The Catastrophist: A Novel (8 page)

I step out of the Regina into the white sun and shade my eyes. Sweat erupts at once on my back. A horn sounds and I look across the street where Auguste is waving anxiously from Stipe’s Chevrolet. Behind, the angry driver of a second car blares his horn again. Auguste, flustered, maneuvers to give the vehicle behind enough room to pass. Instead of taking the opportunity, the driver gets out, strides up to Auguste and starts shouting.

“Can I help you?” I say.

The man is young, barely into his twenties; the Flemish face is bland and boyish and stolid.

“Is this your driver?” he demands of me.

“Yes.”

Auguste’s eyes are penitent and downcast.

“Then teach your dirty monkey not to block other people’s way.”

The young man quickly turns and goes back to his car. He roars up as I get in beside Auguste, leaning on his horn, and shouts something unintelligible before screeching around the corner. Auguste raises his eyes and glances at me carefully before making a small, tentative laugh. I know enough to understand there is a little test of the boundaries here: can he get away with giggling at the rage of the European in front of this particular European?

“I’m sorry, sir,” he says in a silky voice.

“Sorry for what?”

“For making the young
nókó
angry.”

He is pushing the test. I stare straight ahead.

“Don’t call me sir, don’t call me
nókó.
My name is James.”

“I’m sorry, James.”

His spirit is nowhere near as deferential as the show he puts on suggests. He is like the servant whose little joke is to abase himself before his master while behind his back he drinks his brandy and sleeps with his daughters. He puts the car in drive and pulls away.

On Boulevard Albert I most of the shops and restaurants are closed, the streets are empty. Things have not yet returned to normal. By a military checkpoint at the cité’s boundaries there is the tangled wreckage of burned-out cars.

“Where did you learn to speak English?” I ask.

“In the beginning I learned English empirically,” he replies.

“Empirically?”

“From meeting British businessmen here in Leo. Then I was in Bristol.”

“You’ve been to England?”

“Correct. I was sent to study at Louvain, in Belgium. After four years I went to visit my brother who lives in Bristol. He is a sea-man.”

This information is conveyed in a casual tone, but then his voice changes; something respectful and slow comes into it.

“Mr. Stipe says you are a writer.”

“Yes, I am.”

He seems terribly impressed and looks me over carefully.

“I like writers very much,” he says earnestly. “Plato, Socrates, Tom Paine, John Stuart Mill.”

“I write a different kind of book.”

“Yes?”

He looks at me expectantly, as though waiting for me to elaborate on the difference between Plato’s work and my own.

“Are you involved with Lumumba?” I ask, keen to change the subject. “Are you a member of his party?”

“No, James. I am not a member of the MNC.”

“But you obviously know Lumumba.”

“When Patrice came to Léopoldville he went to work with Bracongo, the brewery where I was also working. Mr. de Scheut and his friends in the Cercle Libéral found him this job. Bracongo makes Polar beer. Have you seen the advertisements?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Polar is good beer, but Primus is better,” he says with a mock-guilty giggle. “They are rivals, but even when I was working for Polar I used to drink Primus. Patrice was sales manager for Polar beer. He was a very good salesman because he always loves talking to people, even though he did not know Lingala when he came first from Stanleyville. Patrice is Batetela tribe from Sankuru district of Kasai. Here, in Léopoldville the people are Bakongo.”

“Are you Bakongo?”

“Correct, James. But I am
évolué
.”

“Evolved? What do you mean by that?”

“I am detribalized,” he says gravely. “I am African, but I am educated and my thinking is Western. I want to study in America and I love Plato and Socrates very much. I am also a member of the
Association des Classes Moyennes Africaines
.”

He reaches into his pocket and draws out a card which he passes to me, pride beaming from his eyes.

“What’s this?”

“This is my
carte d’immatriculation
.”

The buff-colored card contains a passport-sized photograph of Auguste in a dark jacket, white shirt and tie. For the occasion the student of Plato has forced his features into an expression of sub-lime high-mindedness.

“With this card,” he explains, “I can sit in European restaurants. I can go into hotels like the Regina and, if I can afford it, I can send my children to a European school.”

“How many children do you have?”

“I am not yet married, James,” he replies with a hint of evasion.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t have children.”

He erupts into bashful giggles.

“How many?”

He giggles again. I make as if to hand back his card but when he attempts to retrieve it I snatch it away and hold it out the window in playful threat.

“Tell me how many.”

Panic sweeps his face. He tries to concentrate on the driving but his eyes are glued to the card. The car swerves.

“Here.”

I give him back his card. He takes it quickly.

“I was only teasing, Auguste.”

“Yes, James. I am sorry.”

We drive on.

“Most Bakongo people do not support Patrice,” he declares after a while, to fill the silence. “When he first came to Léopoldville they said he was just a provincial
évolué,
a man less
évolué
than themselves. The Bakongo people support King Kasa, chief of the Bakongo tribe.”

“King Kasa?” I say, trying to remember the names I have been reading in the file. “Is that Kasavubu? The Abako leader?”

“Correct, James. Mr. Kasavubu. Abako is a tribal party and wants to make a separate state of the Lower Congo, the same as Tshombe wants in Katanga.”

“Moise Tshombe?”

“Yes, James. Tshombe is the puppet of the Union Minière in Katanga, the richest province of the Congo, which he wants to rule by himself. His party is Conakat and his tribe is the Balunda tribe, friends of the Baluba people.”

“I’m getting confused. There seem to be a lot of tribes.”

“Correct. Many tribes,” he says, and he adds mischievously: “All beginning with
b
.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Patrice says you can have tribes without tribalism, that the Congo is one country and the people are one people.”

“Do you think Patrice would be a good leader of an independent Congo?”

“With the help of our American friends, yes, I think Patrice will be a good leader.”

Our American friends?
Stipe’s influence runs deep.

Ahead, at a traffic circle, a white-gloved gendarme is diverting cars off the boulevard. Beyond, several military lorries are blocking the road. A crowd has gathered. Auguste goes round the circle into Avenue Crespel.

“How do you know Stipe?” I ask as he selects a place to park.

“I am Mr. Stipe’s driver. I have been with him since I left my work at Bracongo.”

“What kind of work does Stipe do at the consulate?” I ask innocently.

I have been thinking a lot about the nature of Stipe’s work.

“He is in the political office.”

“The political office?”

“Yes,” he replies, parking the car.

He does not seem inclined to continue. I can’t tell whether this is the full extent of Auguste’s knowledge or whether he is being loyal and discreet.

“Do you know what exactly he does in the political office?”

“Mr. Stipe talks to people. He loves to talk.”

“Like Patrice.”

“Yes,” Auguste says. “Mr. Stipe and Patrice are very big friends. They are excellent friends.”

“Is Stipe good to work for?” I ask.

“Oh, yes. Mr. Stipe is a very good man,” he says. “Mr. Stipe understands.”

“What does he understand?”

“Everything. Mr. Stipe understands everything and he understands everybody.”

The devotion is unmistakable.

As he locks the car he says, “I’m sorry, James.”

He holds up his silly card in explanation.

“We are fourteen million in the Congo. One hundred and twenty have the
carte d’immatriculation
.”

“I had no idea,” I tell him.

The proud member of the Association of the African Middle Classes beams a broad smile at me.

“I wish one day to be a writer like you, James,” he says.

“I thought you were going to be a lawyer.”

“No, now I want to be a writer.”

“What for? There’s no money in it.”

It is one of those flip responses you make without thinking to someone you are at best not taking seriously and at worst patronizing. He gives me a wounded look.

“The money is not important and Mr. Stipe pays me very well,” he says.

“Why do you want to be a writer?” I ask, chastened and cheapened.

“So I can look upon things calmly and show that I am wise.”

“Yes, yes,” I say. “That’s very important, of course.”

“Do you have an office, James?”

“A sort of an office.”

“And six secretaries?”

“No secretaries at all, I’m afraid.”

He looks momentarily downhearted.

“It’s not important,” he says, grinning brightly. “I will bring you three secretaries from my law office.”

“Why am I getting the feeling you’re not being serious?”

“I am always serious,” he replies, still grinning.

“Not with me you’re not.”

“I am as serious with you, James, as you are with me.”

He holds the grin fixed on his face. My response is to feel offended, until I see the truth of what he is saying. We walk on.

Up on the boulevard something is happening for us to look upon.

There are two crowds. The whites, fewer but more confident, have gathered in small knots on the grass verge on the northern side of the road. They seem in good humor, like theater-goers about to resume their seats for the second act of a play they have enjoyed so far. By contrast, there is an ominous neutrality about the blacks. They are massed in front of the golf course on the cité side of the boulevard facing Lumumba’s house, from which they are separated by a line of soldiers with rifles at the ready and bayonets fixed. Two golfers stroll nonchalantly up the fairway, their black caddies in tow.

Flitting between the crowds is the busy figure of Inès. I also spot Smail, and Grant, the British journalist, as well as a number of other reporters. Unlike them, Inès does not have a notebook. She never does. Her refusal to carry one—she insists they set up barriers between her and the people of the story—is only one of several idiosyncrasies I would have thought a handicap in her profession. There is also her chronic lack of punctuality, her wayward sense of direction, her forgetfulness—to say nothing of her unabashed partisanship. But of course, as I know well, Inès is an unusual journalist. She hates government palaces and ministerial offices and the hotels and bars and restaurants frequented by journalists and their sources. She is never interested in interviewing the big people—the ambassadors, the ministers and generals—and rarely bothers to go to press conferences (“all they ever say is lies”). What she covets is not contacts with the high-placed and the respect of her colleagues (“more interested in their careers than in what is going on around them”), but the friendship of ordinary people; she will hang around the stall of a market vendor for hours, listening to talk of everyday things; she will eat and drink beer in the homes of day laborers and street sweepers; she will sleep on their floors when it is too late to get home. She pours her love into these people and their causes, a river that will not be dammed.

I go up to her.

“Hello,” I say.

“Oh, hello,” she says quickly and with no indication that she is pleased to see me.

“You’d already gone when I woke up.”

“You needed to sleep.”

Not waking me had been a calculated aggression, and her thin effort to pass it off as in my interests annoys me.

“I would have liked to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About what we’re going to do,” I say.

She turns away. I can’t tell whether she is angry or upset or—more wounding—simply bored. I feel the stab of bitter pride in my chest. Is this really it? Are we really coming to an end?

I let out a heavy sigh. “Inès, we’re going to have to sort this out.”

“I don’t think this is the time or the place for that,” she says. “In case you hadn’t noticed there is something important going on—they are arresting Patrice.”

“When can we talk then?”

She shrugs.

I look at her with the whole fetch of our story behind my eyes, but she will not yield, she will not soften. Why is she being like this? She used to love me.

“I have to talk to the people,” she says.

“Why don’t you interview Auguste?” I say, pulling Stipe’s driver forward: he should meet her criteria for an authentic interviewee. “He’s one of the people, and he’s a friend of Lumumba’s to boot. Isn’t that right, Auguste?”

“Correct, James.”

His eyes drop so he can adopt the overly respectful demeanor I have noticed he likes to put on for first meetings with whites.

“Inès is a journalist,” I explain. “She’s sympathetic to Lumumba.”

“It’s a bit more than ‘sympathetic,’ ” she says with some asperity.

“Of course it is.”

“Were you at the demonstration yesterday?” she asks Auguste.

He seems bashful in front of her. He is polite, his words lavishly humble. He tells her about the shootings.

Stipe has seen me and nods for me to meet him at the cordon. I leave Inès with Auguste and push my way through to a soldier standing guard at a lorry. Stipe comes out to greet me.

“Sorry I couldn’t get to the Regina, James,” he says, “but as you can see things have gotten a little out of hand. The Belgians have been rounding up everyone connected with the independence movement they can find. They even arrested Kasavubu this morning. Up until a few days ago they liked to show him off as a ‘good African.’ He’s a bad African now. They all are. I didn’t think Patrice would risk coming back to his own house.”

“He knew they were looking for him, didn’t he?”

“Sure, but Patrice is a family man. He can’t be without his wife and kids.”

“What’s going to happen now?”

“Kasavubu’s already at the police station at Avenue Lippers, so my guess is they’ll take him there and then to the Central Prison.”

“Why is it taking so long?”

“The Belgians are worried about the crowd.”

There must be four or five hundred blacks, with more streaming down from the cité every minute. Too many for what looks to me like much less than a full-strength company of soldiers to contain.

“The authorities want to keep temperatures down today,” Stipe says. “Lumumba says he’ll get them to disperse quietly if he can make a speech. The Belgians aren’t crazy about the idea, but I suggested they give it a shot.”

“Why do they listen to you?” I ask mischievously.

He may work in the political office, but it is obvious Stipe is a spy, a conspirator of some sort. Just what is the nature of his power?

“They don’t like it,” Stipe answers with a grin, “but they’re hardly in a position to object. Didn’t you read the file? As we speak, the Belgians are in New York looking for loans to try to keep the place afloat. If they want the Yankee dollar they have to listen to the Yankee advice.”

“What I can’t work out is why the colony is in such trouble, given all the resources.”

“A Marxist like Inès would understand the way the Belgians have developed the Congo,” Stipe says. “It’s the Soviet NEP all over again—rapid industrialization of a primitive rural economy. They’ve had some success, you can’t take that away from them. But taxes are high, the average national income level is low, expansion is lagging behind population growth, and the Belgians just don’t have the capital for more investment—and the situation’s getting worse because with all the political uncertainty the banks and investors are taking their money out.”

“How bad is it—in a nutshell?”

“In a nutshell bad, real bad. The Congo Central Bank can’t meet its obligations so the Belgians have agreed to guarantee its operations but only on condition that the colony’s gold and dollar reserves go to the vaults of the National Bank in Brussels. But these loans . . . it’s crazy. You don’t meet current and past deficits by raising long-term loans—it’s like mortgaging your house to pay last month’s grocery bills.”

“Not that crazy,” I say. “When they hand over the country presumably they’ll be handing over the debts as well.”

“Absolutely right. Patrice doesn’t know it yet, but the day he walks into the prime minister’s office to take a look at the books he’s going to see that not only is the country broke, but he owes Brussels over two billion francs. That’s one hell of a tab to pick up, isn’t it? Who says Belgians don’t have a sense of humor?”

“I don’t suppose he’ll be picking up the profits.”

Stipe lets out a short, sarcastic laugh.

“Say you’re Bernard Houthhoofd, or any other big shareholder in the Union Minière or the Société Général,” he begins, “and you have a piece of the twelve-billion-franc investment in Katanga alone. Your copper industry is the second biggest in Africa. Last year your mines produce three hundred thousand tons of copper at $100 a ton which you sell on the world market for $250. Are you going to allow some jumped-up local politician to take away your business? Are you hell!”

From the black crowd come sudden shouts of
Patrice, Patrice!
Their gaze is fixed on the balcony, where Lumumba, flanked by a Belgian officer, stands, his hands resting on the concrete balustrade.

“Who’s the soldier?” I ask Stipe.

“That’s Lieutenant-General Emile Janssens. I told you about him. He’s the commander of the Force Publique.”

Janssens has the barrel-chested aggression of the middle-aged soldier who prides himself on his continuing hardness and regards scornfully the widening hams and girths of his pampered civilian peers; he looks like the kind of man who takes cold showers and throws medicine balls on the beach.

“Janssens is tough,” Stipe says, “a real disciplinarian.”

There are a few isolated jeers and catcalls from the whites.

“What do you think of Lumumba,” I ask, “as a politician?”

“Outstanding,” Stipe replies without hesitation. “Really. As a politician and as a man. Here’s a guy, very little formal education, nothing more than a dirty
macaque,
everything stacked against him. And by pure effort of will, by refusing to be put down, he transforms himself into a figure of genuine power. He has charisma, oratory, real moral authority. His only flaw is that he can be a little impetuous sometimes, but he’s still only thirty-five years old. With the right help, the right advice, Patrice could shape up to be one of Africa’s great leaders.”

“That’s what Inès says.”

“So we agree on something,” he says brightly; then, more seriously: “How are things with you two this morning? Any better?”

“Not really.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, putting a comradely hand on my back. “Do you want some Yankee advice?”

“Is there a price tag?”

“This is for free,” he says with a grin. His teeth are small and even and white. The lips go far back over the gums. “Is Inès the woman you really want? I mean is this the one?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t give up. Don’t be discouraged. Do whatever you have to do—even if there’s another man.”

“Do what you have to do, even if there’s another man? What does that mean?”

“Kill him, of course.” He laughs. “Is there another man?”

The thought unnerves me. “I don’t think so,” I say uncertainly.

Stipe considers for a moment.

“All I’m saying is stick in there, James, however long it takes. I haven’t found a woman yet who doesn’t secretly like a siege. That’s my recommendation. Take it—I know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t know,” I say, “it sounds like it could be pretty humiliating.”

He makes a gesture as though to say he’s tried his best.

“It always beats me when people don’t listen to things that are for their own good.”

“Is your advice always for their good?”

“Without exception.”

“Yankee advice is never wrong?”

“I can’t think of a time it ever has been—no.”

We become aware of a thin, high-pitched voice speaking in French and turn to look up at the balcony. The voice does not carry well and I miss the first few words. I hear “crisis”; I hear, I think, “many wrongs have been perpetrated.”

A white man next to me cups his hands and shouts hoarsely up at the balcony. His friends take up the chorus. Lumumba stops speaking and looks down at us. He remains still in that position for some moments in an effort to design for himself a kind of sculpted dignity. It seems a little labored and contrived to me, but the catcalls begin to die down.

“Today is not the day,” Lumumba goes on, “and these streets are not the place for the wrongs we have suffered to be redressed.”

He speaks slowly, like Auguste, like most of the Africans I have heard so far.

“Inquiries have been promised,” he continues. “We must trust that those charged with finding the truth will conduct their inquiries without regard to the color of the person’s skin, that they respect the rights of all persons guaranteed in the law of the land and in natural law. We must trust that those charged with finding the truth tell the truth when they find it. If their version differs from what the people know to be true, if it differs from what they saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears, the inquiry will be damned by the people and the reputations of the officials who put their name to it will be dishonored forever.”

The whites start heckling again. Whistles and jeers go up. This time Lumumba speaks through it, goaded, his words coming faster.

“We have suffered like beasts for a thousand years. Our ashes have been strewn to the wind that roams the desert. They had the right to the whip, we had the right to die, but the hard torch of the sun will shine for us again.”

Stipe grimaces. “Oh-oh. This wasn’t in the script. Janssens isn’t going to like this.”

There is real anger in Lumumba’s posture now. Janssens tenses as if preparing himself to drag him physically from the balcony. Lumumba scans his audience. Then his gaze seems to bump into Stipe, and stop there. Glancing at Stipe, I see his eyes are fixed on Lumumba. His head makes a barely discernible movement. A signal to Lumumba to rein himself in?

There is a long, tense silence, everyone hanging on the next words from the balcony.

Turning to the black crowd, Lumumba says at last in a low voice, “Go home now. Go quietly. Do not give the soldiers an excuse to hurt you. Go home and remember that I promise you this: the evil, cruel times will go, never to come again.”