A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche Page B

their pleasure and leave, laughing and telling me, ‘You’re good, Gentille.’ Then there were the others who didn’t ask permission. They just did it. So what I wanted to tell you the other night was, I thought you didn’t like me because you’d never asked me to go with you. And I wanted to because you’d always been polite and nice, nothing else, just polite and nice.”
    “And White … and rich.”
    Why couldn’t he understand what seemed so simple to her? Of course she wanted to be loved like a White woman, like in movies where all you see are caresses and long kisses, bouquets of flowers and men suffering from broken hearts. No, she didn’t want him to suffer, but she’d like to know her man would be capable of it.
    “I know Rwandans who suffer too when their love affairs go wrong,” he said.
    She didn’t know any.
    “I want you to teach me the White people’s love.”
    “I can only teach you my own. And sometimes it’s pretty black.”
    A terrified woman began to scream in the next room. Then came sounds of a scuffle, more screams and chairs being overturned on the balcony, then finally a long, piercing “No-o-o-o” that ended in a dull thud. On the metal awning over the pool bar lay the body of Mélissa, the ugliest and skinniest of the hotel’s prostitutes.
    “Aah, the bitch! The disgusting whore! She jumped just to piss me o f.”
    A fat, naked Belgian was waving his arms on the next balcony. A few paras trying to upgrade their sun-tans looked up. Two tourists stopped swimming briefly, then resumed their studied crawl.
    Gentille shouted, “Mélissa! Mélissa!”
    Valcourt said, “Do you still want me to teach you the White people’s love? ”
    Mélissa lay close to death three floors below on the white-hot aluminum.
    Gentille screamed, “He tried to kill her! Call the police!”
    “Just a dirty, drunken whore,” the pot-bellied Belgian protested.
    However much Gentille might yell and Valcourt argue and threaten, the hotel management never called the police. The head of security at the Belgian embassy, who was lunching at the pool bar, took the matter in hand. His colleague, he explained, had been attacked by a cheap little prostitute who had tried to rob him, he had defended himself, and the unfortunate accident had ensued. The embassy, where they knew how to do things right, he continued, would take care of the poor woman and pay all hospital expenses. The huge tottering beer-barrel, parading his little comma of a penis in the corridor, nodded to confirm his superior’s every word. In conclusion, the embassy official said to Valcourt:
    “Monsieur, you have all the bad friends here a man could have. You’re taking risks … Tell me, why don’t you just leave these people to their fate?”
    At the hospital they searched through all the buildings, stepping over the pallets and mats, describing Mélissa to the staff. In Emergency they were insistent, raising their voices. No Mélissa had been admitted to the KHC that day.
    Mélissa’s body was never found. The fat Belgian spent two days at the embassy and then went home to Belgium. At the bar, another girl who had been waiting for months for permission to begin active service had taken her place. The day after the incident, which had already ceased to be a subject of conversation, Valcourt and Gentille went to the public prosecutor’s office to lodge a complaint. The assistant chief prosecutor received them out of respect for Valcourt, the citizen of a donor country and above all a neutral country like Canada, a country that asked no questions and gave with its eyes closed, a perfect country in short.
    Valcourt laid out the facts in a few words, stressing that the body had disappeared after members of the Belgian security service had promised to take it to the hospital. Why not question them? Where was the Belgian counsellor? The official interrupted, spreading his two hands like a parish priest preparing to bless his flock or deliver