AT TWENTY-FOUR , I got married in church. That was what Nathalie’s parents wanted. She stated her request timidly, all but saying she was sorry, since she wasn’t a practicing Catholic. But she wanted a wedding with a white dress with a train and flower girls and a reception with bouquets on every table. For me, that meant a tuxedo, a best man or two, and a visit to the parish priest. Everyone would be pleased and no principles would be violated, except my own lack of belief, but in Quebec, the fact that you were an unbeliever never turned into a political or philosophical stance.
I was finishing my master’s in international law, and we were both “leftists.” I learned you had to choose what you needed from solitude. My church wedding was a pleasant distraction, along with moving into a new apartment and the inevitable visits to Ikea, and the choice of colours for the walls. I didn’t invest much in the process, but I participated out of respect for Nathalie, who put a lot of stock in those things.
When my mother died, I inherited a certain amount of money, but I had never touched it. Nathalie got a job as a researcher for a Catholic NGO. Even before the name caught on, we were yuppies.
Sometimes a place can change us just as much as an event. Nathalie couldn’t spend a day without paging through a French interior decorating magazine. She worried about the door handles I hadn’t even noticed, and showed me ceramic tiles that, per square metre, cost more than the object they were meant to set off. Her feel for harmony, her ability to bring together colour and form, and choose the seemingly banal object that would magically reinvent a useless shelf and create a new space for the eye to explore—all that astonished me. She applied herself so seriously and so patiently to building the environment for her daily life that I couldn’t help but follow along on her search for the ideal décor. Her need for physical harmony enchanted me.
During my stay at the youth detention centre, I chose the path that Mario rejected. I opted for the rule of law; the patient application of the law would lead the Marios of the future onto the straight and narrow, a Christian expression if there ever was one. I decided that passion gave birth only to excess and stupidity, that desire must yield before admiration and community of thought, that love between a man and a woman must be founded on mutual respect, and that physical attraction was a trap. I hadn’t known it, but Nathalie had been looking for a husband. Not a man or a lover, just a husband. I did the trick, and so she was satisfied.
She would put down her design magazine with an irritated look when I started talking to her about impunity and international justice, the subject of my doctoral thesis. I was asking a simple yet unsolved question. Impunity, especially in Africa, prevented the establishment of a society based on law and organized around fairness. That was a grave problem given that these places were confronting crimes that went far beyond the offenses that judges schooled in normal legal tradition had to face. Do we judge an isolated rape case the same way we would the systematic policy of mass rape? Do we display the same legal circumspection toward a massacre of 800,000 people and the settling of accounts in a biker gang? Law answered yes; justice told me no. The more I studied law, the more I wondered whether it wasn’t the first enemy of justice.
Nathalie would answer with an ambiguous noise that was neither yes nor no.
We made no decisions; things just took care of themselves. We made love once a week in adequate fashion, seriously and a little systematically, respecting the rules of engagement and always finishing in the missionary position. I was absorbed by the court of Arusha that was judging the génocidaires of Rwanda with more respect for procedure than necessary. Nathalie was looking for new kitchen cupboards. We talked less and less.
After two years of married life, I found out she had a lover. I hadn’t kissed her in six months. For my Ph.D., I compiled entries concerning statements of rape victims in international trials. “Évangéline Murozowa, age seventeen, student in the social sciences, raped by eighteen militiamen at a checkpoint in Gitarama.” The judges did not accept her testimony because Évangéline could not prove that the accused had actually participated in the rape since, in all honesty, she admitted that in the darkness, the faces above her all had the same mad glint in their eyes. She did not want to lie to the tribunal or risk perjuring herself because she believed in God and had brought her own Bible on which she would swear her oath. “The entire hill knew that Évariste decided everything that happened at that checkpoint, and that he was always there.” Hearsay, the defense objected, and the judges granted it. Two hundred survivors said the same thing; were they all unreliable witnesses? Was the entire hill an unreliable witness? Was Évariste the first to rape her, or the seventh, or the last? Could she describe any distinguishing marks on his body? Did she see him afterward? Did he rape her again? If not, why had he done it only once? Did she believe that, by achieving official victim status, she would receive financial compensation and, by the way, hadn’t she taken on substantial debts before the incident? I imagined Évangéline’s pain and incomprehension after having been raped eighteen times, and how she did not answer a single question, probably because she was sobbing and the defense lawyer used her tears as a springboard to make her feel even more fragile and retreat further into silence. Drying her tears, she admitted she had used the microcredit issued by an NGO to buy a sewing machine and start producing clothing for children. She was behind in her payments. The defense lawyer cut his cross-examination short once she confessed to her state of financial peril.
Of course, the accused had been at home the whole time, eating grilled goat with his wife and five children. The hill accused him because he was the mayor and the representative of the State, and Tutsis didn’t like Hutus. Eichmann often dined at home as the trains pulled into Treblinka and Jews didn’t like Nazis either, that was a well-established fact.
I told Nathalie the story of Évangéline in the hope, I think, of establishing the lines of communication again. A woman’s story should affect another woman. I added more details to try and touch her emotions. Nathalie listened attentively, but did not seem moved by the story. She took a sip of wine and even before she spoke a word, I knew it was over, especially my search for feelings of comfort. I would never be happy, that’s what she was about to tell me. “How can I get interested in your story? That might happen in Africa, but not here. There’s nothing there that concerns me, and as for that poor girl, I can’t do anything for her. It’s sad, but there’s us and there’s them, and we don’t live on the same planet. I’d like to help them, give them money or demonstrate, but we have important things to do here too.”
I didn’t ask what. Affordable housing, Christmas baskets, a dollar thrust into an open hand in the damp February cold. I didn’t understand this “us” and this “them,” as if rape that happened somewhere else wounded and shattered a person less than rape here.
I think the time I spent with encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and atlases when I was a boy, and later a student, removed the idea of “us” and “them.” In those works and compilations, rape isn’t relative, it just is, period. The poor don’t have any particular colour, their poverty is what defines them in a common, universal way. In the Larousse, a woman is a woman. She isn’t more or less a woman depending on her country of origin. I developed simple notions from books. All human beings are the same, they have the same rights, they are brothers and sisters together, each responsible for the other’s happiness. Nathalie believed that if she were raped, it would be more tragic than Évangéline. There was no sense trying to reason with her. Her vagina was superior and more precious than an African woman’s. We shared nothing, save for a few TV shows and the occasional nature documentary. She decorated; I cooked and cleaned house. We accommodated each other, which meant that, literally, we were a convenience for each another. I gave up on desire and love, not because I had stopped believing in those things, but because they were too demanding. Compiling files on the planet’s victims and the great perpetrators satisfied my emotional needs. And it wasn’t because I was without love that my heart was empty of feeling and affection. On the contrary. As for Nathalie, she found her passion in her own comfort, her immediate environment, her career, and her clothes. She had no energy for the demands love made. She took a lover who, she confided in me, complained she wasn’t loving enough. We laughed—laughed at ourselves.
Nathalie refused to come into my office where the walls were covered with terrible images. A young girl from Mozambique holding a human head in her hands, another girl from Uganda whose breasts had been sliced off, and a boy from Angola, no older than twelve, smoking a joint with a Kalashnikov between his legs.
I am neither perverse nor morbid. Like icons, the photos reminded me of my promise that, for the moment, was leading me nowhere, but I was experiencing it the way a seminarian does, learning, reflecting, praying before entering the service of the Lord and His flock. The pictures displayed images of saints of both sexes who encouraged my vocation. I would do something…. But what? I didn’t know. As I finished my thesis, I surfed the sites of international organizations and NGOs, but the jobs that interested me required on-the-ground experience I didn’t have, and besides, the ground frightened me.
One day, Nathalie disappeared from my life. I can put it that simply because, for her, it was a day like any other, like any other of her mornings I knew. She spent a half hour putting on makeup, measured out her cup of Müslix, read a French magazine, and agreed to meet me for lunch at the Deux Singes on Saint Viateur Street. She kissed me on the forehead and wished me luck with my thesis defense. When I returned, a note was waiting on the living-room table. “You’re always thinking about people who are suffering in the world. But really you’re only thinking of yourself. Goodbye.” The closets were empty.