“Come, I want you to meet Cyprien.”
Cyprien sold tobacco leaves, which he displayed on a little mat opposite the tomatoes which were vastly more popular than his tobacco, for tobacco was more and more a luxury product. He did not hold it against the tomatoes and particularly not against the tomato vendors, whom he cruised constantly though he was married and the father of three children. His ambition was to have fucked them all before dying and he was already not far from having succeeded. The former truck driver couldn’t set eyes on a woman without wanting to have her. Cyprien had AIDS but hardly anyone knew it, not even his wife, so that his last two children were also HIV positive. He had got his place at the market thanks to Father Louis, who financed a program of small loans that enabled certain AIDS patients to carry on a business. Cyprien was happy. His serenity and detachment in the face of imminent death had fascinated Valcourt. But when Valcourt began talking to him about it, bombarding him with questions as only journalists and betrayed wives can do, Cyprien could not understand his astonishment and curiosity. One day, having run out of answers that Valcourt kept finding too simplistic or attributed to the traditional reserve of Rwandans, he said:
“But, Monsieur Valcourt, don’t people die in your country? ”
Cyprien was going to die the same way he came to the Kigali market to sell his tobacco. The end meant no more to him than the beginning or the middle. Here, Valcourt was beginning to understand, dying was simply one of the things you did one day.
“Monsieur Valcourt, I’m glad to see you. We’re going to make the film soon?”
Cyprien was one of some fifty people, most of them HIV positive, with whom Valcourt had become friends, close friends in some cases, while doing research for the film on AIDS he was losing hope of ever finishing. He had approached them and questioned them with such patience and respect that these cautious, even secretive people now confided in him with a familiarity and candour that made his heart glow. Explaining why he had conceived a child with his wife despite his illness, Cyprien had told him:
“Monsieur Valcourt, it was an accident. That day I’d sold all my tobacco in an hour. I was so happy I went and drank beer at the Cosmos. And there was this girl I’d wanted for such a long time. I had her with a condom the father gave me. Then I went home a bit drunk. But I still wanted some more. That girl wasn’t very good and my wife’s very, very good. I didn’t have another condom but I wanted it so much and my wife too. God won’t punish me because my wife and I wanted some pleasure. You see, it was an accident.”
Valcourt repeated for the tenth time that the film project was making headway.
“Will you take me home, Monsieur Valcourt? Business isn’t good today, and most of all the customers aren’t good quality. Look behind you.”
Ten metres away, four young militiamen wearing the cap of the president’s party were twirling their machetes. The market’s cheerful, noisy anarchy had ceased, the way the birds in a forest fall silent when a predator creeps near.
Georgina, Cyprien’s wife, had made tea but they were drinking warm Primus. Valcourt watched the three children intently as they played on the small, well-trodden patch of earth that served as both garden and play-ground. There were a few tomato plants and some beans struggling to grow in the shade of the little hut of reddish mud. The children were like any others. They were making up games with a tin can, kicking it one moment then holding it to their ears like an empty shell and hearing sounds that made them laugh hysterically. Valcourt was not seeing children, he was seeing dead bodies on reprieve. Hardly aware of what he was doing, he searched their faces for evidence, signs of their illness. On each visit he asked questions about their diarrhea attacks or their weight. Had they had fever recently? He was doing it again this afternoon, particularly wanting Gentille to observe, but she just laughed like the children.
“Gentille, how can you laugh so easily? ”
“Because they’re funny. Because they’re having fun. Because right now it’s hot and nice. Because you’re here. Because the beer’s tickling the insides of my cheeks and I like Cyprien and Georgina. D’you want more reasons? Because of the birds, the sea that I can’t see and have never seen, because of Canada, which maybe I’ll see one day. Because I’m alive and the children are alive and because right now things are good for us. D’you want more reasons?”
Valcourt shook his head. Gentille was right.
“Monsieur Valcourt,” Cyprien began, “I’m going to tell you what always gives you such a long, serious face. I’m going to be very straight with you because you know everything about me. You’ve got everything out of my head with your questions. You even know my sickness better than me, and you explain it to me. Yes, as you say, we’re close friends. Funny way to be close friends— you know when I put on a condom and when I don’t, and I don’t even know how old you are. But that doesn’t matter. What I want to say is, you get us thinking. We feel from your eyes what you see in your head. You see dead bodies, skeletons, and on top of that you want us to talk like we’re dying. I’ll start doing that a few seconds before I die, but until then I’m going to live and fuck and have a good time. You’re the one who talks like a dying man, like every word you say is going to be your last. You mustn’t take it wrong, but that’s what I think and I’m saying it. Monsieur Valcourt, have another Primus, have a good time with us, then go back to the hotel, eat, fuck the beautiful Gentille, and go to sleep snoring like a cat. And leave us to die peacefully alive. There, my friend, that’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time.”
Valcourt received the lesson like a boxer taking a devastating punch. He was KO’d.
But Cyprien wanted to confide something else to him. With an indication to Gentille that she should go and join Georgina and the children in the house, he spread his arms to embrace all of Kigali. To the left lay the city centre, with the hotel overlooking it from the highest hill; on the right was the Ruhengeri highway; and opposite, on the other hill, the iron market, which was shrinking to make room for coffin-makers. Slightly farther to the right was the red-toned, almost medieval mass of the prison. Then Cyprien explained. His cousin had told him that the president had set up a training camp in a college in Ruhengeri, and the brothers of the Christian colleges had not protested. Hundreds of young fanatics like those who had been playing with machetes in the marketplace were being trained there. Every day along that highway—he pointed—army trucks filled with militiamen were arriving in Kigali. They were being billeted in different neighbourhoods with party sympathizers, and at night were throwing up roadblocks and checking the identity of anyone passing. They were roaming the streets with papers, filling them with marks after asking whether the houses were Tutsi or Hutu. Sometimes, a bit drunk or stoned on hash which the soldiers doled out to them, they lopped arms or legs off a few stray Tutsis. Recently, in his own neighbourhood, someone had been setting fire to Tutsi houses. The arsonists came from elsewhere, no one knew them, but they never mistook their targets. At “the bar under the bed”
9
nestled in the spot where the road turns and climbs toward the city, Cécile, whom Cyprien liked to fondle on his way home from the market, had shown him lists left by a militiaman who had wanted to fuck but had no money. The names had come from the section head, Madame Odile, a hysterical woman who beat her children when they played with Tutsis. The list held 332 names. Almost all Tutsis. The rest were Hutu members of opposition parties. This is what Cyprien wanted to tell Valcourt. And something else too.
Another cousin, a member of the president’s party, was working as a guard at the prison.
“We’ve begun the work at the prison,” this cousin had confided to Cyprien. “It’s important work for the survival of Rwanda, which is threatened by the cockroaches. We’re eliminating them as soon as they arrive.”
But there was a lot more still to come. The militiamen were passing out machetes in the neighbourhood. Certain section heads had even been given machine guns. And there was beginning to be talk of bumping o f Whites. For example, the priests who organized co-operatives, and who took care of Tutsi refugees. No one was going to be safe, not even Valcourt.
“In the marketplace, the militiamen were shouting that all your friends were going to be cut up into little pieces and you’d never see Canada again, because you’re a friend of Lando’s. And I’m not saying what they promised to do to Gentille. Now that I haven’t said it, you know.”
“If you’re telling the truth, Cyprien, my friend, and unfortunately I believe you, they’re going to cut you up into little pieces too. You have to leave here, and you mustn’t go back to the marketplace.”
“Monsieur Valcourt, in your head, I’m already dead and gone. And you’re right. A few months more, a year maybe. Every day I carry on, I’m stealing time from God, who’s waiting for me and doesn’t hold a few accidents against me. But you don’t stop wanting to live and do things right just because you’re dying. And I’m one that does things right. A friend’s a friend. I’m staying with you to make your film. And something I haven’t told you—Cécile showed me the list because my name’s on it. She likes me. She’s the one I was with at the Cosmos, who I had my last accident with. She wanted me to get out of here too, and go somewhere near Butare because it’s safer.”
When the sun goes down over Kigali, the beauty of the world brings joy to the beholder. Great flocks of birds delicately embroider the sky. The wind is gentle and cool. The streets are transformed into lazily slipping, brightly coloured ribbons, thousands of people, like swarms of ants, leaving the city centre and slowly climbing their hills. On all sides smoke rises from cooking fires. Each column that shows against the sky speaks of a tiny house. Thousands of laughing children run about in the earthen streets, kicking burst footballs and rolling old tires. When the sun goes down over Kigali, if you’re sitting on one of the hills surrounding the city and still have the remains of a soul, you cannot do otherwise than stop talking and watch. Cyprien put his hand on Valcourt’s shoulder.
“Look. Everything’s beautiful from my house. This is why I want to die here, watching the sun put Kigali to sleep. Look, it’s like red honey running out of the sky.”
Gentille came and sat beside Valcourt. They stayed this way in silence, the three of them, until nightfall, hypnotized by the murmuring city curling up for the night in the folds of sun-painted shadows, first golden, then red, and finally brown. They felt that their lives, until now more or less shaped by their own decisions, were escaping them totally. They felt borne along by forces they could name but could not understand because they were foreign to them, had no place in their genes, or their frustrations, or their failures, because never, in their worst excesses of hatred, had they ever imagined that anyone could kill the way one hoes a garden to get rid of weeds. The hoeing, the work, had begun. Still, they were not giving up hope.
Dogs were barking as though speaking, as though warning humans: “Watch out, men are turning into dogs and worse still than dogs and worse still than hyenas or the vultures on the wind making circles in the sky above an unwary herd.”
Cyprien began speaking again. Valcourt, he said, was trying to teach him how to live while waiting to die. He wanted to teach the White that you could live only if you knew you were going to die. Here, you died because it was normal to die. Living a long time was not.
“In your country you die by accident, because life hasn’t been generous and leaves like an unfaithful wife. You think we don’t value life as much as you. So tell me, Valcourt, poor and deprived as we are, why do we take in our cousins’ orphans, and why do our old people die with all their children around them? I’m telling you in all humility, you discuss life and death like great philosophers. We just talk about people who are living and dying. You consider us primitive or ignorant. We’re just people who don’t have much, either for living or dying. We live and die in messy ways, like poor people.”
Over the Kigali prison, the breath and sweat of thousands of men cooped up one against another was raising a cupola of mist.
Cyprien knew much more than he wanted to say about the massacres brewing. He knew the caches where guns and machetes were being stockpiled, the barracks where the militia was training, the gathering places in most of the city’s neighbourhoods. He had never liked the Tutsis. He thought they were arrogant and laughed too much, but he adored their women’s slender waists that he could girdle with his two great hands, their milk-chocolate skin and their breasts as firm as juicy pomegranates. That was his downfall in the eyes of his Hutu neighbours and friends, that and his friendship with this White, who hung out only with Tutsis and talked about freedom when instructing the journalists for the television station that still wasn’t producing any television. He liked this Valcourt, who could listen for hours and hours and talk without ever preaching. But he was also a little sorry for him. Valcourt was as arid as a desert, like dead earth that rejects seed. He was being eaten away by the hopelessness of living, the malady that a flicts only those who can afford the time to think about themselves. Valcourt was dead though alive, while Cyprien was alive though dead. Cyprien had been using this equation to resolve the endless questions he kept putting to himself after their meetings. Perhaps the beautiful Gentille would administer the electric shock that would bring the White back to life and allow him to die properly. Only the living know how to die.
The staccato sounds of a volley of gunfire cascaded down the neighbouring hill, and sleeping dogs woke and resumed their tortured-beast yowlings. Cyprien walked back and forth on the small terrace, thinking about the horrors looming in his country. He did not feel like helping this country that deserved only to die, it had gorged so greedily on lies and false prophecies. He could do nothing for his family, who were already dead, condemned by AIDS. His relatives? His friends? They were already waving their brand new machetes recently arrived from China, and practising cutting up Tutsi meat after smoking a joint or drinking a few beers distributed by the section heads.