The Catastrophist: A Novel

by Ronan Bennett

  “This is the Sankuru River, James,” Auguste says.

  We are leaning on the rear of the car as the boatman poles the flat raft across the brown water.

  “It’s a big river,” I say.

  “It is not as big as the Congo River, or the Volta River in Ghana. Do you know Ghana, James?”

  He pushes the bridge of his glasses up with his forefinger.

  “No, I’ve never been to Ghana,” I say.

  “Ghana is a wonderful country.”

  “How the hell would you know?”

  It is Stipe. He has been listening from the car. He jumps out. The barque shudders under his angry stomp. The boatman does not look up but gets on with his labor.

  “What the hell do you know about Ghana?” Stipe demands.“You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Mark, take it easy,” I say, surprised by his vehemence.

  “He doesn’t know anything about it!”

  I expect Auguste to go quiet. He always does in the face of Stipe’s displeasure. I wait for his smile, but this time it does not come.

  “In Ghana,” he continues slowly, “Dr. Nkrumah is building a hydroelectric dam on the Volta River. The dam will transform all Ghana. It will bring electricity to every village. It will give power to factories and to smelters and make many new industries possible. This is Kwame Nkrumah’s vision. It is a great vision, a true pan-African vision.”

  “You know who’s building the fucking Volta Dam?” Stipe shouts at him. “Do you? I’ll tell you. The Kaiser Steel Corporation of America.”

  “Patrice wants to be friends with the Americans,” Auguste says.

  “He knows we need the Americans.”

  “Patrice can’t be friends with us and be friends with the Soviets at the same time. If he tries he’ll get burned.”

  Auguste does not respond.

  Stipe, calmer, as though regretting his display of temper, says, “Look, Auguste, I know a lot of this stuff doesn’t make sense to you right now, but you have to trust me. I’ve never let you down yet, have I?”

  “Correct, Mark.”

  “Correct,” Stipe says, patting him on the shoulder.

  We have almost reached the far bank.

  “Tell me what you want, Auguste,” Stipe continues in a conciliatory voice.

  “What I want?” Auguste replies uncertainly.

  “What you want—yes.”

  “I want for my country to be—”

  Suddenly Stipe is hard again.

  “No. I’m talking about you, Auguste. You, the individual you! I’m talking about what you want for you!”

  Auguste looks at him levelly, with challenge in his eyes; then some old inclination reaffirms itself and he lowers his head.

  Stipe prompts him. “You want a car, like this one here. Right?”

  “Correct, Mark.”

  “And you want a nice house. Correct? And you want nice clothes and a sexy, beautiful young wife and a good education for your kids. Am I correct?”

  “You are correct, Mark.”

  “Then what the hell are you doing with these?”

  Stipe snatches Auguste’s glasses and throws them in the water.

  “Mark . . . !” I protest.

  “They’re not real,” Stipeshouts back at me. “He has twenty-twenty vision, for Christ’s sake. It’s clear glass. He only wears them because he thinks they make him look like Patrice.”

  Auguste is browbeaten. He has nothing to say.

  “You want goodies?” Stipe continues, his words coming fast and hard. “You want lots of goodies? Of course you do. Just like everybody else. Just like Gillespie, just like me. And you can have them, Auguste. I can make sure you have them. But mess with those other people and you’re not going to get your car or your house or any of it. Do you understand me?”

  We have reached the far bank of the Sankuru. Stipe goes to pay the boatman. He gets into the car and, revving up the engine, drives from the barque onto the crude wooden jetty.

  Auguste and I walk slowly after him. We cross a streaming colony of enormous black ants, crunching them underfoot.

  “Patrice’s vision is a great vision,” Auguste repeats as we near the car, brushing ants from his trouser legs. “The Americans will support this vision. We need American help to build our country. Like Kaiser Steel in Ghana.”

  “American corporations never give anything for free,” I interject, sounding weirdly like Inès; I put it down to the immutable habits of skepticism.

  “If the Americans ask too high a price,” Auguste states simply, “we will go to the Russians.”

  “That’s a dangerous game,” I say.

  “It is the game we are forced to play, James.”

  That night at the guest house Stipe joins me on the patio to drink gin and listen to the BBC World Service on the shortwave radio. One hundred thousand people have demonstrated in Trafalgar Square in favor of nuclear disarmament. This report is followed by an item on Nyasaland and Sir Roy Welensky, and another on the aftermath of the shootings at Sharpeville. Then comes the Congo’s elections. In Léopoldville last night there were three more political murders; in Stanleyville a Belgian engineer accidentally shot and killed a black woman coming out of a shop.

  “That story about Rita,” I ask, “was it true?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to her, do you know?”

  “I should do,” he says, slurring the words slightly, “I married her.”

  I look at him, surprised.

  “Where is she?” I ask.

  “At home. We have a house in Philadelphia. Three kids, two dogs and a cat—at the last count.”

  He takes a photograph from his wallet. The picture is pure Americana: husband, wife and children dressed in bright, clean, casual clothes gathered with the family pets around the family car in front of the family home. Smiles and braces and shy grins and crew cuts. Rita is noticeably taller than her husband. Her look in the photograph is not an obviously happy one.

  “I’m glad it worked out for you,” I say, returning the picture.

  “It didn’t work out,” he says. “Nothing worked out.”

  “How can you say that? You’re married, you have kids, a family.”

  Stipe sighs deeply. “I begged her, on my knees I begged her to come back to me. She held out a long time. But I wouldn’t let go. I knew I had to have this girl, that she was the only one for me. And in the end I wore her down. She gave in. But it wasn’t the same. She never forgave me for what I’d done. Oh, she didn’t say anything—ever—Rita is not a talker, not about these things anyway. But she never trusted me again. My feelings were the same, they never changed. She’s still the only one for me. In my life I’ve only ever slept with two women—the other one was before Rita. Two women. Can you believe that? It causes my colleagues a great deal of mirth. But I’m just not interested. Maybe I should be interested, but I’m not.”

  “I don’t see why it should be a reason for mirth,” I say.

  He shrugs wearily. “Rita’s feelings changed.”

  “Is there another man?”

  “No. She says no and I believe her because one thing about Rita, she is an honest person. It’s almost like she doesn’t know how to tell a lie. Sometimes I think it would be better if there was someone else. At least that way there might be a chance she’d get bored with him and rediscover me, as it were. But it’s way worse than that. She just doesn’t love me anymore and there’s nothing as painful in life as love going in one direction only.”

  We sit in silence, refilling our glasses and looking out at the night.

  “I was an asshole with Auguste,” he says after a while.

  “Why are you being so hard on him?”

  “If he gets mixed up with the wrong people he’s going to get hurt. And I don’t want that to happen. I care about him.”

  He gives me a look that implies I doubt his sincerity.

  “I meet a hundred people every day, James, but the fact is I gen
erally don’t get along with very many of them,” he says quietly. “Never have. And people are the same with me—they look at me and they’re put on guard. They see beef, aggression. People don’t go for that. So when I meet someone and you get along—well, it means a lot to me.”

  Suddenly I see Stipe in true light. It makes sense. He has always given the impression of being self-sufficient, utterly and enviably so. Partly—he is right—the impression comes from his build and carriage—the beef he referred to, solid beef, packed, dense, muscular, and the aggression. People look at a man like that and never think him other than anchored. Self-doubt is for the rest of us. But now it makes sense. The endless invitations to drink at the Colibri, the shameless courting of Anna, the trips to the Matongé rally, to Mungul’s house, to see Houthhoofd and a hundred other places and people—Stipe is a needy man. He wants to be liked. I cannot feel angry with him in spite of his treatment of Auguste today.

  Stipe admits of no higher motives, he is cynical and sometimes bullying, but he is a loyal and true friend, and he is hurt.

  c h a p t e r n i n e t e e n

  Stipe’s Chevrolet rests at the side of the road. He has gone to the improvised checkpoint to talk to the soldiers. The jungle is far behind us and we have almost completed our journey across the open country of the Kasai. Ahead are the brown hills of the Katangan copper belt. The air will be cooler on the plateau where the sky is vast and still and clear.

  In an open-sided thatched hut beside a water pump children conjugate donner in African half song before their old teacher. They steal glances in my direction and in Stipe’s. The two white men who shouldn’t be here. The villagers ignore us, but the teacher has, I think, been trying to catch Auguste’s eye. He seems shy, or perhaps nervous. He wears a short-sleeved white shirt and a dark blue tie. I am sure he wants to talk to us. To warn us? The people here, even the children, act as if there is something in store: there are rumors in their looks.

  I join Stipe at the roadblock. A pregnant woman squats by a termite mound, prising away lumps of woody earth which she proceeds to gnaw. The soldiers are sullen. They have no white officers with whom Stipe might parley. He tries sweetness and flattery, he tries bribery, he tries the barrack-room camaraderie of a man who understands the business of soldiers, who apprehends their orders and the rules—formal and informal—by which they must do their duty. He tries anger. This, especially, does not work. I do not like the look of them, I cannot read them. They flick their eyes from one to another. I hate this: the uncertainty, the anxiety, the powerlessness—and the fact and taint of this confrontation. I may not be a believer, but the starkness of black and white makes me acutely uncomfortable. I want to say, “I am not a racialist, I am not Belgian,” but I can hear in my head the laughter; and the question: “What are you then?”—to which I have no answer.

  Stipe turns away from the morose men.

  “Well?” I ask.

  “They won’t let us through,” he says. “No way.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “There’s rioting ahead. The Baluba and the Lulua are at it again.”

  Since crossing into the Kasai we have passed a string of burned-out villages, looted shops and houses. Parts of the countryside are deserted, ghostly. There are refugees on the road.

  “We’re probably only four or five hours from Houthhoofd’s place,” Stipe says, “but the soldiers say they can’t let us through—for our own safety.”

  I watch the pregnant woman chewing termite earth. Stipe fidgets with the collar of his soiled shirt. My own sweat-hardened collar rasps at the back of my sunburnt neck.

  Stipe pays a woman to give us some beer and manioc, flavored—a small blessing—with a little onion, tomato and hot pepper. We sit under the shade of a baobab and eat hungrily. The teacher has dismissed his students. Auguste has disappeared. We will just have to wait until the soldiers change their mind.

  Stipe asks how I am getting on with Inès these days. I tell him. I tell him that her commitment to Lumumba and the MNC doesn’t seem to leave any space for the two of us to rebuild our life together.

  “Commitment?” he says, shaking his head. “What kind of word is that?”

  “Inès’s father was a communist partisan. She grew up with commitment.”

  “There you go,” he says. “There’s the answer.”

  “What was the question?”

  “Why she is the way she is. Obviously it’s a father thing.”

  I pick at the food. I’ve had the same thought many times, then dismissed it as unworthy—of me, of her.

  “She’s a young woman who wants heroes,” Stipe continues. “Her father was a hero, you were probably a hero to her once . . .”

  The pain of hearing this. Stipe penetrates, he has all the gifts necessary for his special line of work. I think of the way Inès used to talk to me, look at me, write to me when we were first in love. Stipe knows what he’s saying, he knows what these words are doing. He is taking out his own hurt on me.

  “Lumumba’s just the latest in a long line of heroes,” he goes on. “Poor bastard. Having to bear the load of her dreams, her and a million like her. He’ll either collapse under the weight or it’ll drive him to a martyr’s death.”

  I have known for some time that Stipe was annoyed with Inès because of Auguste, but he has never before dared voice his feelings in front of me. Now they come tumbling out. But perhaps it’s what I need. Perhaps he is being cruel to be kind. I have wallowed in my misery long enough. It’s time my idealization of her stopped.

  “Come on, Gillespie, don’t try to tell me there haven’t been times when all those extravagant displays of idealism and solidarity didn’t embarrass you just a little. That time outside Lumumba’s house when he was arrested, for example? I saw the way you were looking at her.”

  “How was that?”

  “You were squirming. She was crying her eyes out with Auguste and you were squirming.”

  It’s true, I know it is true: Inès weeps well. Perhaps I should be defending her, but I can’t.

  The more Stipe talks, the more embarrassments come to mind.

  “She was demonstrating to everyone her sensitivity, demonstrating especially to you, so that you could see how deeply moved she was while you, you cold bastard, haven’t the heart to feel a thing . . .”

  There have been many.

  “ . . . which is all harmless enough, except that you and I know there’s something . . .”—he pauses to select the right words—“something not entirely authentic about such displays . . .”

  One in particular.

  “Admit it, Gillespie. She embarrasses you when she’s doing her revolutionary grandstanding bit.”

  One in particular . . .

  After we’d been together a couple of months she’d had to return to Rome to talk to the paper about her contract. We decided that instead of her coming straight back to London we would take a holiday in Ireland and that she would fly to meet me in Dublin. Her plane was late. There’d been fog at Rome and they’d waited on the runway for three hours.

  “The pilot was coward,” she complained as she marched into the arrivals hall.

  “A coward,” I said in a gentle reminder.

  I was always in two minds about whether to correct her mistakes—as she insisted I do—or savor them.

  “Yes, coward,” she said as though I hadn’t understood the first time. “He could have taken off after just one hour.”

  She was so annoyed by the pilot’s timidity she forgot to kiss me.

  We drove to the west, pursued by rain.

  “We are always unlucky with the weather,” she said.

  “Ireland’s unlucky with the weather.”

  It was late April and Mayo was still in the gray wrap of winter.There was sleet and hail, both were fierce, driving the dogs and the sheep to shelter. At Westport the river boiled over the stone bridge and I had trouble getting the car across. Vai, vai, she said, kissing me. We found a cottage to re
nt five miles from the town. The bed linen was damp. I built a fire and kept it in all night.

  Next day out walking we took refuge from a downpour in a warm bar. We got talking to the farmers and laborers and, several rounds into the afternoon, she brought the conversation round to the IRA. In front of outsiders the reaction of country people is rarely marked, but the change in atmosphere was unmistakable. I felt the stiffening of the people around us, their withdrawal. Inès blundered on, misreading silence for license, the slant of her talk more and more tendentious. She stopped only when I caught her eye.

  Back in the cottage I said icily, “Couldn’t you see how embarrassing that was for them?”

  “Perhaps it was just embarrassing for you.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Well, it isn’t embarrassing for Italians to talk about the partisans,” she snapped back.

  “The IRA are not the partisans. ”

  The outsider with strong but uninformed opinions about Ireland is nothing new, but to hear someone so close to me speak this way was more than I could bear. For the first time I shouted at her.

  “They are not partisans. They are foolish seventeen-year-old boys who get shot in some pointless, bungled raid and die alone in a cow-byre on a freezing winter night with their guts hanging out. They’re middle-aged bachelors who’ve lived all their lives with their mothers on some godforsaken smallholding and then blow themselves and everyone around them to bits with their homemade bombs. They’re not fighting Germans, Inès, they’re shooting ordinary policemen who have homes and wives and children.”

  “The German soldiers in Italy had wives and children as well.”

  Her arguments were glib and sentimental. When we returned to London I found myself wondering for the first time if I had made a mistake. And Inès? What did she think of me then? To my surprise she was as soft and loving as she had been before.

  “Why?” I asked her. “What do you see in me?”

  Sitting under the baobab tree with Stipe I try hard to remember what she said in answer to my question. Nothing comes to mind. I don’t know what she said. I think now she just didn’t want to admit she’d made a mistake.