“Kill me now,” Georgina implored. “Kill me now, please.”
The policeman, furious, pulled down his pants and lay on her. He gave an initial thrust and then a lot more as if trying to ram all the way through her. Georgina expressed neither pain nor pleasure. Not a sound, just staring with eyes empty and already lifeless. The policeman got up in disgust. They executed the woman without enthusiasm, swinging their machetes from the shoulder as if to finish off a dull job. The two bodies looked like abattoir refuse, carcasses clumsily cut up by unskilled butchers. The men had had their fill of pleasure and violence. As they left the roadblock, after putting out the fires and pulling aside the two tree trunks until tomorrow, hungry stray dogs crept in and feasted on this flesh that the humans were offering them with such casual generosity.
Chapter Six
I speak from the depth of the chasm
I speak from the depth of my abyss …
We are the first cloud we two
In this absurd expanse of cruel happiness
We are the future freshness
The first night of rest
Gentille and Valcourt lay under the great fig tree that shaded both terrace and pool. The magic tree, Valcourt called it; it must have been shaped by the gods because it was a perfect sphere. He had been gazing at it since he first arrived at the hotel, appealing to it at times, as we do when we stand before a painting that makes us feel bigger than life size, or a religious picture that reduces us to our puny, real dimensions. This enormous fig tree stood four storeys tall, so that even from the dining room on the fourth floor you couldn’t see the top of it. To Valcourt it was fascinating, reassuring and exotic. In Quebec they sold tiny fig trees as decorative plants. They weren’t trees, they were small shrubs. The only reminder of African luxuriance was the dark, lustrous green of their leaves. Here, this giant tamed the wind, organized the landscape. Not a day went by when Valcourt failed to go to the tree, and sit or lie briefly under it. He loved its beauty, its smooth roundness bristling with irregular little spikes, and the vibrant colour of its leaves, which the sun’s bright rays and the moon’s soft caresses alike would explode into a thousand fireflies. During the great rains that washed all the lands of the country, he would settle himself under this gigantic living umbrella. Not a drop would reach him. At such moments, he had feelings of immortality. This tree was a friend, a protector and a refuge. When he was drunk, he even found himself talking to it and was surprised not to hear it answer.
When she came into the room, Gentille had said, “Make me come again with words.” Valcourt had picked up his copy of Paul Éluard’s
Oeuvres complètes
and led her under the fig tree. She had lain on the warm grass like a woman waiting to be possessed. Though he had never desired a woman so much, Valcourt hung back. He was still afraid of becoming immersed in the necessity of living. He was making one last stand. Reading would be easier than talking, so that is what he would do.
He read in a gentle, serious voice, unpretentiously but with feeling. He did not really differentiate the lines. He heard the sounds they made as his brain grouped the letters that formed the words that created the sentences. He was speaking to Gentille and living what he was saying more than reciting.
At first the young woman was more charmed by the voice of the man she loved than by the words. At school she had been used to reading Lamartine, Hugo and Musset to a rhythm that made a poem more like a cradle song or ballad, and she felt jostled by this cascade of images and the complicated allegories. But when she heard, “I speak from the depth of the chasm,” she asked Valcourt to repeat it, then took his hand.
“It’s you, it’s me, here. We’re speaking from the depth of the chasm.” And to herself she repeated, “‘I am not afraid, all doors are open,’” for this was how she had been coping these past few days. And Valcourt had to repeat three times, “‘this absurd expanse of cruel happiness.’” Gentille was discovering that poetry speaks about life at its worst and its most magnificent. This man, this Paul Éluard, whose name she had never even heard before, was becoming a trusted friend, a kind of guardian angel. He had such a way with all the words of love and all the words of death. And she was at home with these words.
A smile challenged
The gathering night for each star
A single smile for us two
“I want to read everything your Monsieur Éluard has written.”
Valcourt lay back on the grass beside her. He did not close his eyes because the fig tree was protecting him from whatever light and reflection there was.
“I didn’t know a woman could come with so much gentleness and so little caressing,” Gentille said.
Had she come? Valcourt hoped so. He had made love to her delicately, shyly and with restraint, as if not to crush a costly fabric. She had said “yes” a hundred times, never closing her eyes, quivering slightly, until her back arched and then subsided.
“Thank you for being so gentle.”
She had fallen asleep the way small children do, with their little fists clenched, thinking they’re going to heaven and they’re floating on clouds. Valcourt watched her until the first barkings of dogs rose from the valleys and the first curls of smoke penetrated the pockets of morning fog lying like fleecy lakes between Kigali’s still-dark hills. All this time, he was haunted by something Gérard Depardieu had said to Catherine Deneuve in Truffaut’s film
Le Dernier Métro
: “Yes, I love you. And you’re so beautiful it hurts to look at you.” Valcourt had slept for an hour perhaps.
The gardener appeared and waved nonchalantly when he saw the half-naked couple lying under the tree, as though all things were normal in this chaotic world. He was not wrong.
The canine cacophony yielded progressively to the human cacophony. The buzzards took flight in search of the fresh refuse produced by the night. When the buzzards had flown over the city at length and staked out their territory, the jackdaws left the lower branches of the eucalyptus trees around the hotel garden to go and make do, humbly as befits an inferior and obedient race, with places the buzzards had scorned. The croaking of all the city’s ravens was drowned out by horrid clumpings of French boots as a squad of presidential guardsmen jogged around the hotel, as they did every morning. The noise had wakened Gentille.
“You don’t know what they’re singing as they run. They’re singing that they’re going to kill them all. Your friends, they mean.”
“They mean you too, Gentille.”
They had breakfast on the terrace, in the protective shade of the fig tree. Gentille was still in her very rumpled waitress’s uniform with the golden badge bearing her name. The waiters avoided Valcourt’s eye and his signals, but Zozo, who was delighted with their happiness, came quickly to end the discrimination.
“You have chosen well, Monsieur Bernard, she is the most beautiful, and without wishing to make a pun, the most
gentille
, the nicest young lady I know, and all those waiters are only jealous or afraid.” Zozo even went to the kitchen himself to make sure Monsieur Bernard and Madame Gentille’s fried eggs would not be overcooked. They were perfect.
Valcourt and Gentille went back to the marketplace. It was after seven o’clock but Cyprien was not in his usual place and no one had seen him. They drove up to the hill where the tobacco seller lived. The remains of a fire still smouldered in one of the two metal barrels that had lit up the militiamen’s night. Beside the highway, a flock of ferocious, squawking birds were fighting over the mutilated and disjointed bodies of a man and a woman, which appeared to have been thrown one on top of the other. Valcourt recognized Cyprien’s red shirt, then the long rugged face with the narrow moustache that he used to trim with such care. A few metres to the right, a dead-drunk militiaman lay snoring on a filthy mattress, clutching a bloodstained machete.
We can all turn into killers, Valcourt had often maintained, even the most peaceful and generous of us. All it takes is a certain circumstance, something that clicks, a failing, a patient conditioning, rage, disappointment. The prehistoric predator and the primitive warrior are still alive beneath the successive varnishings that civilization has applied to mankind. All the Good and Evil of humanity is in our genes. Either one can emerge at any moment, as abruptly as a tornado can appear and destroy everything where minutes before only soft, warm breezes blew.
For several seconds, a killer’s genes rose up in Valcourt’s blood and a flood of proteins invaded and jangled his brain. Only a firm “No, Bernard!” from Gentille prevented Valcourt from becoming a killer. He had seized the machete from the militiaman’s hands and brandished it over his head as the young man woke and with haggard eyes perceived his own imminent death. Flinging the weapon into the ditch, Valcourt returned to the car, appalled to think that if it had not been for Gentille he would have butchered the fellow remorselessly, the way Cyprien and Georgina had been butchered.
At the police station a few hundred yards from the roadblock, the police officer and militia leader in charge of operations recounted that Cyprien had fallen blind drunk on the road in front of a passing unidentified vehicle. Cyprien’s wife, after being advised of the accident, had been knocked down by another unidentified vehicle. Marinating in the banana beer he was drinking, and belching between sentences, the police sergeant added that the bodies had been left in the road to allow relatives to come and take them and give them a decent burial, and if no one came today he would take care of it himself because he was a good Christian.
“And the children?”
The sergeant continued to lie with an assurance and contempt for veracity that reminded Valcourt of his spells in Communist countries. He did not know where the children were, perhaps with relatives or friends.
What about the machete wounds on Cyprien’s skull, and his wife’s belly slashed open, and her right breast cut o f, and Cyprien’s arm that several ravens were feasting on two or three metres from the tree trunk? The unidentified vehicles did all that? Was it reckless drivers coming home from a wedding, in vehicles with machete-clad tires?
The sergeant kept drinking imperturbably. Perhaps maniacs had cut up the bodies. He asked Valcourt if he wished to lodge a complaint and took a yellowed form out of a drawer.
“You were at the roadblock when we passed it last night. You were in charge of what went on and you were the one checking identities.”
The sergeant poured himself another glass of beer, picked up a pencil and sharpened it slowly with a hunting knife. He licked the point and with a smirk, almost laughing out loud, began.
“Name, address, profession, nationality and civil status, please.”
Valcourt stood up without another word.
“Goodbye, Monsieur Bernard Valcourt, of room 312, Hôtel des Mille-Collines, journalist, expatriate Canadian and protector of the Tutsi hooker Gentille Sibomana. Goodbye, I have taken careful note of your complaint and will forward it to the prosecutor at the earliest opportunity.”
Unable to contain himself any longer, the sergeant now guffawed. Wasn’t he funny, this little White walking around with his hooker, talking about justice and rights and all those things preventing the Hutus, to whom the country belonged, from governing these Tutsi foreigners from faraway Ethiopia as they pleased.
On the door of the little dried-mud house someone had scrawled in red, “Death to the cockroaches.” A small child was crying. On a mat covering the red earth floor lay the headless bodies of Cyprien’s two boys in a huge pool of blood, on which hundreds of mosquitoes and other insects were feeding. The girl had been spared, a typical practice with the Hutu extremists. When they did not kill the boys, they would cut off their feet so they could not become soldiers when they were older. The girls could always be raped and give pleasure a few years later.
At the orphanage, which was run by Belgian nuns and sponsored by the president’s wife, Madame Agathe, they were received coldly. The mother superior informed them that hers was an establishment of excellent reputation on which hundreds of future Belgian parents were depending for the adoption of children that were sound in body and mind. These good, charitable people were investing a great deal of money, and their requirements, rightly, were substantial. The little girl sleeping in Gentille’s arms did not appear to have the necessary endowments. If her parents were killed at a roadblock it was no doubt because they were doing something wrong. “And when there’s something criminal in the parents, there’s often some in the children.” Besides, this child could have AIDS. No one would want to pay to adopt her and the orphanage could not pursue its charitable and essential work without the income derived from adoption.
Valcourt never raised his voice when he was angry.
“If I understand correctly, you and Madame la Présidente specialize in the export of fresh young flesh. You are trying to reduce Rwanda’s trade deficit by selling babies. How are the profits split between La Présidente and you? Perhaps you have a price list, depending on whether it’s a boy or a girl. Do skinny Tutsis sell for less than sturdy Hutus? And do the prices vary according to the children’s ages, the colour of their eyes and their social class? ”
Valcourt and Gentille went back to the hotel with Cyprien and Georgina’s little girl, having decided to keep her themselves for the moment, buying diapers and baby food on the way.
Raphaël was already sitting by the pool. Valcourt told him what had happened.
“Valcourt, sometimes your naivety astonishes me. You showed up at La Présidente’s orphanage with the little girl of parents killed at a roadblock. You didn’t know the good sisters are more into international trade than charity? ”
Valcourt had heard talk of it of course, but once again he hadn’t wanted to believe the worst.
“And all Cyprien’s neighbours, all his friends and relatives are terrified today, because here, killers talk. In the bars in the morning they talk about their exploits of the night before. It’s their way of sowing terror in people’s minds. Listen to me, Valcourt, I’m talking about people I know. I’m talking about my own neighbours, who burned down my house, and buddies I play football with every Sunday, who’ll kill me when the section head says it’s Raphaël’s turn. I know them because, in a way, I’m just like them.”