The Catastrophist: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

little.
    “Is he great?”
    “Ha!”
    She drinks from her glass. A bead of sweat trickles by her ear; her hair is tied stringently back.
    “Are you going to Bernard Houthhoofd’s tomorrow?” she asks.
    “Where?”
    “Bernard Houthhoofd has people over on Saturdays to his house in Brazzaville.”
    “I don’t know if we have an invitation,” I say.
    “Inès has been before. You should come.”
    She says it like a challenge. Her throat is shiny with more of her sweat. She turns back to her companions.
    Inès decides it’s time to go home. Smail and de Scheut leave with us. Madeleine, busy with someone else, doesn’t notice my departure.

    Beyond the Zoo, where the streets are darker and the houses meaner, a pair of gendarmes stand guard at a checkpoint.
    “The
cité indigène,
where the blacks live,” she says.
    We are walking the other way.
    “The Congolese must be out of the European quarter before dark unless they have a special permission from the police,” Smail tells me; he adds with light sarcasm: “It makes us settlers feel safe.”
    “Not all settlers are the same,” de Scheut puts in amiably. “Really there are two kinds. The first is born here or has lived here a long time. He understands the African mind, he speaks Lingala or Swahili or Kikongo or one of the other languages, if not several. He loves the country, it is his home. He wants to die and be buried here.”
    “And the second kind?” I ask.
    “Sees himself as Belgian. He wears a jacket and tie and looks down on the whites whose shoes are not shined. He imports frozen butter and cheese, lobster and chicken rather than eat locally produced food, which is better and cheaper. In the middle of the most exotic fruit garden in the world, he imports tinned peaches and pears—at great expense. He is forever complaining about the heat, the water and the Congolese; he is obsessed with malaria, sleeping sickness, bilharzia, river blindness, blackwater fever and gonorrhea. He knows someone who has had them all. He is here to make money and go home.”
    From somewhere not too far off we hear raised voices. We turn and look back to the boundary of the cité, where three or four white men stand with the gendarmes in a watchful, wary attitude.
    A party of police hurries to the top of the street. There is the sound of breaking glass and more shouting.
    “What’s going on?” de Scheut shouts to the gendarmes.
    “It’s the
macaques,
” one of them shouts back.
    “I keep hearing that—
macaque,
” I say.
    “You know what a
macaque
is,” Smail explains. “It’s a monkey.” People have left their tables and come out from the restaurants and clubs. They peer towards the darkness of the cité, puzzled and tipsy.
    We follow the gendarmes to the cité’s boundary, where a small group of settlers have gathered. Confronting them is a crowd of blacks. I can’t tell whether there are tens or hundreds. Faces and limbs catch the light for a second and disappear again, rippling the dark. A window beside me explodes.
    “Not more stones!” Smail grumbles in mock complaint. “Will someone tell them please we are friends of Patrice!”
    We duck for cover. All except Inès, who stands in the middle of the street as the stones fall round her, caught, once again, on the wrong side of the lines. I run to her and pull her behind a parked car.
    The gendarmes seem to be in a state of shock, they cannot believe this is happening. No one moves.
    Inès is distant, away from me again, working through her contradictions.
    The blacks set up a vibrating and sonorous chant:
Depanda, depanda, depanda!
    “What are they shouting?” I ask.
    There is another volley of stones. More windows break. The crowd advances. The gendarmes continue paralyzed, moving only to dodge the stones.
    Depanda, depanda!
    Inès is suddenly bright. The chant means something to her. She turns to me, eyes wide.
    A gendarme curses. He has had enough. Without warning, without thinking, he dashes