The Catastrophist: A Novel

by Ronan Bennett

  “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.”

  There is no cheering from the blacks, nothing at all. Perhaps the end has come too abruptly, perhaps cheering and clapping are not their way. Perhaps it is simply because they feel the extent of this their most recent defeat.

  Lumumba disappears into the house, escorted by Janssens. It all seems terribly anticlimactic. The whites relax and resume their idle chattering while I wonder again about the extent of Stipe’s influence: with Auguste, with Janssens, with the Sûreté, with Lumumba. It seems to go far, and in all directions.

  We stand in the avenue, midway between the two crowds. Stipe surveys the scene. The blacks wait where they are; I can’t tell whether Lumumba’s speech has calmed or inflamed their feelings. The whites start drifting away, the play over, though I get the feeling they are disappointed with the denouement.

  “So, what do you think?” Stipe asks. “Are you interested in writing something?”

  “You’re certain the Belgians are going to capitulate on independence?”

  “Within six months.”

  It is a good story. I think of Alan, my publisher in London. He likes to see my byline. I also think of the fee and the possibility of more work, and I think of Inès. She will take notice. At the very least it will give us something to talk about.

  “I’ll write something,” I say.

  “Need any help getting it placed?”

  “No.”

  “If you want anything else, facts or figures, give me a call. I know you’ll be careful how you source it.”

  A great cheer suddenly goes up from the blacks. L
umumba has appeared at the gates of the house with Janssens and a party of soldiers. His hands are chained behind his back. The crowd starts chanting: Depanda, depanda! Janssens leads his prisoner to a military lorry. The soldiers haul him up and push him into a seat between two armed guards.

  The blacks send up a deafening cheer, one of triumph almost. The chant changes to Patrice, Patrice!

  “It’s so predictable, but no one ever seems to learn,” Stipe says, waving a hand over the black crowd. “Half these people weren’t even MNC supporters this morning. The more demonstrators you shoot down, the more leaders you lock up, the more people flock to the cause. But I hardly have to tell you that.”

  Puzzled, I look to him for an explanation.

  “Isn’t that what happened in Ireland after your Easter Rising?”

  “It wasn’t my Rising,” I say tightly, hoping Stipe isn’t going to turn out to be one of those maudlin Americans who has discovered he has Irish ancestors who arrived in the New World on the famine ships, “and anyway, the situations are hardly comparable.”

  He responds to my defensiveness with a chuckle and gives my back a parting slap. “That’s what every colonial power always says: ‘You don’t understand—things are different here, the situation’s more complicated.’ ”

  Looking for Inès I bump into Smail. The handsome diamond trader shakes hands warmly.

  “I suppose you will want to write something about this?”

  “About what?” I ask abruptly.

  He is a little taken aback by my harshness.

  “The arrest of Patrice, what happened at the river yesterday.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say, again in a rather uncompromising tone; then, seeing his look of puzzlement, I add: “Inès will write about it, and she does that kind of thing so much better.”

  He wishes me well and says he hopes we will be able to have a drink soon.

  I pick Inès out on the other side of the boulevard, the black side. I start to cross the road. Then I see that she is crying. Next to her is Auguste. She looks at him and sniffs. He puts a thumb to the corner of his eye and carefully rubs away a tear of his own.

  My presence would be an intrusion. I leave them to their sore tears and clotted grief and drift away with the last of the whites.

  c h a p t e r t h i r t e e n

  I work on the novel in the mornings after Inès has left, and again for a couple of hours in the early evening, but I like to sit out the electric afternoons of the rainy season at the Colibri, where I have become friendly with Anna, the owner. She is a tough old woman who pretends to be more cynical about men than she really is. Why she likes me I do not know. She says I make a change from her usual clientele—Sabena pilots and Otraco employees, lawyers and officials. She even defended me after Courrier d’Afrique and L’Avenir picked up my article. Their editorials were not friendly and they commented with withering sarcasm on my newness to my subject and to the colony. I had not expected anything like the hostility I was to encounter, in print and in person.

  Had I known what I was letting myself in for I doubt I would have agreed to write the piece. At the Sabena Guest House, having oysters one night with Stipe and de Scheut, a Flemish woman spat in my face and pummeled my chest with fat and ineffectual fists. She accused me of wanting to see the Congo destroyed, she screamed that I was advocating a communist takeover. I replied coldly that I was an advocate of nothing, precisely nothing, that I was neutral in this, that I was merely painting the picture as I saw it. De Scheut, unflappable, genial and unassuming, remonstrated with her in his fatherly way and led her struggling and shouting back to her husband.

  “Handled with admirable aplomb,” Stipe said to me, topping up my wine.

  “I want to remind you I am quite detached from this, and so can look on it calmly,” I replied with a smile.

  I do not normally pull quotations out like this, but I’d had a little to drink and was overcompensating to cover up what I have to admit was my shock. The truth is that though writers like to think their words have meaning and importance in the world beyond the printed page we are not used to being held so directly and emphatically accountable. I had not experienced anything like this before. But then I asked myself if the woman’s display of outrage was really so unforgivable. If the pen is mightier than the sword, as we tell ourselves every day, can the wielder of the pen complain when one he has struck retaliates with her fists—a much inferior weapon by our own account?

  “Joseph K.,” Stipe said, identifying the quotation, “very good.”

  We had by then spent many evenings over tall drinks talking of books and writers. We had discussed Flaubert and Sand, we had discussed Jonson’s masques and the irony in Mansfield Park, but he had not mentioned Kafka as a favorite; nor—to a disappointment I tried my best to conceal—had he raised again the novel of mine he had read. I began to wonder if he had read it at all. But if he hadn’t, how had he known about it? And why would he have mentioned it?

  The woman continued to fire salvos from her table, turning heads throughout the restaurant.

  “The liberals and socialists in Brussels have no use for us,” she shouted. “We’re an embarrassment. But if they try anything, we’ll fight them. We have the guns. We’ll show them what we think of independence!”

  Stipe grinned. “Some people take things very seriously.”

  “Not us,” I said, raising my drink.

  Stipe clinked my glass with his.

  “When people like this good lady start talking about taking up the gun you know the revolution is in trouble,” Stipe said. “You’ve read A Sentimental Education? And Baudelaire—‘Mon coeur mis à nu’?”

  “The revolution was charming only because of the very excess of its ridiculousness.”

  “The middle class has many talents but insurrection isn’t one of them.”

  De Scheut, when he rejoined us, was embarrassed and full of apologies for the behavior of his fellow-countrywoman. He and Stipe, and also, to my surprise, Bernard Houthhoofd, were my principal defenders in the controversy the piece provoked. Their varied influences helped keep the bad feeling from spilling over into anything nastier and after a week or so the stir died away. I must not exaggerate. The story was moving and soon left me and my article behind. The Belgians had inaugurated a roundtable conference in Brussels to which all the independence leaders—except Lumumba, who was in jail for his part in the disturbances—were invited. In the pages of L’Unità Inès asked sarcastically what kind of settlement was possible when the most prominent figure in the independence movement was denied a place at the talks?

  I wrote a second piece for the Observer when a leaked copy of the colonial administration’s report into the shootings at the river was delivered anonymously to the apartment. I assumed Stipe was responsible, and though he did not confirm my suspicion, neither did he do much to deny it. The report absolved the Force Publique, though it said that the actions of one or two soldiers had “bordered on the reckless.” Responsibility for the deaths was fixed squarely on Lumumba and the organizers of the illegal march and on the demonstrators themselves. The pockets of several of those killed were found, on examination by the soldiers, to contain stones. The Force Publique had acted with restraint against the determined provocations of a riotous mob.

  I know Inès read my articles, but she never talked to me about them.

  I find her working at the little table when I arrive back after a long afternoon at the Colibri with Stipe. She is not often home so early. I ask her how her day went and she says fine. I cannot get her to say anything more. The typewriter clacks, she gets on with her work. This is not unusual. Today—I don’t know why, perhaps because I have drunk an extra couple of glasses—it is more than I can stand.

  “Talk to me!” I scream.

  “About what?” she says in a bored voice without looking up.

  “You know about what.”

  She continues her typing.

  “Inès, I can’t go on like
this anymore.”

  There is no break in the rhythm of the keys. In fury, I spin her round and pull her up, holding her wrists fast.

  “Can you hear me? I can’t go on like this.”

  Does she care? She looks at me without tenderness.

  “You are going through a confused period in your life,” is all she says.

  And I want to hit her. Hatred boils up inside me. I am not much, but I have been her lover for two years and I deserve better than this. I am on the verge of tears of rage and self-pity.

  “I’m not confused,” I shout at her. “I am clear. I want to be with you. It’s that simple. I want to be with you, Inès. With you. Forever. There’s nothing confused about that.”

  “I can’t talk about this now, there’s too much happening.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  She does not respond to me. I let her out of my grip.

  “What’s happening?” I ask in a tone of spite and pettiness. “What’s happening here that’s so important? It’s a grubby little squabble about which bunch of power-hungry, corrupt, venal little men will end up being in the most advantageous position to line their own pockets.”

  “Are you saying Patrice is power-hungry and corrupt?”

  “I’m saying that politics stinks. I’m saying that it’s not important. I’m saying it’s a spectacle, a farce we’ve seen a thousand times. The set varies, the actors change, the plot twists in different ways, but it’s always the same story and you always know the ending. And who cares anymore? Politics is boring. Who cares?”

  “I do, for one. I care, and if you can’t see what’s happening here with your own eyes, then there is nothing more to say.”

  “Come back to London with me,” I say as calmly as I can.

  “Please.”

  She says nothing.

  “Inès, I love you. I have waited all my life to love the way I love you. I’m afraid I will never love like this again.”

  “You will,” she announces matter-of-factly. “I don’t believe there is ever just one person in the world for us.”