The Catastrophist: A Novel (5 page)

I find a bar still open on Avenue Vangele, the Colibri. I am already aware that white Léopoldville is a small town. The settlers go to each other’s houses and parties, they frequent the same restaurants and clubs. So I am not particularly surprised when among the half dozen or so inside I find Stipe. He is standing alone at the bar, throwing down the last of a drink. He spots me the moment I enter. When I first saw him in Houthhoofd’s garden I thought he had the look of a man permanently on call for stern and enigmatic duties, but tonight his expression is compassionate, sheltering.

Though he had seemed to be on his way out when I arrived, he leads me to a table by the window. The interior is small and painted a deep red. The wood of the furniture is dark, there is a brass footrail at the bar, behind which, in a shallow, frosted-mirror alcove, liquor bottles stand on glass shelves. A tape recorder is playing the music of Charles Trenet.

“You look like someone who needs to talk,” he says.

Here is someone who understands. I already know that when I walk out of here we will be friends. He orders cognacs from the elderly Walloon proprietress, whom he calls Anna. His manner with her is flirtatious and jaunty. He tastes his drink.

“Wherever I’m posted I try to find a bar like this,” he says, “somewhere I can call home, where the people know me and do little things for me, little courtesies, like start mixing my favorite cocktail as soon as I walk in the door, or if there’s a crowd serve me first. That way, if you’ve had a bad day, you always know you have a friendly place to go. It’s not much, I know, but life can be lonely and by my age you’ve learned to appreciate the small favors people do for you.”

He pauses and looks at me. His brown eyes are set quite close together, and there is the slightest suggestion of a squint. When he leans forward like this—arms on the table, ankles crossed under his chair, drenching you in his attention—it gives his expression a special and irresistible candor.

“So,” he says with a sympathetic grin, “how has your day been?”

This is not like me. My closest friends do not know any of this. Maybe it’s because he’s a stranger and the embarrassment is less and there is no version of my own history and my history with Inès that I have to keep to for consistency’s sake, for pride’s sake; maybe it’s just a kind of exhaustion on my part, as though I no longer have the strength to keep my true words dammed up. I tell him everything. I tell him especially one thing, that after six months of trying Inès had not conceived.

I have as little to do with doctors as I can manage and I would have been happy to leave it for another six months, for a year or longer. Forever. There is value in ignorance, don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise: the blind eye serves a function. But her attitude was different. She wanted tests, she wanted to know. She may, I thought afterwards, have already suspected the truth. We went for the tests. The problem, they discovered, was not with my sperm, but with her tubes. It was pure chance I saw her the day of the doctor’s appointment. It was about three in the afternoon. The morning had been gloomy, it had never really got light. The people on the streets made their way without spirit, thinking only of home. I glanced out the window of the bus and happened to notice, from the back, a schoolgirl walking along with the aimless, dreamy preoccupation of girls of that age. Alone among the pedestrians she seemed oblivious of the sludge and the cold and the bitter drive of the wind. She looked about, saw nothing, saw no one. She reminded me of the girls from St. Dominic’s and Fortwilliam, their skinny bare legs in the winter and their touching self-absorption. This one had not yet filled out as a woman, but within six months, or a year, she would be transformed.

As the bus drew level I still did not recognize the pale, cold face. It was abandoned, alone, so very near defeat. In shock I recognized Inès and I bowed my head in instant understanding. My first thought was to get off and go to her; I was already grasping the cold metal rail of the seat in front. And then I let my grip relax. I knew I could not face her unhappiness. Not very noble, but very easy. The bus accelerated. The stops went by, including my own. I did not move.

I don’t recall where I got off, but I do remember wandering down Charing Cross Road and browsing in the bookshops. I bought a secondhand copy of Henry James’s criticism. I walked over Waterloo Bridge and along the Embankment. I was not like Inès, I felt the cold. The sludge seeped into my shoes, my socks became damp. I knew she would be in the flat, waiting with her news. So I walked on, my feet like ice, and on.

Eventually I recrossed the river and made my way home, slowly and on foot. I got in around eleven. She was already in bed, silent.

“I had a drink with Alan,” I told her as I undressed. “Sorry. I should have rung.”

She murmured something, that it was okay. If she had seen my face she would have known at once that I knew, but she was on her side, turned away from me.

I got in beside her and kissed the back of her neck. In those days we made love every night. She did not respond and I am not the kind of man to insist. Yet that night I did, I did insist. I should have known better. I thought it would be a kind of ecstatic reaffirmation, a defiance, of nature, of failure, of fate; instead it was desolate. In the morning she told me. She cried, only a little. I told her it didn’t matter, and we never mentioned it again.

Inès’s love is like heated air. It cannot stand to be confined. It must expand. At that point in her life it needed a child, and not finding one, it turned elsewhere.

Stipe listens like a good priest. And in return he gives bits of himself away. Not much, no great detail. But enough. I learn that like me he barely knew his father. Like me, he watched a mother struggle. And, like me, he loves someone more than she loves him. Enough. Enough to know there are things between us.

He looks at his watch. The bar is empty. Anna yawns, encouraging us to go. He stares at me. I can see some calculation behind his eyes.

“Where are you going now?” he asks.

“Home, I suppose.”

“Why don’t you come along with me?” he says after a pause. “I might have something to interest you.”

On Boulevard Albert I there are only military vehicles. The settlers are in their houses.

We pass the cemetery, the golf course and, directly opposite on the other side of the avenue, standing in a walled garden, a solid, two-story, red-brick house that reminds me vaguely of the kind of middle-class homes you find in Crouch End or Muswell Hill. Soldiers and police mill around the closed iron gate. They turn to stare as we pass.

“Lumumba’s house,” Stipe explains. “He was one of the first blacks to be allowed to live in the European quarter. There are still very few. The Belgians will arrest him the minute he shows up. I got word to him to go to my driver’s house. He’ll be safe there for a while.”

“How many were killed today?” I ask.

“Could be tens, could be hundreds. African death has a habit of defying accurate quantification.”

“What exactly happened?”

“The MNC held their rally. Patrice’s speech was pretty high, as you can imagine, and inspirational.” He gives me a grin. “It inspired the young hotheads to some stone-throwing and shop-breaking. After last night’s little display, the Belgians were in no mood to give them a free hand, so they sent in a platoon of regular Belgian soldiers and the Force Publique. The rest you know.”

“What’s the Force Publique?”

“It’s not really an army—even though contingents served with the Allies during the last war: they were involved in the Abyssinian campaign and I think I heard they sent a field hospital unit to the India-Burma front—but really it’s more like an internal security force. Twenty-four thousand men—sort of part-soldiers, part-gendarmerie—with just over a thousand Belgian officers.”

From somewhere in the distance there is the sound of an explosion.

“That’s not what I think it is?” I say.

We listen. The sound we are waiting for comes thirty or forty seconds later. A second explosion. Like the first, the sound is muffled rather than sharp or reverberating.

“That’s a mortar, isn’t it?” I say.

“What a mess,” he says, shaking his head. “What a godawful mess.”

We have turned off the boulevard and are approaching a checkpoint at the cité’s boundary. A black sergeant waves us down. Stipe reaches into his jacket and takes out his papers, and also a second document to which he draws the soldier’s attention. The soldier goes to consult a white officer, who, after inspection of the documents, comes over. There is another exchange. The officer withdraws.

Stipe, gazing after the soldiers, says, “The highest ranking Congolese in the Force Publique are NCOs. As you can imagine, they’re not entirely happy about the setup. Not that it bothers the commander, General Janssens. He’s an officer of the old school. A bonehead, and not exactly what you would call forward-thinking on the race issue.”

He hooks his arm through the open window and drums his fingers on the metal.

“This may take a little time,” he says. “The Sûreté have given me permission to move about, but the soldiers will want to do their own checking.”

He offers me a cigarette. There is a third explosion, followed about a minute later by a fourth. What are they bombing? I try to picture the soldiers and their mortars and the missiles lobbed incomprehensibly into the vast dark slums of the cité. What were they firing at? What did they expect to happen?

“How long would you say the Belgians can hold on here?” Stipe asks idly.

“They seem to be doing pretty well.”

“I don’t agree,” he says evenly. “The shooting this afternoon, the mortars—it’s their last gasp. The Belgians are about to give in.”

“Give in to what?” I ask.

“Independence.”

“Yes, in ten or twenty years.”

“More like six months.”

He draws slowly on his cigarette. He knows he has my attention.

“That’s not the official position,” I remind him.

The official position, which Inès damns in every angry article, was set out in the
Déclaration Gouvernementale
in Brussels earlier in the year. The Belgians had decided that since the colony would not be ready for self-government for a long time to come, the Congolese people would have to be led to independence
graduellement et progressivement.

“The
Déclaration Gouvernementale
isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. They’re preparing to pull out as we speak.”

“Is the country ready for independence?” I ask.

“What do you think?”

“I arrived yesterday.”

“Even so, have you seen anything resembling a black professional class so far?”

I make a small laugh in acknowledgment of his point. Five minutes in Léopoldville was all it took to see how and by whom the day-to-day affairs of the colony were managed.

“There isn’t a single black soldier above the rank of sergeant,” Stipe says. “There isn’t a single civil servant above junior clerk grade, there isn’t a single black doctor, or engineer, or banker. Rumor has it there’s one lawyer—the journalists are taking bets on who finds him first. The point is: who’s going to run the country when the Belgians go?”

“Does that mean you’re against independence?”

The officer comes over to the car and returns the papers to Stipe.

“There are gangs of thugs everywhere,” the officer announces gravely. “I can arrange an escort if you want.”

“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary,” Stipe replies cheerily, putting the engine in drive.

“You are armed?”

“Absolutely.”

I hadn’t thought about the possibility that Stipe would be carrying a gun. In our present surroundings the knowledge is reassuring, but it also raises questions about the man, who he is and what he does.

The officer waves to the soldiers at the barrier and gives Stipe a stiff salute. Stipe seems to accept it as his due. I look at him. I look at the fat vein in his forehead and the long, curved lashes over his soft brown eyes. In the distance there is the dull crash of another mortar bomb. As we proceed through the checkpoint, as the officer holds his salute, as the soldiers scuttle to swing the barrier aside and clear our way into the cité, I see again what I saw in Houthhoofd’s garden earlier in the day, the authority, the confidence, the self-belief. Even when I remind myself that this is no more than a dark corner of a colonial city most people have never heard of, I cannot help the way my thoughts run. I cannot help but think about power, about authenticity, and the uselessness of being a writer.

Sewage runs in the open channels of the cité’s narrow and unpaved streets. The low, crude, cube housing is arranged in small, densely packed, alley-scarred blocks. There is little lighting in this squalid labyrinth. There are no other cars, there is no one to be seen.

“You didn’t tell me where you stand on independence,” I remind Stipe.

“My government has always had a sympathetic interest in the decolonization of Africa. The U.S. is one of the few Western nations with no selfish strategic or economic interests in the Congo.”

“There are American companies here though, aren’t there?” I say.

He is beginning to sound a little disingenuous, even to me.

“Sure, but our economic interests are relatively minor. Mobil Oil is one of the biggest U.S. corporations operating here. They have a $12 million investment in service stations, but when you compare that to a total Western investment of four to five billion, you couldn’t say Mobil is one of the Congo’s big players.”

“What about you personally, how do you feel about independence?”

“Perhaps I’m making large assumptions here, James,” he says, “but I’m no more of a
believer
than you are. If I believe in anything, it’s government as management—good management. Balanced budget, fiscal probity, low taxes, proper defense preparedness—that’s my philosophy, such as it is. I’d be happy with an independent Congo as long as it were stable and well run. I’d be happy with a continuation of the present setup, as long as you could prove to me that it would be stable and well run. But what I think is irrelevant. The fact is the Belgians are going in six months and that’s the situation we have to deal with.”

He turns into an alley. The only illumination comes from the car’s headlights. He counts off the shacks as we trundle past. They are not numbered. He stops and cuts the engine and lights.

“Can you imagine what’s going to happen when the settlers find out?” he says as we get out of the car. “Most of them right now are burying their heads in the sand. They won’t admit even to themselves what’s going on. The men are out there on the links boasting about their cars and their pensions and the women sit in each other’s houses talking about curtains and kitchens. They think their colony is going on forever, that they’re going to live like lords and ladies for the rest of their lives. But real soon they’re going to have to make some very big mental and material adjustments. It’s going to be difficult for them.”

My thoughts turn to Madeleine. I can see that the required adjustments might not be easy for her.

Stipe leads me to the anonymous door of a dingy shack. He doesn’t have to knock, our arrival has been noted. A black man of medium height appears to greet us. He wears sharply pressedma roon trousers and a bright, violently patterned yellow and green shirt which has the sheen of synthetic silk. The ridiculously huge buckles on his patent shoes gleam in the half light. He has a heavy fake-gold necklace and several rings set with red and amber glass.

Stipe puts an arm around the man’s shoulders.

“James, this is my driver, Auguste,” he says in French.

Auguste is handsome, with a high-domed forehead, good cheekbones and a strong jaw, and he would have appeared intimidating, or at least serious, had he not smiled as we entered. The smile spoiled the face; his look then was almost comically craven.

“This is a great kid,” Stipe says, looking at Auguste like a father at a son and shaking him with rough affection. “You didn’t get caught up in the shooting?”

“I was there, but I’m okay,” Auguste replies.

“You shouldn’t have gone.” Stipe’s voice is full of tender remonstration. “I told you there was going to be trouble.”

Auguste closes the door behind us. The small, windowless room is bare except for an iron bedstead—no mattress—and a long plank of gray, splintering lumber, raised by mud bricks to about a foot from the floor to serve as a bench. An old hurricane lamp gives out what little light there is. On Auguste’s brusque command, two young men shift from the bench to the relative discomfort of the bedstead. The black paint on the iron frame is bubbled and flaking. The air is close with the smell of damp earth and sweat. A grubby kitten plays on the raffia mat laid over the dirt floor. Auguste and his two companions sit opposite us like bored children, watching in a distracted sort of way but saying nothing.

Stipe asks for more details about the afternoon’s events. Auguste’s French is slow but the accent, cadences and phrasing are too unfamiliar for me to be able to follow easily. I do, however, pick up the mention of “Patrice.”

“Is Patrice all right?” Stipe asks. His own French is heavily accented but fluent.

Auguste nods to the far wall, where an old bedcover hangs over what looks like the entrance to an adjoining room, from where I can hear several voices. We settle down to wait.

“Why would the Belgians want to give up their colony?” I ask Stipe after a while.

“When you ask the Belgians why they’re in the Congo, they tell you,
dominer pour servir.
Dominate to serve. To serve and civilize. That, they say, is the sole excuse for colonialism, and its complete justification. It’s bullshit of course. The excuse is profit. Once the profits go, so do the excuses.”

“Have the profits gone?”

“Gone and goodbye. The colony’s economy is shot.”

“It doesn’t look it.”

“It’s a disaster zone,” he says flatly; then he adds: “If you wanted to write an article about this, I could help you.”

The suggestion catches me by surprise.

“Why?”

“The sooner the settlers know what’s going on, the longer they’ll have to get used to the idea.”

“No, I meant why me?”

“What can I say? You get a feeling about someone.”

He shrugs and puts out his hands in an open gesture to acknowledge the plain fact of our instinctive liking for each other.

“I have the documentation,” he continues, “all the facts, all the figures.”

Someone pushes aside the hanging bedcover.

I see a tall, thin bespectacled young man with a head that seems too small for his wide shoulders. He is wearing light gray trousers and an open-necked, short-sleeved white shirt. He has a scraggy goatee beard, his arms are long and rangy. I recognize Patrice Lumumba from the newspaper photographs. He looks over at Stipe, then at me. He holds my gaze for a moment, no expression on his face. He is joined by two other men.

“Mark, my friend.”

Stipe goes over and shakes hands warmly with Lumumba.

“Patrice, how are you?”

“It has not been a good day. So many are dead.”

“We have to get you out,” Stipe says, “get you somewhere safe. Brazzaville first, then maybe Accra.”

Lumumba considers for a moment. He says, “Is it right for the leader to run and leave his followers to their fate?”

“Is it right for the leader to allow his enemies to put him in jail? The movement will fall apart without you.”

Lumumba says nothing. His gaze reaches me.

Stipe says, “Patrice, this is James Gillespie. I think you know his friend—Inès Sabiani.”

“Of course we know Inès,” Lumumba says, his voice becoming suddenly animated. He takes my hand in both of his. “Inès is a good friend to our people and to the cause of the Congo. She is your woman?”

I hear myself say yes quickly and with emphasis, and I see Stipe look at me. I am not used to describing Inès in this way—
my woman
—and the words do something to give me hope, as if their vehemence alone makes the statement true. Stipe drops his gaze for a moment. He knows what is going on in my head and he cares.

Stipe introduces me to the two men with Lumumba—Nendaka and Mungul. They are senior MNC officials. The first is dressed as a more prosperous version of Auguste, with smart shiny well-tailored clothes. His smile is too broad, his handshake too ingratiating to be trustworthy. Mungul is sober, serious and although polite I get the feeling he does not welcome the presence of these strange white men.

Stipe says to me, “I have some things to discuss with Patrice. I won’t be long.”

The four men disappear into the other room.

I sit back down on the bench and check my watch. It is after one. I close my eyes. I become aware of someone standing at my shoulder. Auguste grins at me.

“This man is my brother,” Auguste says in English, pointing to one of the young men sitting on the bed frame.

“What about the other one?” I ask.

“He is my brother also.”

I smile at the other brother. Auguste grimaces obsequiously.

“You speak English very well,” I say.

“Ad graecas litteras totum animum impuli.”

“And Latin.”

“Knowledge is essential,” he says as though revealing a hidden truth. “For the same reason that Erasmus learned Greek, I have learned English.”

I nod, trying my best to match his seriousness.

“English is the language of the new Romans,” he adds confusingly.

“The new Romans?”

“The Americans.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I will go to America to study,” he says.

“What will you study?”

“Psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, physics . . .”

“That’s quite a lot of subjects to study, and they all begin with
p.
”

“Yes,” he says seriously. “Do you have friends in America?”

“Some.”

“You can give me their addresses?”

I pause. “I don’t have my address book with me now. I’ll look up some names for you later and give them to Stipe.”

“Thank you,
nókó
,” he says gravely. “I think America is a good place.”

“I think so.”

“In America you are respected for what you achieve. The color of the skin is immaterial.”

I feel torn; to collude in this is both patronizing and dishonest, but at the same time I have no desire to interfere with a fantasy which may, for all I know, be central to making an intolerable life here tolerable.

I ask instead what he intends to do once he has finished his studies in psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy and physics.

“I shall become a lawyer,” he says with a grin.

“I see,” I respond, nodding uncertainly. “Why do you want to be a lawyer?”

“To defend the poor people against injustice.” He smiles, with a mischievous sparkle this time, and adds: “And to have an office on Park Avenue with six pretty secretaries.”

He starts laughing. So do his brothers, though I am not certain they have understood. After a while I get the impression they may be laughing at me.