The Catastrophist: A Novel

by Ronan Bennett

  “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.

  c h a p t e r n i n e

  The time will come when I am no longer engrossed in her idea. That time may be soon, but it has not come yet.

  She is on her side facing the wall with her knees drawn up, feet free from the tangle of the sheet. The room is airless and hot. I undress and get in beside her, molding against the contours of her narrow back and hips. In an automatic movement, she lifts her wing-folded arm to allow me to put a hand on her breast. It’s our way of sleeping together. She has solace fingers between her legs.

  “Did you file your story?”

  I brush aside a strand of hair and kiss the nape of her neck.

  “The Sûreté were preventing journalists to use the telex, but I got a boatman to take me to Brazzaville.”

  Her voice is remote and wounded, the dregs of the argument lie between us still.

  “Where have you been?”

  “With Stipe.”

  She makes a little grunt. She is not impressed.

  “He’s not what you think,” I say.

  “The Americans and the Belgians are on the same side. They are enemies of the independence movement.”

  “Maybe it’s more complicated than that,” I suggest.

  “That is very naive.”

  Pots and kettles, but I want to placate. I lean over and kiss her ear. She does not move, she does not respond to me. Her eyes are shut.

  “Inès,” I say softly. “I came here for you.”

  “Let’s not talk about this now.”

  “When will we talk about it?”

  She makes a little sleepy sound. I squeeze her breast gently and press against her hips. In London—during our first year at least—she would have turned to me, hungry and ready. Tonight she uses sleep.

  “Inès,” I whisper.

  I listen to her breathe as she settles into her own deep stillness, her refuge where I cannot go. I close my eyes and hold her tightly. Inès . . . Inès . . . You were fast and I was slow. You used to say before we lived together, When can I see you, when can we meet? You used to say, You can’t even imagine how much I love you, don’t forget. And I answered, Never. I said, Mai, mai—the way you taught me. When we first became lovers I had no intention of falling in love. I liked you, I was charmed by you and I wanted you, but I did not want to love you—different reasons, different things. Too complicated, too unsettling. I am slow. It takes time with me. And you—your declaration was fast, it caught me unawares. I am already loving you. Mine was, as is my way, slower. It took time—in Belfast and in Donegal, in Rome and Bologna, and finally in London.

  You sleep beside me. At this time of night, after the day we’ve had, all this takes on the self-pitying proportions of a tragedy, but the truth of my situation is banal; it happens every day, to others. Now it’s happening to me. It is painful, it is sad. I said, Mai. I said it quietly, I meant it. Now you who demanded have forgotten your question, and wait for no answer, want none.

  We met at a party at my publisher’s house in London. She was on her way to Ireland for L’Unità after she failed to persuade the paper to send her to Algiers. Someone had mentioned my name and she asked to be introduced. One of my books had recently come out in Italy. She had not read it, but had seen some notices. Alan, my publisher, brought her over. I took her small hand in mine and was struck immediately. Not by her looks so much as by her vitality, her openness, and also—I have to be honest—by her evident interest in me. Maybe it amounted to no more than a man being flattered by the attentions of a pretty young woman. I could give it this defensive construction—mock myself from my own mouth to forestall the ridicule—but I know in my heart it was more than this.

  The following day we met for lunch in Soho and spent the afternoon and evening together. I did not press her, and I think this disconcerted her a little. Next morning she rang. She was leaving for Dublin at midday. We talked and talked—this is not usual with me. I felt I had known her a long time and wanted to know her more. After perhaps an hour we were both aware that our tone had altered, that we had arrived at a sort of threshold. Her voice became softer. Little silences crept between us. She gathered her nerve and asked if I would join her in Ireland.

  In many ways, I suppose, the week turned out as I’d expected. I went for an adventure and I got one. But that was not all.

  I used the opportunity to visit my mother in Belfast, whom I had not seen for two years. Her life is filled with pain and patience; I do not know that my presence provides her with much comfort, but I had to see her of course.

  I met Inès off the train at the GNR—she was coming up from Dublin. I was, as usual, too reserved, too cautious (what if she had changed her mind?) to greet her the way I would have liked. I took her bag and we got her booked into Robinson’s in Donegall Street.

  We took the Greencastle trolley-bus as far as the terminus, then walked to Whitehouse and along the shore of the lough where my sister and I used to bring our dog when we were children. She talked and talked—she laughed and said talking was a fault of hers. But she could not be quiet; nor did I want her to be.

  She told me how much she loved Ireland. She told me about a holiday she had taken here as a child with her father. She told me excitedly about the interviews she had had with the IRA in Dublin. She had been to Carrickmore, where the people were brilliant, and to Edentubber, where the terrible bomb had gone off the month before. I held my tongue. The peculiar enthusiasms of the political believer have always left me unmoved; and political anger
—of all things—provokes in me, depending on the circumstances, mirth or contempt. There would be time enough for correctives, time enough to set her right on Ireland, and in the meantime her idealistic pronouncements gave me the opportunity to be older, wry and amused.

  I caught her looking at me once or twice as we walked—it was a look I recognized from other lovers: she did not know if she was going to be petted or pushed away. It had nothing to do with desire or lack of it, but with my internal argument. What was I getting into? And at the same time wanting, wanting . . . desperately wanting . . . I was not feeling all that strong.

  The sky was cloudy and sad. It began to rain and we took shelter under the railway bridge at Whitehouse Park. There we kissed for the first time. She kissed me with her mouth wide, with licks and flicks of her tongue. It is not my style of kissing but I was terribly aroused. The rain eased to a drizzle and we moved on in search of a more private place. We went behind a wall under some trees where we kissed again and I pulled up her sweater and kissed her breasts and stomach. She said we could make love. She undid my trousers and her little fingers gripped me. But I stopped it there, confusing her more I think. I held her and she said, “What if I fall in love?” I said, “You won’t.” She pinched my cheek. “I am already loving you. Ti amo.”

  She felt me slide away. I did not have to say anything, she felt it. There was the evidence. I could not help myself; it was worse than embarrassing, it was cruel. We fell silent while it sunk in for her that there were limits to this. My heart was low, I felt empty and weak.

  We walked slowly back to the terminus. There were few words. It was cold and damp on the trolley-bus and I put my arm around her. Her spirits could not be tamped down for long. She pointed to a notice—No Spitting—and said she had never seen this before on a bus. She thought it very funny and was amused by my embarrassment. She said I should be proud of my hometown. But what’s there to be proud of in this bitter, hard place? I asked her about Italy, where I had never been but about which I had read much. I asked her about Florence and the Palazzo Vecchio, about Venice and St. Mark’s Square. She told me about the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy, about Gramsci, Togliatti, the partisans and the svolta di Salerno. She talked as though I had knowledge of these people, these events. On my return to London I went to St. Pancras library.