The Congo Venus

by Matthew Head

  The rehearsal itself had not gone well. Pending my delivery of the new E-string, Dr. Gollmer had shown up at the rehearsal with a raffia one he had made, which, being practically an indigène product, Madame de St. Nicaise could hardly bear to put onto her Caucasian cello, but she had finally used it as a desperate expedient. Its tone was very thin and not very true, so that she was at a terrible disadvantage, but at least a rehearsal of sorts had been gone through with. What with this irritation, and the culminating misfortune of Mimette’s escape, Madame de St. Nicaise was in a bad state of nerves and depression. During the days of Mimette’s absence she could not rehearse at all, and upon the discovery of his body, the day before the concert, it was decided to postpone the performance for a week because she was in no condition to play. In any case, she continued to insist that under no circumstances would she play on a raffia string, and an indigène one at that.

  The postponement was an advantage to me in my assignment because it gave the mail plane time to arrive on its return trip.

  It arrived, but without a string.

  Although the Voix d’Afrique had not played the thing up the way, say, the Daily News might have if the story had hit during a dull spell, still they had begun carrying emergency bulletins on the concert, with really very nice tributes to the American Mission’s efforts to locate a string, so nice in fact that I began to think I had missed a good chance at a public relations coup when I hadn’t made more effort. By good luck, the pilot of the mail plane arrived with the news that he had actually tried to locate the string. I was able to give in all honesty to the editor of the Voix a story which he ran in a small box the next day, headlined : “Tragédie Musicale: Pas de Cordes à Accra.”

  I thought that was the end of the concert, but on the following day the Voix carried a story with the headline, “Le Concert Sauvé, Grâce aux Efforts de M. le Docteur Gollmer.”

  My first reaction to this headline was that it was a blunder, because Madame de St. Nicaise would be sorer than a boil if the concert came to be thought of as Dr. Gollmer’s baby instead of hers, but the story took care of that very nicely, in a way that translates in a very rough way something like this:

  CONCERT SAVED THANKS TO THE EFFORTS OF DR. GOLLMER

  The concert of the Léopold String Quartet, big event of the season, grand charitable gesture toward the unfortunates of the war, seemingly predestined to oblivion by a series of malchances—is rescued, thanks to the talents so generous and knowledge astonishing of the well-known local amateur anthropologist and writer extraordinary upon subjects native, Dr. Marcus Gollmer, and the most gracious agreeableness of our local lady musician most charming, Mme. Hélène de St. Nicaise. For, after many trials and errors painful, Dr. Gollmer has produced, with no more laboratorial equipment than the simple implements of his own kitchen, an E-string for the cello of Mme. de St. Nicaise, upon the formula for the strings of the lute Batshiok, which, while not the equivalent entire of a string proper, will serve two nights from now as the organ of transmission for the music so lively of Haydn, the melodies so charming of Schumann, the Scarf Dance so bright and so French of Madame Chaminade, and, grand climax, the beautiful dream so poetic of Debussy, composer impressionist.

  Great thanks also to Mme. de St. Nicaise, patron of the arts and organizer of the quartet, who, through refinement of skillful musicianship and great courtesy of spirit, will accept the difficulties of performing upon this string extraordinary. To the civic spirit of this lady, our homages sincere.

  Nor should we forget to render thanks to Monsieur Tolliver, of the Mission American, for the spirit of friendship in which he occupied himself with great efforts though unsuccessful, to procure by airplane a string regular.

  To all we say, Bravo! Well done!

  With this build-up the concert was a sell-out, and people came with an interest that couldn’t have been much greater if it had been announced that Madame de St. Nicaise was going to manipulate the bow with her toes. The Haydn went off very well, and everybody was a little disappointed that the string didn’t seem to make any difference at all. There was a round of what the Voix would have called applause lively, and the other musicians all bowed in the direction of Madame de St. Nicaise, smiling. Everybody was having a whale of a good time. But in the Schumann the string suddenly slipped so badly that the quartet had to stop, and Dr. Gollmer came over and adjusted it for Madame de St. Nicaise, and they started over again, and got through without mishap, except for a couple of faintly sour tones that might or might not have been the E-string, I don’t know. The first half of the program wound up with the Chaminade, which was arranged for four instruments by Madame de St. Nicaise herself, and a lousier bit of perfumed tripe nobody ever performed anywhere.

  There was a surprise just before the intermission. It was announced that Dr. Gollmer would play a transcription of a Batshiok love song. He played this on only one string of his violin, a brief, wandering, gentle little line of melody that wavered through half and quarter tones and sounded thoroughly love-sick in the most appealing and touching kind of way. It produced far too much applause for the taste of Madame de St. Nicaise, who had sat on the stage back of Dr. Gollmer with an expression on her face that showed very clearly what she thought of native music.

  A goodish number of people left at the intermission, and that was tough for them, because they missed the fireworks. The Debussy was too difficult a job for the Léopold String Quartet, and particularly taxing for the cello in the second movement, a slow sonorous melody with unexpected intervals in a curious, meandering pattern. Dr. Gollmer made a brief speech in the general tone of the Voix article, bearing down heavily on Madame de St. Nicaise’s admirable combination of courage and musicianship which made her willing to tackle the job. She seemed somewhat mollified. The first movement went off all right, except that Madame de St. Nicaise sweated an awful lot.

  They rested a moment before beginning Madame’s ordeal of the second movement, and she and Dr. Gollmer fooled around with the string quite a bit. She seemed to be objecting to something or other; later, in her public statement, she said that she had noticed the wavering tone of the string and was reluctant to go on with the second movement. They began playing, though, and as the movement went on, the wavering tone was more and more apparent to everybody. The tone also seemed to be deteriorating in quality. She would draw her bow straight across the string, but the tone would change as she drew it, going a little up or down; also, the bow seemed to stick slightly to the string, as if the gut were not properly cured. It was some time during this movement that the horrid idea occurred to me that this was a gut string, not a raffia one, and that Madame’s bow was being held back by a badly cured piece of animal intestine. The string wailed more and more irregularly. People laughed a little, but in a friendly and sympathetic way. But as the wailing grew worse, as it began to have a very particular quality half-harsh and half-resonant, as it began to suggest, in sudden uncontrollable yowls, the tone of a small accordion with laryngitis, my own spine prickled, and even from where I sat I could see the sweat drip from the forehead of Madame de St. Nicaise. She began to tremble; her eyes bulged. The other musicians regarded her in alarm, but she was unaware of them, even when they stopped playing. She panted, her eyes transfixed on her instrument. She drew her bow across it one last time; the string gave one final yowl, the very sound of an anguished Siamese. Madame de St. Nicaise dropped her bow and screamed, “C’est Mimette! Mimette! My Mimette!”

  Then she staggered up, and the cello banged to the floor in front of her. She raised an arm straight out, rigid, and pointed a quivering finger at Dr. Golimer.

  “Murderer!” she screamed. “MURDERER! MURDERER! MURDERER!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE REPERCUSSIONS OF Mimette’s death and possible transfiguration into an E-string were at first public and highly colored. After the immediate hysterical ruckus had died down, the lives of Madame de St. Nicaise and Dr. Gollmer continued to be affected, in different ways, but both
for the worse. The affair continued to exist as a kind of emotional cancer for Madame de St. Nicaise, and Dr. Gollmer’s position in Léopoldville, through the efforts of Madame de St. Nicaise, was so greatly undermined that he was ultimately reduced to the position I have already described.

  The simplest immediate result, and the most apparent one, was within the Léopold String Quartet itself. It was obvious now that Madame de St. Nicaise and Dr. Gollmer could never again enter the same room, much less appear on the same platform, to serve art or anything else. Dr. Gollmer was easily the best musician in the Quartet, but there were other amateurs in the city who had for years been yearning for admission into the group. Madame de St. Nicaise selected one of these for second violinist, promoting her second violinist to first to replace Dr. Gollmer, and then, incredible outrage, discovered that the second violinist of the original quartet preferred to stay with Dr. Gollmer, who was building a new quartet of his own. Eligibility for membership in either quartet came to be based on qualities other than musicianship, and since membership in Dr. Gollmer’s group came to be less and less desirable as his position deteriorated, Léopoldville finally ended up with only one quartet, under Madame de St. Nicaise, of course, where membership was determined entirely by the loyalty shown by its members to Madame de St. Nicaise during the schismatic period, and whose performances were at a level just as low as you would expect. But all this was relatively unimportant.

  Open warfare between Madame de St. Nicaise and Dr. Gollmer began the day after the concert. Madame de St. Nicaise received her best friends at the Morelli residence, in a sort of day-long levée, propped up in a bed made with her best linen, and supplied with an endless chain of lace-edged handkerchiefs for eye-dabbers. The names she is reported to have called Dr. Gollmer during that day include brute, barbarian, cannibal (that one is a little obscure, but she used it), demon, ghoul, vivisectionist, and, in one bad slip into vulgarity, espèce de chameau. That evening, in response to the urgings of her friends (she said) she prepared a statement for the Voix (which had dropped the story like a hot potato), and when the editor asked her if she couldn’t tone it down a little, she purchased advertising space in the paper in order to publish it as she had written it. Later it developed that the editor had shown the article to Dr. Gollmer and had received his permission to print it without action for libel.

  For her statement Madame lifted from Zola: “J’Accuse,” she called it. She accused Dr. Gollmer of having conceived the idea of using Mimette’s gut as an E-string during the rehearsal when Madame had objected to the raffia string. She accused him of deliberately opening the door at a moment when Mimette was prepared to take advantage of the opportunity to scoot, of luring Mimette home with him, and there disemboweling him, with intimations that this disemboweling was done in some particularly fiendish manner (calling up images of an incision in the side of the living animal, from which the intestine was slowly drawn out to its full length), and of tossing the body in the street of the native village where what was left of it would be so despoiled by scavengers that its previous mutilation wouldn’t be apparent. She called upon all Léopoldville—aye, upon the civilized world wherever men respected and loved animals, particularly animals of aristocratic lineage—to witness and to punish an act without parallel in the history of cruelty. She called upon the patron saints of animals to protect helpless beasts from worse beasts in the form of civilized man, and she ended by comparing herself, using every rhetorical device except the classical couplet, to the ancient king who was served the heads of his own sons on a banquet platter.

  Dr. GoIlmer’s response appeared in a shorter, more direct statement the next day, also as a paid advertisement. He denied all knowledge of Mimette’s whereabouts after Mimette had ducked out the door. He pointed out that Madame de St. Nicaise was apparently under the popular delusion that violin and cello strings are cat-gut, when as a matter of fact they are sheep-gut. He himself, however, had made the string in question out of the gut of a kid, on the formula of the Batshiok lute string, which anybody was at liberty to check for himself. He stated that he was willing to have the string subjected to any tests which would prove whether it was kid-gut or cat-gut, and to stand the expense of the tests himself. He offered the testimony of his houseboy, who had procured the kid-gut in the village.

  At this point the Voix washed its hands of the whole thing, and refused to print Madame de St. Nicaise’s rebuttal. But she circulated it by word of mouth. Of course Dr. Gollmer’s houseboy would lie, would offer any testimony Dr. Gollmer wanted him to, she said. And of course you couldn’t get anything out of any of the other villagers—ces indigènes were such brutes. If they weren’t liars they would simply shut up and say nothing, even if they had seen Dr. Gollmer dropping Mimette’s body in the street. As for the laboratory test on the string, you wouldn’t expect her to keep the string around the place, would you? Of course not. She had burnt it, given it respectable cremation, the first thing the morning after the concert. No, she had not waited until Dr. Gollmer’s offer of a test before burning it. She had burned it immediately: you didn’t have to take her word for it, you could ask her house-boy, if you didn’t believe her. It was too bad, it was simply too bad, that the murder of Mimette, which was as much a murder as anything could be, was not a murder in the eyes of the law and punishable by execution, that was all she could say. It was simply too bad. But, she would insist, at the end of her tirades, she wanted to make one thing clear, absolutely clear: as far as she was concerned, Dr. Gollmer was a murderer, and she would continue to regard him as one. That was that.

  Dr. Gollmer was in a particularly vulnerable position in Madame de St. Nicaise’s campaign to ruin his practice. I don’t think he had ever been one of the best doctors in the world, by a long shot, and there had never been any illusions in Léopoldville on this score, but doctors were scarce there, particularly at that time, during the war, and Dr. Gollmer had an adequate practice. This practice was divided mainly between two groups in the city, the first being the very little people who would accept Dr. Gollmer as a doctor because his fees were smaller and because it was easier to get away with not paying him at all, if that was what you had in mind. The other group of patients called him in for exactly the same reasons. These were the low-class second-raters socially, a sub caste within the second-rate class of which Madame de St. Nicaise was a pinnacle. Among these people, who were as eager to have tea with Madame de St. Nicaise as Madame de St. Nicaise was to have tea at the Governor-General’s, Madame de St. Nicaise waged her campaign. Ladies who had never entered the doors of the Morelli house except at large parties were received on terms of intimacy, and Dr. Gollmer began to discover that there would be whole days when he would not receive a call. Stories about him began to circulate around town. It had always been true that you couldn’t depend on him, that he might go off to Popokabaka without warning, and it was true that he often gave the impression of tossing off only a minimum routine treatment, on some kind of theory that most patients weren’t worth more than routine attention, but now you also began to hear that he had prescribed a wrong dosage to so-and-so, and only the quick intervention of somebody-or-other who had thought a teaspoonful every hour seemed excessive, and had discovered it should have been a drop every hour—and so forth and so on. It made no difference if you listened to these stories with full knowledge that they were hearsay, and maliciously conceived in the first place. They affected your confidence in Dr. Gollmer and I, for one, wouldn’t have called him in except as a last resort.

  But what was happening to Madame de St. Nicaise was much worse. The emotional cancer was malignant. And long after people had tired of the story of Mimette, and had nearly forgotten it, and long after Dr. Gollmer and even Madame de St. Nicaise had ceased to analyze the source of the friction between them, this cancer continued to spread itself within her, and it occurred to nobody in Léopoldville, when Liliane Morelli died, that there was any connection between her death and the death of a Siamese cat some yea
rs before.

  Miss Finney listened to the end of the story of the Great Stringed Instrument Schism without questions or comment, and when I finished she said nothing at all. We had wound in and out of town, and when I finished we were heading out into the country again. It had been a fine moonlight night, and now, at two in the morning, the moon was still brilliant. We rode on in silence for a while, until Miss Finney took a deep breath, shifted her position to sit up a little straighter, and said, “Thanks, Hoopie. Turn around now.”

  I stopped the car and finagled it on the narrow road to head in the opposite direction, and we started back to town.

  Silence again.

  I asked her, “Going to say anything?”

  “I don’t think so. Not tonight. You learn anything from telling me all this?”

  “A lot.”

  “I thought so. How about breakfast tomorrow morning, Hoop? Come have it with Emily and me.”

  “Why don’t you come out to our place, the two of you?”

  “Fine. Fruit and coffee for me. Emily ought to choke down a little solid food, if you have it. What time?”

  “Eight would be good.”

  “All right, eight.” She paused a while, reflectively, and then eventually she said, “You know, Hoop, it’s too bad that unpleasant people suffer so much. Makes you feel sorry for them when you shouldn’t have to be subjected to any limitation of that kind.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said, “but I’d feel worse about having to feel sorry for Madame de St. Nicaise, unpleasant as she is, if I didn’t feel sure that in addition to suffering quite a bit, she has also enjoyed some of the nastiest little satisfactions known to humankind.”

  “Many thanks,” said Miss Finney. “That’s the biggest word of comfort anybody’s said to me for a long time.”

  I said, “Then we’re out to get Madame de St. Nicaise?”