The Catastrophist: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

of day, is not great—some dented car bodywork and a few broken windows, already in the process of repair. People are still drinking coffee at the pavement cafés and buying their bread and meat, but even I—newest of arrivals—can devise in the town something sobered and alert. A military jeep passes and there are patrols of soldiers as well as gendarmes. Inès talks briefly to shopkeepers and traders, to policemen and passers-by. This is not her side, these are not the people she really wants to interview, but even so, she treats them respectfully, solicitously; she does not stalk potential interviewees as though they were a species from another planet. I feel proud of her, and protective: I desperately do not want her to be disheartened.
    The roads into the cité are sealed by soldiers and gendarmes and they turn us away—for our own safety, they insist. She argues but they are implacable at first and unpleasant soon after. She tries to find out from the houseboys and workers trickling through the checkpoints if the MNC rally is still going ahead. No one knows anything for certain, or possibly no one is willing to say. The MNC office in town is closed, there is no one around. Her spirits begin to slide. She is anxious not just about her story but about the loss of momentum for Patrice and his party.
    I persuade her to have a late breakfast. She picks at her food, then goes to make some calls. She can’t get through to Lumumba or any of the other MNC leaders. The morning wears on, nothing happens. Under the brightly colored umbrella shading our table we have a cold beer.
    The sun climbs higher and my heat-sapped mind daydreams its way back to last night, to the bed, to Inès and the touch of her little breasts on my chest as she collapsed on top of me, breathless and laughing.
    Two men make their way to a table nearby. Inès recognises a British reporter called Grant and comically shades her face with the menu. She despises journalists personally and professionally and avoids them when at all possible. It is nothing to do with rivalry. She simply cannot stand the self-regard, the camouflaged allegiances, the humbling generosity of their claims to neutrality. Grant, whom I would put at under thirty, is lanky and slow-moving. His brown hair, which he touches frequently, has a foppish cut; he has the studied languor of the old public schoolboy about him.
    Inès surveys the street like a sunbather whose beloved little beach is becoming polluted by crowds and noise. She finishes her beer and decides we should, after all, go to Bernard Houthhoofd’s for the afternoon. Most of the people there, she says, will be unpleasant types, but she might be able to pick up some useful information.
    We walk down to the public docks, past the Palace Hotel on the left and the GB Ollivant depot opposite. The waterfront is busy—tugs, cargo boats,
vedettes,
canoes, dugouts, river transports; as far as the eye can see there are piers, warehouses, cranes, petrol tanks, dry docks, shipyards. A four-decked, stern-wheeled passenger steamer, painted white and blue, barges lashed to its sides, makes its way upriver, bound for Stanleyville.
    “Bernard Houthhoofd is one of the richest men in the Congo,” Inès tells me, “and one of the most influential. Nothing happens without him.”
    “Does that include independence?”
    “No,” she replies at once. “Not even Houthhoofd can stop independence.”
    Jostled by the laughing women on their way to market, we board the ferry to Brazzaville.

c h a p t e r   f i v e
    Across the river and we are in another country. The French colony is different; it is haphazard and scruffy. Whites and blacks mix; they share restaurant tables and queues. We spend a little time ambling through the untidy streets and browsing in the market, threading our way through the women and their mounds of tapioca and cassava, sugarcane and bananas, avocados, tangerines, coconuts and peanuts. We find a taxi near the bus