We duck for cover. All except Inès, who stands in the middle of the street as the stones fall round her, caught, once again, on the wrong side of the lines. I run to her and pull her behind a parked car.
The gendarmes seem to be in a state of shock, they cannot believe this is happening. No one moves.
Inès is distant, away from me again, working through her contradictions.
The blacks set up a vibrating and sonorous chant: Depanda, depanda, depanda!
“What are they shouting?” I ask.
There is another volley of stones. More windows break. The crowd advances. The gendarmes continue paralyzed, moving only to dodge the stones.
Depanda, depanda!
Inès is suddenly bright. The chant means something to her. She turns to me, eyes wide.
A gendarme curses. He has had enough. Without warning, without thinking, he dashes out alone, baton raised, and runs yelling directly at the crowd. As though on some unspoken order his comrades leap forward and charge into the penumbra. The rioters disappear in a hectic scatter.
“Depanda,” Inès repeats in a reverend whisper.
“What is that?”
“Independence!” she says. “They are shouting for independence.”
She hugs me so tightly.
I wake when she gets up to go to the bathroom. She urinates, then pads sleepily flat-footed back to bed. She yawns and lets out a small noise as she stretches. She breathes deeply, settling again under the sheet. I am lying with my back to her and do not move. I am drifting off to sleep when I hear the rasp of fingers on pubic hair; then, after some moments’ silence, there is something softer, slower: moist flesh palpated. The movement of the sheet is very slight. I hear something in her breath, a catch, a small cry suppressed, and though no part of us is joined I can feel her muscles tense and then relax. I am not the cause of her excitement, not tonight, but I do not feel excluded or diminished or insecure about this. I am filled with desire.
I turn to her and she smiles guiltily.
“Were you awake?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Why didn’t you do something?”
She tastes salty and metallic, she is coming on.
Later she says, “I suppose you have been with other women.”
“I haven’t.”
It is a lie.
“You know I am a very jealous person.” She pronounces it yellous.
I say nothing.
“I love you,” she says.
“Still?” I am not sure.
“Ti amo,” she says; and she adds the way she used to: “Don’t forget.”
We kiss suddenly and deeply.
She is above me now. I reach up, take hold of her hair and pull her head down to my shoulder, I am not gentle. I shiver beneath her and I say things to her—promise her, threaten her with things I have never done to her. Inès is stimulated by my abandon. She comes with the breath of my hot threat-promises in her ear. She flops on top of me and noisily draws air into her lungs.
She kisses me and says, “I like you when you are ardent.”
I have forgotten everything. All that exists for me is the lover’s state—the bed, the sheets, and the arms and breath of her. These days I am confused about where my emotions lie—they are in the wind, I can never catch them. It was not always like this. Once I was more like her, open and friendly and funny and hopeful. Along the way I have turned into someone I do not like. But tonight at least there is no contradiction between heat and sterility.
c h a p t e r f o u r
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.
NO MORE COLONIAL MINISTERS,
NO MORE GOVERNOR-GENERALS!
1959 LAST COLONIAL GOVERNMENT!
INDEPENDENCE OR DEATH!
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.
c h a p t e r f i v e
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.
The Catastrophist: A Novel Page 3