The Catastrophist: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

is telling me now about the Société Générale de Belgique, a fabulous, malevolent giant with interests in cotton, coffee, sugar, beer, palm oil, pharmaceuticals, insurance, railways, airlines, automobiles, diamonds, cattle, shipping. At last she pulls up her panties, the elastic snaps and she looks about for her dress.
    What gives her the right to be like this, so sublimely unselfconscious? She really doesn’t see my gaze, or herself. Her figure, in unclothed harshness, is angular and bony. I don’t know, even after two years, what she thinks of her own shape and appearance. She spends no time attempting their improvement; I have heard neither delight nor despair nor coy encouragement to compliment . . . A memory comes to me and I smile inwardly. It is from the early days of our affair. Soon after she moved to be with me in London we went to see
Love in the Afternoon
. Walking home that night, she judged the film pretty slight but at least it had Audrey Hepburn.
    “She looks like me,” she had remarked matter-of-factly.
    She glanced up at me to see how I had taken this.
    “Yes,” she said with a little more emphasis, “she is very like me.”
    There are conventions about this kind of thing, there are devices to shelter the speaker’s modesty. She might have said that a friend of hers once told her she bore a resemblance to the actress though she couldn’t see it and what did I think? But no. Audrey Hepburn looked like her. Inès had stated it as a simple fact and in such a way as to suggest the actress was the copy. I could not think of it as vanity; it was too innocent for that.

    We pass a wall daubed with freshly painted slogans.

    N O M ORE C OLONIAL M INISTERS ,
    N O M ORE G OVERNOR -G ENERALS !
    1959 L AST C OLONIAL G OVERNMENT !
    I NDEPENDENCE OR D EATH !

    She notes them with approval and says with a certain friendly provocation, “You know, Roger Casement wrote a famous report about the rubber plantations. It was because of him that Léopold’s crimes were exposed to the world.”
    “Yes, but that was a long time ago, I think.”
    “Casement was Irish.”
    “At the time he wrote the report he was the British consul. He got a knighthood for his services.”
    “That’s not important. The British hanged him.”
    She thinks me a poor Irishman, hardly one at all. I travel on a British passport and I couldn’t care less about Orange or Green, about the Six or the Twenty-six, the border she thinks so important. I have tired of trying to explain that the line on the map may have been significant once but it is not so now, and never will be again.
    “You could write something like Casement about today’s situation,” she suggests.
    Her sense of perspective is very particular to her. I smile, amused and touched by her loyally inflated opinion of my stature as a writer; she is forever urging me to put my pen at the service of this or that cause. What cause would benefit? And if by chance it did, what would be the cost? When has involvement with a cause—any cause—ever been good for a writer?
    “Why are you not angry about this?” she demands good-humoredly.
    “What good would my anger do anybody?”
    “It might do you some good.”
    On another occasion my detachment might be the subject of a long discussion, but after last night’s momentous events it is this morning an irrelevance. The Congo will be free and Lumumba will be a great African leader, as great as Nkrumah—even greater, for the Ghanaians have been forced into compromises by Nkrumah’s recent errors of judgment. In some, this kind of talk, with its vocabulary of certitude and supererogation and its premise of limitless commitment, would sound strident or naive or irritating; in Inès, it always seems yet more evidence of her sunny optimism. I put an arm around her and kiss the top of her head. Her black, brittle hair is hot in the sun. I rest my cheek against it and squeeze her. She tells me she is so happy.
    The damage, in the light