The Catastrophist: A Novel
b y R o n a n B e n n e t t
The Catastrophist
Overthrown by Strangers
The Second Prison
SIMON & SCHUSTER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by Easter Productions Ltd.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Originally published in Great Britain in 1997 by REVIEW, an imprint of Headline Book Publishing
Simon & Schuster and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1337-0
ISBN-10: 0-7432-1337-8
For Georgina
t h e
c a t a s t r o p h i s t
What should I be looking at now? The Sankuru is not as wide as the Congo, not at this point at least where the
barque
crosses, but it has the same dull mud color, the same tinge of rust after rainfall, and there are the floating tangles of water hyacinth I know from Léopoldville. I have seen them here before, I have seen them in Stanley Pool and at the cataracts below the capital, I have seen them at Matadi where they debouch to the sea. The flowers are purple or magenta, some are powder blue. They are beautiful and malign, yet more parasites for this overleeched land. The rivers will never flush away these tokens of infection. The rain fell hard in the afternoon for two hours, forcing our absurd convoy off the road—one more delay upon many. Soon after the sky cleared one of his aides claimed to have heard the engine of a spotter plane and there was general alarm, but when I looked there was nothing. What does it matter? We have reached the Sankuru. On the other side is safety, and he and Auguste and the others of the inner circle are already across. The air has cooled. These are the bewitching minutes of the red sunball and the palms where the pied crows roost, when the bamboo groans, and homeward lines of workers tread the dusty, pocked roads—how far do these people walk in a single day? Near me, very near, a frog croaks. The cicadas are beginning their chorus. What else should I note here? I am the trained observer. Smells? Yes, there are things to smell. I can smell the fish the women have piled before them like neat mounds of twisted silver nails. I can smell the boiled eggs and the
pilipili
and the fried manioc they have prepared in the hope of passing trade. And I smell the hot oil and exhaust fumes of the soldiers’ lorries. On the far side of the river he waits with the old boatman.
The soldiers come among us, or among them, for I am not truly part of this, and because my status, my ever-evasive presence, is manifest—in spite of my visible wounds—I do not have to be afraid in the way I can see the others are afraid. Inès is afraid, though not for herself. She stands by the sky-blue Peugeot in which Pauline and little Roland have been traveling for the last three days. The doors are open, the stifled occupants begging the breezes. In the back, Pauline holds the boy. Inès, like the others of our party, studies the soldiers’ movements and glances for clues as to their intentions. So far, they have exhibited signs of a morose but unspecific hostility only: as long as their animus remains general and unexcited we may yet get across to join him. They stalk the cars and passengers. No one says anything. They come to Pauline’s car. An officer recognizes her and demands, first in Lingala, then in French:
“Où est-il? Où est-il?”
Pauline remains silent. The officer’s voice rises, sweat blisters on his forehead. A soldier reaches into the car and jerks Roland from his mother’s grasp. A cry. Inès starts forward. Pauline is now out of the car, she sees only her child: the soldiers’ guns mean nothing to her. There are high shouted words in one of their languages, interrogatory and uncompromising. A soldier raises his rifle butt and strikes Roland in the face. And now we know.
What should I be looking at? Now that we know lives are at stake. A child’s face has been broken but I have seen so much. I have seen bodies and blood. I have heard wailing and terror. I watch as though through a screen, I listen as though to a recording I might interrupt at will: the imprecations and pleas, the threats and the whimpers. I am thinking of the leprosy of politics, of the banality of this country and the low comedy of its calamities. I am thinking, actually, of Ruskin. Yes,
Ruskin
. And all of this makes me angry with Inès, for I should not be here and she should not be here: we neither of us belong to this moment of farce and melodrama. I actually feel impatient, almost embarrassed. I will not be able to confess this to Inès. But I have more than a little justification. There is something worked up, overheated about this whole business. Even this journey. We could have reached Stanleyville yesterday—we had a day’s head start, the roads are for the most part good. As it is, he—the prize—is out of the soldiers’ reach. But had we moved with even the minimum of expedition, they would all be safe: Roland would not be bleeding and crying now, his face would not be smashed. I have cause for my irritation.
Things now are getting worse. The soldiers are jumpy, scuffles are breaking out. Someone says they are Baluba tribesmen. I cannot tell, but if this is true the situation is serious, for the Baluba have scores to settle. I go to be with Inès. She is so small and frail. I put my arm around her, partly in an act of reassurance, partly to restrain her; I do not trust her temper. There is something proprietorial in my motives, I cannot deny it. Auguste is watching from the other side of the river. He is watching us, and for once—for the first time in a long time—I am nearer than he. I am beside her again, and perhaps I will be able to stay beside her.
It is like trying to hold a bird. She moves restlessly this way and that, struggling to follow the wheeling eddies of the affray. I do not know if she is aware of me or my touch or my careful intentions. She does not meet my gaze but beats the cage of my arms and struggles towards the makeshift jetty where, as though marshaled by a command only I have not heard, our party and the soldiers have thronged. I let her go, and she glances at me for the briefest moment, a look between alarm and accusation: she has news of impending tragedy, and again I have not heard. She is off, away from me, running to join the others. The melee has been suddenly quenched, there are no human sounds. I follow her, and as I approach I discover the cause of this sudden respite. We gaze across the river.
He already has one foot on the
barque
. The crude wooden raft can take one vehicle and its passengers at a time. Mungul and the others had insisted he go first. Even then they had dawdled. I can see Mungul now, and Mulele and Kemishanga, pleading with him not to go back. They keep a nervous watch on the soldiers; even now they are slipping away into the bush, leaving words of farewell to hang in the air behind them, apology for their essential desertion. Auguste—he looks distressed, near to tears—embraces his leader. Then Auguste too is gone. Now there is only the boatman.
The pole pierces the water film, the muscle balls in the boatman’s arm, the veins swell . . . and they are launched. I see Inès close her eyes. Some of our party, distrait and grieving, break from the jetty like the first mourners retiring from a burial. My irritation rises, I feel like reminding them of all the avoidable delays which have led to this.
He stands towards the front of the
barque,
tall and thin, glasses glinting in the last of the sun. What is he thinking? He will have seen the soldier hit his two-year-old son, and certainly he will be concerned about Pauline’s safety. Perhaps this gesture is for her, repayment for his innumerable adventures. (Inès, whom I accuse of having a touch of the puritan in her, has complained many times since our arrival here: “The men of this country!”) I do not believe he is convinced that he is crossing to his death. Probably he is counting on being able to talk our way out of this problem, as he talked his way out of the last, and the one before that. This is not heroic self-sacrifice. It is, as ever with him, political calculation and self-belief.
When they are twenty feet from the jetty, a small plane appears and swoops down over the
barque
. It follows the course of the river, then banks sharply and climbs to circle above. Once again the atmosphere alters abruptly. Disbelief and resignation give way to high tension, the apprehension is palpable. I hear a voice cry out, clogged with emotion, “No!” It is Inès. “Patrice, no!”
Pauline clutches Roland and stares in bewilderment. I have only ever seen her in stylish European clothes and high heels, but now she is a young village girl: she looks needfully from face to face—can someone explain this to her? What will it mean for her? For her child? The wood of craft and jetty connect with a listless clump. The soldiers come forward for their prisoner. I move away to stand alone, apart, removed from the people and things of this unnecessary moment. The cicadas chirp, the frogs croak.
As the Baluba soldiers take him, a look of alarm crosses his face; he now understands the nature of his position. I am thinking of Ruskin, of his injunction:
Does a man die at your feet, your business is not to help him, but to note the color of his lips
. On the far bank, Auguste has reappeared for a wordless leave-taking. Inès looks up through her tears to raise a hand, a soldier rushes over to take aim, and Auguste backs away into the bush.
This is a story of failure.
A R T
O
N E
léopoldville, november 1959
The pitted sponge of jungle gives way to scrub and sand. The sun is red in the east.
I am here to be with Inès, I am here for her, though I do not know what my welcome will be. No one who knows me would say I am a sentimental man, but I have a letter in my hand from the first weeks of our affair. A man my age should know better than to read and reread such a thing, again and again. The lines in which I had thought to trace a way back to her have already faded. Each time I look I just get more lost.
The plane comes in over the brown slur of the river. The wheels skim the runway with a short screech and we have landed.
I want you to know me. I want you to understand how I am to be found, and where. I want you—very selfish!—to be part of a world that I feel belongs to me. Oh, this is getting complicated, but I have to say it. Ti amo, ti amo, sempre—Inès
. I fold the words from another time and put the letter away. I am embarrassed by my own melodrama, but I am here because I know—know profoundly—that this is the last chance I have to make love work for me, and I am frightened that I will fail.
The stewardess points the way and I fall in with the returning settlers and their families, with the businessmen, the priests and the nuns, the students and administrators and the army officers. We pass a parked military helicopter and a Piper Cub. The concrete and glass of the terminal building is ahead of us, and behind, in a distant screen of banana trees and palms, a small boy stands with his goats.
A porter holds open the glass door and gives me a sudden smile. I produce my passport for an official who speaks first in Flemish, then in French. The arrivals hall is ornamented with broad-leafed pot plants and wrought iron grilles. Our luggage is lined up in a hushed operation performed by many black hands.
Inès waits, a small, gauche figure in a sleeveless blue polka-dot frock. She signals her presence to me with a wave and I smile carefully back, as though she were little more than an acquaintance and as though there were nothing at stake for me; I am surrounded—always—by my own distance. I must not ruin my chances by pressing my case; I must be patient if I am to take her home again. And if she says no, she will not hear me complain. This is what I tell myself.
The customs man asks a few routine questions, then I go to her.
“You are here,” she says. She kisses me on both cheeks. “I am so happy to see you.”
I say nothing, trying to gauge the feeling behind this.
“You are not happy?” she asks.
Her English is good, apart from a few stubborn idiosyncrasies of preposition and tense, but these are music to me, sung solecisms—how else to describe “I am already loving you,” her first declaration of feeling for me, now two years old? Her accent, however, is strong:
You are not ’appy?
“I am ’appy,” I say.
“You don’t look.”
I don’t look
because I am the lover on the losing side. I am remanded, awaiting her verdict. I cannot make myself look happy, though I know melancholy to be tiresome.
I rally a smile. “Of course I’m happy—just a bit tired.”
She pinches my cheek and hugs me and there, in her embrace, my heart aches. I don’t yet know what the circle of her arms means, for she is naturally demonstrative. The words I need are out of reach. I push her gently back to take her in. She has lost weight in the Congo, in the weeks we have been apart, and her spareness now makes me feel fleshy, sleek and overfed, though I do not think that I am, really, any of these things. Her shoulders are skinny and slightly hunched, her back a little rounded. Her skin is flushed and clear.
I put a thumb to her hairline.
“I know,” she says, rolling her eyes, “soon—bald.”
She worries about her hair. So do I. Since I have known her it has been getting thinner and duller.
She is with someone, a man. She introduces me to Zoubir Smail. Though I would put his age at fifty, Smail has a freshness that makes me feel worn and shabby. He is tall and trim, with silver-washed straight dark hair. The whites of his green-brown eyes are very clear. My own eyes are burning and sore. They are in any case my weak spot, prone to tiredness. I cannot compete. I try hard to look him in the face as I shake his hand and tell him that I am very pleased to meet him.
“Zoubir brought me to the airport,” Inès explains.
What has she been doing for sex? The same as me? Smail gives her an affectionate smile, which she returns. She has friends here already, she is liked. She is not above letting me know of her little triumphs.
“Your first time in the Congo, James?” he asks pleasantly.
He has that Mediterranean ease and style which the English and the Irish—and those like me in between—admire and begrudge.
“My first time in Africa,” I reply in my poor French.
He helps me with my bags and we walk to the exit. In the sunshine and heat Inès links her arm in mine the way she used to do.
“So, what do you think?” she asks.
“About what?”
“This.”
“Toytown,” I say.
My observation pleases her. And it is true: the affluence, the order, the newness of things and their perfect maintenance are not real. Something has been made in a place where it has no place, even I can see this.
Smail has to make a detour to see someone. We leave the paved road after a few minutes to turn onto a track of compacted dirt and I get my first glimpse of the native world. In a clearing of round, windowless mud huts with low doors, chickens peck at the dirt, a goat stands skittishly atop a termite mound, a young girl washes clothes in a zinc tub. Two older women sit like sisters in knowing silence. It seems oddly familiar, even to one who has never trespassed here before. The women sit motionless, staring irreducibly back—it is not the way of Europeans, but neither is it new to me. I have seen the newsreels.
At an isolated reed shack, in exchange for a thin wad of francs, Smail receives a dirty folded cloth from a man he calls Harry who looks like he might be Indian or Pakistani.
“What is it?” I ask Inès.
“A bit of smuggling,” she says in the tone that women use when boys will insist on being boys. “Zoubir has a small diamond business.”
“How did you get to know him?”
“He is in the Party. The Sûreté are always watching him. He is a brilliant person, isn’t he?”
She tells me how exciting it is to be in the Congo at this time, how things are happening, how she wants to introduce me to more brilliant people like Smail, how she knows I will want to write about all this. I remind her I have my book to finish and she says I won’t be able to stop myself. She leans forward and kisses my cheek. She searches my eyes.
“Why are you not happy?”
“I’m getting happier,” I say.
She gives me a big kiss. I
am
getting happier. There are things to discuss, but the way she has been with me makes me think our problems can be resolved. I long to be in bed with her, to make her mine again, to start again.
Smail rejoins us and we set off back the way we came. Newly expansive, newly generous and bright, I ask Smail about himself. He replies in English, to my relief. He came to the Congo from Lebanon before the war. He “learned diamonds” in Brussels and Antwerp. The real diamond mines are in the south, in Katanga.
“On the big stones the benefit is good. On small ones like these”—he taps the cloth parcel in his shirt pocket—“it is about five percent. It’s not easy.”
There is a thud and a crack. The car swerves a little. Smail pulls to a halt.
“What is it?” I ask.
Had we hit something? The road seemed clear. Smail gets out of the car. I turn to Inès, who is staring out the back window.
“What happened?” I ask again.
She has seen something.
“Probably just a stone that came up from the road,” she says with an evasive shrug.
She gets out of the car. I do the same.
“It didn’t come up from the road, someone threw it,” Smail says, inspecting his windshield. The glass is chipped and there is a lightning fork of splintered lines; the damage is not serious. A smile plays in the corner of his eyes. He is a lighthearted and amused man. I am beginning to like him, in spite of his familiarity with Inès.
He starts walking down the way we came, a desultory search for the culprit. The car’s engine thrums and the air is still. There are some far-off noises from the jungle. Monkeys? A guess—what would I know? I stare into the trees and the foliage. The jungle is dense, undivided, but it does not seem virulent or vengeful. There are pretty wild flowers fringing the roadside and at the soft edges of the rain pools small violet and yellow butterflies sap the mineral mud. This is not
An Outpost of Progress
. The sky above is clear now, and only the sun is implacable.
“You saw something,” I say.
“No, nothing,” she replies.
I look at her with plain sight, but she resists my gaze. Her demeanor has changed quite suddenly. She is away from me, in her own thoughts. I try coaxing her with small talk and news of our friends in London, but she won’t come back.
The suburbs are pleasant and spacious. The bungalows are whitewashed and the rust on the iron roofs has been tamped down with years of paint—deep red and olive green—and the thin metal now has texture and substance, like canvas worked in oils. Over the walls and spiked fences giant flowering shrubs lie in brilliant mantles. Gardeners in blue boiler suits and Wellington boots are already at work. The air smells summery, of cut grass and the diesel of lawnmowers.
A long, wide, tree-lined avenue cuts the heart of the city, Boulevard Albert I. On traffic islands white-gloved policemen in pith helmets control the flow. The cars are new and shiny, luxury European models and expensive American convertibles, chromed and extravagantly finned. There are flat-backed trucks and delivery vans and taxis and buses, and a silver-black stream of bicycles ridden by the Congolese. At the pavement cafés Europeans read their papers over coffee and croissants. There are boutiques, jewelers, delicatessens, patisseries, ice cream parlors and hotels. The doors of the Banque Belge d’Afrique are just opening.
Smail drops us outside a new seven-story apartment block, one of a small cluster at this end of the double boulevard. Inès has borrowed the flat from someone who has gone to Uganda for a year. I thank Smail for the lift. He suggests dinner tonight at the Zoo. The owners are French and the cuisine is the best in Léopoldville.
I yawn and stretch happily. The welcome has been good.
