The Catastrophist: A Novel (7 page)

We start out in these things from the same place, the fast and the slow. We pass along the same stages: excitement, enchantment, dispute, anger, reconciliation, love. And the end of love. We pass these same stages, unevenly paced, until at last, everything exhausted, we arrive at a place marked
I just don’t care anymore
.

How I hate this. She got there before me.

But soon I will be able to see the funny side. These things happen, they happen every day. Usually to others, now to me. Already I am laughing.

At a table on the other side of the swimming pool a small party comes down for a late breakfast—a Sabena crew by the looks of them, enjoying some free time before their next flight out. A man and a woman dive in and swim a length underwater. They come up at the far end, spluttering and laughing.

I sip my coffee and turn the pages of Stipe’s file—cuttings from the
Economist, Le Monde,
the
Wall Street Journal;
extracts from a British naval intelligence report, marked “for official use only”; financial and banking reports; and confidential projections by State Department analysts and U.S. consular officials, several of which bear Stipe’s signature. There are assessments of the current political situation and profiles of the most prominent black leaders—Lumumba, Kasavubu and Gizenga, among others.

Lumumba is described as “Most likely to succeed to leadership post-independence. Earnest, energetic, hotheaded, charismatic, tough, can be ruthless. A republican and a reformer. His hero is Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. Like Nkrumah, believes a young state must have strong, visible powers. Believes in firm, modern central government for independent Congo, rejects plans for federation, opposes authority of tribal chiefs. Lines up alongside Nyerere in Tanganyika and Sékou Touré in Guinea. But raised by devout Catholic parents and outlook has always been pro-Western in spite of occasional socialistic outbursts.”

Kasavubu, leader of the Abako Party and chief of the Bakongo people, is summarized as “lethargic, inward-looking, suspicious, unforthcoming and serious. Closest adviser is A. J. J. van Bilsen, Belgian liberal and staunch Catholic. Highly regarded by Belgians as one of their ‘trusties.’ Essentially conservative and middle-class, but also stubborn and proud. Stands more for creation of the ancient Bakongo kingdom—the territory now covered by northern Angola, Bas Congo and Brazzaville—than for independence of a united Congo. A federalist.”

Gizenga, leader of the Parti Solidaire Africain, which controls the Kwango and Kwilo regions of Léopoldville, is “an undiluted extremist. After visit to Eastern Europe earlier this year, returned a convinced doctrinaire communist. Anti-Western, pro-Moscow. Believed to hold racist views. PSA is small, but Gizenga appears to have dangerous and growing influence on Lumumba.”

The bulk of the file, however, is concerned with economics. There are figures for the volume and value of shipping in and out of Matadi, for net and gross profits from palm oil and copper and diamonds and cattle, for budgetary receipts, treasury holdings and the public debt.

I order another coffee and light a cigarette. I check the time. Stipe is late. I turn to a section headed
Katanga/Union Minière
. The southern province accounts for three quarters of the colony’s mining production and almost all its foreign earnings. The Union Minière’s impressive profits—4.5 billion francs last year, mainly from copper but also from tin, silver, zinc, manganese, cobalt, platinum, radium, uranium, tantalum, germanium and other metals and minerals of which I’ve never heard—allow it to function almost as a state within a state. The company has built up a close relationship with a local black leader, Moise Tshombe, and his tribal party, Conakat. Bernard Houthhoofd gets several mentions as a figure of extreme wealth and behind-the-scenes political influence.

I glance up to see a long-legged blonde woman in dark glasses and a toweling robe approach the next table. She sets down her room key, bag and towel.

“Hello,” I say.

“Hello.”

“Are you staying at the hotel?”

“I’m going back to the farm tomorrow. I felt like a little pampering before I left Leo.”

“Will you join me?”

I pull out a chair for Madeleine. She takes up her things and comes over.

She orders orange juice, coffee, toast and scrambled eggs. I offer her a cigarette and light it for her. She leans back in her chair and crosses her tanned legs. She is wearing a black one-piece swimsuit under her robe. She draws on her cigarette and exhales a jet of smoke. I can’t see her eyes behind the shades.

“How often do you come to Léopoldville?” I ask.

“Whenever I can.”

“You don’t like your farm?”

“I love my farm.”

She taps the room key abstractedly on the tabletop as she looks over the pool and scans the Sabena crew.

“What about your husband?” I ask.

“Do I love my husband?”

“I meant, doesn’t he mind you coming here, leaving him at the farm?”

“I never ask him.”

“Do you have children?”

“A daughter. What about you?”

“No children.”

“But you want children,” she says in a half question, half guess.

I should have known when I asked her that she might turn the question on me. She senses my discomfort and, being the kind of woman she is, presses her advantage.

“Don’t you want them?”

“It’s not an issue,” I say curtly.

“For someone your age it has to be an issue. What about Inès?”

How I dislike her, this froward, vain, silly, empty woman. I glance at my watch and wish Stipe would hurry up. The waiter brings her order.

“They’re all at it,” she says.

“Sorry?”

She is looking across at the Sabena crew.

“The pilots and hostesses—they’re all screwing each other. Part of the job, I suppose.”

She stubs out her cigarette. I say nothing.

“I’m not puritanical about these things,” she continues. “It’s just that it’s all so obvious. I prefer a little more discretion.”

“I suppose so.”

“Are you puritanical about these things?”

She lifts the coffee cup to her lips.

“No.”

She makes a small sound of appreciation. It could be the coffee but I’m sure it’s something else, and I’m sure she intends me to understand it’s something else.

“I didn’t think so,” she says. “You have that look about you.”

“What look is that?”

She shrugs. “You know it when you see it.”

Her cup shivers in the saucer as she puts it down.

“People tell me I have it too,” she says, and waits.

She lifts her knife and fork when I make no reply. Her hand is trembling slightly, she is not quite as composed about this as she would like, and to my surprise I find her nervousness touching.

“I was talking to someone,” I say, only partly to change the subject, “who told me the Congo would be independent within six months.”

She lets out a snort of forced hilarity.

“You don’t think it’s possible?”

“It’s absurd. Not even the
indigènes
think they’ll get independence in six months. Most of them don’t want it, you know. They have a good life under us, better than anywhere else on the continent. You’ve heard about the railways?”

“No.”

“Our drivers and firemen are
indigènes,
but when the main train arrives at the border of Northern Rhodesia the black driver has to be replaced by a white. It’s the same with the firemen and the waiters in the restaurant cars. Our blacks can go to the theater and cinema if they want, they can sit at European cafés and restaurants.”

“They can’t enter the European quarter after dark.”

“And there’s a law against Europeans being in the cité after dark as well,” she replies tartly. “It works both ways.”

“But if it were true that in six months—”

“It’s not true,” she says sharply, and throws her knife and fork on the plate.

A little crumb of scrambled egg sticks just below her fat bottom lip. I have to stop myself from leaning across to lick it off.

“The blacks are children,” she says. “What use have children for elections? They don’t want democracy. They don’t understand it. They need a father, a chief.”

“A white chief?”

“ ‘How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad; that driveth oxen; and is occupied in their labors; and whose talk is of bullocks?’ ”

“I was educated in Catholic schools. We didn’t read Scripture much.”

“I am the daughter of a Lutheran pastor,” she says. “Time doesn’t matter to these people. In Lingala,
lobi
means both yesterday and tomorrow. How can you run a government without the concept of time? How can you plan ahead?”

“Is it possible you’re exaggerating?”

She pushes away her plate, her meal barely touched, and stands up before me. I assume she is going to walk away to brood alone on her settled prejudices. Instead she removes her dark glasses and puts them on the table. Then she takes off her robe. There are small bruises on her arms and thighs. They make me think of sex.

She is a strongly built, mature woman with a broad back and full breasts. There is a bit of extra weight around her stomach—she has that little ridge that women get—and the skin of her chest and throat and upper arms is no longer taut. Few women I have known would have the confidence to stand before a virtual stranger like this, even those whose bodies are younger, suppler. She holds my gaze. I can’t decide whether like some mad diva she thinks she is still young and irresistible, or whether she is saying this is what women my age look like and I look better than most, take it or leave it.

“Hold this.”

She drops the robe into my hands, takes her towel, walks to the edge of the pool and dives in. She crawls for a length, breathing correctly, her arms making clean, effortless cuts in the water. She reaches the end, tumbles smoothly under the surface and launches into the butterfly. I watch, admiring the steady, confident rhythm of her propulsion and the power in her back and shoulders.

I turn to the file and consider what I’ve read. The figures show the extent of the Belgians’ success but, though the great concessionary companies are making billions of francs of profits every year, the colony is on the verge of bankruptcy. I check the figures again: according to an unnamed State Department analyst, the Congo’s current deficit is running at approximately $40 million. I have no idea what a figure of this size represents in relative terms, but by any measure it seems substantial.

“Monsieur Gillespie?”

A black bows his head and hands me a folded piece of paper, then steps deferentially back.

The note is from Stipe: “Lumumba’s house, opposite golf course. Quick as you can.”

I look again at the black. He rubs his hands humbly and gives me a dazzling grin.

“Mr. Stipe asked me to take you,” he says in English.

I know him now—our Erasmus-quoting host from last night.

“Auguste?”

“Yes, sir.”

He is wearing the same maroon pants but has changed his shirt. It’s an unforgivable shade of purple.

“What’s this about?”

“Mr. Stipe asks for you to come, sir. To the house of Mr. Lumumba.”

I reach for my cigarettes and the file and get to my feet. Madeleine is climbing out of the pool. She brushes off the water from her arms and legs and comes over, patting her hair with the towel.

“I have to go,” I say, handing her the robe.

She gives me a curt nod, but her eyes are fixed on Auguste. He responds to her hard stare with a servile bow and a shuffling retreat of several paces.

“I will get the car,
nókó
,” Auguste says quickly, already scuttling across the patio towards the lobby and the exit.

“What did he call me?” I ask Madeleine.
“Nókó?”

“It’s Lingala for uncle. To these people the uncle is the provider,” she says, pulling on her robe. “The Congo is a miracle. It was jungle, it was swamp and scrub before we came. Now there are towns and plantations and farms and the blacks have good jobs and homes, they have medical care and education. We are their providers and they know it. You hear them say all the time,
Les Belges sont nos oncles.
Next time you see your friend who spun you this fantasy about independence tell him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“I will.”

She drops into her seat.

“If the
macaques
ever get their beloved independence, it will be a catastrophe.”

“I’m sorry we couldn’t talk more about this,” I say.

“Outsiders never seem to have the time to listen to our side of the story.”

Her imagination is irredeemably belligerent. We do not like each other, we have nothing in common except the difference between man and woman. We are flirting with each other.

“Perhaps another time,” I suggest.

“If you can find the time,” she says in a bored challenge.