The Congo Venus

by Matthew Head

  Miss Finney waited, the way you might do for a second or two before jumping across something you weren’t quite sure you could make, and then said, “Yes. For the time being, yes. I could change my mind. One thing I’m pretty sure I want you to do, I want you to see Madame de St. Nicaise again, soon. Couldn’t you pay a call of condolence or something?”

  “That’s something I don’t want to talk about tonight. You know I’ll do whatever you tell me to.”

  Miss Finney reached over and patted my knee. I usually got one knee-pat per case with Miss Finney, and this one having come so early, I knew things were going well from her point of view. That was all until we got to the hotel.

  “Don’t get out,” she said, opening the door for herself. “Now you go home and get some sleep.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said, without any intention of doing it at all. “Give Emily my love. See you at breakfast.”

  Miss Finney climbed out and slammed the door. I watched her enter the hotel, then I started up and went in the direction of our quarters. But I didn’t go there. I went a couple of blocks, just on the chance that Miss Finney might see me from a window, then when I was out of sight I turned off in the direction of the Funa, the swimming club, that is, because there was something special I wanted to think about. And the best way to think about it, considering that it was so special, seemed to me to be at two in the morning, all alone, in the bright moonlight, at the Funa.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IF I HAD A FAVORITE spot in Léopoldville, the Funa was it. It was a big pool, wide open to the sky, set out in the middle of great empty fields beyond the edge of town. As a pool there wasn’t anything exceptional about it; it was just the usual concrete basin, with concrete pavement along the banks, and along one side this pavement was widened into a terrace to accommodate a scattering of tables under bright beach umbrellas. It wasn’t at all fancy, but it was water to swim in. When you swam down into the bottom of it, it was cool. I used to swim around down there, rolling and paddling, as long as I could hold out. At one end of the pool there was a diving platform, with boards at ten, twenty, and thirty feet.

  After I left Miss Finney at the hotel I drove through town and then along the rough deserted roads to the Funa’s parking area, but the space looked so big and empty and quiet at night that the presence of the car there was like an intrusion. So I kept going, and took the little road or, more accurately, the pair of worn tracks that went off one end of the parking area, and bumped along past the bath houses and back of the other end of the pool. I parked the car in the shadow of the end of the bath house; that was better, because among other things it made my being there seem even more secret and made me feel more alone, which was the way I wanted to feel.

  When I shut off the motor, and the last sounds of crunching under the tires had faded away, everything was absolutely quiet, without even so much as the sound of an insect anywhere. It was one of those silences which aren’t just the absence of sound; the silence had an existence of its own, just as the air did, and both the silence and the air were impregnated with the vaporous moonlight, so that all three of them, silence, air, and moonlight, were the same thing at the same time.

  I opened the door as quietly as I could, and got out, and shut it again without making any noise. There was the feeling that this silence and air and light shouldn’t be disturbed, like the delicate pollen-like coating on the wings of a moth, that you wouldn’t mar by rubbing your fingers across. When I walked toward the pool, the sound of my footsteps was absorbed quickly into the silence, and as I moved through the air it gave way before me and closed in behind me as usual, and the light, at once so brilliant and so unrevealing, lay quiet and undisturbed on my palm when I held it out and kept walking along.

  I don’t like to swim at night; it wasn’t swimming I was after. I walked along the concrete terrace, past the beach umbrellas that were folded up and hanging in shapes like faded morning-glories, and followed the bank of the pool on around to the diving platform. This was a simple scaffolding of painted boards, and tonight it stood out as a criss-cross of bony white against the sky, with the diving boards projecting out blackly from it like stiff, flat tongues. I began climbing the ladder, prolonging the pleasure of ascent through all that light by going slowly rung after rung.

  When I got to the top I walked out to the edge of the platform and looked out across the pool. It was black in the angle of the moon, but now and then the water would stir faintly, as if sighing in its sleep, and the surface would catch momentarily a slick, heavy gleam. After a moment or two I turned away from the pool and went to the center of the platform and lay down on my back. It was completely isolated there. You couldn’t see anything beyond the platform edge, and nobody could see you. It was more as if the platform were floating than supported from below.

  I had spent a lot of time up there on top of that platform. Never at night before, but a lot of time, at high noon.

  There’s a story they tell in Africa and India and maybe other places; it’s in most of the poorer tropical memoir and travel books, about the white man who went down at high noon to see his friends off on a boat, and forgot and took off his sun helmet long enough to wave them a good-by, and of course got sunstroke because he had let the noonday sun onto the top of his head. The noon sun was much feared and respected, and everything in Léopoldville closed up from noon until two, all the offices and stores and everything else, and everybody stayed inside, usually taking naps.

  But if I take a midday nap, I’m logy for the rest of the day and awake for most of the night, so instead of fooling around our quarters I used to go all alone out to the Funa from noon until two. There was never another soul out there at those hours, never. It was fine.

  I would jump in the water and swim across the pool and back, then go sit in the shade of one of the umbrellas and stick my legs out on a bench into the sun to try to get them brown. This was an experiment and a pastime, because I had never had brown legs and I didn’t think it could be done. I know it sounds silly enough but this is the way it happened and I am telling about it. As soon as I got hot I would jump in and swim across and back and then sit there and sun my legs and heat up again. I used to do this for an hour or so every day.

  My legs got brown as a Hindu’s, and I even began to get an ecru tone above my trunks, from the reflected light under the umbrella. So one day I said the hell with the story about the man who took off his sun helmet, and instead of sitting under the umbrella when I climbed out of the pool, I lay down on the bank, having to douse it with water first to cool it off, and I lay there until my hair was almost dry, on the theory that cool wet hair ought to do something in the way of keeping you from getting sunstroke.

  I didn’t get sunstroke, so from day to day I kept doing it more, jumping in and getting wet and then lying in the full sun until I was almost dry, over and over again. Pretty soon I began to develop the color of something in a beach advertisement, and like everybody else who has ever got himself a good tan, I began to look pretty silly to myself in the shower, with all the area under my trunks looking pasty and underprivileged.

  This was in December, according to the calendar, at the end of my first year in Léopoldville, and that was the month I got my recall to come back to Washington. That winter I had a very special reason, which has nothing further to do with this story, for wanting to come home looking the best possible, and whether it sounds silly or not, for the sake of this special reason I wanted to capitalize on whatever associated ideas of romance and adventure were tied up with the word Congo; and the idea of coming back in the middle of December, to Washington, with a tan such as no one had ever seen before, was more than I could resist. And if you’ve ever really gone in for sun-tanning, you know that the sun-tanner’s great yearning, the one thing desired above all, his dream of the sum of all good things, is to find a place where he can lie stark naked and get the same color all over.

  So every day that month I went out to
the Funa at high noon and jumped in and got wet and then climbed up to the top of the diving tower and took off my trunks and lay there in the sun. About every five or six minutes I would have to put on my trunks and climb down to the ten-foot level and dive in, then climb up to the top and do everything all over again, and before long I was the rich color of molasses, with a purplish sheen in the richest spots, all over. I really did a fine job, with oil and everything, and special attention to difficult nooks and crannies, and in the mornings when I would wake up, I would see the color I looked against the ‘white sheet, and I knew that nobody, anywhere, without the help of walnut stain, had ever managed to transform his natural coloration to a greater degree or over a greater percentage of his surface area than I had done.

  There had been a luxuriousness about those hours, lying up there, not able to see anything above, or around the four edges of the platform, except sky, lying motionless and feeling suspended in the blazing air. I had got to feeling that the top of that platform was my own, and one day when I went out and found another car already parked in the area, I had premonitions right away that there was a poacher around somewhere.

  It was my last day. My bags were all packed and I hadn’t a thing to do until I went to the airport after supper. I was feeling excited and a little sentimental, and above all I felt like lying there in the sun and not thinking, just feeling. This car wasn’t a car I knew, and as I walked onto the terrace there was nobody in sight anywhere. But the water in the pool was agitated, instead of lying flat and smooth as it usually was when I first arrived. Then I saw that somebody had climbed out of the pool near the diving platform, leaving a wet trail that led right up to the ladder. As I started to climb, the rungs were still wet too.

  I had seen from the terrace that there was nobody on the ten-foot platform, and when I got my head above the twenty-foot level there wasn’t anybody there, and the rungs were still wet under my hands. I climbed on and stuck my head over the edge of my thirty-foot platform, and Liliane Morelli was sitting there in a dripping white suit, pushing her yellow hair back away from her face and straightening it a little by running her fingers through it.

  She looked at me and smiled.

  “Monsieur Tolliver,” she said. We had met a number of times. We had exchanged nods or even a few conventionalities at parties. I had never danced with her, though, because I never did dance much, and when I dance I like somebody who is little enough to pick up and carry over the rough spots. Also, I hadn’t been sure I liked her.

  “Madame Morelli,” I said. “How did you get here?”

  She kept smiling at my head stuck up over the edge of the platform, and raised her eyebrows a little and made a gesture with one hand to indicate the ladder. “I climbed,” she said. Her smile was beautiful—amused and very friendly, and her teeth were white and beautifully shaped. “You forgot to go in the water,” she said.

  So I had. I always drove out in my trunks and shirt. I had left the shirt in the car but when I saw the other car there, the rest of my routine had broken down. “How did you know I always go in the water first?” I said. I had a sudden unpleasant feeling that all this time while I had felt so alone I had been spied on.

  “Oh, Monsieur!” she said. “Here, everybody knows everything.”

  It gave me a start. Of course plenty of people knew I came out there. Tommy Slattery and everybody else at the mission knew it, and there wasn’t any reason why they shouldn’t tell anybody they wanted to, but it was uncomfortable all the same to find that people were interested enough to know it and talk about it, even if it didn’t mean a thing—or particularly because it didn’t mean a thing. I had listened so casually to so much gossip about Liliane Morelli that it was uncomfortable to realize that all year people had been saying whatever they wanted to about me too.

  “What do they say?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Nothing bad. That you come out here at noon, that you jump in the water and then come up here and sun tout nu, that you are as brown all over as you are where we can see. That you will die of sunstroke one day.”

  “Not if I don’t die today,” I said. “I’m leaving tonight.”

  “I know,” she said, in a pleasant, matter-of-fact voice. “Now you must get wet, or you really might get a coup de soleil.” She moved her position a little to give me more room to climb up onto the platform.

  It was an uncomfortable minute because I had never gone off the thirty-foot board and I intended never to go off it. I decided I wasn’t going off it now. Male pride or no male pride I said, “Be back in a minute,” and climbed down to the ten-foot platform and took my dive.

  When I surfaced I looked up, and she was leaning over the edge of the platform. I realized that I was liking her. “Wait!” she called. She disappeared for a second, then reappeared and tossed a towel down toward me. “Bring it to me,” she said. “Very wet!”

  The towel hit the water and began to sink. I caught it, and heard her call, “And this. Fill it like a little bucket.” Her white bathing cap came down. It hit the water with a faint slap and I got that too.

  I swam to the bank and climbed out with the soaked towel dripping around my neck. I filled the cap, carrying it by its strap, and mounted the ladder to the top. She was smiling when I came up to the edge, exactly as before. When I had climbed over and sat down beside her she said, “Thank you,” and took the towel and wrapped it around her head, turban fashion.

  I have said I would hesitate to describe her as being really beautiful. But she looked really beautiful now. Even in the brilliant light there wasn’t a flaw on her skin. It was gently tanned, but not tan enough to stand much of the sun the way it was at that time of the day. I was sorry about the turban. It looked all right but I had liked the look of her hair, wet and silky and curling a little, and glistening in the sun.

  I said, “What do I do with this?” She took the capful of water and stood up, then moved over to the rail with it.

  “This is for you,” she said.

  She hung it by its strap over one of the supports, then stood there looking out over the pool and the fields with the first houses of the city beyond them. But for me to see there was only platform and sky and Liliane Morelli standing in the brilliant sun.

  I said, “What do you see?”

  She said without turning towards me, “Nothing.”

  “Léopoldville?”

  “A little of it.”

  “Don’t look at it.” With Madame de St. Nicaise, and Jeanne, and Morelli in it.

  She turned her glance toward me, questioningly, and I said, “The nice thing about being up here is being away from everything else. When you stand up and look out, you lose it.”

  She turned full toward me now and said, “Yes. I know,” and took the step or two to the center of the platform, and sat down close to me. There was a faint coolish scent of moist hair and flesh, very fresh and agreeable, mingling with the hot smell of the boards. Now everything beyond the platform was closed out again. She said, “Why, Monsieur? Don’t you like Léopoldville?”

  “I’ve liked it a lot. People have been awfully good to us.” Although I was pretty sure I knew the answer, I said, “Do you?”

  She looked genuinely puzzled, as if she couldn’t decide. “It is hard to say. I have been so few places.” She seemed to think about this, knitting her brows slightly. Then she decided. She smiled. “Of course I like it,” she had decided. “I am quite happy here. Why not?” I smiled back at her, because I saw that even in her relationship with herself she was as naïve as she was in her relationships with other people. Our smiles held for a moment, then our eyes wandered in the inspection of one another by two people who have suddenly come on a new sense of one another’s identity. Our eyes met again and she said, “You are really épatant, Monsieur. The color.”

  “I’ve worked at it. It gets to be an obsession. I want to get to Washington in midwinter this way. I’ll be there in three days.”

  “How fine,” she said. “I think
you will make a sensation.”

  “I hope so.”

  There was nothing to say for a couple of minutes. When I would meet her eyes she would give me that smile, very frank and open and direct, friendly, but without any come-on. It was as simple and open as a good child’s.

  I asked, “Do you come here often?”

  “Oh, yes. Very.”

  “Alone, I mean. I’ve never seen you here.”

  “I come at night.”

  “At night?”

  “At night. If there is a moon. Sometimes when there isn’t. When there is a moon, you can’t imagine how beautiful it is. And more alone than ever.”

  “You like to be alone?”

  “Yes, Monsieur.” The smile went away and she added, “Not always, but sometimes it is very—” She stopped, and made herself stop thinking of whatever it was that disturbed her. She changed it to, “Sometimes it is very beautiful up here. When there is a moon.”

  I said, “My name’s Hoop.”

  She considered this, and then said, “Very well. My name is Liliane.” She added, “—Hoop.”

  I said, “Last day, first names.”

  “What?”

  “My last day here, and we begin using first names.”

  She made no comment on this, but gazed at me rather questioningly for a moment or two before she smiled again and turned to pick up a bottle of some patented sun-tan lotion. She poured a little into the palm of one hand, set the bottle down, and began smearing the oily fluid onto her other arm. The oil darkened her skin to a golden color. I had seen that color somewhere.

  I remembered. “Do you know what you’re the color of?” I asked.

  “No. What color?”

  “The Parthenon. People think of it as white, but it’s a kind of golden color. Pinkish in very early morning. Pinkish gold.”

  Her expression was a little guarded, and I wondered if she knew what I was talking about. “It sounds very nice,” she said at last. “Pinkish gold.”