by Matthew Head
“I’m being a lot of nuisance at a time like this,” I apologized.
“No, no,” she said. “We are only sorry your visit will be less pleasant for you. It is very good of you to come. My husband looks forward so much to talking to someone from America. This is Henri Debuc’s house, a young man your own age, monsieur.”
Henri Debuc was already out on his rickety front steps as we drew up in the truck and stopped behind a rusty Ford. The headlights raked the man long enough for me to see that he was big. He came on down the steps and I saw he moved with a kind of slouching grace.
“Henri,” said Madame Boutegourde, “I am taking you by surprise. This is our American, Mr. Taliaferro, who came after all. With Mademoiselle Finney at Gérôme’s, and Mademoiselle Collins at our house, and Father Justinien in the guest house—”
“Of course,” said Debuc. He smiled noncommittally and we shook hands. His sleeves were rolled up and I saw a heavy, loosely muscled arm that was a fit with his broad athletic build. He had a wide full mouth and a short broad nose, and pleasant blue eyes under brows that were so light they showed whitish against his ruddy face. There was only one thing I wanted more than to fall into bed, and that was to have a nightcap before I did it, and I discovered that I liked the idea of having a drink with Henri Debuc. There was a bottle of whisky in my bag. I began to feel better.
Madame Boutegourde had forgotten she would have to get back to the road, so I had to drive her back in the truck. I said good night to her and again to Father Justinien, glad to see the last of him for the day. When I got back and parked the truck and went up the front steps, ready to propose the drink, Debuc was just bringing out his own whisky and a couple of glasses.
“I’ll show you your bed in a minute,” he said, “but you’ll want this first.”
Henri Debuc had that kind of big, easy-going, full-bodied and round-muscled good looks that runs to belly and jowls in middle age. But Henri wasn’t middle-aged, he wasn’t more than thirty, and I envied him the effortlessness of his attraction. He wasn’t “magnetic” or any of those words. In fact he was a little bit slovenly, but every movement he made suggested a kind of lumbering vitality that was sexual as all hell. His habitual expression was a kind of half smile, without any particular gaiety to it. The first thing I always wonder about new people is what they manage to do for a living and how they arrange their sex life, because it seems to me that those two activities plus sleep and a movie or two account for most people’s twenty-four hours a day. You felt about Henri that normally he would live in a routine indulgence of his good healthy viscera—eating, mild drinking, and plenty of women, never having to hunt too hard for his opportunities and never feeling anything much one way or another about them the next morning, or at any rate not anything that couldn’t be expressed by a good stretch, a shower, and breakfast. But this wasn’t Europe, it was the Congo-Ruzi, and as usual it turned out I was wrong, because Henri’s life had included something like youthful idealism, real personal tragedy, and a disillusion that his easy-going half smile never suggested. I wondered what kind of life a man like Henri managed to lead at a tiny station where everybody was under everybody else’s nose all the time. There were always the native women, but that’s low stuff and unsatisfying, without the eating and drinking and dancing and companionship that make the rest of it worth while. Anyway the Belgians don’t go in much for that kind of thing. The British colonials accept it as a substitute and the French think it’s rather fun and the Portuguese are crazy about it, but the Belgians avoid it both as a matter of preference and colonial policy.
Henri was wrong about me, too, because he regarded me as a kind of exotic personality, when God knows nobody is less exotic than I am when I’m at home. Of course when you come down to it I was exotic in the strict definition of the word, so much so that as I guess I’ve already said, I got tired of being a novelty. I was doubly a foreigner, because any white man is a foreigner in equatorial Africa, and I was a foreigner among the Belgians too. Somehow you always think of the other fellow as the foreigner even when you’re in his country. I was always surprised to remember that I was one, and by the time I reached the Congo-Ruzi, tired out from my other inspections and from driving the truck all day, I had developed a pretty authentic case of homesickness. I suppose that was why I stayed up with Henri that night and got a little bit drunk instead of going to bed, tired as I was. Because I felt with Henri just the opposite of the way I had felt with Father Justinien. I felt at ease. I even felt almost at home in Henri’s house, somehow.
It was a crazy dilapidated place, of a type they used to build a lot in the Congo before bricks and concrete were easy to get. It was a precarious skeleton of thin iron pipes perched five or six feet off the ground on stone stilts. The walls and floors were nothing but thin wooden partitions hanging to the iron, and here and there they were rotted through, or channeled with ant runs. The curtains at the windows and doors had been bright native prints but now they were faded and out of shape. All around the house there was the rickety veranda, with all these hanging baskets and plants trailing out of them. The plants were orchids, but Congo orchids aren’t much, with their tiny inconspicuous blooms.
The thing that made it like home to me in spite of all of this bizarre stuff was that Henri or somebody had furnished it with a few clean, spare, usable pieces of furniture and a few pieces of native art, all good. There were some beautiful carved canoe paddles crossed on the wall, some black pottery with spouts in the shape of human heads, and one little ancient fetish, ivory, even darker than the handle of that circumcision knife. It was of a man clutching his abdomen in both hands, and had probably been carried as protection against dysentery and the whole list of intestinal ailments that ravage the natives. Finally on the walls there were half a dozen small oils of quiet landscapes and simple interiors, typically amateur as far as technique was concerned, but with a nicer feeling for their subject matter than you usually find. Henri said these had been painted by his brother, a dentist in Antwerp.
So the thing that made it like home to me, a little bit, was the spareness and selectivity that I had known all my life in the houses of students and professors. It didn’t fit in at all with my first impression of Henri and was my first hint that I was going to have to revise my opinion of him.
Among other things over the first couple of drinks, Henri told me about the other people at the station, but since they all come into the story I’ll tell about them as they show up. Over the third drink I began to hint around to see if I could find out what it was about André de l’Andréneau that was so fishy. Henri countered with a question of his own.
“Why didn’t André want you to come here?” he asked suddenly.
“He did want me to come here,” I said. “I had the most cordial letters from him.”
“I know those letters,” said Henri. “I wrote them myself for André’s signature. I mean later. He was all right when we sent the letters, but a couple of weeks ago, just about the time he got sick, he asked Gérôme to wire your offices not to send you.” Gérôme was André’s elder brother.
“I didn’t get the wire,” I said.
“Gérôme didn’t send it. He may have led André to think he did, but Gérôme was too anxious for you to make the inspection. I suppose you know you’re going to be the life or death of the Congo-Ruzi?”
I didn’t like that because my premonitions weren’t so good, so I changed the subject. I told him how much I liked the room we were in and why it made me think of home, of the University.
“I’m glad you like it,” he said. “Your life at your University sounds good. It can’t be anything like this, really. Life would be hell here if I didn’t find ways to make it painless. I can’t make it enjoyable, the way César Boutegourde can, but I can keep it from hurting.”
“You could always leave.”
“No, I came out on a five-year contract.”
“How long ago?” I asked.
“Nearly five years,
” he laughed. “Yes, I could leave. I could leave the fifteenth of next month. In fact it looks very much as if I’ll have to. I suppose now that André’s in the shape he is they’ll keep me on a little longer, but I’m in a good way to be fired.” He took a swallow of his drink. “And a good thing for me, too,” he added.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “You’ve got a doctorate from Louvain.”
“It’s a good degree and I used to be a good botanist,” he admitted, “but I’ve done a rotten job here. I’m not even sure I could get a job at another station. I could have had my pick five years ago if I hadn’t signed for the Congo-Ruzi in Belgium. I didn’t know what I was getting into; it sounded good and they offered more than the government stations. But that was five years ago and the Company has been folding up ever since. I’d have left before I went to seed, if I hadn’t signed that long contract. If they fire me now I’ll take any old job, and glad of it. Do you mind all this getting so confessional?”
“I like it.”
“I’d better let up. You might put it in your report.”
“What’s your particular recipe for making it painless?” I asked.
“Oh, a lot of semiprofessional fiddle-faddle. The orchids, for one thing. And these.” He set his drink down and swung lazily around in his chair to lift the lid of a neat painted chest next the wall. It was full of birds, gutted and dried with the legs folded up against the slit bellies. The feathers were in perfect condition, glossy and shiny where they were supposed to be, still soft and downy in other places. The reds had gone a little brown but they always will, no matter how good you are at specimen work. Henri pulled them out of their paper tubes one by one, and laid them on the table. Some of them were flashy and iridescent; others were soft gray-white with rose colored tips to the wings and cherry-colored beaks. The feathers still felt alive.
“It’s taken a lot of time to find all these,” I said. “Is this why you’ve done a poor job—spending your time on other things?”
“If I hadn’t done this I’d have sat twiddling my thumbs,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of others. Do you think you could get them past customs for me? I’ve thought I might sell them in America.”
Everybody was always asking me to do things like this.
“Maybe I could,” I said, but I couldn’t put much enthusiasm into it.
“The hell with it,” said Henri. “I’m flat broke and just happened to think I might sell them. Forget it.”
“What in the world do you find to spend money on out here, to be flat broke?”
“There was a little thing called the invasion of Belgium,” Henri said. “Most of my salary checks had been deposited there. And lately the good old Congo-Ruzi has been paying me in stock.”
We began putting the birds back in their tubes and into the box.
“I’ve got a little more than dried birds to show for my five years,” Henri said. “Tomorrow morning you’ll drink the best cup of coffee in the Congo. I grew the beans and dried them and roasted them, and tomorrow I’ll grind them and drip your coffee.”
“Look,” I said, “you’re a good man and you really enjoy this kind of work. Why have you done such a poor job—if you have.”
“I have, all right,” he insisted. “You’re here to make an investigation—”
“No, an inspection,” I said.
“Amounts to the same thing,” Henri said. “If I tell you why I’ve done a poor job I’ll have to violate professional ethics and also speak ill of the dead. Have we had enough drinks for that?” He smiled to show it wasn’t as serious as it sounded.
“I think we have.”
He didn’t smile when he said, “I’ve done a rotten job because nobody could have done a good job under André de l’Andréneau.” He stopped.
“Go on,” I said. “What was the matter with him?”
“Among other things he was an incompetent drunk,” said Henri. “I keep saying ‘was’. It’ll do, though. He’s in the past tense now, all right—not a chance to recover. I must be getting drunk myself. It’s fun to talk so much. It’s like being in college again. I think I know what you mean when you say this room makes you think of college. I can see it now. What was I saying?”
“André de l’Andréneau was an incompetent drunk.”
“I could go on a long way from there,” Henri said. “He was an incompetent drunk. He was also a very poor businessman. That’s no moral defect but it’s been damn hard on the Congo-Ruzi. Also he was a seducer, a fornicator, a nigger-beater—worse, too, I think, but that’s all I know. I imagine other things. I’m sorry I said all this.”
“Forget it,” I said.
“You forget it,” said Henri. “Let’s go outside. I’ll show you my garden.”
He had laid out a crisscross of gravel paths with a circle in the middle. In the pale light I could see a few sturdy garden flowers—cosmos, gaillardia, common day lilies, a few dahlias. In the middle, in the circle, there was a topless oil drum on a pebbled cement pedestal. There was a hole cut in one side of the drum, with a pane of glass sealed into it. “It’s for fish,” said Henri, “but they die as soon as I get them in there. Too hot. Look over here.”
It was a wire cage with a thatched roof, about eight feet high and as far across. Henri lit a match and held it up. I could barely make out a black crested eagle on his perch. “Tomorrow I’ll make him scream for you,” said Henri.
“Here’s a lady I want you to meet.”
Flanking the eagle’s cage on the other side of the little garden there was a miniature native hut not more than three feet high, in the center of an enclosure made by a miniature bamboo stockade.
We stepped over the stockade and Henri lit another match and went to the door of the hut, bending down to look in. “Come, Dodo,” he said. The match went out but he had awakened Dodo, and she came staggering out into the moonlight on sleepy legs. She was a mouse antelope, only about eighteen inches high to the top of her head, mostly legs and as soft as a kitten. She came out to us and nuzzled at Henri’s shin. We squatted down and when Henri pushed Dodo over to me she came without hesitation, and thrust her nose between my knees and up into my ribs.
“She’s almost grown,” Henri said. “She won’t get much bigger. I found her in the bush when she was really little. You know it’s funny about the antelopes. When they made the Albert National Park the antelopes were protected from the natives and most of the animals that prey on them. And instead of increasing they began to die out. They don’t breed unless they’re preyed upon.”
“Dodo’s got a nice home and won’t be preyed upon,” I said. I picked her up in my arms and she lay there as gently as a house pet.
“Some night something will come out of the bush and get her,” said Henri. “Maybe another animal, maybe a native. Poor Dodo! But they all die that way anyhow. I’m feeling better. Let’s go in.”
I put Dodo down and when I looked back at her from the steps she was still standing at the little stockade.
“I’m tired,” I said. “I think we’d better go to bed.”
“You’re using my bed and I’m using the couch in the other room,” said Henri. “Don’t fuss about it because it won’t do any good.” I made the mistake of drinking what was left in my glass as we passed through the living room. We went into the bedroom and undid the mosquito net and Henri began taking off the sheets. I made helping motions.
“I talked a lot,” said Henri. “There’s one thing you never did answer. Then I’ll be more circumspect. Why didn’t André want you to come here?”
“I haven’t got an idea in the world,” I said. “Maybe it was because his station is in such lousy shape. It’s a sorry way to be welcomed, though.”
“André never cared about the station,” Henri said. “He used to laugh about how embarrassed you’d be to see how bad it is. It was Gérôme and Boutegourde who wanted you to come. Something happened. He had some personal reason.” The last part of my drink was busy being just that much too much. I be
gan to have agreeable feelings of being abused.
“I think it’s a hell of a way to be welcomed,” I said, feeling sorry for myself because I was so homesick again. “Me a foreigner and all. He didn’t even want to see me.”
“Well, you’ll never see each other now,” said Henri. “Let me finish these sheets myself.”
He did, while I began undressing. He went out and came back after a minute with some aspirin. He poured a glass of water from a carafe by the bedside and made me take two pills.
“What’s André de l’Andréneau got?” I asked.
“Amoebic dysentery,” said Henri. “The worst kind. Good night, Taliaferro.”
“You call me Hoop,” I said. “I’ll call you Henri. G’nigh’, Henri.”
“All right, good night Hoop,” said Henri, and went out. I wasn’t really tight but I was a little bit dizzy. I lay there and it didn’t take me long to go to sleep, but the last thing I thought of, of all things, wasn’t anything to do with the Congo.
I kept thinking of Yvonne Printemps in a show I had seen in Paris in 1937, Trois Valses, where she did a little tap dance in black velvet slacks and sang a song, Je ne suis pas ce que je semble. It had a catchy little tune but I could only remember the first line. It kept going through my head and I kept seeing her dancing. She didn’t tap very well but she got away with it by dancing as if she were letting the audience in on the little secret that she wasn’t really very good at it. She held her arms out to the sides and did this little tap step, back and forth, back and forth. “Je ne suis pas ce que je semble,” I heard her singing over and over again—“I am not what I seem, I am not what I seem, I am not what I seem.” She was still singing it when I went to sleep, a long way from home.
It was as close to prophetic vision as I ever expect to come. There was hardly a person at the Congo-Ruzi who wasn’t trying to fool me one way or another, and most of them got away with it.