There’s a little place to stay in Butare that I just love. It’s just off the main road, and the first time I was here, two years ago, it didn’t even have a proper gate. Pieces of corrugated metal leaned, rusted and ramshackle, against each other, and I had to crawl through a little hole in one of them to get inside. I thought, “Dear lord, what has the translator who booked this place got me into?” And then, on the other side, was this magical, beautiful little place of preening blumes and perfect symmetry. I felt like Mary finding the secret garden.
The room was huge, the floor tiled, the bathroom pristine and—my own! This was quite a change from the small church guest house where I’d been staying in Kigali. Every room had a little porch, with a tall oak table where you could have your breakfast. The rose-colored tile under the table’s feet matched the bricks of the building, and the roof and small walls that divided one porch from the other matched the wood of the tables.
And everywhere, flowers, flowers, flowers. Tall, wide bushes in bright greens and yellows; short, triangular plants with little buds and indigo leaves; palms of all sizes, some in surprising colors (pink stripes!).
It’s still the same beautiful place, though like everything, it’s maybe less idyllic the second time around. The French people staying next door to me woke up early and immediately loud; not long after they started throwing their voices across the courtyard, the cleaning staff turned on a radio with a predilection for old Celine Dion songs, from the era when I used to like her, which means I know the words. Which means, of course, that going back to sleep was impossible: before I knew it, I was singing along.
In French, is the strange thing. I bought one of her French albums when I was 14 and so good at French they advanced me a year. I wanted to improve even more rapidly and thought this CD might help. It had a song called “J’irai et tu irai” or something like this, which was verb form we were studying. Sold.
This is all a way of saying that once upon a time, we were people we wouldn’t know any more, speaking languages we can’t understand and walking around high school with Celine Dion albums in our backpacks, for heaven’s sake. And then one morning, in the cozy safety of the Secret Garden, we get to wake up and try that person on again for a moment.
Which is, it turns out, just long enough.
I remember once upon a time you tried converting me to her.
Shudder.
It is a testament to what a good Madisonian I am, a patriot with a belief in free speech even when its pursuit embarrasses me, that I didn’t censor this comment. That will not, however, stop me from denying what you’re saying. It can’t be. I’m sure it can’t be. Except that the little voice of truth they call a Conscience seems to remember maybe even dubbing that French tape, or parts of it, and sending it to you.. Oh, I hang my head…
It was alright, Miss Jina. You didn’t do the hard sell. It was more like a gentle nudge in the Celine Dion direction.
Had you done the hard sell, though, I very well might have thought you had joined a cult.