The Catastrophist: A Novel (11 page)

“Auguste!” she cries.

Twenty yards further up the avenue Auguste is on his knees, encircled by the mob. Smail is doing his best to defend him. Someone kicks Auguste savagely in the chest.

It is the signal for the start of the fight proper. The marchers are already breaking ranks and, throwing aside their palm fronds and placards, they dash headlong into the enemy to rescue their comrade. Some of the whites scatter, others run to take them on. Gendarmes rush over.

“Auguste!” Inès shouts.

He staggers to his feet, helped by Smail. The marchers, the crowd and the police join in a fighting swirl.

“Auguste’s all right,” I say. “Smail’s with him. He’s all right.”

Auguste is not all right. But I have to get her away.

I lead her down the boulevard, back the way we have come. There is fighting all around us. The streets, normally so well kept, have a sudden air of shabbiness, of discouragement: there is a pair of man’s underpants lying sodden and gray next to a storm drain (what happened that they should be there?); there are discarded palm fronds and placards; and strewn everywhere is the diamond glass of smashed car windows. An armored car cruises up behind us, its machine-gun turret swiveling with robotic dispassion. Rioters scatter as it advances.

“Stop,” she shouts suddenly, her voice urgent and weak at the same time.

She bends over and puts her hands on her knees to try to rally her forces. I hold her from behind by the waist. She is a feather.

“Are you all right?”

She does not say anything.

“Inès?”

She makes a little groan. From behind on the boulevard there is a pop. Tear gas.

“I can’t move,” she says and tries to sit down on the pavement.

I will not let her free.

“We’re going home,” I say.

As I pull her gently up I notice Grant and one of the correspondents looking at us. Grant nods to me and I give him a stiff smile in return. I see a smirk cross his face. He turns to say something to his colleague. I doubt that it’s kind. It must please him to see his competitor embroiled in so undignified a situation. I doubt Grant has ever been in the middle of something like this—with temper, anger, passion flaring, with someone’s spit trickling from nose to chin. I doubt he has been with a woman like this, a woman who causes fights and flails with her fists. No, Grant would never put himself in such a ridiculous position.

I can see myself and Inès now, the state we’re in, from where he’s standing.

I dab her swollen lip with iodine. She demands I telephone Stipe to get him to help Auguste. If Stipe can’t, or won’t, I am to go to the cité, to the house of Auguste’s brother, where there will be people who will know what to do.

I say all in good time, first she must see a doctor. Above her protests I telephone Roger. She hasn’t forgotten what Roger’s friends said in Houthhoofd’s garden all those weeks ago, even though compared with the things whites say every day about blacks their observations seem mild. I have bumped into Roger occasionally at the Regina and the Caravelle. He is a gentle, well-meaning and unimaginative man, thoroughly English, thoroughly decent. He comes over straight away.

He is kindly with her, though she is an irritating patient, interrupting his examination with questions about the Brussels announcement, about Lumumba, the demonstration: what has he heard?

“The radio said there are going to be elections in May for a Chamber of Representatives.”

“Patrice will win easily,” she predicts confidently. “The MNC is the biggest party.”

“Are you taking your malaria tablets?” he asks.

She seems not to hear the question but muses to herself: “I will arrange an interview when he comes back.”

“Nivaquine? Paladrine?” Roger presses.

“Paladrine,” I answer for her, though I am not sure how regularly she takes her pills.

“How about your movements?”

Inès looks at him, puzzled. I explain. She flushes a little. She is coy about this, engagingly so: it is the one thing about the body that discomfits even her earthy senses. She always used to go to great lengths, adopt all sorts of stratagems, to contrive that I was out of earshot when she went to the bathroom, and sometimes, if she couldn’t get me out of the way, she would hum nervous little improvised tunes to cover her distress. She has not been able to keep up this fastidiousness. Two nights ago I woke to find myself alone in the bed and to hear her vomiting and shitting. I waited for the sound of the toilet to flush, for the tap water to run, for rinsing and spitting. There was nothing except the dull whirr of the
condi
. I leapt out of the bed and in the semidarkness of the bathroom found her sitting naked on the toilet, leaning forward in an attitude of complete exhaustion. There was a lumpy gray-brown splatter of vomit on the floor between her feet. I helped her up and got her into the shower. Her skin was cold and damp. She sat in the basin, her back against the tiles while I directed the jets of water. I dried her off and carried her to bed, then went back to clean up the mess.

I leave her with Roger and her modesty and go to the window in the living room. I call the consulate and leave a message for Stipe, telling him about Auguste. The street below is silent. No one is stirring. I glance down at the table, on which my manuscript lies. What do I feel about the novel, if I am honest? It is about a man who has reached a point in his life where, unsure of who or what he is, he becomes convinced that only by finding the father he never knew will he discover the clues to his own identity. When I first told Inès that I was planning to write this book she became very excited. For reasons to do with her interest in my past and my family and my makeup, this was the novel she wanted me to write. It would be different from what I had done before, it would be a departure, it would be
felt
. She plied me with questions, she made endless suggestions, her enthusiasm stoked mine. Every evening, when she came home to the flat, she would ask to see what I’d written. She devoured the pages.
Bravo, complimenti
. She would kiss me. But then, as the work progressed, her attitude began to change. Her reactions were formal. I tried to hide my disappointment, but one night I tackled her about it. She said of course the work had technique and craft. She said she liked some of the descriptive passages (the more practice, the greater the opportunities to perfect the tricks). But the book’s heart should be the son’s need and this she did not feel. After that, she would turn the pages with the air of one who reads from duty. One evening when she asked to see what I’d written I replied with studied casualness, “Oh, I don’t think I have anything worth showing you tonight. The passage I’m working on isn’t ready yet,” and she did not ask again. Having been disappointed in the book, it was as though she’d forgotten all about it.

It’s true, she’s right. Though I write and rewrite, I still cannot seem to make felt what’s at stake for the son. Melodrama embarrasses me, raised voices are unnecessary. Whenever I try for emotion, anger, fire, the effect seems false. I will write to Alan to tell him I need a little more time.

Roger comes out of the bedroom.

“She’s anemic,” he says in the bland, matter-of-fact way that doctors have of announcing everything from corns to cancer. “She’s probably got a touch of malaria, and she’s almost certainly picked up amoebic dysentery. Probably got it from eating in the street. That’s not to be advised. Pretty unhygienic, you know. Actually, manioc has virtually no nutritional value. It’s a filler, a bulky starch. You can really feel it in the tummy but it does nothing more than satisfy immediate hunger pangs. It’s also thought to contain more than a trace of cyanide.”

“I suppose there’s something fitting in that,” I say.

The idea that the staple food of the black Congolese should be poisonous seems all too appropriate but Roger is not a man for whom ironies or metaphors have much meaning.

He runs the side of his finger along the bristle of his short ginger-brown mustache.

“She needs to pay a bit more attention to her diet—plenty of protein, fresh vegetables and fresh fruit. I’ve left some vitamin supplements and iron tablets. You should see that she takes them.”

“I will.”

“And something for the tummy trouble. I’ve also taken blood samples and specimens and I’ve made an appointment at the clinic in Gombé. In the meantime keep her in bed. She needs rest and looking after.”

I ask about her hair. I feel embarrassed doing so, embarrassed for Inès, more so than if we’d been discussing her movements.
Bald whore.
The stocky man’s insult rings in my head.

“It is a bit thin,” Roger acknowledges. “Women occasionally do lose some hair. It’s sometimes related to a nervous condition and it’s usually only temporary. Diet should help.”

I walk with him to the door.

“What do you think of the news?” I ask.

He sighs. “When I came out in ’49 it was a terrific life. Wonderful standard of living, far better than anything a young bachelor was likely to have back in England. And conditions for the blacks, you know, were actually on the whole jolly reasonable. But it’s all started to go a little downhill. It’s not the fault of the big companies. Unilever and the Union Minière built really splendid homes for their workers—I mean splendid by African standards: running water, electricity and so on. The trouble is that a lot of the Belgians who came out in the last ten years or so—the
petits colons
—they’re not terribly nice or terribly educated people. I think they’ve done an awful lot to inflame the blacks. I doubt I shall stay on much longer.”

I thank him again and open the door.

“If I were you,” he says, almost as an afterthought, “I’d think about getting out as well. I suspect what you saw today is a sign of things to come.”

I ask him how much I owe but he won’t hear of it.

I go in to see Inès. She is groggy. I sit on the bed.

“Will you phone to Stipe? You must find out about Auguste.”

I bend over and kiss her hot forehead and tell her I have already phoned to Stipe.

“Now that we know Stipe was right about independence,” I say, “what do you think now about his motive in giving me that story?”

She says nothing.

I tease her. “You won’t admit you got him wrong?”

“I do not know what his motive was, except that it wasn’t honest.”

I put my fingers to the side of her face.

“You know I love you,” I tell her.

I feel able to risk this because we have been together again; in the street it had been as though there was nothing wrong between us.

She presses her cheek against my hand, but does not otherwise respond. Her eyes are closed. One thing about Inès—she never lies, not even to spare someone’s feelings. She is tactlessly sincere. Her silence now is silence to avoid a lie.

“Roger says we should consider getting out,” I say slowly.

“What do you think?”

I ask the question as though we had a future together.

“Roger is a panicker,” she announces after a minute, “like all doctors.”

There is no future.

“Of course.”

Doctors are panickers. That’s all there is to it. She avoids the other implications.

“Anyway, how can I leave now, with independence coming?”

These are hurrying times; she must not be left behind.

Her illness has brought out the best in me, or what little there is I might reasonably claim for the best. I like her being sick—this is the truth of it; her weakness now plays to chivalric fantasies which have lurked in me from the day I saw my father raise his angry hand, the day I saw my mother tremble.

But there is more to it. Something is being recovered, slowly, unevenly. At times it almost feels a little like it used to after we had made love. In those minutes—if it had worked, if I had done it right—this restless, tumbling woman was momentarily calm, and in that calm I could glimpse a place for myself. It was when I most felt her need, and she mine. And now there is need again, on both sides. At least I think so, I hope so.

In the mornings I go out to get the papers. Since the Brussels announcement dozens of new journals, magazines and party news sheets have appeared. I buy a selection for Inès, as well as
Courrier d’Afrique, L’Avenir, Actualités Africaines
and whatever foreign papers I can find. They are costing us a fortune. I come back to the apartment and make coffee for myself and weak lemon tea for her. I sit on the bed and read aloud the headlines. She picks the stories she wants to hear. They are mostly to do with the election campaign, which began the moment Lumumba and the other delegates stepped off the plane from Brussels. I was already familiar with the larger political parties and tribal associations—Lumumba’s MNC, Kasavubu’s Abako, Tshombe’s Conakat—but new parties appear almost daily, as do coalitions, cartels, federations and alliances. These are shifting, to say the least: announced in sacred declarations of eternal fraternity in one issue of a news sheet, they are dissolved in the next in language of low abuse and high charges of betrayal. There are so many chaotic and clamorous voices, so many names, acronyms, initials: PSA, Cerea, RP, PP, Reko, Mederco, Luka, Puna, RDLK, Unimo, Coaka, Abazi, Cartel MUB, Unebafi, MSM, Balubakat. Not to mention the Parti National du Progrès. Inès calls it Parti des Nègres Payés, for the PNP is the Belgians’ favorite and its links with the administration’s coffers are no secret. Money—its sources and the channels in which it flows—is the subject of endless and vitriolic speculation.

She gets enraged by the bulletins of
Inforcongo,
the government’s mouthpiece.

“Look at this,” she howls in protest.
“The only mistake the Belgians may be making is to expect moderation and common sense from the self-appointed leaders.”

I tease her by reading the worst of the silliness in
Indépendance,
the MNC newspaper:
“Patrice Lumumba, you are the man we need, you are our hope and the hope of our future . . .”

“Shut up,” she says, roused to the effort of trying to snatch the paper from my hands.

“No, listen—it gets better.
Martyr of freedom, child of our fatherland, symbol of liberty, protector of our ancestors’ rights, valiant soldier, let your agonizing enemies watch your triumph and our glory
.”

She grabs the paper and tosses it to the furthest corner of the room.

“It’s easy to mock,” she chides, “but there are important things happening now.”

“Perhaps, but language like this makes important things difficult to take seriously.”

“Maybe for you. But when you think of what has been done, of all the oppressions and the miseries, words like this are inevitable. Anything less would be an insult to the people who have suffered.”

Suffer is
soffer
. There is always a lot of suffering in Inès’s lexicon. She reminds me these people have been
rightless
since the arrival of the first colonists and that only when Lumumba comes to power will their rights be restored.

“Martyr of freedom? Child of our fatherland?”

“One day you too will be forced to take this seriously. You won’t escape.”

In the early afternoons, instead of going to the Colibri, I sit on the bed and read novels to her.

“He is not there when he is speaking. It is too technical,” she complains halfway through
A Sentimental Education,
which Stipe had lent me. “If he is not moved, why should I be?”

She had listened with the same kind of withdrawn impatience to
Salammbô
and
St. Antony
.

“Just relax,” I say. “Listen to the descriptions, imagine the pictures in your head. Enjoy them.
Like an architect designing a palace he drew up his plans for his future, full of things dainty and splendid, towering to the skies; and sunk in contemplation of such a rich array he lost all sense of the outside world
.”

“How can anyone lose all sense of the outside world?”

The Realists are not to her taste. She prefers the metaphors of Yeats, prefers his extravagances and symbols and terrible beauties, shares his disdain for peering and peeping persons and the hawkers of stolen goods. I should have remembered before choosing Flaubert that language for her is not about precision, it is not about verisimilitude or the perfect description of person, thing, time, but a burning tesselation of images and instincts, of deeply felt, half-real things. In her world reality, imagination and emotion are indivisible—in deed, in thought. She is never detained by detail.

We have, in a way, made up some lost ground. I have no illusions. Nothing has been settled. We neither of us are certain where we stand with the other or what the future holds. It is just that for the time being there is a different, quieter context in which to be together.

Sometimes when I know she is sleeping I will leave the desk and go to stand in the doorway of the bedroom. I love to look at her. There are times when I can almost convince myself that all I have to do is rush to the bed, fall on my knees and beg her to make everything all right. It would be too absurd. My father was a man of impulsive and transparent gestures, performed intermittently in compensation for other, larger, more fundamental derelictions. After a bolt of his temper, after a hurt he had visited, he would present my mother with flowers he could not afford and she did not want. He always dreamed of making good and as his failures mounted so his attempts to buy his way out of them intensified. More flowers, bits of jewelry, dinners—not expensive, but more than there was money for. I used to see him stand before my mother, the little boy with his head hanging, waiting to be kissed, to have his hair ruffled and patted, but most of all waiting for a forgiveness he knew my mother could not withhold. She was soft and he made promises for the future. I cannot say I knew my father well but I saw enough of him to loathe this courtship by stealth, by trickery, by feint. It seemed cheap to me then and it does so now; I am only amazed that it seems to work.

My father’s flowers, my father’s flowers . . .

. . . and my words. What worth have they? From my youth I have lived by disguises—and with each disguise a new set of words to please the ear of my new audience. Like Margaret who had forgotten her height, I have forgotten what my real words are. I have lived disguised from myself, in permanent doubt of my own emotional authenticity; and since I am never alone with myself, since I am always watching the character playing my part in the scene, there is no possibility of spontaneity.

And so I leave her to sleep and say nothing.

I am writing at the table one afternoon when she calls to me.

“Do you want something?” I ask from the door.

She looks low.

“What is it?” I ask.

My hopes are up. There is never a chance of anything between us when she is happy, distracted by her commitments. In her sadness there are openings.

“I don’t know,” she says wearily.

She looks a little better. Her eyes at least are clear, though her face is still drawn.

“Come here,” she says.

“Do you want me to read to you?” I say, sitting on the bed.

“No,” she says. “Are you working?”

“It’s okay.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to interfere with your work.”

“What’s work, Inès? You have interfered with my life.”

She reaches up and kisses me.

With my hand, with my right hand, I stroke her. She whispers for me to get undressed. I hang my head, feeling nervous and uncertain. We have not made love for many weeks. Our last attempt was not a success.

“Come on,” she says gently.

I do as she says and open the sheet. The bed is an envelope of her smell. She has never been fastidious, there is no rule about showering every day. I lie beside her and press my nose into the sourness of her armpit. I breathe in deeply and kiss the side of her breast. She says nice things to me, that I am patient, not just in bed, that I am a good man, that I am kind. It is true, I suppose, I can sometimes be kind. I would put it no higher than that. But at this moment I do not want to contest her judgments; I want to feel well about myself.

“Tell me more,” I whisper.

Instead of speaking she gently pushes me onto my back.

“Are you sure you’re strong enough?” I say.

“I am very strong.”

She reaches down to take hold of me. We both smile. This is one of our shared sexual jokes. Once—soon after we became lovers—I had guided her hand to my cock. She hesitated and I was surprised because in everything else she had been abandoned, and I felt a little humiliated, as though chastised for something unseemly, for greed or perversion. But she had explained, “I am no good at this, I have never known how to do it right.” In my lover’s joyful egoism I said I would teach her. But I never did: patterns formed, self-consciousness settled, the moment never arrived again.

I do not at once collude in what she is doing, I do not relax—out of fear she will lose confidence, that she will think it is taking too long. But she continues, she goes on. Then I close my eyes and give myself up to it. I caress her back, I lower my hand to her cheeks and cup her and squeeze her. I give her small signals that it’s working, a clinch of my hand, a flaw in my breath. She kisses me and I respond.

“I want to be inside you,” I tell her.

She shakes her head. “I want to do this for you.”

She licks my teeth and lips and moves her mouth to my chest. She licks my nipples, bites them, flicks them with her free hand. I say her name over and over and say don’t stop, don’t stop and when she makes me come I feel momentarily embarrassed, a weakness exposed. But she does not make the false cooing noises of mistimed or unsatisfying sex. I see that she is excited by what she has done—even that it has made her love me again, and I feel suddenly whole and happy and confident.

She lies quiet, her hand running across my shoulder. After a while she begins to press herself against my thigh. She moves up to the bone and, reaching across my stomach, pulls us closer. I feel the prickle of the hair between her legs, a burn on the smooth skin of my hip and waist. I feel wetness and heat. How I love it that she comes so easily.

I can feel her breath on my stomach. We lie in silence until she tells me she loves me.

“Where is this going?” I say.

“You are . . . I cannot think of the word in English. In Italian it would be
catastrofista
—a catastrophist. Is there this word?”

“I’ve only ever heard it used in a geological sense.”

“As usual! English is always so poor. The meaning of this word is much bigger. If you are
catastrofista
no problem is small. Nothing can be fixed; it is always the end. Do you recognize this person?”

“A little.”

“Me too.”

“But if the problem is big,” I say, “if it can’t be fixed, the only thing to do is leave it behind.”

“You are
catastrofista
,” she says, putting a hand to my cheek, “but I don’t care.”

She sits up. I regard her from behind. Her vertebrae are clearly visible, there is a slight curvature from left to right. Her little bottom sinks into the mattress and looks as though squashed, pressed.

“I am depressed,” she says.

“Depressed?”

“It’s this stupid thing,” she says, reaching down to the floor. She comes up with a newspaper. “Here,” she says, presenting me with this morning’s edition of
Indépendance.
She taps the page. “It is the
Loi Fondamentale
.”

“You’re depressed about this?”

La Loi Fondamentale,
the sixteen resolutions passed unanimously by the Brussels conference, will form the basis of the post-independence constitution and the future Congolese government. They were agreed with pronouncements of high sentiment, amity and idealism—the kind that typically are made at the end of long and bitter conflicts when those charged with finding a settlement find first and most praise for their own statesmanship, far-sightedness and generosity. I saw a newspaper photograph of Lumumba shaking hands with Eyskens, the Belgian prime minister, just after the Brussels meeting broke up. Inès thought he looked handsome and dignified; I saw the child in the schoolyard who had at last been allowed to play with the big boys. At the time,
La Loi Fondamentale
was hailed as the beginning of a new era.

“No, not depressed, just . . .”—she trails off and shrugs—“sad, I suppose, that Patrice agreed to these things.”

Oh, talk about us, please, not the politics of this absurd place, anything but that. What is wrong with us cannot be recomposed so easily, so quickly. It will take more than an afternoon in bed. Talk about us, Inès, and what the future will be.