The Catastrophist: A Novel (3 page)

She is not an early riser, but this morning is different. The air tastes of imminence, there are patterns to the clouds and she can see things. I sit on the bed, silent, feet on the floor. She is behind me, playfully, naked, on hands and knees. Her excitement boils and the hairs on the back of my neck bristle with her kisses. She goes to shower and I become the sole object of my own gaze. I bunch the white cotton sheet in my lap. Where this leaves me I do not know.

Her talk is high and fast over the drone of the water. It is of the slaving centuries when Europeans and Arabs hunted down the Congolese in their millions. It is of Léopold and Stanley and the millions more sacrificed to propitiate the accountants and ledgers of the Congo Free State. It is of the old colonial plantations, and the chain gangs, floggings, mutilations and rapes. It is of the lands and factories and mines of the Union Minière, Brufina, Unilever and the Banque Empain.

She comes out of the shower and drops her towel to the floor. The ends of her hair are wet and coiled. She stands with her back to me, still talking, and stoops to recover yesterday’s panties. As she steps into them she notices something about her inner thigh—an insect bite, some red little mark. She splays her feet, bends in a sort of half squat and pulls the flesh to inspect the irritation. Her underwear is stretched just below the knees. She is telling me now about the Société Générale de Belgique, a fabulous, malevolent giant with interests in cotton, coffee, sugar, beer, palm oil, pharmaceuticals, insurance, railways, airlines, automobiles, diamonds, cattle, shipping. At last she pulls up her panties, the elastic snaps and she looks about for her dress.

What gives her the right to be like this, so sublimely unselfconscious? She really doesn’t see my gaze, or herself. Her figure, in unclothed harshness, is angular and bony. I don’t know, even after two years, what she thinks of her own shape and appearance. She spends no time attempting their improvement; I have heard neither delight nor despair nor coy encouragement to compliment . . . A memory comes to me and I smile inwardly. It is from the early days of our affair. Soon after she moved to be with me in London we went to see
Love in the Afternoon
. Walking home that night, she judged the film pretty slight but at least it had Audrey Hepburn.

“She looks like me,” she had remarked matter-of-factly.

She glanced up at me to see how I had taken this.

“Yes,” she said with a little more emphasis, “she is very like me.”

There are conventions about this kind of thing, there are devices to shelter the speaker’s modesty. She might have said that a friend of hers once told her she bore a resemblance to the actress though she couldn’t see it and what did I think? But no. Audrey Hepburn looked like her. Inès had stated it as a simple fact and in such a way as to suggest the actress was the copy. I could not think of it as vanity; it was too innocent for that.

We pass a wall daubed with freshly painted slogans.

N
O
M
ORE
C
OLONIAL
M
INISTERS
,

N
O
M
ORE
G
OVERNOR
-G
ENERALS
!

1959 L
AST
C
OLONIAL
G
OVERNMENT
!

I
NDEPENDENCE
OR
D
EATH
!

She notes them with approval and says with a certain friendly provocation, “You know, Roger Casement wrote a famous report about the rubber plantations. It was because of him that Léopold’s crimes were exposed to the world.”

“Yes, but that was a long time ago, I think.”

“Casement was Irish.”

“At the time he wrote the report he was the British consul. He got a knighthood for his services.”

“That’s not important. The British hanged him.”

She thinks me a poor Irishman, hardly one at all. I travel on a British passport and I couldn’t care less about Orange or Green, about the Six or the Twenty-six, the border she thinks so important. I have tired of trying to explain that the line on the map may have been significant once but it is not so now, and never will be again.

“You could write something like Casement about today’s situation,” she suggests.

Her sense of perspective is very particular to her. I smile, amused and touched by her loyally inflated opinion of my stature as a writer; she is forever urging me to put my pen at the service of this or that cause. What cause would benefit? And if by chance it did, what would be the cost? When has involvement with a cause—any cause—ever been good for a writer?

“Why are you not angry about this?” she demands good-humoredly.

“What good would my anger do anybody?”

“It might do you some good.”

On another occasion my detachment might be the subject of a long discussion, but after last night’s momentous events it is this morning an irrelevance. The Congo will be free and Lumumba will be a great African leader, as great as Nkrumah—even greater, for the Ghanaians have been forced into compromises by Nkrumah’s recent errors of judgment. In some, this kind of talk, with its vocabulary of certitude and supererogation and its premise of limitless commitment, would sound strident or naive or irritating; in Inès, it always seems yet more evidence of her sunny optimism. I put an arm around her and kiss the top of her head. Her black, brittle hair is hot in the sun. I rest my cheek against it and squeeze her. She tells me she is so happy.

The damage, in the light of day, is not great—some dented car bodywork and a few broken windows, already in the process of repair. People are still drinking coffee at the pavement cafés and buying their bread and meat, but even I—newest of arrivals—can devise in the town something sobered and alert. A military jeep passes and there are patrols of soldiers as well as gendarmes. Inès talks briefly to shopkeepers and traders, to policemen and passers-by. This is not her side, these are not the people she really wants to interview, but even so, she treats them respectfully, solicitously; she does not stalk potential interviewees as though they were a species from another planet. I feel proud of her, and protective: I desperately do not want her to be disheartened.

The roads into the cité are sealed by soldiers and gendarmes and they turn us away—for our own safety, they insist. She argues but they are implacable at first and unpleasant soon after. She tries to find out from the houseboys and workers trickling through the checkpoints if the MNC rally is still going ahead. No one knows anything for certain, or possibly no one is willing to say. The MNC office in town is closed, there is no one around. Her spirits begin to slide. She is anxious not just about her story but about the loss of momentum for Patrice and his party.

I persuade her to have a late breakfast. She picks at her food, then goes to make some calls. She can’t get through to Lumumba or any of the other MNC leaders. The morning wears on, nothing happens. Under the brightly colored umbrella shading our table we have a cold beer.

The sun climbs higher and my heat-sapped mind daydreams its way back to last night, to the bed, to Inès and the touch of her little breasts on my chest as she collapsed on top of me, breathless and laughing.

Two men make their way to a table nearby. Inès recognises a British reporter called Grant and comically shades her face with the menu. She despises journalists personally and professionally and avoids them when at all possible. It is nothing to do with rivalry. She simply cannot stand the self-regard, the camouflaged allegiances, the humbling generosity of their claims to neutrality. Grant, whom I would put at under thirty, is lanky and slow-moving. His brown hair, which he touches frequently, has a foppish cut; he has the studied languor of the old public schoolboy about him.

Inès surveys the street like a sunbather whose beloved little beach is becoming polluted by crowds and noise. She finishes her beer and decides we should, after all, go to Bernard Houthhoofd’s for the afternoon. Most of the people there, she says, will be unpleasant types, but she might be able to pick up some useful information.

We walk down to the public docks, past the Palace Hotel on the left and the GB Ollivant depot opposite. The waterfront is busy—tugs, cargo boats,
vedettes,
canoes, dugouts, river transports; as far as the eye can see there are piers, warehouses, cranes, petrol tanks, dry docks, shipyards. A four-decked, stern-wheeled passenger steamer, painted white and blue, barges lashed to its sides, makes its way upriver, bound for Stanleyville.

“Bernard Houthhoofd is one of the richest men in the Congo,” Inès tells me, “and one of the most influential. Nothing happens without him.”

“Does that include independence?”

“No,” she replies at once. “Not even Houthhoofd can stop independence.”

Jostled by the laughing women on their way to market, we board the ferry to Brazzaville.

Across the river and we are in another country. The French colony is different; it is haphazard and scruffy. Whites and blacks mix; they share restaurant tables and queues. We spend a little time ambling through the untidy streets and browsing in the market, threading our way through the women and their mounds of tapioca and cassava, sugarcane and bananas, avocados, tangerines, coconuts and peanuts. We find a taxi near the bus station—Inès hates the extravagance of this but Houthhoofd’s house is ten kilometers out of town. The lulling rumble of the cataracts at Livingstone Falls gets louder as we proceed.

A servant opens the gates to the walled villa. To our right is a clay tennis court. Madeleine is one of the players. She wears a short white dress and her limbs are long and strong and tanned.

At the back of the house a wide garden inclines gently down to the river, where a pair of speedboats pull girls on water-skis. Away to our left on the far bank the long, low profile of Léopoldville stretches out. Directly opposite, perhaps a mile distant, is a cluster of dusty brick buildings with tin roofs—some black quarter or other, no one seems sure of its name.

There are about sixty guests standing around in small groups with drinks in their hands; there is a swimming pool and a gazebo.

A fat, soft, goitrous-throated man with bulging eyes approaches us. Inès introduces me to Bernard Houthhoofd. Our host signals to a houseboy, one of a dozen or so lined up and waiting—almost straining—for summons. He brings us drinks from the little wooden bar by the shade of a mango tree.

“Did you hear about the disturbances last night?” Houthhoofd asks Inès.

“We were there, we saw it.”

“The Force Publique must be firmer next time.”

“They can be as firm as they like,” Inès replies, “it won’t do any good. There are a hundred thousand Europeans who don’t want independence and fourteen million blacks who do. The outcome is inevitable.”

Houthhoofd grins tolerantly.

“There are other numbers that matter,” he says equably.

“What are they?” I ask.

“Money,” he says, his grin widening.

There is nothing ostentatious about Bernard Houthhoofd’s dress or appearance, but still he has the look of a very rich man: it is in his self-possession and his manners—courtly yet at the same time somehow ominous. His smiling gaze is full of cool appraisals. He is the lord in his castle. We chat politely for a few minutes before he excuses himself.

De Scheut is playing croquet with another man and a boy and a girl in their early teens. They are healthy, shining, handsome children and they call de Scheut
papa.
Inès and I gaze at them and say nothing. My chest tightens momentarily. We cannot speak about this subject. I am again on the bus traveling up Kentish Town Road as Inès walks damp-footed through the gray snow after her appointment with the doctor. I had avoided going back to the flat that afternoon, avoided being there when she got home, for I knew from her expression, from the way she was walking, from the size of her, what she had been told. She cried, of course, but not for long. Inès bears misfortune bravely and I assured her it made no difference to me. At the time I believed this; now I am not so sure. What will the absence of children mean for us? For different reasons—hers to do with politics, mine with doubt—we have so far refused the disciplines and dreams of a conventional life together. We have never spoken seriously of marriage, we have never looked for an ideal home. But both of us feel the tug of domesticity, are aware of what it gives as much as what it takes away, and at moments like this, looking at de Scheut’s children, our thoughts cannot but help turn to what we know we shall never have. Two tattered African grays perch forlornly in their small cage, looking out at nothing.

We fall in with a group of guests by the gazebo. They seem well meaning, polite, even a little diffident. They ask for our impressions, advise on health precautions, recommend restaurants and sights to see. We should take the steamer to Stanleyville. We should go to Goma, a nice city with a pleasant climate. From there we can explore the Virunga national park. We should climb the Ruwenzori mountains.

As the conversation broadens I begin to pick up the miscellaneous little navigational tips the newcomer anywhere requires for his social and political map. How the diplomats tend to look down on the commercial people and rarely invite them to embassy parties. How the British generally are trusted in business matters.

How the Belgians are not good at mixing with the other nationalities, and the Flemish even worse—Houthhoofd is the exception. How the Walloons tend to be on the trading side, the Flemish more in administration and security. How the African mind differs from the European.

“The African mind?” I say. “What is that?”

When it comes to the blacks the first thing I am to understand is that they are like children.

“Naughty children,” a Portuguese trader elaborates.

“Mischievous,” a Swedish dentist adds.

“You can take the black out of the jungle but you can’t take the jungle out of the black,” someone else says. “Never show weakness in front of them—you’re either the predator or the prey.”

The man who had been playing croquet with de Scheut stands on the fringes of our group. He has been silent throughout. He is not tall, he is not physically imposing in that way, but his presence makes itself felt. Even though this is only my second day in the country—my second day in Africa—I have seen enough to understand that white men’s frames take on contours and conditions that imply compromise of varying degrees with their new environment. The way this man carries himself proclaims him inviolate, immune. He wears a short-sleeved shirt complete with tie. I assume he is de Scheut’s second kind of settler: he looks every inch the parodic
colon.
He seems to be trying to catch my eye.

“One afternoon, a couple of months ago,” the Portuguese trader says for my instruction, “I got my driver to take a friend home. His farm is on the way to Kikwit and it’s a good road. The journey should have taken two hours at most. That night no sign of my driver. Next morning I found him four miles outside town asleep in the back seat without a care in the world. I said to the fellow, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ He hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. What was the problem? He knew I’d come along eventually and sort it out.”

“What was the problem?” I ask.

Inès is bridling. I am surprised she has held her tongue so long.

“He’d run out of petrol.”

There is some shaking of heads to indicate shared experience.

“Your driver’s behavior seems perfectly logical to me.”

It is not Inès but the man in the shirt and tie. He speaks with an American accent.

“Treat a grown man like a child,” he continues, “and he’ll behave like a child. Your child did what any child would do and he looked after your property into the bargain. I don’t see you have anything to complain about.”

For a man so powerfully made and for so abrupt an intervention, the voice is disconcertingly gracious.

“I don’t think he was complaining,” Roger, a British doctor, says quietly. He is a ginger-sandy man of about my age. The face is faintly freckled and the mustache is of the kind popularized by RAF officers during the war; it tends to go with a pipe and a phlegmatic spirit. He pokes diffidently at an anthill with the toe of his shoe.

“Wasn’t he?” the American says. “My mistake.”

From further down the garden Houthhoofd shouts a summons: something across the river deserves our attention. The group breaks up, thankful to get away.

The American puts out his hand.

“Mark Stipe.”

“How do you do?” I say. “I’m James Gillespie. This is Inès Sabiani.”

I am very aware that I am looking at what I am not. His eyes are brown and frank and go some way to mitigate the stamp of barely tethered aggression implied by the large, round head and the close-cropped blond-gray hair. His face is open, and his broad, high brow divided in the middle by a thick, beating vein: for a moment I experience a bizarre urge to press my thumb to that violent pulse, as if in some way touching him there, where his blood runs nearest the surface, would enable me to get the measure of the man, to understand, even share, the sources of his authority. I came across men like this in the army, and I have written about them since, pretending—as the writer does—to know them or to know more than they do. I am never easy in their company.

Stipe looks down the garden at our companions.

“When are these people going to see they have a problem here and they’re going to have to do something about it?”

I say nothing, unwilling to collude in something I know so little about.

“James Gillespie,” Stipe says slowly, turning the name over, wondering aloud. “How do I know that name? You’re not the writer, are you?”

I say that I am.

“I’ve read something of yours. A novel? Set in London, wasn’t it?”

“It’s possible.”

“I have a bad memory. Remind me of the title.”

I give him three alternatives. He selects my second novel.

“You know, I liked that book a lot.”

I am deeply flattered, more than I pretend to be. My books are not widely read.

“Are you a writer as well, Inès?”

“No,” she replies.

There is a short, rude silence which I try to cover by explaining that Inès is the correspondent for
L’Unità.

“The communist paper of Italy,” she declares.

This addition, given Stipe’s determined amiability, hardly seems called for, and it is uttered with unmistakable truculence. I look at her, surprised. I had thought that after Stipe’s intervention she might have found an ally. Her throat has flushed red. She has taken against him. I see it at once. So does he.

“I’m more of a
Wall Street Journal
man myself,” Stipe says.

“I wouldn’t expect anything different.”

“Nor I of you, Inès.”

Her whole face now is red; she doesn’t have the temperament or a sufficiently ironic grasp of English to deal with Stipe’s careful insouciance.

“You’re not a journalist then?” I say to get us out of the awkward moment.

“I work at the consulate. I was in the London embassy for two years before I got this posting,” he says, and he smiles to show he has not taken offense. “We must have a long talk over tall, cold drinks some evening. Leo has its merits, but culture isn’t one of them.”

Inès squints down to the lower end of the garden where Houthhoofd’s guests are gathering.

“There’s something happening across the river,” she says and she walks down to join them.

Watching her as she goes, Stipe says with an amused sympathy I slightly resent, “I like a woman who knows her own mind.”

I do not respond to this; he is a stranger. We peer over to the far bank.

“I’ve got a pair of binoculars in my car,” Stipe says, and, excusing himself, he strides away up the garden.

I go down to the crowd and find myself next to Madeleine. The water-skiers weave and circle, a pied kingfisher hovers twenty feet above the water. There are men in military uniform on the far bank.

“What’s going on?”

“You see?” Madeleine says, pointing across the river at the buildings of the native quarter.

There is some ragged movement, people running this way and that. The sounds coming to us from the far bank are muted and flat.

“This will show them who’s boss,” Madeleine says with relish.

“It was inevitable,” I hear Houthhoofd announce. “If we do nothing, they’ll get it into their heads that they’d got away with it and next time it will be a lot worse than a few broken windows.”

“You’re only stoking up more trouble for yourself, Bernard,” de Scheut says.

“Romain,” Houthhoofd begins in an indulgent tone, “what is your alternative?”

“There is always an alternative to force,” de Scheut replies. “Talk to them, talk to their leaders, make them feel part of the setup.”

“How can you talk to those people?” Madeleine breaks in vehemently. “They can barely speak enough French to understand when you tell them to clean the house.”

Stipe rejoins us. He has a pair of field glasses.

“Looks pretty serious,” he says after a while, handing me the glasses.

I am confronted by a turbid blur—the magnified foliage of the bush, the muddy water of the river or the gray sky above, it could be any of these. Something passes before me, accelerating fast. One of the speedboats. I adjust the focus and trail it. The boat starts to slow down, the girl on the skis slews gently into the river like a landing waterbird, the boat circles and picks her up. I move the glasses and find the kingfisher, its hammer-shaped head cocked for movement below. It folds its wings and drops into the water.

A new image: a small, sudden cloud of dust kicked up on a wall, then another next to it. I am puzzled; then I hear the first of a series of distant dry cracks.

The gunfire is clearly audible now. I realize I was looking at the strike of bullets.

“My God,” de Scheut whispers.

Stipe takes back the glasses.