The Catastrophist: A Novel (10 page)

I am still here, though I will leave soon. We share even less than before. Stipe advised me to hang on, but being around her and receiving nothing has discouraged me. It has worn me down. It has overthrown my self-esteem, sapped my pride. She is indifferent to my presence. I can take no more.

She has not been well. Out of habit, I suppose, I badger her about not eating properly. When she goes out on her tours with Smail and Auguste—who now seems to drive for her as much as for Stipe—she makes do with
fufu,
plantain and cassava. What’s good enough for the people is good enough for her. She is so thin and worn. Her big blue eyes seem bigger now; there are black-brown smudges beneath them and they are disturbingly bright.

There is a funny side to this. Though she would deny it, Inès has a competitive sense—not about esteem or earnings or proficiency with languages or anything like that, but about health and stamina. During our first winter in London I came down with a bad cold. She brought me endless hot whiskies and whispered comforts, and informed me—a little boastfully—that she never got colds. When a few days later she took to her bed
dying
of one I teased her, but she of course could not remember having said anything of the sort. She doesn’t play fair: she gives you pieces of the jigsaw and snatches them away again. Little details, the things that make up the whole.

I do not tease her now. I am too worried. When Lumumba was unexpectedly freed to attend the Brussels conference—something she is convinced her campaign in
L’Unità
was instrumental in bringing about—she could not find the strength to get out of the apartment. She insisted she would be fine and was adamant about not seeing a doctor. Doctors are panickers, she says. But the truth is she does not want to be reminded of London, of what the doctors told her there. There are days when she is fine, and days when she is not.

I am writing at the table when I first hear it. The noise is low, indistinct, faintly like the air being sliced, a sound you think you have heard, then decide is inside your head. Inès is in the bedroom, reading, dozing. Today is one of the bad days.

“Can you hear that?” she calls out weakly.

The sound is louder now. I become conscious of something odd, something missing. I look at my watch. It is just after four. There should be traffic and there isn’t any. Not a single car.

“Can you hear that?” Inès calls again from the bedroom.

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

I get up and look out the window.

“What’s happening?”

Inès comes into the living room pulling a dress over her head. I glimpse her white stomach and breasts and feel a sudden sharp pang of loss. The beautiful things that were mine and are no longer. This proximity is killing me. I have to go, if I am to survive. I have to go, but I don’t want to.

The phone rings.

“I can’t see anything,” I say to her. “But have you noticed? There’s no traffic.”

She comes to the window and stands beside me. Her skin smells of sleep and milk and sweat. I go to answer the phone.

“Heard the news?”

It is Stipe.

“No.”

“You must be the only man in Leo who hasn’t. What the hell do you writers do all day?”

“Write.”

“Try to get out a little more. Or at least listen to the radio.”

“What is the news?”

“Remember your article—six months?”

“And?”

“You weren’t out by much. June 30th. It’s just been announced from the roundtable conference. Congratulations. Let’s have a drink at the Colibri soon to celebrate.”

He hangs up. Inès is looking at me.

“Well?”

“Stipe.”

She makes a noise of disapproval and turns back to the window. Nothing Stipe has to say could possibly be of interest.

“The Belgians have set the date for independence—June 30th.”

She turns back at once.

“Jesus,” she says quietly. “Is he joking?”

“I don’t think so.”

I have never seen her look so astonished. She hurries into the bedroom to finish dressing.

I check the date: February 27th.

“Four months,” I say to myself. “Four months to independence.”

Only now do I realize that I hadn’t believed Stipe when I’d written the article. I’d been a proxy floating something speculative and provocative. I had claimed—the way journalists do—to be painting the picture I had seen before me. Inès has no time for this defense. What colors do you use? How do you mix them? Where do you stand? What factors influence your choice of perspective? But in this case the defense was especially spurious. I had painted a picture I hadn’t even seen. It was Stipe’s picture.

She reemerges clutching a pair of scuffed old shoes and leans against me as she slips them on.

A middle-aged Belgian woman in a pale blue floral dress tugs at my arm. She clutches a white handbag to her breast. She has a desperate look.

“Nous nous trouvons devant l’inconnu complet,”
she mutters.
“L’inconnu complet, l’inconnu complet
.”

She wanders off with the distracted air and unseeing eye of someone who has just been told that their child has been killed in an accident. She is not alone. Every white face betrays loss, and utter bewilderment. At the corner of Lambermont a small group of white office workers have come out to confirm with their own eyes what they have been told on the radio. They are speechless, blank, horrified.

“Come on,” Inès says urgently and she starts down Avenue des Aviateurs, where the blacks are marching. I follow, pushing past the benumbed white spectators.

“Where is the army? Why are they letting this happen?” I hear a man say to his companion as I pass.

Something about this jars. Not the words. Not that. Something else. It is not until I have gone another ten or twenty paces that it hits me: the man was whispering, he was speaking under his breath. I have often heard whites being defensive and wary, but this is the first time I have ever heard a
colon
keep his voice down. In that instant I grasp the extent of what we are witnessing. I stop to look back at the speaker. I have to see him, I have to fix the image of this moment. He notices me, and so do his companions; they see me and unite against me in paranoia and aggression.

I hurry after Inès. All around is suppression and silence. There is only the steady, foreboding swish.

Towards the bottom of the avenue, near Place de la Poste, we come upon the marchers. They are in their thousands. They walk at a deliberate step, their eyes straight and implacably ahead, expressions set with a confidence I have not seen before on black faces: it is mixed with ostentation, borders on hostility. They whip the air with palm fronds to make the violent hiss I first heard in the apartment. The sound sends shivers down my spine.

A frightened white woman at the post office gathers up her daughter, an infant too big to carry, and hastens away, staggering bow-legged under her load like some comic female impersonator. The gendarmes stand around, resentful, frustrated, humiliated, leaderless.

Inès and I follow the marchers as they turn up towards the boulevard, where we bump into Grant among the growing crowd of onlookers. He puts a hand to his floppy brown fringe and brushes it from his forehead. As far as I can tell from the snatched conversation I have overheard at the Colibri or the Regina he is a man entirely devoid of enthusiasm. Inès says it was trained out of him at whatever public school or university he was educated. Today is no exception. The news to him is nothing special. He casts a languid eye over us and from his much superior height—he is at least six foot four—condescends to speak to me.

“Congratulations,” he says with a politeness so tight it conveys no congratulations at all. “Your piece turns out to have been rather prophetic in the end.”

“Thank you,” I reply.

Inès walks ahead. Her dislike is for the type as much as the man.

“Did you know this was coming?” he asks.

“I had no idea,” I say.

“I thought your CIA chum might have told you.”

“I really had no idea,” I repeat.

He seems to read this as a competitor’s rebuff. Part of me tingles with the satisfaction of the outside chance who has won the race against a stronger and more fancied opponent, and without even trying. Some of the other correspondents gravitate over. They gaze at me expectantly. One of them is trying to catch my eye. When, out of mere politeness, I nod at him he smiles as though favored.

“You’ll be in demand now,” Grant says.

Further down the boulevard one of the marchers has broken from the demonstration and run up to Inès.

“Auguste!” Inès cries out in delight.

They rush to embrace.

“It is coming,” Auguste says, his voice high and thrilled. “Freedom is coming. Just like Patrice said.”

I hadn’t realized Auguste was so ardent a Lumumbist and wonder if Stipe knows. Inès hugs him again.

“I am so happy,” I hear her say.

I watch as, arm in arm, gabbling excitedly, they fall in with the demonstrators. Their friendship has grown steadily over the weeks since I introduced them. Neither notices how shocking their display is to the white crowd. Grant is going on to me about the inevitable offers of work that will come from the London papers, about word rates and expenses. I hardly hear him. My gaze is fixed on a thick-armed, stocky man who has started after Inès and Auguste. I cannot see his face, but the outrage and anger building up in him are clear from the way he moves.

“Perhaps you’d like a drink later?” Grant says.

“Excuse me,” I reply quickly and start after Inès and Auguste.

It is too late. The stocky man has exploded. He lunges from behind, throwing them apart with a violent shove.

“You like black cock, is that it, you fucking bald whore? You stinking whore! You have to get it from niggers because no real man would touch you.”

Inès shouts something back in Italian, too fast for me to understand. The white crowd hovers, tense and unpredictable. The stocky man spins round and pushes his face into Auguste’s.

“Get out of here you ugly monkey or I’ll kill you now with my bare hands. Go on, you dirty black monkey.”

Inès shouts at their antagonist, but Auguste glances warily around him. He does not want to leave Inès, but the anger of the other whites, the men and the women, is getting up. He takes a cautious step backwards. Someone lunges from the crowd and punches him in the chest.

Auguste stumbles. The whites close in. How big his eyes are now, how manifest his fear. He is like a silent movie nigger, a joke to those who cannot know the reach of his terrors. Someone kicks at his legs. He knows he must not go down. He begins to retreat, backing off carefully, trying to find a way back to the safety of the march. The demonstrators are becoming aware of what is going on but seem uncertain about what to do.

“Leave him alone!” Inès shouts.

I try to push through the clotting crowd. They are shouting insults at Inès—
Salope, salope!

“Let me through,” I shout. “Let me through.”

Hearing my accent they eye me suspiciously and become slow to budge. I am not one of them; they have associated me with Inès and Auguste.

“Get out of my way!”

Someone smacks the back of my head. A glob of spit lands on my nose. I push ahead, someone grabs my arm.

The stocky man is confronting Inès. She is not intimidated and gives as good as she gets.

“Shut up, you filthy whore!”

He bumps her with his fat chest, pushing her off the pavement onto the road. She pushes back. The man raises his hand and slaps her across the face. She is taken by surprise but rallies immediately, fire in her eyes, and throws a tiny fist back at him.

I am in the grip of someone who will not let go. I lash out and, without knowing who I have hit, find myself released. I think I have just seen a face I know. Smail? I turn back. It is Smail. The diamond trader is fighting with the crowd, pushing them off me, swearing and challenging them. Our eyes meet briefly, just long enough for us to confirm the presence of the other; then I turn and struggle my way through to Inès. I manage to get between her and the stocky man. I am not a fighter. I cannot remember the last time I threw a punch—a very long time ago, at school probably—but there is blood on Inès’s mouth.

“Don’t touch her,” I tell the stocky man.

I am not shouting, my voice is quiet. I can hear the menace in it myself. Some way behind us I am aware of the scuffle still going on around Auguste.

“You filthy racist!” Inès shouts at the stocky man.

“Be quiet!” I tell her.

I can see that the stocky man is thinking about taking me on. If he does he will beat me. I have to concentrate on not letting him see that. He pauses. There is such contempt in his eyes.

“Keep your fucking woman under control,” he says.

He spits in my face, then turns away. The crowd stares at us but no one seems to want to make the first move.

I take Inès’s hand and start to lead her away.