The Congo Venus

by Matthew Head

  Miss Finney and I went out to Hippopotamus Point, then, and I told her about the first time I had seen Liliane Morelli. To tell it here I have to go into a little more detail, because, for instance, I have to explain about my friend Schmitty, and other things now and then that Miss Finney already knew about:

  I was in the Congo first during the war, with one of the civilian agencies, then I had a very unsensational tour in the service and then I came back to Léopoldville to do a kind of wind-up job on the contracts we had made earlier. The first time I saw Madame Morelli was early in the game, not long after my first assignment to Léopoldville. It happened to be at the same café, the little Equatoriale, that I have just been talking about, but we were sitting outside, on the concrete terrace, since it was early in the evening and the sun had dropped dead promptly at 6 P.M. the way it always does, and hence it was no cooler one place than another. It was the time of day when the heat begins to lift enough so that you feel you can breathe without actual physical effort, and the air begins to feel something like air when you take it into your lungs, instead of like soup. I was with this Schmitty friend of mine, a sub-sub-consul who was 4-F on about eight counts in addition to diplomatic exemption, and I had been admiring in an abstract kind of way a pretty brown-haired girl, sixteen years old or so, who was eating some kind of magenta-colored ice a couple of tables away. She was really quite pretty, feature by feature, although she had a discontented look that couldn’t be entirely explained away by the heat, and from what I could see of her above the table, no objections at all could be made to the general arrangement of essentials. What I was trying to figure out was why she left me cold, speaking strictly metaphorically in that climate. She was with a militantly respectable-looking middle-aged woman who half suggested a duenna and half suggested a good bourgeois mamma. This woman had a very sharp eye, and she didn’t like my looking at them, but I kept trying to look, dovetailing these looks in between her glances in my direction. The girl attended strictly to business, eating her ice without looking around at all, as a nice girl should, especially when accompanied by a duenna who looked as if she might crack her over the knuckles if she so much as lifted an eyelid in the direction of the vulgar fellow at the table with Schmitty.

  Schmitty and I weren’t engaged in anything more strenuous than the occasional bending of the elbow to raise our beers through the eighteen-inch interval between tabletop and mouth. We weren’t even talking, just sitting there in the torpor that you can spend half your life in, when you’re that near the equator and the humidity is trembling on the edge of a hundred and one.

  But then Liliane Morelli walked in, and if there was one thing you felt around Liliane Morelli, it wasn’t torpor. You might not like her, and in fact at first glance I disliked her, because she looked too big and brash; and you might not be feeling like going in for the kind of sport Miss Finney described as “light entertainment,” which her figure immediately called to mind. But you didn’t feel torpor. She was one of those people always called “alive,” and I don’t mean highly animated or sparkling. This aliveness was like an emanation from her flesh. In a tropical locality where all the women cultivated a Garboesque air of sexual languor, partly out of climatic necessity and partly because it was still modish that year, this aliveness was almost flagrant, like an offense. And I know now that a lot of Liliane Morelli’s trouble came about because she had this aliveness, which was not an affectation at all, but very real, and she had no idea what to do with it or where to direct it.

  She came striding across the café terrace, with at least seven or eight men trailing after her in a way that was downright suggestive. She had on shorts and a halter, I think it’s called—one of those exterior bra things—in a rich, bright native print, as beautiful a native print as I have ever seen. You couldn’t miss her, and she was making just about as many mistakes at one time as any woman in the Congo could manage to make. In the first place, the shorts-and-bra costume would have been wrong for her anywhere. She was good-looking, not cute, and the shorts and bra were cute, definitely. With her hair and her figure and her height she should have looked queenly, but in the costume she had chosen she just looked big and sexy and incompletely dressed. For a second mistake, she was in a town where people might go in for plenty of private unconventionalities but were always pretty careful, in their conservative Belgian way, to be completely conventional in public, and the idea of a costume like that, on anybody, not only in public but in a café at the busy evening hour, was grotesque. A couple of her men carried golf bags, which explained her costume, but it still wasn’t good. In the third place, although this might not sound so bad to anyone who hasn’t lived in a community where six thousand whites have to remain demigods to many times that number of natives, it was the worst kind of mistake to use that native material. It was beautiful material, much better looking than the second-rate European prints the rest of the women in the café were wearing, but the idea of a white woman wearing native fabric in a town where the color line was drawn with a rigidity that would make the most hidebound American community look free and easy—it was unheard of, that’s all, and absolutely beyond the pale.

  I forgot about the brown-haired girl who left me cold, and said to Schmitty, “What’s that?”

  Schmitty kept his glance on the over-generous exposure of bare thigh, and said, “That’s my tragedy.”

  “She’s a tragedy,” I agreed, “but she’s drawing a great house. Shall we line up?”

  Schmitty put on all the air of dignity that a little balding jockey-sized double-sub-consul can assume, and said, “You can lay off the cracks. Can you imagine me in that line-up? I’d look like a Chihuahua in a bunch of Airedales.” His eyes followed the group until they had gone inside the café, and only their heads and shoulders were visible as they stood at the bar. Liliane’s yellow hair attracted the light as if a baby spot were playing on it. Schmitty heaved a sigh that came up all the five-feet-six from the bottoms of his shoes and repeated, “My tragedy.” He added, “They’re all my tragedy.”

  I asked, “Is she as easy as she looks?”

  Schmitty shrugged. “So they say, so they say. Don’t ask me. I’m the little boy with his nose against the candy shop window.” He looked with distaste at what was left of his glass of beer and said, “I think I’ll start on whisky,” and called the waiter.

  Maybe I’m too generous to Liliane Morelli in retrospect, feeling as I do that what happened to her was all out of proportion to her offense. It’s true that she didn’t have a lick of sense about appearances. She could have led the private life of a saint, but with the public indiscretions she committed, like striding up to the bar with those men, when she should at least have stayed out at the golf club, and with all the other violations of superficial convention she was guilty of—sometimes through ignorance and sometimes through carelessness —with all these violations, she could have led the private life of a saint, and things would still have happened to her as they did. She always inspired talk like Schmitty’s and mine. When you first saw her you just began thinking that way, and then it got to be a habit of thought around town so that whenever her name was mentioned, somebody could be trusted to go into the same old routine. It’s a truism that we tend to be what people expect of us, and in Liliane’s case, at least, what they expected of her seemed obvious because of the way she looked, and she didn’t manage those looks right. A lot of the life Liliane Morelli had to accept was determined more by the way she looked than by the way she might have felt and thought about things if all her relations with people hadn’t had to channel themselves through the apparent sexuality of her body. I suppose I’m being pretty awkward and obvious and roundabout in an effort to say that the way we think and feel is determined a lot more by the way we look than we have any idea of. I tried to say something like this to Mary Finney.

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “Look at me. Do you think I’d be an aging female medical missionary sitting here on Hippopotamus Point at the rear end o
f nowhere if I’d had soft curly hair and no freckles and hadn’t outweighed half the boys in town? I’d probably be the leading dowager in Fort Scott, Kansas, right now. Or maybe I’d even have got as far afield as Kansas City. I might have developed a local reputation for my angel food cake. Look here, Hoop,” she snapped, “I’m enough of a sentimentalist to feel a strong prejudice in Liliane’s favor, but let’s not get pathetic about it. I’ve seen plenty of good-looking girls who managed to overcome the handicap.”

  “Everything I say,” I complained, “you make it sound silly.”

  Miss Finney smiled and said, “I don’t mean to. Go ahead.”

  “There isn’t much more to it, about that first time I saw her, I mean. But first I want to say something. Sentimental or not, I think Liliane had a sweetness of nature that stood in her way.”

  “When did you discover that?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get to it. Is that all right?”

  “It’s the way I want it. I want to get acquainted with her the way you did. The straighter you tell it the straighter I’m apt to get it, and don’t jump around any more forecasting things like this sweetness-of-nature stuff. But since you’ve started it, tell me one more thing: do you think she was stupid?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “She did stupid things.”

  “No she didn’t. She did careless things. I think she was ignorant. More than that—by golly, I think she was innocent, she had a kind of innocence. That sounds funny, but I think it’s true. But she wasn’t stupid.”

  “Well, do you think she was bright, then?”

  I thought about this a minute, and then said, “No, I don’t. The more I talk to you about her, the more I learn about her, and I may change my mind, but for right now I don’t think she was awfully bright. Or shrewd. That’s what she wasn’t—shrewd.”

  “Well, we’ll see. Drop this now, and go on.”

  “That’s all there is to that incident, except the little bit about the brown-haired girl.”

  “You mean the cold-leaving brown-haired girl?” Miss Finney asked. “What about her?”

  “I want to tell you about the red-headed lieutenant,” I said. “He came next. And I want you to tell me about Dr. Gollmer.”

  “Cold-leaving girl first,” Miss Finney said patiently.

  “Well, she got up and walked out of the café.”

  “Indeed,” said Miss Finney. “So?”

  So she didn’t just get up and leave. When Madame Morelli came in she saw this girl and the woman with her at the table and she smiled at them, but she didn’t get any smile back. They looked at Madame Morelli and the string of men following her, and the girl’s face turned the color of the magenta ice in front of her, and the middle-aged woman’s face sort of snapped tight together, and they gathered up their packages and walked out and left their ices melting on the table.

  Schmitty turned to me and said, “Did you see that?”

  I said, “Everybody in the place saw that.”

  Schmitty said, “It must be very, very pleasant chez Morelli of an evening, when they all meet together in friendly family union and talk over the events of the day. That was Madame Morelli’s daughter.”

  I figured rapidly and said, “Arithmetic says I doubt that.”

  “Oh, well, stepdaughter,” said Schmitty. “A very reserved little number, especially by contrast.”

  “The old job with her looked as if she had a few reservations herself,” I said.

  “Oh, a very reserved type,” Schmitty said. “The girl’s aunt, maiden aunt. The girl’s mother’s sister. Morelli’s sister-in-law by first wife. Let’s see, now, that makes her—I don’t know what the hell that makes her to our little friend shorty-pants at the bar.”

  “I imagine it makes her a thorn in the flesh,” I said, and Schmitty said something indecent about how there could be worse fates than to be a thorn in that particular flesh, which I guess I have now repeated, and that was that.

  Miss Finney listened to me tell all this, then asked, “What are their names?”

  “The girl, Jeanne. Morelli, of course. The aunt, Mademoiselle—or Madame by courtesy since she’s passed un certain âge—Madame de St. Nicaise.”

  “That’s a hell of a fancy name,” Miss Finney commented.

  “You ought to see her living up to it,” I said. “I know her a little, and the girl a little too. I’ll tell you about them.”

  “It’s getting to be quite a list,” Miss Finney said.

  “Including Dr. Gollmer, from you,” I reminded her.

  She said, “I suppose you have an idea what that’s all about?”

  “I have a general idea. I have an idea that you’ll never write up the Morelli case for the medical journals.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But maybe for the criminal record.”

  Miss Finney said grimly, “You’re on the right track, of course. But if I can work it the way I think I can, I hope I won’t write it up for anything, or tell anybody about it, or do anything except—” She stopped.

  “Except what?”

  She shrugged, hesitated, then said, “Except straighten it out, maybe. I don’t know where I am, yet, Hoop. Don’t badger me. Will you tell me about the red-headed lieutenant now?”

  I took a deep breath.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THIS WAS DURING THE TIME of the North African campaign, and almost every week-end we used to get a plane load or two of service men, sometimes enlisted men but usually officers, and most usually pilots, flown down to Léopoldville for a rest. My idea of a rest isn’t to fly half a continent in the bucket seats of a stripped-down DC3 and stay a day and a half and then fly back, but with these boys it always seemed to work fine.

  They were certainly a nice bunch, for the most part, and they always came to Léopoldville after a very thorough briefing to the effect that they were to watch their conduct and not bust loose, that the Belgians and British in Léopoldville would regard them as representatives of the whole American armed force and it was up to them to behave, and so on. The result was that at the Saturday night parties at the Club, toward the end of the night, there was always a circle of sober American striplings sitting around at a table looking dazed at the goings-on all around them, because these parties always tended to get pretty raucous and loose-jointed toward the end.

  These boys were good at keeping watch on one another, too, and when one of them began to step out of line, the others were very adept at straightening him out. He would disappear, and either you didn’t see him the rest of that evening, or when he appeared later, looking fresh-combed and clean-faced again, he would have stopped weaving, or talking too loud, or offending husbands.

  I don’t mean to give the impression that these boys were a bunch of Eagle Scouts or that they all looked like the starry-eyed models in the war posters. They were full of the usual fatigues and neuroses, and a lot of them came to Léopoldville hunting just one thing, and a lot of them found it there, because it was more than ordinarily available there just as it was everywhere else during the war, and as everybody knows, it was particularly available to transients surrounded by a patriotic-romantic aura. Very especially it was available to these boys, with their high average of good looks and, above all, their novelty, in an ingrown community where everybody had got so tired of everybody else’s face and mannerisms and conversation that sometimes you felt as if you were involved in a kind of multiple matrimonial deadlock that had gone flat long ago.

  The point in going on at some length about the virtues of these boys is that the one I am going to talk about most was a pilot who shall be called Lieutenant Malcolm since that was not his name, and who, in my books, was a pure, unadulterated, dyed-in-the-wool yard-wide son of a bitch.

  He came down one week-end with ten or a dozen others, and he was one of the two we put up at our place. He was a great big red-faced orange-haired fellow maybe twenty-two years old, with an unblemished but coarse-grained skin, wiry eyebrows, an
d a chest and shoulders like the ones they rub down with oil to make them shine for photographs in the muscle magazines. Unfortunately he also had a big broad behind and his legs were a little too short, so that although he walked with his chin away up and his chest stuck out so far in front of him that he should have carried a small red warning flag on it in traffic, his strut had a tendency to backfire on him and turn into a plain old waddle. The other pilots called him Tiny.

  These boys were always bowled over by Léopoldville when they first saw it. The inconveniences of living there, the hundreds of irritating daily precautions, the tensions and the isolation, the monotonous diet, the monotonous faces, the monotonous diversions, and all the tropical deceptions—the sudden unexplainable sickness, the persistent itching, the small but incurable running sore, the hard spot that appears on your arm or stomach or eyeball and might be a small cyst, until a filament begins working its way out of the center of it and you discover it’s a guinea worm—all these equatorial treacheries which keep erupting through the Europeanized surface of life aren’t apparent when you first see the place. Instead, you see the broad paved streets and the pretty women and the big clean hospital and the café terraces, and during the war when they were rationed everywhere else you saw shelf after shelf of the best whiskies in the grocery stores, and plenty of sweets and pastries (three days a week) and all the tobacco anybody could smoke. There was plenty of gasoline (no spare parts if your car broke down, and of course no more cars) and no dim-out of any kind. It was a bright little imitation of the good gay cosmopolitan life, and if you were there just for a week-end, and had come from desert fighting, it didn’t make any difference at all that you could take this bright little imitation and punch your finger right through it at any point.

  Tiny blew into Léopoldville ready to take it by storm, and came busting into our quarters yelling, “Lead me to it, man, lead me to it!” He made it clear immediately that he expected to get “fixed up with sump’n” and he seemed surprised that a bunch of civilians whose job was the procurement and development of strategic commodities hadn’t spent a lot of their time in anticipation of his visit procuring and developing the commodity he was interested in. For about five minutes Tiny was funny, then he was just something big and noisy and in the way. We showed him his bed and told him what time supper was and then tried to get back to work in our offices, which adjoined the quarters, but all the rest of the afternoon I had the impression that we were working to an obbligato of bull-like bellowings and the crashing of furniture.