The Catastrophist: A Novel

by Ronan Bennett

  “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.

  “I can see one man down,” he says. “Two.”

  The shooting continues intermittently for four or five minutes more. I look around at the faces of the guests. It is strange but there is no trace of emotion. People are being shot and there is no visible reaction. But then . . . why should there be? This is a garden party, after all. There is the tennis and the croquet lawn and the children, there are the water-skiers and the kingfisher and all the innocence and play this implies. Shots have been fired, but injury and death in this arrangeme
nt still seem incongruous, mistimed. No one—least of all I—can be sure of our connection with the fuzzy events across the wide river.

  The murmuring onlookers start to drift off, back to the swimming pool, back to the gazebo. Madeleine rejoins her tennis partner. A houseboy comes up and offers to replenish our glasses. I search the man’s eyes for something, anything. A response of some sort. Resentment, anger, hate. But there’s nothing. He fills my glass and smoothly turns to another guest.

  Stipe hands me the binoculars again and this time directs my line of sight.

  “You see that big floating island of green? The one over by the little jetty?”

  I focus on a tangle of vegetation. Amid the trailing roots and the broad, fleshy leaves are mud-flecked flowers of pale blue.

  “Water hyacinth,” Stipe explains. “It’s an exotic. Some fool brought it over from South America because he thought it would look pretty in his garden pond. The damn thing spread like a plague.”

  “It does look pretty.”

  “It’s a parasite,” de Scheut says vaguely. “It eats the oxygen and kills the river.”

  I see something more than flowers. I am not aware of making any reaction, but Stipe picks up on some minuscule betrayal in my attitude, or in my breath, in my smell.

  “You see now?” Stipe says.

  I see.

  It is a human body, half submerged, half supported in the chaotic lattice of the drifting island. I move my field of vision up to the jetty where a group of black soldiers, directed by a white officer, are heaving a second dead man into the water. More corpses—four, five, six—are being brought to them for disposal.

  The shooting has stopped. Now there is only the noise of Madeleine’s tennis game and the gentle roar of the cataracts, many miles away.

  “I must take my children home,” de Scheut says.

  He puts a hand on my shoulder.

  “Du calme, du calme,” he says. “Adieu.”

  He clasps his children to his sides. They trudge up the garden.

  I go to Inès. I can see the fury in her, she is absorbed in rage and grief. I saw some things in the army, but have never been witness to anything like what has happened here today. I long ago gave up the search for anger in myself. As I look at her, my thoughts splinter and in their disorder my mind turns to my mother. I am thinking about love—fierce love—and loyalty, and the intent of these things. My mother loved, passionately and unselfishly. She loved the man she once idolized, loved him even after he deserted her and her children. Inès would deny it, but she no longer loves me, not the way she once did. I know it. I can see it. In spite of my welcome, in spite of last night. I am for now replaced by other things. Dramatic, involving—they will take her. But I will not give up hope. The politics of idealism go hand in hand with disillusion, and when disillusion sets in I will still be here for her.

  Out on the river the speedboats have started up again. The water- skiers detour towards the jetty. Like drivers at the scene of an accident, they slow down as they pass the water hyacinth and its bleeding litter. Then they accelerate and head out to uncontaminated waters to continue their sport.

  In the tropics one must before everything keep calm. Of course. Behind, from the tennis court, someone shouts “Well played, Madeleine.”

  Du calme, du calme. Of course. Always.

  c h a p t e r s i x

  She divides me. Her words divide me. Her language refuses the disciplines of the eye, of history, of the world as it is. Her imagination turns on symbol and myth. She lives in the rush of all-embracing sympathies, and sometimes, listening to her song, my lulled emotions slip their noose and follow in the blind career of her allegiance; but then a word, a single word, a note so obviously wrong, interrupts and I am filled with resentment of her and her histrionic lexicon. She said to me once—it was during my first visit to Bologna, when she was showing me the plaques which commemorate the city’s fallen partisans—“I often think I am so fortunate to have had the experience of the Party, to know there is something to support you always, that you aren’t alone in the world. I can’t imagine to be without this.” We’d had a nice day: we had got up late, had coffee and bigné and canolo for breakfast, drunk wine at lunch and strolled through the arcades in the afternoon. She had laced our time with excited talk, but I looked at her when she said this and brutal thoughts hit me like stones: Who do you think I am? What have I ever said or written to give you the impression I have anything to do with what you’re talking about?

  I should have told her then, “Inès, I know myself too well. This isn’t going to work.” But I didn’t, I couldn’t; I loved the spirit behind the hopeful, spinning monologues. I am in love with it still.

  She has left the apartment to file her story from the little office near the Marché Indigène which she shares with the ABC correspondent. Why did I react so strongly? So savagely?

  She had sat at the little table before the window overlooking the street and stabbed at the keys of the typewriter. A wind came up and the late afternoon light gave way to a brooding, luminous gloom. A sudden gray rain swept the street, there was a stunning clap of thunder and the downpour began. She passed me the pages as they came off the roller, translating the words I did not know.

  “Well,” she said, her head bent over the typescript, “what do you think?”

  “I think you should take an hour to cool down.”

  Her head jerked up and her eyes flashed fiercely: “What?”

  I shrugged; she’d heard. She was on her feet in an instant.

  “What are you saying?”

  I had no time for this. She clutched at my arm.

  “What are you saying?” she demanded again.

  I shook her off.

  “All right,” I said with heat, “feel angry about what you saw. But you are a journalist. At least keep a sense of proportion, at least try to keep some distance.”

  “And how would you write about this?”

  “You don’t have to shout to be heard.”

  “People have been murdered.”

  “People have been shot,” I corrected her, “and you weren’t the only one who saw that.”

  “Have I said that I was? Where have I said anything like that?”

  Her jaw was set, her face flushed.

  “Where?”

  It was in every word. The rage of her writing made her the exclusive witness, banned, disqualified the rest of us. This empathetic one-upmanship always infuriates me.

  “To write about injustice without anger,” she shouted at my stiff back, “is another injustice.”

  “I feel confident I could make a strong case for exactly the opposite proposition,” I replied with the disdainful calm I know incenses her.

  She snatched up her pages and left.

  Why did I react so acerbically? The answer is not hard to find. I am being squeezed out of her orbit. I have come a thousand miles to pin her down, but I see there is no chance of that in these crowded, coursing times. I am bitter. There is no place for me.

  But it is also to do with words. The implications go deep: it is about the way we see the world. I know there are inner things, below, beneath, from the dominion of hesitation, and that these, in some degree, count. But not for much, not for as much as Inès thinks. It may not all take place on the outside but there is still much on the surface. What is real to me is what can be seen; I understand above all else the evidence of the eyes. She is moved by things that cannot be described, that are only half glimpsed, and when she writes—is this allowable in a journalist?—it is not primarily to inform her audience, but to touch them. I object to this; I find it embarrassing, unprofessional, and I object to the implication that those of us who cannot or will not produce in our writing so ostentatious a display of outrage are in some way at fault, that we are at worst collaborators with the enemy, at best heartless, selfish, trivial. Words, real words with real meanings, matter to me. I have never taken strong beliefs seriously; in my first career I was a h
istorian.

  She is gone and I feel suddenly very alone. I drink what whiskey I can find. I want to shake her and tell her to hurry up and grow up and get disillusioned like the rest of us; and I want her not to change, ever, for I need her to be like this: I have been stimulated, I have found things I otherwise would not have found. I live in the tension of our disparities. But where is this going, this strange affair?

  The storm has passed. I pour the last of the whiskey, swallow it in one gulp and go outside; I have to walk off my anger. I stride away, careless of direction. The light is fading fast. I walk and walk until I find myself in one of the residential districts. The streets are deserted; most of the houses are locked up. I walk on, further and further from the city. The houses become fewer, the tarmac gives out, the night comes in. I visit bitter retaliations on Inès, I do not keep track of my route. After a while I am completely lost.

  Eventually, I flag down a car and ask for directions from a man who is at first wary, then, once I explain the situation, concerned about my safety. After what happened today, he says, who knows what the blacks will do. There are rumors of more disturbances and some property somewhere is already burning. I can taste the smoke and also something sharp—tear gas perhaps. He offers me a lift but I thank him and decline. He is hesitant about leaving me, but I insist I will be all right. I need more time to myself.

  I follow his directions but get nowhere. The night is sticky, the shirt is plastered to my back, my hair is flat with sweat. Soon I wish I had accepted the lift.

  In the distance I see lights, and, as I approach, I hear the high, heedless voices of people at a party. The poison of the things I said to Inès still courses in my veins and the sound of friends and lovers enjoying themselves only adds to my rancor. When I am close to the bungalow I stop and shut my eyes. I really do not want to face anyone now, not even to ask for directions. What am I doing here? What am I doing in this country? Why did I come here? The heat has drained me, the drink has made me self-pitying.

  I have to take stock, Inès. I have to think and I have to be honest. I have to be honest for once in my life.