by Matthew Head
I woke next morning with someone tugging at the sheet. The air was cool, and the pale lemon-colored sunlight came through the window in a long slant, so I knew it was early, not much after six. Henri was on the other side of the mosquito netting.
“André died during the night,” he said. “The funeral’s at seven-thirty. We’ll have to hurry.”
I didn’t see why I should go to the funeral of a man I had never seen, but Henri was taking it so for granted that I didn’t say anything. He went out and I managed to pull myself out of bed.
A houseboy came in with a pitcher of wash water and a towel and some soap. He took a lot of time setting these out ostentatiously just so, then he turned and spread out his face in a big smile. It showed filed teeth in a face covered with spectacular tattoos. The purplish lozenge-shaped welts spread out in concentric circles on his cheeks and fanned up across his forehead from the bridge of his nose.
“Moi-je ’pel Albert,” he said in his own version of the French language. His name certainly hadn’t been Albert before the missionaries got hold of him; with teeth and tattooing like that he hadn’t been born in the bosom of the Christian church. He was in it now, though, and he had saints’ medals to prove it, hanging on a string around his neck with his own heathen jujus. When it comes to religion the natives always play both ends against the middle.
Albert had a fine broad chest and shoulders, and bulging pectorals. His torso knotted itself down into compact hips and his belly looked like cast black metal, but like all native bellies it arched outward and spoiled what would otherwise have been a beautifully slung together body.
“Glad to know you, Albert,” I said. “Je ’pel Monsieur Taliaferro.”
He gave me some more of his jibber-jabber but I couldn’t understand it this time. I stood and smiled at him, which I had learned was the technique. He made the same jabber again, but this time he pointed to the pitcher with one hand and made the motion of drinking with the other. Then he shook his head in a violent negative and bent over clutching his belly in a spasm of agony. Then he straightened up and grinned and pointed away from the pitcher to the stoppered carafe by the bedside and went through the whole rigmarole again, except that this time he was just as violently affirmative and rubbed his belly in ecstacy. He was a wonderful pantomimist and I enjoyed the show, but if there’s any time you don’t have to be reminded not to drink your wash water, it’s when you’re about to use it to shave with so that you can go to the funeral of a man who has just died of amoebic dysentery.
“All right, Albert,” I said. “O.K. to drink out of the carafe.”
Albert cackled in delight. “Ho-kai, ho-kai!” he said, happy as a kid, and went out of the room. We were getting along fine. Through the doorway I saw him pick up the ivory fetish and rub it a couple of times over his belly.
I got shaved and dressed and went out onto the veranda. Henri was waiting for me at a shaky table with a clean white cloth on it. I sat down and unfolded my clean white napkin that had holes worn in it. It was still cool and it was pleasant out there. Somebody had soaked the orchid baskets and they dripped with little cool noises.
“Sorry to hear about de l’Andréneau,” I said.
“Sorry to have to wake you to go to a funeral,” said Henri. “It’s good of you to go. This funeral—you’ve no idea what a poor thing a white man’s burial can be out here. Just a raw hole in the earth with a wooden box if he’s lucky like André, and half a dozen white men to see him off. Then too you represent the American government and André was head of the station. It may sound funny to you, but it makes it a much better funeral, your being here.”
“Anything I can do to help,” I said, trying to sound less stiff than he did. His manner was self-conscious and I saw he was suffering from the feeling you get the next day, after you’ve jumped the gun a little bit in sharing confidences or intimacies. I’d seen it lots of times, the morning after drunks had cried all over me and told me about their love life and so on. Henri hadn’t told me very much, but the Belgians expect any friendship to stay on a formal basis longer than Americans do. All the same it made me feel disappointed and let down.
The coffee was really good, but when I told Henri so he said, “I’m glad you like it,” almost coldly, and I gave up. We had to hurry anyway and it was a good excuse for not talking, and for not finishing Albert’s reasonable facsimile of toast, soaked in canned butter that tasted of preservative and wax. Albert had given it to me with a big happy smile and the proud announcement that it was “toas’ ’merican,” and I began to feel that he was the only friend I had in the Congo.
When we went down the steps and across the little garden to Henri’s car I added Dodo to my list, making two. She came stepping delicately out of her hut and followed us as far as she could along the stockade, and the last I saw of her she was watching us bump along the lane to meet the other cars. I decided right then that I wouldn’t stay out my four days at the Congo-Ruzi. I didn’t like it there. I would spend that day and the next, and then go back up in Costermansville for a couple of days until my plane got there. Also it would eliminate the chance of missing my plane if the truck broke down on the road going back.
They had chosen an open unused field about two miles from the center of the station to bury André de l’Andréneau. It sloped down to a deep valley, and across the valley there were the turbulent green mountains you saw everywhere around there, with the brown patches blackening and giving off smoke as the grass fires crept across them.
The station truck was pretty far gone, like everything else at the Congo-Ruzi. It led the line down the road, with four native boys in clean white shorts holding the coffin in place as the truck jounced over the ruts. I caught a glimpse of Madame Boutegourde in the car just ahead of us. There was another car between her and the truck-hearse, and Henri and I brought up the rear. The sun was on us now and we began to choke on the dust, and to sweat, that early in the morning. When we reached the field everybody got out of the cars and stood while the natives took the coffin on their shoulders and started across the field to the grave. The hole was raw enough. The fresh up-turned earth was bright red against the chemical greens of the bush beyond. Along the edge of the bush you could see here and there the crooked bleached-looking branch of a fever tree with its vermilion pom-poms and no leaves at all.
The coffin was an awkward box made of lumber from knocked-down packing cases. If he had been the Governor General and died out there, de l’Andréneau couldn’t have done any better. There’s a twenty-four hour burial law in the Congo, and the sooner you get it over with the better, because there’s no embalming even in the big towns, and once you’re dead you don’t last long in that climate. André was lucky to have this box at all. Lumber was one of the tightest items on the whole colony list because you couldn’t get the mechanical saw blades for cutting it since the war. I know that Papa Boutegourde didn’t feel any grief for André de l’Andréneau that morning, but he could have wept when that lumber went down, because it was some he had been hoarding for his new seed beds.
I was never able to think of César Boutegourde as anything but Papa. He just looked like it. He and his wife and a young girl were ahead of Henri and me as we all straggled across the field after the coffin. The boys set their load down by the grave and withdrew to a respectful distance while the white people came to uncertain stops in their own isolated groups. The Boutegourdes stood some twenty feet away from me. To look at them they might have been Respectability Triumphant, the mayor and his wife and daughter in any prosperous Flemish town. They made the exotic landscape look out of place behind them instead of looking out of place against it. The banana groves and the fever trees became offenses against normalcy.
Papa Boutegourde held his sun helmet in his hand while his bald head and his spectacles shone in the morning light. Madame Boutegourde managed to nod to me with an ambiguous expression that did what it could to combine friendly recognition of our meeting the night before with the proper
funereal reverence of this morning. She was the only person there who had made an attempt at mourning. The threadbare black skirt and black waist were unbecoming, and without the lanterns to make them shine, her eyes weren’t as fine as they had been when I first saw her.
The girl with the Boutegourdes looked eighteen or nineteen. She was nearly as tall as her mother, and while there was nothing fragile about her she was nicely trimmed down in the right places—the ankles, the waist, the wrists, the throat. She had on an honest simple white dress that would have been just clothes anywhere else but was really good for that part of the world. She had white shoes but no stockings and her legs were tanned, which was unusual for the Congo, where a pale skin is still fashionable. The dress was cut to fit tight from the waist up, and across the front it confined the girl’s high swelling breasts in a way that made me uncomfortable. I was looking at them when I raised my eyes and found her looking at me. She had a calm face with exceptionally regular features, pretty and fresh, with a lock or two of light sun-bleached hair escaping underneath the white hat. She knew what I had been looking at but she let our eyes meet curiously for a moment before she turned hers slowly away, without embarrassment. This was Gabrielle Boutegourde, the pretty daughter Father Justinien had told me about. I remember that what I thought most about her that first morning was that she had a beautiful healthy girl’s figure and I kept feeling uncomfortable because her dress was so tight across the front that I felt as if I couldn’t draw a full breath. And I thought that for a young girl stuck off in the Congo she had unusual poise. She and Madame Boutegourde stood in the same easy, erect and graceful attitude, and it occurred to me that some day Gabrielle’s figure would achieve the pleasant monumentality of her mother’s.
I didn’t expect wailing, or people throwing themselves over the coffin at this funeral, but no one there showed any signs of having so much as been under a strain. We stood as patiently as cows in four little groups, very small in the violent landscape. My shirt was already sticking to my back. Father Justinien and the coffin made up one group. He looked as sturdy and sensible and unspiritual as Papa Boutegourde as he stood there reading the service, but he read it with deliberation and reverence in spite of his heavy robes and the increasing heat.
The Boutegourdes made their own group, and Henri and myself ours. There was a fourth group of three people who stood under a tree near Father Justinien in the only spot of shade in the field—a man and two women. The man had rather long hair with a wave in it, a toothbrush mustache, and a handsomely near-aquiline nose in a ruddy face. I’d have taken him to be British if I hadn’t known he was Gérôme de l’Andréneau, André’s brother. His chin projected strongly without giving him an air of force, and his perfectly arched brows had an artificial symmetry. He was tall and should have been good-looking, but there was something about him that suggested the good looks of a man who has depended on his face and figure to get him by—like a matinee idol without talent. I couldn’t believe that I could have seen him before, but I had the feeling that I knew his face. That happens lots of times and I tried to dismiss it, but there it was. I kept wondering.
The two women made incongruous companions for him in their serviceable dun-colored cotton dresses, like a couple of gunny sacks tied in the middle. One of the women was slightly built and looked mousy and sweetish, but the other one I’d have trusted to get me out of a tight spot anywhere, if she were my friend, and I’d have hated to have her working against me. She stood straight and strong with her freckled arms and big hands across her stomach. Her hair was hidden, but from her freckles I knew what it would be—coarse and carroty. Both the women had on old sun helmets freshened with thick coats of shoe whiting, and I’d have guessed them to be about the same age as the man—around forty-five or even fifty.
Father Justinien came to the end of a phrase and turned his eyes to the man and the two women. They began to move from the shade toward the coffin. Papa and Madame Boutegourde exchanged a look and a slight nod, and began to move forward too, with Gabrielle following. Father Justinien lifted the top half of the coffin lid, and I found myself being pushed along by Henri in the wake of the Boutegourdes, and realized that we were all going to have to file past the coffin for a last look at André de l’Andréneau. So I was going to see him after all.
I watched them as they went by ahead of me.
The tall elegant man was first. He stopped by his brother’s coffin and glanced down. Nothing changed in his expression. As he looked up our eyes met for a fraction of a second. I was certain I knew that face, and my vague memory of it was mixed up with some feeling of dislike. He walked back into the shade and stood there quietly, avoiding my eye.
The mousy woman crept up to the coffin next, sighed dutifully as she looked in, and walked away. She was the only person there who felt obliged to put on a little act.
The carroty-haired woman with the freckled arms paused longer. She stood there as if she were really saying good-by. She stayed quietly looking down at de l’Andréneau for a long minute with a nostalgic and reflective expression on her strong, plain face. Then she walked on and joined the tall man and the other woman under the tree.
Papa Boutegourde walked up quickly, looked in so shortly as to give the impression of rudeness, and walked off. Madame Boutegourde did as Madame Boutegourde would: she simply walked up, she simply looked in, and she simply walked away again and stationed herself beside Papa Boutegourde. Gabrielle was just in front of me. It was a matter of six or seven steps to the coffin. I know that she took the last step with her eyes closed. Then she averted her head quickly to open her eyes and walk away.
I felt self-conscious as I walked up myself. I knew they were all looking at me, and I wondered if I could look interested without looking curious, and respectful without looking indifferent or pious. I should have been worrying instead about looking surprised and staying there too long. I stayed even longer than the carroty-haired woman. I had seen André de l’Andréneau before.
There had been no undertaker to fix him up, so he had none of that false air of hypnotic sleep of an embalmed corpse, but I recognized him. The face was more tired and wasted, but it was the same face—the peaked eyebrows, the hawk nose crooked to one side, even the stubble on the chin, because they hadn’t shaved him. It was my hangman of Bafwali. His head was thrown back stiffly and the chin jutted up, showing the slick white scar along its underside. And now I knew why the tall man under the tree looked so familiar. His regular features were those of his dead brother, straightened and unravaged.
So I didn’t get to see how Henri looked into the coffin. It took everything I had to walk naturally out into the field a dozen paces and wait for Henri there. I didn’t dare look at anyone. I knew that this ought to explain everything that happened in Bafwali but I couldn’t patch the pieces together. I could see why everybody avoided comment on André de l’Andréneau but I had seen that last night. They hadn’t anything good to say of him, so they didn’t say anything at all. I can look back now and see what a puny little puzzle it was, and as a matter of fact I got that part of it straightened out very soon after. It took me longer to discover what one of the people standing there in the field already knew, and what another suspected—that André de l’Andréneau had been murdered; and when I did find it out, it was already too late to save another of us from being killed.
Right then all I wanted to know was what had happened to make de l’Andréneau hide his identity from me in Bafwali and later on try to keep me away from the station. I looked at the people standing there while the boys sweated at lowering the coffin into the red earth, and I felt shut away from them. The only faces that were anything but impassive were those of the natives, contorted with the strain of letting the ropes out slowly as the box went down.
“I am not what I seem—I am not what I seem—I am not what I seem.” Later on, the woman with the carroty hair elaborated on the same idea, and I might as well put in here what she said to me:
“I tr
y to be as honest as I can,” she told me, “but when it comes to other people out here I always look twice. It seems to me that everybody in this part of the world is two people— not always Jekyll and Hyde stuff, either. Sometimes two kinds of Jekylls, and as often as not two separate kinds of Hydes. People change when they come out here. They go on acting the same to hide the change, or they make up a new character for themselves to keep laid over the change, but whatever they do you’ll find more false faces per capita among white men along the equator than you could find scare-faces if you searched every witch doctor’s hut in the Congo. There’s some kind of devil out here in the bush that changes people. Maybe the real stuff inside them gets a chance to come out the way it wouldn’t in real white man’s country, just the way a lot of people get to feeling away from everything and lose their inhibitions on shipboard, and act different from the way they act at home. Or maybe they really do change. Anyhow I always look twice, once on top and a good long time underneath. And you’d better watch out,” she added to wind it up, “because it can happen to you, too.” It did happen to me in a small way, which brings me to me and Gabrielle Boutegourde.
CHAPTER THREE
Gabrielle
AFTER THE FUNERAL I was introduced to Gérôme de l’Andréneau and the two women. Gérôme said he was sorry that he couldn’t see me that day, but that I would understand. He would see me tomorrow and we would make the inspection and talk things over, if that was convenient for me. He knew I would enjoy dinner at the Boutegourdes that night, and if I needed anything that he could help me with during the day, please call on him, and in the meanwhile Henri would take care of me. I said I’d be happy to spend that day doing nothing at all for a change, and tomorrow for the inspection would be fine.
