The Catastrophist: A Novel

by Ronan Bennett

  c h a p t e r f o u r

  The villagers are about to scatter when I pull up in the car, but Auguste, after a momentary look of alarm, gives me a terse nod of acknowledgment and they gradually settle down again. I stand at the edge of the clearing while he resumes his talk. Squatting outside one of the mud huts, he speaks in Lingala, without eye contact with his listeners. His speech is unemphatic and punctuated by long silences during which people look vaguely at the ground or the sky or the trees. Occasionally he takes a spoonful of rice and beans from a tin plate at his feet. He chews the food with great deliberation and follows each mouthful with a sip from a Coca-Cola bottle. Whatever I have come to say he seems in no hurry to hear it, though he must know my presence here portends something out of the ordinary. There is never any urgency in the tropics. I know that now. Du calme, du calme. Always. There is resignation and withdrawal. There is watchfulness. Sometimes there is a kind of faintly optimistic indolence. There is never exigency, never emergency. Even when lives are at stake. A black hen with a single yellow chick in tow pecks at the earth around my car. The day is hot and humid and brooding; we will soon be in Léopoldville’s worst season.

  A listless hour passes before Auguste gets slowly to his feet and comes over to me, and for the first time there is no smile, no craven, clownish grin. His gaze is level and self-assured. I have never seen him like this. Even his clothes are sober now. He wears a simple white shirt with short sleeves and an open collar. It hangs loose outside dark gray slacks. The jewelry is gone.

  “It is good to see you again, James,” he says in English. “Are you well?”

  The voice, like the gaze, is confident. The people, gathering at his back, murmur among themselves and gaze at me without expression.

  I tell him I am well enough, and I tell him that Inès is at my house, ill with malaria. I tell him why I am here. He nods slowly, taking in my news. There is no indication of panic or fear, nor is there any sign of discomfort at being face-to-face with the man whose lover he has taken. I look him over. He’s about the same height as me, perhaps an inch shorter, but he’s younger and leaner; there is not an ounce of spare flesh. His back is straight and his shoulders strong. He is muscle and bone, the perfect mesomorph. His skin is perfect too. I look for flaws to make me feel better, and can find none: he is, I see for the first time, a beautiful young man. How shabby I feel. How jaded and bitter. I take a deep breath. I must do what I am here to do. I tell him that Inès is afraid Smail will be tortured and will give away his hiding place. I tell him he can stay in my house until the Egyptian plane arrives.

  Auguste looks into my eyes. Is he asking himself if he can trust me? He waits a long time before saying anything; then, simply, “I will get our things.”

  Our things.

  Watched by the silent villagers, we walk together to the car and drive the rest of the way along the dirt road. I see Harry tending a little garden of beans to one side of the shack. He looks over at us as we pull up, mutters something to Auguste, ignores me, and goes back to his labors. I climb the steps to the crude verandah—constructed, it seems, from broken-up wooden pallets of the kind that litter the docks and warehouses in Leo—and enter the diamond smuggler’s stuffy, grubby two-roomed hut.

  A narrow iron cot dominates the bedroom at the back and I realize that Inès has been living here with Auguste. This is the bed they have shared. Her things—their things—are scattered about. Her suitcase, her typewriter, some old clothes, a few books and pamphlets. I look over the titles—The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; Anti-Dühring; The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man: Engels was always a great favorite, more readable than Marx, she used to say. There is an edition of Gramsci’s prison letters and, on a rough box by the side of the bed, a history of the Communist Party of Italy under fascism. Auguste puts the suitcase on the bed and starts to gather up their possessions. He lifts from a chair a dress of heavy silk, dusty pink—Inès’s favorite, the one she kept for the few occasions when she had to look smart. I almost shout get your hands off that. I bought her that. Me! You know nothing of it, you have no right to touch it . . . but he doesn’t hear the thunder I want to strike him down with, doesn’t see the fury in my eyes. He lays the dress on the bed, slowly, carefully, lovingly, and smoothes it with his gentle, fine hands. Black on pink. He seems lost in a memory, recalling her and the feel of her through the material. I can’t bear that he has the right to touch it—and so casually, as though they had been together always, as though I were the stranger. I have to turn away. I remember the day I bought the dress. I remember it very well. I had been up to see Alan in Highgate and was on my way home when I passed a secondhand shop in Camden. There in the window was the tailor’s dummy on which the dress was draped. I am not good at buying clothes—I have no eye for it—but I knew at once it was for her. I bought it and took it home. She gabbled away as she put it on. She said she could never get away with a dress like this, but she was terribly excited. And when she stood in front of the mirror and saw the color, the fit and the cut—saw that everything was perfect—she became suddenly quiet, and I did too. Something changed in the room and made everything there was between us yet more intimate, more intense. When she turned to me there were tears in her eyes. “It’s a dress, just a dress,” I said as she hugged me. She sobbed against my chest and I forced out some weak laughter and made poor jokes. But the truth is my own eyes were moist. A dress, a simple dress. It had made her so happy. Why hadn’t I bought her a hundred? A thousand? What does Auguste know of this? Nothing. I look again at the bed. What things did he do here to Inès? How well did he do them?

  “Are you all right, James?”

  I hardly hear him.

  “James?”

  He is looking at me but he doesn’t see. I fight down the urge to tell him he can go to hell, that he can escape without my help. To cover my emotions I pick up the history of the Communist Party of Italy from the makeshift bedside table and go to where it is bookmarked. The paper is cheap and thin and spotted with brown. It smells musty, faintly like geraniums. She has underlined a passage. I was always horrified by her habit of scribbling on the pages of what she was reading, but she insisted books were not ornaments and that broken spines, torn dust jackets and annotations were proof the author’s work had been appreciated. I read the lines she has singled out for attention. It is a quotation from someone called Eugenio Curiel, a Party member: “The major effect of fascism in Italy is infinite skepticism, which kills all possible faith in any ideal, which derides the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the welfare of the community. This is, at bottom, the most conspicuous conquest made by fascism and will remain its bitterest legacy”. Inès’s bedtime reading.

  “I suppose we should take these,” I say, indicating the books.

  “Yes,” he says, “Inès will want them when we get to Stanleyville.”

  “Is she definitely going to Stanleyville?” I ask with studied casualness as I gather the books and pamphlets together.

  She had told me she didn’t know if she would go. Was that just a ploy to get me to help her? Or do I know something Auguste doesn’t?

  “Yes. Inès will come to Stanleyville. It will be safer there.”

  “Will it?” I ask harshly. “I mean, I know it will be safe for you, but is it going to be safe for Inès?”

  “I did not say it would be safe, James,” he replies calmly, “only that it would be safer than here. In Stanleyville Patrice will reorganize the movement to fight back against Mobutu and the military dictatorship.”

  “I asked if it would be safe for Inès,” I shout at him. “I don’t care about anything else.” I gather up a handful of Inès’s clothes and throw them angrily into the suitcase. “I don’t care about Patrice or Mobutu or any of them, and frankly I don’t care about you. This whole thing is a mess and it will be a mess whichever incompetent, vicious lot of you takes power.”

  I drop the books on top of the clothes in t
he case. Auguste, standing still on the other side of the bed, regards me quietly. His affected calmness enrages me still more.

  “Who do you think you’re kidding, Auguste? You’re no revolutionary. Six months ago you were proud to be a member of the Association of the African Middle Classes. Remember? Remember you were going to be a lawyer on Park Avenue? Remember you were going to have an office full of pretty secretaries? You can try your man-of-the-people act on with simple villagers, Auguste, but, please, not with me.”

  He looks at me without responding.

  I gather up the rest of Inès’s things. I am cursing her inside my head. What right had she to ask me to help the man who has replaced me? Auguste is now in mortal danger but that has nothing to do with me. It is her responsibility. She put him in this position. She is the one who convinced him that the world was a place where anything was possible if you ignored the rules they made for you, if you were brave enough to disregard the boundaries. But boundaries exist, Inès, boundaries exist. Lines on maps, lines between peoples, between individuals and men and women, between color and class and profession and belief. They are there, even in the skies. You can negotiate them, one by one, you may cross them on occasion, but you cannot behave as if they don’t exist. It is your fault that Auguste is in danger. You convinced him that there were no boundaries except those the Belgians had placed in his imagination. And because of your fault all my faults are exposed. All my pettinesses and jealousies. This isn’t fair, Inès.

  I grab the typewriter, leaving him to bring the suitcase in which their clothes are mingled.

  “Let’s go,” I say, “before the soldiers get here.”

  I walk out to the rickety verandah. There, before the house, the entire village seems to have congregated. Harry works his little garden as though nothing out of the ordinary were happening. He keeps his head down, ignoring the crowd, ignoring me. What an infinite capacity people have for overlooking what they do not want to be part of, even when it is going on outside their own house. Auguste appears behind me and a murmur goes up from the villagers. A woman in an electric-blue pagne with a design of golden telephones holds up a baby as though for Auguste’s blessing. As we descend the villagers throng round us, reaching out to touch Auguste’s face, his hair, his back. He puts down the case and they take hold of his hands. He stands among them like a prophet among the faithful, his eyes calm and vatic and kind. A girl with short hair and a necklace of small blue and white stones stands before him and smiles bashfully.

  “Maybe she can be one of the secretaries in your Park Avenue office.”

  He gives me a brief glance. There is an infuriating forgiveness in his gaze.

  “Come on,” I say, bored with this, and irritated. “Tell the true believers your girlfriend’s waiting.”

  Still he makes no move to hurry. What has he said, what has he done that these people should treat him this way? What has prompted this devotion? It is a long and slow leave-taking. The villagers press close as he gets into the car beside me. Hands come in the window for a last touch of their seer. I start the engine.

  “What did you tell them?” I ask maliciously as we pull away, “that their dead relatives would rise from the grave when Lumumba was back in power? That they’d find Belgian money growing in their fields?”

  He gazes back at the villagers. They are waving farewell.

  “The people thought you were mundele ya mwinda,” he says when we have left the shack and the village behind.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s what the old people used to call the Belgians. The white man with a light.”

  “Why did they call them that?”

  “When the Belgians came to the villages, the men would hide in the forests. So the Belgians would round up the women and children as hostages and rape the girls and threaten to kill them all unless the men returned. When the men came back the Belgians took them away to work on the rubber plantations and the railways. They worked with steel rings around their necks with chains linking one to another. They were whipped and beaten. They had their hands cut off as punishment for not producing enough rubber or ivory. So the next time the Belgians came to the villages, all the people—whole clans and tribes—would flee into the forest to escape the mutilations and rapes. Then the Belgians sent the police into the forests at night with powerful flashlights and so the people called them mundele ya mwinda. White man with a light. Many people thought the whites were demons with magic lanterns.”

  The rain has started. It beats down on the windshield and drums on the roof.

  Auguste continues, “I was telling the people that the whites are not our enemies.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I ask.

  “There are many who are,” he replies, “but you are not one of them.”

  “I’m neither a friend nor an enemy,” I say.

  “If you are not a friend of the people, why are you helping?”

  “It has nothing to do with sympathy for you or Lumumba or the MNC,” I reply bitterly.

  “Inès says you are not really so detached.”

  “That just proves you can live with someone for years and never really know them.”

  “Perhaps you cannot see what your real motives are.”

  “Oh, I’ve always had a good view of my motives, Auguste. But I think perhaps you’re in the dark about your own.”

  “You think it is wrong to want justice and equality?”

  “Those aren’t motives—just words, and rather overused ones at that.”

  “I disagree.”

  “They’re not words that motivate me—or anyone else I know.”

  “They motivate the people I know.”

  “Obviously we move in different circles.”

  We drive on towards town through the torrential rain.

  “There’s a roadblock about a kilometer from here,” I say to Auguste. “It would be best if you hide in the back.”

  As he climbs into the trunk and waits for me to close it we realize we are thinking the same thing.

  “Have you any idea how I feel about you?” I say.

  He flickers.

  “Have you thought even for one second what seeing you does to me?”

  He hasn’t. It never occurred to him to spare a thought for me. One of love’s privileges is to excuse the lover from the normal, everyday duties and responses. We allow the newly in love certain dispensations. We condone, at least for a time, their self-centeredness. But that doesn’t make this thoughtlessness any easier to bear. I look down at him. We both know he is entirely in my power. I could deliver him to the soldiers at the roadblock. Or to Stipe. I could make up a story for Inès. I could be rid of my rival forever. I slam the trunk shut. We both know I could do this. We both know I won’t. I know my motives better than he. They drive me in one direction. He is safer with me than he can imagine.

  c h a p t e r f i v e

  Passing the Regina it occurs to me to make a precautionary telephone call. I park the car on Avenue Moulaert and shout back to Auguste, still hiding in the trunk, that I will be five minutes. The storm has passed and the rain has eased a little, but it’s still heavy. I leave the car and make a dash for the hotel. Inside I see Grant talking to George, the U.N. secretary general’s press officer. They shout their hellos and ask if I will join them for a drink. I make my excuses and go straight to the public telephones. I dial my own number. There is no sense in being amateurish about this, there is too much at stake. The phone rings twice.

  “Hello?”

  It is Roger.

  “It’s me. Is everything all right?”

  “Ah, James. I’m glad you’ve called. I’m afraid there’s been a little activity. You’ve had some callers.”

  My heart thumps in my chest.

  “Yes?”

  “Military.”

  “I see,” I say, my voice uncertain. “Is everything all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Did they say what they wanted?
”

  “Not in so many words, but they were rather keen to come in.”

  “Is Inès all right?”

  “Oh, yes,” he says brightly. “Don’t worry. I sent them packing. Told them not to come back unless it was with a warrant.”

  I laugh with relief. I can imagine the scene: Roger facing down an armed body of ANC soldiers with nothing more than the unshakable conviction of the English middle classes that officialdom must always act legally and correctly. It wouldn’t have surprised me to hear he had cited Magna Carta in support of his refusal to allow the soldiers entry.

  “However,” he continues, “I think it’s probably not a good idea for Inès to stay here much longer. I have the feeling they may be back.”

  “Is she fit to travel?”

  “A short distance only. She’s a little better, but still quite weak.”

  I fall silent, trying to work out a solution to this latest complication. I am not sure how much I can ask of Roger.

  Before I can say anything he speaks again. “I can take her to my house, if you’d like. The coast seems clear now.”

  Relief and gratitude flood into my voice as I thank him. But then I think of the possibility that they might raid Roger’s house now they’ve seen him at mine. Nor do I feel comfortable about asking him to shelter Auguste as well. I am sweating heavily in spite of the hotel’s air-conditioning. I glance around, trying to marshal my thoughts. Grant and George are having their drink at a white table near the swimming pool. I feel terribly tired and sticky. My feet are hot and swollen. I wish I could take off my shoes and all my clothes and dive into the pool. I wish I could float face up with my eyes closed and my ears below the surface. I wish I could lie down. I think of Madeleine. It was here, by the poolside, she flirted with me, and I with her.

  “James? Are you there?”

  Madeleine. The solution comes to me.