The Catastrophist: A Novel

by Ronan Bennett

  When they were gone, I asked Inès if she was ready to go home. I did not want to talk about Auguste and Stipe, for I knew her mood. She looked frail and worn. She had of course resumed her schedule as soon as she had risen from her sickbed.

  “No, I have some work to do,” she said abruptly.

  “What work? It’s after midnight.”

  She looked at me severely.

  “I would hardly discuss this work with you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “So you could tell your spy friend.”

  “Inès,” I said softly, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder.

  The last thing I wanted was an argument, but she twisted away from me, out of reach.

  “What work?” I demanded, annoyed.

  “I have been asked,” she began deliberately, “to do some work for Patrice, and I said I would do it, so I am going to do it.”

  “Okay, do your work. What time do you think you’ll be home?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She said it aggressively.

  “I don’t understand why you’re so angry,” I said.

  “I am angry because of Stipe. Because you should not be with him.”

  “He’s my friend. Why shouldn’t I be with him?”

  “You think only of yourself, as usual. It’s always about you.”

  I had in my right hand a rolled-up newspaper. Without thinking I swung it at her face. I felt brutal and hurt, and this time I was not going to be weak and pleading. My pride would not allow it. I was going to tell her once and for all that sometimes she could be a silly bitch and why didn’t she just stop all this nonsense. She jerked her face away, letting out a little cry, but I stayed my hand in time. I did not hit her.

  “Oh Inès, I’m sorry.”

  She glared at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  “I have work to do.”

  “Inès, is there someone else?” I asked.

  “No,” she replied, but there was something in her voice that did not convince me. It wasn’t hesitation—it wasn’t that, she hadn’t hesitated at all; it was more the boredom with which she had said it.

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Yes it’s the truth.”

  And again I did not feel convinced, again because of the lack of effort she put into her answer.

  “I don’t know what time I’ll be back,” she said, starting off.

  “Are we going to argue because of Stipe?” I called after her. “Are we going to lose all the ground we made up because of him?”

  She spun round to face me.

  “When will you see what he is doing?” she said sharply. “When will you see what is happening around you?”

  I would rather have heard her condemn me as a woman-beater than hear this. At least then it would have been about us. She turned and walked away. Away to do her work for Patrice.

  Things have been cold between us since. She is involved with her people, her cause, as never before, staying out all hours, spending more time in the MNC headquarters and Lumumba’s house than in her own office. She is frequently with Smail.

  The bats continue in their zigzag flight. The young men are still bored and listless, they drift away and back again, murmuring to each other indifferently. A large flying beetle, the buff-colored kind that stream in from the river, lands in my hair. I flick it off with a shudder and the young men snigger among themselves. I am getting sleepy. Tomorrow I have a long article to write for the paper. I also have to get back to work on my novel. I have reached the climax. The son has found his father but has not yet found himself, and I have not yet found a way to make his feeling of failure and desperation seem real to the reader. I will have to write again to Alan, there will be another delay in delivery.

  I tell Stipe I think I will go home. He has been silent and brooding for the last hour. There is none of the usual banter between him and Auguste, their strained talk has faded away. He says something in Lingala to one of the men lounging around. Lingala is a military-like language and always sounds abrupt. It sounds even more so in Stipe’s mouth tonight. I know enough to understand that he has told them to remind Patrice that he is here.

  One of the men gets lazily to his feet, spends a little time stretching, yawning, a little time talking to one of his friends. Then he goes inside.

  He does not come out again.

  Fifteen minutes or so later a man emerges from the house. It is Smail. He seems surprised to see us.

  “Hello, James. What are you doing here?”

  “Mark’s waiting to see Lumumba.”

  “Really?” Smail says.

  Stipe doesn’t like Smail: the communist diamond merchant is as bad an influence on Lumumba as Inès and Gizenga.

  “Well, the thing is,” Smail says, a little embarrassed, “Patrice isn’t here. He left.”

  “What do you mean he left?” Stipe demands.

  “He was here, but he left a couple of hours ago.”

  Stipe says nothing. He does not move.

  Smail, reading Stipe’s mood and trying to appease it, says, “Patrice hasn’t a moment these days. He has his work in the College of Commissioners office. When he gets home there’s always thirty or forty people waiting to see him. That takes him up to midnight. After that there’s party business to see to. He gets to bed around three if he’s lucky, then he has to get up at dawn for more appointments before he goes to the office and the whole thing starts again.”

  Stipe is not mollified.

  Smail wishes us good night. To me, he says: “Give my regards to Inès.”

  “You should give her mine. You see much more of her than I do,” I say to the man whose company Inès seems to prefer these days.

  He smiles tightly, gives a courteous little bow to Stipe and is gone.

  In the car Stipe remains silent until we reach the apartment block. As I bid him good night he tells me he is thinking about a trip to Katanga to visit Houthhoofd.

  A few days later he calls to suggest I come with him. He assures me I will be interested in what Houthhoofd has to say. I ask if he has managed to see Lumumba. He tells me he hasn’t in a tone that strains to say he never expected to and it’s no big deal that he hasn’t, and I know at once that some significant realignment is under way. Advice has been offered and spurned. Stipe won’t let that go.

  c h a p t e r e i g h t e e n

  Though Auguste is with us, Stipe is driving. He seems to think this a kind of punishment for Auguste; if so, it is one his driver, sprawled in the back seat fiddling with his new glasses, is taking in his stride. Auguste adjusts the spectacles continually and checks his reflection in the window when he thinks we’re not looking.

  On the road out of Léopoldville towards Kikwit we pass an endless parade of posters, billboards and painted slogans.

  Stipe reels them off in a bored voice: “Votez MNC, Votez Abako, Votez Puna, Votez Redako . . . Did you know there are over thirty parties fighting this election? Someone should tell people here about the benefits of the two-party system. At the very least it would cut down on the waste of paper.”

  “The MNC is the biggest party,” Auguste puts in from nowhere. Stipe looks at him in the driver’s mirror. Auguste, feeling

  Stipe’s soundless censure, turns to stare vacantly out the window. We drive on in endless silence. I am in the middle of another family’s row. It is a five- to eight-day drive to Katanga, depending on the state of the roads. We could have flown to Elisabethville in a few hours and gone on to Houthhoofd’s estate from there, but Stipe wanted to see how the election campaign was progressing up-country. Stipe’s temper would be worse if he knew what I knew, but Inès made me promise not to tell. Auguste has secretly joined the MNC; not only that, he has been elected—it still seems incredible to me—to an important party post.

  Shortly after the Matongé rally Auguste came to the apartment. It was late and Inès, who had been out with Smail on party business, had gone to bed. While
she got dressed I had to act the host, not something I am good at, the awkwardness made worse by the atmosphere between us. The apartment reeked of our estrangement. I put on a jolly front but I was sure Auguste could sense what was going on. I could see he was bursting with excitement but the exaggerated sense of propriety he reserves for Europeans—at least for the first few minutes he comes into their presence—meant we first had to proceed through the rituals of politeness: he asked elaborately after the progress of my novel, after my health, my mother’s health . . . Auguste always gets proportions wrong.

  “So?” Inès asked on entering the living room.

  She knew something, or wanted something confirmed; the two were in a quiver of conspiracy.

  Auguste delivered his news with great solemnity: at a meeting that night he had been elected deputy chairman of the party’s newly created youth wing, the Jeunesse MNC. Inès let out a whoop of delight. She threw up her hands and rushed to embrace him. I could see the pride growing in him. As an évolué, as possessor of the carte d’immatriculation, as a member of the Association of the African Middle Classes, he was already a man of some account. Now that he was an officer of the colony’s largest political party—soon in all probability to be the country’s governing party—he had double reason for his gravitas. But he did not stay frozen in his seriousness for long. A few bottles of beer and Inès’s mischief thawed him out. He quickly relaxed into a more comfortable self and relived for us, in large and scatological detail, his success at the meeting. Inès was overjoyed about this first advance in what she predicted would be one of Africa’s great political careers. Her own sense of proportion is much like Auguste’s. She sat with feet drawn up, face flushed from the heat and drink, eyes wide while he boasted of the vanquishing of his rivals and the power of his oratory. The night went on a long time. When eventually he took his leave he attempted his new role of political leader; he embraced us with a look that implied we three had accomplished some momentous feat that bound us in the bundle of history and heroism and eternal comradeship. I was willing to bet he was thinking of Horatio at the bridge, or something similar. The Catholic priests who educated him had given Auguste a weakness for melodrama and tales of classical valor. In Belfast the Christian Brothers had tried to do the same for me. Inès was swept up in a historic moment, but all I could see were empty beer bottles—Primus, Auguste’s favorite—strewn over the table and floor. I had not seen Inès as happy for a long time. That someone else—a man who I thought little more than an amiable buffoon—was the source of her joy did not sit well with me. And the minute Auguste was gone, her happiness drained away. The coldness returned and she went to bed without saying a single word.

  She told me the next morning Stipe must not find out. But I am beginning to think he already knows. How could they hope to keep something like this secret from Stipe? He finds everything out. It is his job.

  “What do you think Lumumba’s motivation is?” Stipe says as though thinking aloud. “I mean his real motivation?”

  He is talking to Auguste through me.

  “He’s a man with a mission,” I reply, ready to go along with it for at least part of the way. What else can I do?

  “Is he? I mean, sure, Patrice cultivates the image of a man with a mission. But what really, deep down, makes him tick?”

  “Who knows what really makes people tick?”

  “You’re right there,” he says after a pause, “you’re absolutely right.”

  The road runs through the heart of the jungle, through the vines and the wild orchids. The ebony and mahogany and rubber trees are laced with creepers and furred with mosses. Eerie animal noises come from nowhere, barking, howling, screeching. There is very little traffic. Every hour or so a jeep or a truck might pass overladen with sacks of rice and baskets of manioc and beans, on top of which men and women and children perch in watchful silence.

  “Who knows what makes people tick?” Stipe muses aloud.

  He goes quiet before continuing.

  “When I was at college there was a girl. Rita. She had the most beautiful chestnut hair, she had big dark eyes, and a figure straight out of a magazine. She smelled—I’m not kidding you—she smelled of apples. It wasn’t synthetic, it wasn’t perfume or soap. It was her natural smell. Everybody asked Rita for a date, but no go. Then one day we’re in a literature class together, Rita and I, and she starts talking to me and one thing leads to another and before you know it we’re going out together. All my friends are green because she’s chosen me. I should have been a very happy kid.”

  “But you weren’t?”

  Stipe has all my attention. He rarely gives away any personal details. The few he lets fall I hoard like gold sovereigns.

  “I wasn’t happy because I couldn’t stop wondering why she had chosen me. It was a puzzle because I am not a handsome man.”

  I laugh, but I cannot make even the weakest effort to contradict him.

  “It’s okay,” he says lightly, forgiving me. “I’ve come to terms with it. It’s not a problem.”

  “Was it a problem for Rita?”

  “Not at all. In fact, her not finding it a problem was the problem,” he continues in the same airy tone. “I kept asking myself, what is she doing with me? It got to me. After a while it became an obsession. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I started flunking my exams. I just couldn’t handle it. So one day, blunt, straight out, I went to her and I said, ‘I don’t love you anymore.’ ”

  He falls silent.

  “And?”

  He sighs, more serious now.

  “Rita was devastated, as you’d expect. I can still see her face.”

  “So why did you end it?”

  “Why did I end it? At the time, I put it down to all sorts of vague but implacable things. It was fate, it was God, it was the need to suffer for redemption. Whatever it was, it was big. It had to be big, I knew that.”

  He snorts before continuing, a prelude to frank confession.

  “Indoors with Rita, no problem. I was a lover. If you could have seen me . . .” His voice trails off, momentarily diverted by memory. “Outside was different. Outside with friends, going to the movies, to games, I was embarrassed to be with her.”

  “Why?”

  “You see, Rita . . . This is not easy. I’m a short man, as you can see, and Rita was two and one half inches taller than me. I would see my friends with their girls. They looked great and we didn’t. I ask you: can a man two and one half inches shorter than his girl play the part of the romantic lover, which is how I saw myself then? It’s not possible.”

  He laughs at himself.

  “My crisis wasn’t to do with anything big,” he says with finality. “It came down to this: I wanted to feel Rita’s tits in my stomach, not in my throat.”

  I look at him. I don’t believe him.

  “You’re being too hard on yourself,” I say.

  “No,” he answers. “Our instinct is always to dress motivation up. I prefer to strip it bare. Take Lumumba. Patrice is highly intelligent, no question. He’s gifted, original. But he has a flaw and that flaw is going to be his undoing.”

  “What’s the flaw?”

  “He cannot put the past behind him. In the Belgian Congo the highest Patrice could hope to be was a clerk. Not unnaturally he resents this. He’s a very talented man. So he steals from his employers and they, not unnaturally, throw him in jail. Now he’s really angry. Now it’s not just about frustration, it’s about revenge, revenge on the white man. Then along come Smail and his friends with their Marxist theories and their scientific socialism. It’s all bullshit, but Patrice laps it up because it gives him justification for turning one individual’s resentment into a political crusade.”

  In the back Auguste is listening to every word.

  “If you accept,” Stipe concludes, “that Patrice’s motivation is at bottom petty and personal, then you know that all of his followers have no real cause.”

  We are approaching Port Francqu
i. On the other side of the river lies the long road southeast to Luluabourg, Bakwanga and Katanga.

  I pinch the sticky shirt and tug it from my breast. The air has no energy, neither do I. I look at the luxuriant water hyacinth, the ravenous oxygen-eater, the killer of the river. I look at the pretty purple flowers.

  I think of the road ahead, the endless track that stretches on and on through the wilderness. Five minutes out of a town, any town, and there is nothing, only the hot, sweet, decaying smell of the forest. I used to enjoy long drives. I could inhabit whatever fiction I was writing at the time. I could talk to my characters, live in their story. But this journey is already proving disagreeable. It is not just the heat and discomfort, not just the tension in the car. So far I have managed to avoid thinking about Inès, but during the monotonous hours my thoughts will inevitably turn to her, to our situation. It is worse now than it has ever been. She is out all the time, for the paper, for the MNC; she has thrown herself into this thing completely. I cannot remember the last time we had a meal together. She often does not come home at night and has long since stopped phoning to warn me. I exist for her only as a minor irritation. I wake up every morning feeling empty; I put off going to bed until I think I will collapse from exhaustion. But I never do. I lie in the wrinkled, clammy sheets brooding about her. The drive will be like that. I will invent scenes with her, I will relive arguments, remember the wounds I have received, pick them, infect them. They will darken my imagination, make me short-tempered with Stipe and Auguste . . . Italians often use a faux ami when they want to say affairs or relationship. Inès calls it a story and it’s one of those mistranslations I never corrected because I liked the sound of it. It seems especially appropriate here, now. We can’t go on like this. Our narrative has lost its thread. We must recover it and see it to its conclusion. We must provoke the climax to our story.