagues from work at the People’s Bank and the minister responsible for the financial institution, flanked by two young soldiers nonchalantly carrying their Uzi automatic rifles, courtesy of Israel via France and Zaïre. All Agathe’s girls were present, as were Lando and his Québécoise wife, and several men who remained discreetly at the back of the room and were quickly associated with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the clandestine army of the Tutsis. For Méthode, it was rumoured around the pool, had been a member of the undercover army, like Raphaël.

On the left behind the minister sat the few officials and Hutus close to power who felt obliged to attend this bizarre funeral. On the right were all the Tutsis, the Hutu friends of the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party, and all the women Méthode had laid.

A television set occupied a place of honour over the coffin. The emaciated face appeared with huge burning coals for eyes. The lips barely moved. It was the eyes that spoke.

“My name is Méthode. I work at the People’s Bank. Weekends I’m disc jockey at Lando’s discotheque. My favourite music is country and love songs. I’m Tutsi, you know that, but above all I’m Rwandan. I’m going to die in a few hours, I’m going to die of AIDS, a sickness the government says didn’t exist a few years ago, when it was already destroying my blood. I still don’t understand much about how the sickness works, but we’ll say it’s like a country that catches all the defects of its sickest people, and each of these defects turns into a sickness that attacks a different part of the body or the country. That’s pretty well what I’ve learned about it, it’s a kind of madness in the human body, which succumbs piece by piece to all its weaknesses.

“To those who love me, I want to say that I didn’t die in pain. A friend kissed me and told me I would wake up in heaven. I died in my sleep. I felt nothing. In fact, it’s as if I didn’t know I was dead. But I know that if we carry on this way, a great many of you will suffer frightful pain and die appalling deaths.

“But I want to talk some more about the sickness. We refuse to talk about it, and staying silent kills. We know that a condom protects, but we big strong black men go through life as though we’re immortal. My friend Élise calls that magic thinking. We tell ourselves the sickness won’t happen to us and we fuck and fuck like blind men, with our cocks naked in the belly of the sickness. I’m telling you, and this is why I want to talk to you before I die, that millions of us are going to die. Of AIDS, of course, of malaria too, but most of all from a worse sickness for which there’s no condom or vaccine. This sickness is hate. In this country there are people who sow hate the way ignorant men sow death with their sperm in the bellies of women, who carry it away to other men, and to the children they conceive … Could I have a little water?”

A hand holding a glass of water appears in the picture. Méthode drinks and chokes. He takes some more, more slowly.

“I’m dying of AIDS, but I’m dying by accident. I didn’t choose, it was a mistake. I thought it was a White’s or homosexual’s or monkey’s or druggie’s sickness. I was born a Tutsi, it’s written on my identity card, but I’m a Tutsi by accident. I didn’t choose, that was a mistake too. My great-grandfather learned from the Whites that the Tutsis were superior to the Hutus. He was Hutu. He did everything possible so his children and grandchildren would become Tutsis. So here I am, a Hutu-Tutsi and victim of AIDS, possessor of all the sicknesses that are going to destroy us. Look at me, I’m your mirror, your double who’s rotting from inside. I’m dying a bit earlier than you, that’s all.”

The minister stood up and shouted, “It’s a disgrace!” He stormed out. The effect was to wake his two body-guards, who had fallen asleep. The dignitaries, the Hutus and the two representatives of the Swiss embassy, which was subsidizing the People’s Bank, followed.

“I’m dying happy because I’ve spoken at last. Goodbye and may the Lord bless you.”

Standing at the back of the wide, cold, ugly hall, Gentille was crying. When Valcourt came to see her she said, “Méthode’s right. Promise me you’ll take me with you when you leave, I don’t want to die.”

Valcourt put his trembling hand on her cheek. “I promise.”

His world flipped. Uttering two words had brought him back to life. He had come here to live at a leisurely pace, with no goal, ambition or passion. All he had wanted was to go to the end of his own path without deceit, but at the same time without getting involved or taking sides in anything. One day he had written, “We are inevitably prisoners of the words we speak.” Oscillating between anxiety and happiness, he set off with the gang to get drunk at Lando’s, prisoner of the last words he had spoken.