The Catastrophist: A Novel (16 page)

She hates me now. She loathes me. It’s all right. I am proud of what I have done and I bask in her fury. I have struck home. At last I have hurt her.

I shout my justification, I scream it at the top of my lungs in an ecstasy of rage. Yes, Stipe gave me the story, but every word is true. Nendaka told me himself. The first article made the Belgians uncomfortable, this one makes Lumumba uncomfortable. So what? That’s the problem with the truth, Inès, it falls where it will. Not that you would know anything about the truth, how could you when all you do is churn out eulogies for the great leader and nauseating adulation for his party and its program? All I was doing was reporting the facts.

Non gettare il sasso e nascondere la mano,
she shouts back. Don’t throw the stone and hide your hand.

Is what you do journalism? Is it honest journalism? Not even Grant is so obviously partisan. I hate what you do, Inès, I hate your pointless, belched slogans. It’s a degradation of your profession. Self-interrogation is unknown to you. Where is your independence of position? Where is your critical distance? I should have said this a long time ago. Why I didn’t I’ll never know.

And she attacks along the usual lines—that what’s important is being on the side of the oppressed, of sticking with that side even if it makes mistakes, of not being diverted, of keeping a clear sight of what the real issues are and who the enemy is.

Grow up, Inès. Grow up and join the real world, where things aren’t always black and white. Join the world in which irony exists, read Empson and there you will see it is possible to believe that people are at once guilty and not guilty; you will see that principles shift and people are skeptical and weak.

Oh weak? Tell me about weak! How weak I am to deny who I am, to deny my nationality, to deny my history, my place, to deny my own name.
Seamus!
She screams at me.
Seamus!
Your name is not James. You are Seamus. Why do you talk with an English accent? Where did that come from? What are you trying to prove with that?

That none of it matters! That it’s old and tribal and petty.

You’re ashamed. You’re ashamed when you should be proud! If you weren’t ashamed it would be in your books. How can you be from Ireland and not take a side? You look, and look away.

Because it’s old and tribal and petty, and because I’m a writer and I see all sides. I work in words, I am a worker in words and these words cannot be made to work for others, they are not the slaves of party or position. Maybe you look down on it, maybe you and your bitter comrades think it’s precious, but the writer’s words are their own justification. They have to be if they are to be true, if they are to count for something.

And you say that Dante wrote that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality.

Where is this great moral crisis? I see ambition, I see corruption, I see squalor, I see intrigue and vanity and self-promotion. Where is the moral crisis?

And you say, the words chilly with contempt, that there are times when it is necessary to be more than just a writer.

She’s gone. She’s taken her things. I don’t know where she is living. It’s fine. I am not sad. Actually, I feel a glorious sense of liberation. I lived in the saturation of her disdain for too, too long. I was tired of her winter words. I don’t miss her. Not at all. Some days I don’t even remember to think of her. She is not in the apartment, not in its fabric or walls. I cannot smell her, she has left no spoor. It’s as though she’s never been here.

I enjoy my routine. I no longer have to mold it around her. It is at last my own again. She was so fixed that even though she was home so little her needs always predominated. The hands of the clock turned around her coming and going. I am liberated from time. I am liberated from lying awake waiting to hear the key turn in the tumbler. I am free of all that.

I am mildly surprised that I am coping so well. De Scheut asks if I’m all right, so does Stipe. One night they take me to the Sabena Guest House and try to make me eat. I tell them truthfully that my appetite was never large and that in any case I needed to lose a little weight. I assure them that I haven’t felt so well in months, years. The wine is good though. What was I thinking of, I ask rhetorically as I top up my glass. Why did I put myself through such torture? I say I am beginning to think it was no more than pride. I couldn’t stand the thought of rejection, so I mounted an absurd and extravagant campaign—during which I deployed every device known to the spurned lover up to and including the tactical use of tears. Me crying! I tried everything I could think of—and more than I was proud of—to make her mine again. I believed that if I didn’t win her back I would be finished. But here I am and look!—I’m obviously not finished. I have a life before me. A good life. I should have let her go when she left London and saved myself the heartache and disruption. I should have simply said, “Go! Go, Inès. Go to the Congo and find your new heroes.” It’s so clear to me now. And now she’s gone and I’m fine. I’m really fine. Stipe swallows a mouthful of mussels and takes a sip of his wine. He stares at me with a funny look. De Scheut puts a hand on my arm and asks if I would like to come and stay with him and the children for a while. For a moment I am tempted—a home, a family home of which I could be part. But I’m all right. Really. I thank him for his generosity, for his concern—he’s such a kind man—but no . . . no . . . I’m fine. I really am.

I work and I work. I am in a work fit. In the afternoons and evenings I talk to sources, cultivate contacts, do my interviews. I file on time. They appreciate me at the paper. They’ve increased my retainer. They had to. I was getting approaches. They now ask for “think pieces” as well as straight news reports and features. Grant defers to me. In company I am the one whose eyes he searches for approval whenever he hazards a comment. I know he hates himself for his obsequiousness, but I am, for the time being, king of the correspondents’ little castle, however much he resents it.

I keep the mornings for the book. It goes very well. The day Inès left I solved the problem of the novel’s heartlessness. It came to me in a flash. I realized I had been trying to write something I did not believe—I realized in fact that I had been writing in an effort to please Inès (insanity—when was there ever any pleasing her?). She had been encouraging me to excavate feelings that had never been there. Phantom emotions. I had been trying to write about an anguish that had played no part in my life. My solution was the obvious one: it was to do what I do best, to revert to my usual style. I took the novel apart and put it back together, remaking it dry, mordant. I have made a virtue of its lack of feeling. The book mocks the son for thinking he can find anything in his father. There are no answers there, there never are. The book is cruel, very cruel. Sometimes it makes me laugh. I write to Alan, promising him the manuscript within a month. I start to make plans for my next book. It will be a comic novel. It will be about a serious-minded, idealistic young girl (Chinese? Russian? Czech?—possibly a junior member of a trade mission on her first foreign posting) who falls passionately for a staid, middle-aged and rather surprised man (estate agent? tax inspector?), wrongly believing him to be a fearless spy in the service of international communism. I will have fun with it, at both their expenses. At our expense.

I feel different about my writing now she’s gone. I admit that my confidence was shaken. By Inès, by Houthhoofd, by Stipe—I know now Stipe has never read anything of mine, though I am sure from certain things he has said that he has had the books sent from London; I think he probably keeps meaning to get round to them. Inès saw it from the first. He was flattering me, he was doing what spies do—finding a way into someone of potential use. It hurt, I admit, because we are friends. His deception contributed to the doubts I had. I was starting to think that Inès was right, that the writer is merely an egoist who, puffed up by the respect even the mediocre published word commands and by the fact that every act and person is liable to eventual summation in print, deludes himself into thinking he is worth more than he is, so much so that he convinces himself that he is some kind of special crea ture, delicate and fearless at the same time, independent and yet in need of eternal protection.

But now I see my novel—whatever its merits, however it will be judged on publication—has an importance. It is the proof of what I am, of what I have title to. For the first time in a long time, and with sudden precision, I see the consequence of my profession. I understand its worth and the worth of what I do. It is undermining to be surrounded by so many people who have a role in this country and the things that are happening to it—people whose passions and interests can make the onlooker seem impotent, dilettantish. But I was allowing myself to be done down. I have my book, my words, my distance, my impartial eyes; I have the rights not just to my own story, but to theirs. The written account does endure, it outlasts all participants. Eventually it will define them. It will be the breath on which their memories live, the tongue that summons their names.

I will have the last word on Houthhoofd and his proprietorial assumptions. I will have the last word on Stipe and his intrigues. And I will have the last word on the woman I once loved. I am liberated.

Madeleine calls. Madeleine and her maw. Am I being unfair to her? My appetite, my need, is just as sharp. She’s at one of Houthhoofd’s houses in Leo, near the Colibri on Eugene Henry. The house is empty, she’s alone. There we will consummate our hostile attraction. I shower and shave, I buy flowers and champagne. Inès had no time for the paraphernalia of seduction. I, on the other hand, have missed them.

Who am I kidding? I am in hell. I can’t bear the slowing down of the day. The onset of dusk sends me into panic. In the watches of the night I go mad. I am in a maze, a confusion, I am blasted by depression. I think I hear her voice, but there is only the echo of her name on my dry lips . . . Inès, Inès, Inès . . . In the mornings I wake up and she’s not there. She used to look at me with bright blue eyes and say
buon giorno,
say it sweetly, say it as though the day was bound to be good because she had found me lying beside her. I have been left with less than I had before; more had been given me, more taken away. I am the debris of what I was. I am angry and bitter. I heap recriminations on her. I was right to be suspicious when she said she was already loving me as we stood in the drizzle at the lough shore in Belfast. How could she have loved me then? She barely knew me. It was too much too fast too soon. Her love is like a struck match. It flares up suddenly and brightly and dies away in an instant. Why did I let myself be taken in? Why hadn’t I treated it as just another affair? Why did I let her come close? She is incapable of sustaining any deep attachment. She spreads her feelings widely, thinly, indiscriminately, there is no possibility of real, lasting attachment. Her friends say how warm she is, but this warmth is for herself. Conscious of what they are saying, aware of her reputation, her reviews, she basks in her own glow. Is this warmth any kind of real warmth? All this giving, all this altruism and ostentatious sympathy for the downtrodden—it’s about her, it’s to meet her needs not others’. I always hated her holier-than-thou manner, her irrefutable justifications—how do you breathe a word of criticism against someone whose answer is that they are serving others? You end up appearing peevish and self-centered. She is one of the most selfish people I have ever met. You’re selfish, Inès, that’s all you are—a selfish little bitch who’s convinced herself she’s a saint of the cause! Why on earth did I put up with your selfishness for so long? That and the scorn with which you looked on me and everything I did.

I crumble. After pouring out my venom I crumble. I apologize to her in my head, cravenly, submissively. I beg her. I cry that I didn’t mean any of it, that I’m just upset, that I’m missing her and the life we had.

Just before the elections I decide to leave the apartment. I can stand it no more. I find a house for a reasonable rent on Gombé. The night before the move I pack my last few possessions. Among them is a book,
Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana
. It was the first present she gave me. She told me this book moved her more than any other. She said it would be good for my Italian because the language was simple. I never did more than flick through it. Now I sit down and turn the pages. I can read most of it, even without a dictionary. I come to a letter written by a partisan from San Remo, a sixty-one-year-old tailor. It’s twelve lines long. He tells his children and his mother and his sisters and brothers he has just been informed that he is to be shot. He asks his son and his daughter to be good to each other, and asks his mother to forgive him the pain he has caused her. He ends with
Baci a tutti, vi assicuro che muoio con coraggio. Baci, baci, baci
. The honesty of the feeling behind the simple words, the knowledge of the circumstances in which they were written. The man in his cell, waiting for dawn, for the step outside his door. I can’t bear it. Kisses to all. Kisses, kisses, kisses. Tears stream down my face. I am crying not for him but for myself. Everything now reduces me to tears. I can’t believe that I am to be deprived of her forever. It is like a death.

The following morning, waiting for de Scheut to come and help me with my things, I sit down at the little table before the window and start to write.

Oh Inès, why am I writing this when I know it’s hopeless, that the one thing you’ll never forgive is the thing that I have done? I lay awake all last night, alert to every sound, thinking, hoping, you might come home to me and make everything better. I did not really think that you would—I am too much of a realist—but I could not stop my body refusing to lie still, or my mind imagining you once again in my arms.