With keen precision, her hand drives the blade into the cassava bulb, picks the bulb up with the blade, and drops it in her other hand to strip the cassava bare in a few quick cuts. Two last chops lop off the ends, and the fat root is tossed atop the pile. In Claudine’s hand the machete whirls in an unbroken rhythm even as she chats with a visitor or lectures a child on the other side of the hedge. One senses that her skill runs in the family, a dexterity handed down from her mother or grandmother before their deaths. Her legs outstretched, her back set against a low stone wall, she sits on a cloth facing two pyramidal piles. The entire season’s harvest will pass beneath her blade—between the shrinking pile of brown cassava and the rising pile of peeled, white bulbs—before being hauled off to the mill.
Claudine speaks in her distinctive low voice. She poses questions about Parisian life, the height of the buildings, the climate in France. She asks for news about my mama and her health, and she wonders about my siblings’ work. She is curious about all the traveling that journalists do. Don’t they get tired of gathering such chaotic news? How do they eat so far from home? Do they find wives in every country? She is also one of the few people who inquire about my books.
Her foot is giving her trouble; its arch looks dreadfully swollen. The exams she had at the hospital in Kigali failed to reveal anything conclusive enough for the doctors to diagnose the ailment. The healer near Ntarama, whom she has consulted since childhood, attempted several remedies before confessing her bewilderment. “It’s the poison of jealousy,” says Claudine. “There’s no shortage of it around here.”
The construction site behind her may very well be the cause of the jealousy. On the spot of her old adobe dwelling, still the standard in the mudugudu, rise the roughcast-cement walls of a home like those now found in Nyamata. The windows await windowpanes; the house frame stands ready to support a V-shaped roof and a ceiling for insulation. She and her husband, Damascène Bizima, had a stroke of luck when the new asphalt road leading to the future airport in Kigali arrived alongside their property, a strip of which Damascène sold to developers at a premium price. The couple is also building a hut for a mudugudu grocery in a corner of their yard and, at the opposite end, a pen for their cow as well as the goats that will soon be joining them. As Claudine remarks, “Good fortune was passing on the road and made a stop for us.”
We are waiting for Nadine. Damascène was hostile to our initial interview three days earlier, a position he justified by relating his fear that the narrative of certain episodes from Nadine’s life might prove harmful to the entire family. More than he lets on at first, he has plainly been stung by the mockery to which they have been subjected in recent years. This explains why he had put Nadine on her guard, although he did so to such an extent that she said almost nothing during our first conversation. Fortunately, Claudine intervened. She doesn’t share Damascène’s anxiety, doubtless thanks to her past experience with my books; she knows that a story published in France has no effect on the rumors here. She also no doubt believes that her daughter, by telling her story to a sympathetic stranger, may be able to express what she tends to fixate on in silence, that talking to me will encourage Nadine to open up about “her roots,” which, as Claudine puts it, “got tangled up in sorrow.” In convincing her husband to allow us to speak one-on-one, Claudine displayed both diplomacy and a touch of guile. Most important, she put her daughter’s mind at ease.
Nadine finally arrives. She has donned a cherry-red sheath dress and matching turban for the occasion. She pauses a moment, hesitating in the doorway. We give her a round of applause. She turns in place, kisses her mother, who leaves the room with Damascène, and settles comfortably in an armchair. She was four years old in the photograph published in Life Laid Bare. Because she spoke neither English nor French, I saw her grow up over the years without really speaking to her. She is now the eldest child of a lovely family. With an air of nonchalance and a mischievous smile, she knows that she is a beautiful girl whose curves hold the gaze of the boys from the mudugudu as well as those from her class. But what is most striking is how similar her deep voice is to her mother’s.