by Rémy Ngamije
Boarding her flight from Kigali to Kinshasa with four other girls also bound for Paris, she was wowed by the size of the plane, the luxury of the economy seats, the kindness and beauty of the dark Zaïrean air hostess who made safety announcements and answered questions about the limited variety of on-board food in fluent French, heavily accented English, and stuttering Swahili. Therése’s seat mate, Bernadette, who came from a neighbouring village, was headed to another secretarial college in Paris. Unlike Therése, who vibrated with delight at the humming and whirring of the engines and the explosion of speed as the airplane sprinted down the runway, Bernadette gripped her chair in fear and cried out aloud when the aircraft made its ascent in defiance of gravity, tradition and custom, and all else the girls had ever known. Bernadette teared up and even screamed that the airplane would crash. The hostess shushed her gently, trying to allay her fears and her rustic naivety. Therése, on the other hand, marvelled at the shrinking ground, the green tapestry which drifted below them as they climbed higher and further. She could not fall asleep, long as the flight was, determined to see everything, hear everything, and feel everything she could. The cabin lights above her were marvellous, the clicking seatbelt was one of humanity’s technological high points, eclipsed only by the on-board toilet which flushed and smelled of blue chemical neatness. Bernadette’s whimpering, which came at irregular intervals, annoyed her. Bernadette resisted all comfort. She wanted her feet back on the ground, back in the rituals she knew and understood.
“But then why did you apply for this?” Therése asked her.
“I did not want to. It was my aunt’s idea. She said it would be good to study,” Bernadette replied. Therése smiled at the prevalence of aunts who readily encouraged their nieces to revolt against their fathers’ wishes and their mothers’ acceptance of the way things were.
“Your aunt did the right thing,” she told Bernadette. “In a year or so we will be back, and then you will thank her. You will be an educated woman.”
The title drew a curse from Bernadette. To be an educated woman was like being deflowered by the devil.
“But a year is a long time,” Bernadette said. “And I am not sure whether there are many Rwandans in Paris. How do you expect us to fit in with all of the white people?”
Time, change, no Rwandans, white people – all the things that scared Bernadette thrilled Therése.
“I’m sure it won’t be hard,” Therése said. “There are many black people in Paris. Congolese, Senegalese, Cameroonians, Ghanaians – I have even heard there are parts of Paris that are just black. And there are Germans, Swiss, Spanish, and Italian people. You don’t have to go with what you know.”
Therése’s mouth tasted the possibilities of diversity as she named the various nationalities, hitherto just words on a vocabulary list. Allemand, Belge, Suisse, Russe, Anglais. They were becoming people she could meet, hands she could shake, conversations she could have, and handsome, accepting gentlemen she could walk next to on a campus while discussing something worldly and grand.
“But you must be around your own people,” Bernadette said. “You need to be around your own people.”
Therése smiled at Bernadette and squeezed her hand in assurance, all the while disagreeing with her internally. Then she turned her head and gazed out of the cabin window as they flew over borders and crossed timelines. Not for the last time in her life she remarked at the strangeness of travellers who try to take home with them.
Therése loved her Parisian life. The variance of the citizenry made each day different. The ease with which she took to her studies rewarded her risk to apply. She hovered in the top five of her class and she felt as though her sylvan soul had been remade in the culture and clutter of Paris. She was a tram-taking, café-visiting, book-reading, concert-going belle noire who did not gawk at the city’s night lights. Her jeans hugged her body, her turtleneck sweaters stuck to each contour, and her dark skin stood out in a crowd. Only for the briefest interval of time did she flounder in the bustle of her new life. The plentifulness of milk, sugar, and bread, almost wasteful in their abundance, had forced her to observe a period of culinary conservativeness out of respect for her former life. Electricity was a new omniscient god and she became, first, its awestruck follower; but after a few weeks, it was just another passing comfort she rarely acknowledged. The delicious ease of summoning hot and cold water at the turn of a handle was a power she relished and exercised injudiciously. It was not long before she realised there was also an endless supply of croissants and no shortage of discotheques or white boys trying to kiss her on the dance floor. She decided to shed her village-girl virtue and enjoy a life without shortage, without routine, and without the threat of marriage looming over her. She had not managed to find the young gentleman who would walk her across their campus discussing how they were going to fix the world but she had faith it would happen.
She had, at least, been kissed by a young and curious Parisian boy – she considered all white men to be boys of varying ages. His mouth was light and fleeting on hers, his pink tongue slithering past her lips to connect with hers for an electric instant that tasted like sweet tea. It was a sensation she would never forget, the taste of a kiss, and, later on, she would forget the names and the faces of boys who kissed her but remember the flavours of their tongues. Ettiene was sickening strawberry, Jacques was warm bread, and Lucien, the first man she took to bed, always tasted like toothpaste. He insisted on brushing before they kissed. Antoine, the struggling musician, was winey and intoxicating like their passionate embraces in his too-small apartment, and Frederic, a rugged man with wild eyebrows and big arms, who owned a small chocolaterie and called her his cacao doux was like strong coffee and cigarette smoke, a consuming combination which kept their faces and bodies stuck together for hours at a time as they tried to drink and inhale each other. At first she had felt ashamed by the ease with which advances were made at her. Sometimes she felt like a frontier her lovers had to cross, but when she realised she was guilty of the same thing she relinquished her judgement and focused more on enjoying the varying flavours of masculinity.
Seven months into her studies at a friend’s house party she met Guillome. His torso occupied every inch of his shirt, and his maroon bellbottom jeans accentuated a prim pair of buttocks and strong thighs. He had a solid jaw and a black corona of jet black hair. When he was not flashing his perfect white teeth at a clever comment or some particular insight he favoured, he had a pensive look to him. Guillome also had a laugh that sounded mischievous, rather unnatural in a man who otherwise exuded calm and poise. He was studying pharmacy in Brussels. Like Therése, he had been chosen to bring European knowledge back to Rwanda.
Their first meeting was accidental. Therése’s friend from secretarial college, Genevieve, had dragged her into the narrow kitchen to introduce her to the other Rwandan at the party, and she had stood, abashed, at being dropped like a sacrificial lamb in front of a handsome and terrible Rwandan god.
“Il étudie à Bruxelles. Est-ce-que tu le connais?” Genevieve asked Therése, who replied that she did not know every Rwandan in Europe. She did, however, cast a raking glance at Guillome, who was leaning against the counter with the most casually cool stance she had ever seen.
“Mais vous êtes tous deux du même pays. Vous obtiendrez le long,” Genevieve said and vanished from the scene. You are from the same country. You will get along. Therése stood rooted to the spot. Guillome did nothing to alleviate the awkwardness of the situation by keeping quiet.
Eventually, he asked, “Est-elle ton amie?”
Therése’s being quivered at the sound of his voice. Deep, rich, probably used to command, she thought. She found herself replying with a shy “Oui.”
“Her party sucks but at least her friends are good to look at and, hopefully, speak to,” Guillome said. Thérese blushed.
A polite and curious conversation had started between them. They found it strangely comforting to speak about home, about
their parents, their tribes of siblings, and the simple but appetising flavours of food they had grown up with.
“The French complicate their food,” Guillome said. “Sometimes I just want something simple. Like boiled potatoes and beans with a little bit of salt – Rwandan food.”
“The salt comes from the cook’s sweat – there are no spices in our foods. Let the French complicate their food as much as they want.”
“Still, you have to admit the French cook like they are trying to make up for lost wars. Il est trés compliqué.”
Therése laughed. They conversed as the party grew, swelled, and dwindled around them. Therése detected Guillome’s desire to return home, to build, create, and forward the Rwandan cause; Guillome picked up Therése’s particular distaste for the ordinariness of domestic life back home.
“You think the situation should be different?” he asked. He was not challenging her. He seemed genuinely interested in what she had to say.
“The problem with Rwandan women,” Therése said, “is Rwandan men. They want tradition and the future at the same time. They want to be modern gentlemen but they do not want their wives to be ladies. That is not fair and it cannot work.”
“You cannot have the future and the past?” he asked.
“No,” she said, fiercely. “The past belongs where it belongs. In the past. If you want to go into the future you must be prepared to lose something. But Rwandan men do not want that. They want to travel into the future but they pack for the past. They want the here and now of fancy cars and telephones but they also want to come home and find their supper cooked and ready by a woman who cannot use the telephone or drive the car. What kind of foolishness is that?” She built up such fierce momentum and then, suddenly, fearing she had said too much, she ended her treatise with a limp “That’s what I think” and took a sip of her drink.
Guillome took a deep breath and then looked at her levelly and said, “I agree,” and flashed a brilliant smile which made Therése’s insides fidget. “Who did you come with?” he asked.
“No one,” she said. Did his smile widen ever so slightly? “And you?”
“I was supposed to meet a friend,” Guillome said. Therése was crestfallen inside. Of course he had a friend, some mademoiselle, tall and pale, with long skinny legs, who read complex French poetry and smoked cigarettes daintily. “But he did not show up.” Therése brightened up. “I am glad he didn’t,” Guillome added.
Therése’s face could have thawed a glacier.
Their romance was firm and fast, each only slightly disappointed that they had come all the way to Paris to fall in love with someone from back home, someone with the same deplorable childhood spent fighting for leftover saliva-sapping brown beans.
Therése finally got her wish and walked across L’École Parisienne’s square with a man who looked at her as an equal. That he was a dark-skinned Rwandan man was just fine with her. Their conversations would frolic with ease from the trivial to the complicated, their young minds agile and alert. It was not long before they talked themselves into marriage.
They were in Guillome’s apartment in Brussels, listening to jazz records, lying on a bent sofa with cushions rubbed shiny and smooth by a hundred anonymous buttocks. Therése always liked how his massive frame encompassed her smaller one when they lay next to each other, as they were doing just then. She would run her hands over his chest and listen to him talk about the future when a whole generation of intellectuals would call Rwanda home.
“They are all returning home,” he said, “even the ones who have married abazungu. My mother said there are whole villages of grandmothers trying to teach white women how to pound flour. Imagine.”
“And you want to go back too, Gui?” She was the only one he allowed to call him that. He despised nicknames.
“I don’t know, maybe.” He stroked the top of her head, his hand pulling the tufts of tough hair. “What will you do when you finish here?”
“Go back home. I have to work off the scholarship. But I am not sure if I can adjust to Rwanda after”—her left hand swept in a wide arc of generality—“all of this.”
Guillome followed the sweep of her hand and said playfully, “You came all the way to Europe and all you are going to miss is this apartment? My god, you really are a village girl. If I had known I would have impressed you with my two-plate stove and a train ticket or something. Now I have wasted all of my time on you. I could have had umzungu too. We would make caramel kids with soft hair that would not make them cry when they have to comb it.” He pulled at her hair again. Therése smacked his hand.
“Your white wife would not have to squeeze their heads between her thighs to wrestle the knots in their hair, that is true. But you would be a widower within a year because she would not be able to eat anything in Rwanda. O-ho, you think butter and croissants are being sold by the roadside or what?”
He laughed, a deep laugh which made his chest reverberate and her body vibrate in resonance. “But at least we would still have interesting conversations and we would miss Europe together.”
“Is that what you want?” she asked, raising her head and turning to look at him. “You want someone to miss this time with you?” There was no humour in her voice. Some sort of fork in their lives had been reached.
“No,” he said, looking at her straight. “I want someone who wants what I want for myself.”
She raised her eyebrows. Guillome had a way of drawing out conversations, speaking in segments. “And what is that, Gui?” she asked softly.
“I want to go back to Rwanda but I don’t want to go back to be Rwandan – I don’t think I can fit in. I don’t want the cultural stuff, not all of it. I don’t want to sit on the porch of my farmhouse and drink with all of the other banana farmers and talk about the past like it isn’t dead. I don’t want to be in Rwanda forever. My children should see the world. I cannot have my boys circumcised by someone high on powders and invented spirits.” He looked away from her, into the wide expanse of generality her hand had just encompassed. His right arm reached out and traversed the same arc as he said, “I want an unscripted future.”
Therése was moved by his desire for a life unlike the one he had grown up in, the one she had grown up in too. He had the pale scars of a hundred little cuts on his back and stomach from a fever bloodletting and since she had known him he seemed to hate sitting around in bars drinking and talking and talking about drinking. He would suggest cafés and cinemas and art galleries instead. He was determined in his studies and outspoken in classes, unlike other foreign black students who were cowed in lectures, yielding to their supposed betters. Even in his skirt-chasing days he said he had always pursued women who seemed to be out of his league, smart women. “Because,” Guillome said, “if you wanted to fuck their brains out it would take more than one night.” Even his crassness was different, Therése decided. She was secretly pleased that after a year of lovemaking she could still excite him, that they could still have debates about politics and literature and films and listen to his jazz records together. She did not want it to end.
“And do you want that future alone or with someone, Gui? If that is what you want, then we can get it together. I am not going back to Rwanda to cook and clean and be beaten and be the person who is talked about sadly to a mistress who does not know the pain of giving birth to five children. I also want my future. We have fun here, Gui, but we could have this and more – another wave at the infinite unknown—“and we can get it together. There is more for us, no?”
A short silence alighted between them before Guillome said, “I agree.”
He said “I agree” in the same way he said it when she said something clever, when he heard the sound of reason in an argument. To hear him say those two words meant he had thought something over, had dedicated time and thought to it, evaluating its shortcomings and its merits, and had come to the conclusion that he could, indeed, add his assent to its veracity.
Therése looked at him
pointedly, looked at him like the man from her application flyer and said, “If you give me my life, I will give you yours.”
It was Therése who proposed the marriage, and Guillome who accepted. They lay on the couch for the rest of the evening, the rest of their lives unfolding in fantastical and heartfelt plans for the future.
Therése was the first to graduate. She extended her student visa to keep Guillome company in the final months of his studies. They would return to Rwanda together and announce their intention to marry to their parents, circumvent the longwinded traditions of courtship, and defy their ancestors and customs by having a quiet church wedding. On their Air France flight back from Europe the air hostess had more makeup than face, and she lingered a bit too long by Guillome’s seat, offering him the small comforts of a drink. Therése’s unimpressed stare eventually drove her away, and as she retreated, Guillome patted her hand gently and whispered to her, “Don’t worry. She would last all of five minutes. But you, you are going to take a lifetime.”
Therése blushed in her seat. She was returning to Rwanda, qualified, travelled, loved, and determined to bring the world home with her.
Guillome and Therése secured work in Kigali immediately, he as a pharmacist at a new hospital, and she as an office administrator for the United Nations Development Programme. They decided to postpone their marriage while they made a foothold in the city. Therése’s pregnancy, though, pushed up their plans. It would be easier for them and the baby, she said, when she gave the news to Guillome, if they were married. “But we don’t have to do it now. We can wait a bit. There is no rush.”
Their postponement lasted all the way through Therése’s pregnancy, scandalising their parents. When a fat baby boy with big eyes was pulled from her womb they both looked at him and agreed to call him Séraphin, the angel, for his calmness, and Turihamwe – we are together”—as a sly reprimand for their parents and social circle. When Séraphin turned one, though, they married, to their displeasure, in a big traditional ceremony.
