“Bonjour, Monsieur Bernard. If it’s for Célestine, it’s too late. She died yesterday morning.”
He had known Célestine at the Cosmos. She had asked him to help her pay for her studies in international secretarial work, just a little loan that she would pay back in a few weeks. She had persisted, putting her hand on his thigh: “Even if you don’t give me the loan, I want to go with you tonight, just for the pleasure.” She came to try again at the hotel at two in the morning. He had let her sleep on the deckchair on the balcony. He had woken with a start. Célestine was sitting on the edge of the bed, masturbating him studiously. He couldn’t come, and gave her the loan. She had been coming back regularly for a bed when she had no john. Then she had disappeared. He had seen her again in Pavilion B, lying head to foot beside an old tubercular patient. She had asked him for another little loan for food.
No, he had not come for Célestine, he said, he had brought a visitor.
“Bernadette, how many do we have today? Monsieur Lamarre, who works for the Canadian government, is doing a study on the financing of health services in Rwanda.”
The nurse moved several small bottles and took out a big blue book with gold lettering on its spine, like those old registers that accounts used to be kept in before computers emptied offices of their clumsy files. She slowly scanned the columns with the point of a chewed Bic pen and wrote the figure on a paper handkerchief that she took out of her sleeve. Though Pavilion B was holding to about average, she had lost two beds this week; they had collapsed under the weight of the patients lying in them.
“That makes 68 beds and 153 patients. A bit better than last month—70 beds when we had 180 patients.”
Ridiculous and unbelievable arithmetic for Lamarre, who had spent only five days in a hospital, in a private room, with a big bed and a television set, a desk and several comfortable chairs, not to mention a shower and the small refrigerator that his wife had filled with pâtés and cheeses and several bottles of wine so as to make his stay in such a depressing place more enjoyable. Marie-Ange, his wife, had even spent a night with him. All excited by this audacity and violation of taboo, she had held back several cries she didn’t even recognize as her own while he was on top of her, screwing quickly for fear a nurse would open the door and discover them. She had come, already imagining other taboo places as original as the elevator, the airplane toilet, the car in a shopping mall parking lot on a Friday night, and especially, especially, her small office at the Department of External Affairs. Jean Lamarre had turned down all her persistent and increasingly incomprehensible proposals, suggesting instead that she go and consult a psychiatrist. The baby to be born in a little less than two months was the product of this penchant for the taboo. It had been conceived in five minutes with a stranger in the parking lot of a chic restaurant where Marie-Ange had gone to eat when her model-employee husband was working late, voluntarily, at the office. This time she had not held back her cries. The man took fright and fled with his fly open and penis dangling in the cold. Today, sitting under the hotel’s great fig tree, all she was thinking about was soon being rid of this enormous belly that was keeping all men at a distance, except for her over-modest husband who always came to bed clothed in pyjamas and never took them o f, even when laboriously making love to her.
“How many with AIDS, Bernadette?”
“About a hundred.”
They entered a scene of chaos. In each small bed lay two patients, many holding children in their arms. Under many beds lay other patients, sometimes on mats, sometimes on the concrete floor. There were children, some crawling, some running about. Some older children were feeding a greyish gruel to their mothers who were too weak to hold a spoon. In the room beyond, several volunteers, all HIV positive, were trundling an enormous pot with a stew of some kind from bed to bed. They were enrolled in one of Father Louis’s programs and came every day to distribute a free meal to AIDS patients who had no family to feed them or were too poor to pay for food. Today the volunteers had more than seventy mouths to feed and were afraid of running short.
“Take some pictures, Monsieur Lamarre. Don’t be shy. They’ll like it. Every time someone takes pictures or movies of them, a little hope of help to come is born. Anyway, they’ll die before they realize that no capital city in the world cares about them.”
The young diplomat was sweating more than his clothes could take. He had an irresistible urge to vomit, which, mortified, he did in full view of a flock of laughing children as soon as he emerged from Pavilion B. His visit to the morgue, whose air-conditioning system was not working, did nothing to calm his gut. It was not so much the smell of death issuing from the dozen bodies there, as the odour of life beginning to rot. He asked Valcourt to take the pictures for him and left to vomit again.
Brother Cardinal was reposing on a gurney completely naked. A bullet had pierced his forehead and two others had lodged near his heart. The killers, who knew how to shoot, had murdered him calmly, without wasting their ammunition. The man bore no other sign of violence. Petty thieves or discontented workers were supposed to have killed him. Valcourt took three pictures as Lamarre had asked: one for the embassy, one for the Rwandan police and another for the French secret service, which was what Madame the Consul, informed of Cardinal’s death on the tenth hole at the Kigali Golf Club, had ordered Lamarre to produce. The inquiry would be put in the hands of the French because the Rwandan police could not be trusted. And above all, she made it clear, if the embassy said nothing to anyone, the news might spread fastest and farthest through undesirable rumours.
Valcourt found Madame Lamarre under the fig tree while her husband changed his clothes. Gentille was swimming with their new daughter. The diplomat’s wife seemed particularly interested in the sexual customs of Africans as she had heard them reported. Valcourt reassured her. She was in no danger, especially in her condition. But yes, White women were attractive to Black men, just as, he had been told, the reverse was true. If he himself had a Black wife, that was a matter of chance rather than a passion for the other colour. As for knowing whether these Blacks with their asses so firm and their breasts so pointed were “better” (this was the term she used) than Whites, he couldn’t say. And the prostitutes? He explained that here, if you valued life, masturbation was better. And the child?
“Do you believe in the Immaculate Conception?”
Valcourt called justin, the pool attendant, who wore his young Apollo anatomy and his glistening skin gloriously, the way others wear their clothes. This young lady, Valcourt told him, in her delicate condition was in need of special attention, not only company, for her husband was working long hours, but also physical relaxation, perhaps even some vigorous massages of which justin had the secret, he’d heard. Justin declared himself at Madame’s service and Madame felt a great shiver sweep through her. She hated the enormous belly separating her from the supple, muscular body parading before her. A river of perspiration wet her thighs. Her already heavy breasts quivered, tingled and hardened till they hurt. Valcourt took his leave. He had agreed to meet Lamarre in the hotel lobby. They were going to François Cardinal’s village.
Justin, whose stiffened penis was almost popping through his tiny bathing suit, was already tasting his vengeance. One day, a little drunk with sunshine and beer, he had confided in Valcourt. Every time he fucked a White—and there were so many of them walking around with their uncertain bodies and their hidden lusts, their fascination with the barbarous, powerful negro—every time, he was getting even for being a pool attendant and mere lust object for the boss ladies. He was getting even, too, for being Black. He behaved with the White women the way they hoped and dreamed he would, like a brutish animal, as if he were not really human. They screamed like animals, reduced to his level at last, and begged for more, as if they wanted him to humiliate them even further, turn them into pure unsated flesh, emptied of all mind and all dignity. And it was then, when they were begging for a second humiliation, that real vengeance came. He said no. They could try all they liked, come to his shack at the pool, pester him at his room, promise him money or visas for all the havens of the West, he would turn them down. Around his pool they would lie on their plastic deckchairs, frustrated, jumpy, unsatisfied and bad-tempered because for a few minutes they had known the power of a dark force that now, always smiling, carried on with his humble pool attendant’s work, respectfully attending them. Compared to this country’s violence, justin’s vengeance was rather gentle, although Valcourt was impressed by its refinement and psychological cruelty. He never lost an opportunity to contribute to the young man’s war effort. However, justin had concealed the real measure of his hatred. He had AIDS. When worried ladies demanded that he put on a condom, he would brandish a forged HIV negative certificate.
Justin did massage her—for he did know something about massage—after sitting her down on a small stool because it was unwise, in her condition, for her to lie on her stomach on the massage table. He began with her neck, shoulders and shoulder blades, on which he worked effectively and conscientiously, with each movement of his fingers pushing aside the shoulder straps of her voluminous dress and ample bra, which slipped down to her waist. She rose several centimetres and let her clothes fall to the floor. The man pressed against her back and just above her nape she felt an enormous penis thrusting into her hair. Two big hands were kneading her breasts so vigorously they began to squirt milk. She wanted to speak but couldn’t, except to say, “Take me,” in a hoarse, animal voice that was shaped also by sharp, shooting pains from inside her sweat-bathed belly. Justin picked her up by the armpits, lifted her and pushed her to the wall, against which she leaned with her hands and head. With a single brusque, violent movement he entered her the back way. Never had anyone touched or caressed this part of her body, even by accident. Muscles exploded, cried out. Her belly struck the wall. The greater the pain or the pleasure, for they were one and the same, the faster and more often she repeated, “Deeper, deeper.” After long minutes when she expected to faint a hundred times over, she screamed as one does only before death, paralyzing the young man, who had never heard such a rending cry. He sat her on the little stool. She was seized with cramps, daggers driving through her belly. A stream of viscous fluid started to flow from her vagina and the contractions began. Marie-Ange gave birth in the shack, attended by a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor who came every day to do his hundred lengths in the pool. He cut the umbilical cord with a Swiss Army knife that a major benefactress of the Red Cross had left with justin to remember her by.
When Jean Lamarre returned from Mugina with Valcourt around eleven that night, he was a father and cuckold, both for the rest of his days. But the worst was not having even settled in his first posting abroad before fearing he’d be recalled to Ottawa and confined to consular information or the Mongolia section before he could enjoy his first villa, his first gardener, or his first cook, which are today—short of being able to influence the course of history—the foremost pleasure for a diplomat representing a country like Canada in Rwanda.
François Cardinal had not been murdered by ordinary petty thieves, or by Tutsi rebels—another version suggested to him by Lisette, the consul, when Lamarre went to see her on the way back to the hotel. Along with Valcourt he had tried to reason with her but she was not in the mood to listen to anyone bringing her disagreeable facts. Her golf tournament had been a disaster. She had been humiliated even by the consul of Tanzania and a secretary at the embassy in Kenya. It was really not the time to bring up the possibility of a diplomatic incident, or worse, a review of the long-standing friendship between Canada and Rwanda. In any event, the inquiry had been entrusted to the special services of the presidency, meaning the French secret service, competent people who would be sure to get at the truth. For the moment, if anyone in Canada asked who had killed Brother Cardinal, the authorities would reply, “Thieves or rebels.”
By telephone, Valcourt told a friend in Canadian television that they were very strange thieves because they had left over 150,000 Rwandan francs on the mantel-piece, the pay that the brother was going to distribute to the members of the egg producers’ co-operative that he ran. As for the Tutsi rebel hypothesis, that was completely hare-brained. The brother was taking in Tutsi refugees fleeing from the North (the president’s region), where they were terrorized by massacres. No, Cardinal had been killed by soldiers, in broad daylight, because his co-operative was a threat to the near-monopoly of a nephew of the president over the egg trade in the capital, or because he was taking in Tutsis, or both. Valcourt knew why he had been killed, but it was not the stuff of news bulletins. Cardinal was working for the dignity of men, for sharing of the land’s riches, for tolerance. In the eyes of the law governing this country, these were three offences deserving of the death penalty.
Canadian television simply announced the brother’s death, and noted that while the murder was difficult to explain it had probably been committed by thieves. Thus is life recounted, compressed into capsules and composed by people far away, ignorant but without ill will, who, sitting at their computers, do not differentiate between a settling of accounts among bikers and a political assassination in Rwanda. A dead man is a dead man.
Since the coming of Gentille, in the manner of all historical watersheds, Valcourt had passed in a matter of seconds from a world of doom and gloom to a universe of beauty without the slightest trouble, as if he had learned to navigate among all the countries of man. He took no pride in it, only felt that he was luckier than others.
In his notebook he wrote, “I’m emerging from another horror. It’s not this death that’s horrible but the deceit constructed around it, a way of officially denying Cardinal. This man is a hero, and his country is going to treat him purely as a wretched victim of a barbarous, anonymous act. And I come in here where Gentille is sleeping with Cyprien’s daughter. I’ll lie down beside her in a few minutes. She’ll wake up, I know. And we’ll make love, quietly so as not to wake the little girl. And after, I’ll sleep, like all happy men. But in my sleep there’ll be as many nightmares as ecstasies.” And that night, for the second time in his life, he made love with Gentille.