The Catastrophist: A Novel

by Ronan Bennett

  I open my eyes to see two young women come out on to the bungalow’s brightly lit verandah. They wear strapless evening dresses and talk with an animation that is intimate and knowing and innocent. In the darkness I have not been noticed. The smell of smoke is stronger now and there are embers in the air. A gust of wind comes up and the glowing cinders glide like ragged fireflies. The women, with skin exposed, shriek in playful alarm. The younger of the two, a tall girl with short dark hair, takes courage and blows at the invaders, as at bubbles, to the applause of her merry companion. The commotion stirs their friends, and the men come out, gallant and laughing, to perform mock heroics. I watch this cheerful little war, fascinated by the high spirits I cannot be part of. I look. I look too long. What forms in front of my eyes is the disdain and envy in my own face—the compound that is the habitual onlooker’s most unappealing property. How many times have I caught myself looking at Inès like this, wondering at the secrets of her optimism and her easy friendships, then waspishly questioning their authenticity and congratulating myself on my own distant self-sufficiency?

  I have to be honest. Self-sufficiency has its limits. I have spent too much time in the cheerless solitude of my own ego. In Inès’s absence over the last few weeks it has been more than I could stand.

  There is a woman in London. Her name is Margaret. I am not proud of this. Some days before I left for Léopoldville I rang her. I had not seen her for several weeks and had not slept with her since Inès. We met that evening in the pub near my flat in Camden. I started, as I am prone to, tentatively, even shyly, not speaking much and tending to avoid her gaze. After a few failed attempts to draw me out, Margaret asked if at that moment I was where I wanted to be. I made some vague sound of affirmation. She asked about Inès and how she was getting on in the Congo. I said she was doing fine and left it at that. Margaret regarded me for a moment, weighing up my silences, speculating on the likely course of the night should she decide to spend it with me.

  “James,” she said simply, “whenever we meet it’s as though you have to spend the first hour deciding whether you like me or not.”

  It might have been more hurtful to Margaret to get up and walk out. But that is not why I stayed. I desperately needed company and I wanted to forget Inès, to forget her hold on me, to announce my independence to myself. All very banal. I was aware of it at the time, but this did not stop me.

  So I told her that I was, really, happy to see her again. She was not convinced. I was acutely aware of my lack of credibility. I was banking on time and the drink to establish my case for me. Sure enough, glass by glass, I began to relax. I encouraged her to talk, which Margaret always does well. I let her fast, salty chatter mask my evasions. I started to remember why I liked her, why I enjoyed her hearty presence. She always made me laugh. She told me stories from the set of her new film, and of how when she had gone for the insurance medical the doctor had asked what height she was. Five-eight, she had replied, only to be told she was in fact five-five.

  “Are you sure?” she had demanded, lofty and offended. “Is that measuring thing right?”

  She shrieked with laughter.

  “I’ve lied so often about it, James, I couldn’t remember what height I really was.”

  Margaret was permanently amused—by life, by others, by me, by her own ripe physicality. Her fine hair fell loosely around her shoulders. She employed the little tricks of seduction with gusto—an occasional flutter of the eyelids, leaning forward to show her cleavage, a casual readjustment of skirt which could not but call attention to her legs. She enjoyed to the full the happy accident of her sensuality.

  At closing time she asked again if I was sure. By then the alcohol had done its work for me. Fortunately, in the company of women, I am a happy and flirtatious drunk. Margaret always used to say I should drink more often.

  Afterwards, did I feel guilty? I imagined an argument with Inès in which I defended myself from her jealous indictment of my infidelity with You left me, you went away and left me! What did you expect? Then I thought of something worse. That her feelings had changed to such an extent that she might not care now at all.

  I walk on. It gets lonelier with every step. The pulsing throb of the frogs and cicadas is my only reassurance and whenever it stops I stand still, cautioned and vigilant like some nervous forest animal. I cannot see to put one foot in front of the other. I stumble and fall on the track. An insect I cannot see crawls over my hand and I brush it quickly away.

  A car approaches, sweeping me with the headlight beam. I get to my feet and wave it down. I suppose I must look quite frantic and I am surprised when it slows to a halt. The driver reaches across and opens the passenger door. I climb in, muttering a thank-you in French.

  “It’s dangerous to be on foot,” the driver says with a mixture of sternness and solicitude.

  “Yes, I know,” I reply contritely. “I got lost.”

  “Tonight the blacks are going crazy.”

  c h a p t e r s e v e n

  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 th
ree 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.

  c h a p t e r e i g h t

  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.