by Matthew Head
“If I don’t, I’ve been misled by the State Department.”
“And send a boy with tattoo on his face if you’ve got one.”
“Tattoo?”
“The G.G.’s messenger has the handsomest tattoo in town. We’ll try to run second. Now go write that note. First tell the boy to put on his uniform and let me see him. The shape this mission lets its boys get into is a crying shame. Also you’ve got soap in your ear. Now hurry up. Do you realize it’s going on nine o’clock?”
I did as she told me and came back after a while with the note for her to read. I was sure it was right because once I had had Schmitty give me the right form out of the Department social manual. I showed it to Miss Finney and after she had looked it over I said, “O.K.?”
“Hell, how do I know?” she said. “People don’t write this kind of stuff to me. It sounds silly enough to be just fine. All right, let’s have the boy. Where is he?”
I rang for the boy and he stepped in from behind the kitchen door where he had been standing stiff as a board in a new starched suit and he looked pretty good. Miss Finney sealed the note and looked at the address and then gabbled something to the boy in Lingala. He thrust his face forward toward her and bared his teeth like a leopard and half scared Emily and me to death. An uglier mouth full of choppers I never saw. “Fine,” Miss Finney said. “Pretty good tattoo and filed teeth.” She gabbled some more to the boy and gave him the note and he went out on a trot, beaming.
“What did you say to him?” I asked. “That’s the first time he’s smiled since he came here.”
“I told him he had a fine set of teeth and I recognized his tribe from his tattoo,” Miss Finney said.
“You’re pretty bright,” I said, meaning it.
“Oh, hell,” Miss Finney said, “you pick that kind of thing up. You gave yourself a terrible shave this morning, Hoopie. I’ll come with you while you do it over again. I want to ask you some questions. Emily, you go lie down somewhere.”
“Oh, dear,” Emily said. “Where?”
“Out of earshot somewhere. Hoopie?”
“There’ll be beds made up in the guest room.”
“That’s good. All right—let’s go.”
We all trooped out, and went first to the spare room. Emily followed obediently, but just as we were about to leave her she said, “Mary?”
“Yes, Emily?”
Emily said with some asperity, “I do not intend to lie down. I am not tired. I have a mind of my own. I intend to sit up and read a magazine. Is that clear?”
Miss Finney’s jaw dropped for an instant. Then she grinned and said, “Perfectly. See you later, Emmy.”
As we went out, Miss Collins had picked up an old copy of Esquire and was settling down happily to puzzle it out.
CHAPTER TEN
WE WALKED ALONG toward my room, and as soon as I thought Emily couldn’t hear us I said, “What about this stuff? This Morelli.”
Miss Finney scowled and said, “I don’t know what about it. It hasn’t jelled.”
“What do you mean, it hasn’t jelled?”
“I mean I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I want you to get shaved and dressed and ready to go see Madame de St. Nicaise as soon as that boy gets back. Also I think now I’ll go there with you. And Emily.”
We went into my room and I went into the bathroom to shave. Instead of waiting outside, Miss Finney followed me into the bathroom and sat herself down on the rim of the tub. She sat scowling at first, as I began lathering up, then she seemed to dismiss from her mind whatever was bothering her, and became absorbed in watching me work with the brush.
The minute I had got my mouth covered with lather she asked, “Wonder what Freud or somebody says about shaving?” Just as I got enough lather wiped off to open my mouth she said, “Desire of the male to return to a state of innocence or something, I guess.”
“The last thing I want back is my innocence. I had too much trouble losing it. The reason I shave is my beard itches in hot weather.”
“The reason you shave is social pressure.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m trying to hurry like you said. Do you want me to shave or talk? If you want to waste good shaving time by talking, that’s all right with me, but unless the reason I shave really has something to do with what you’re trying to find out about Liliane Morelli, we’re not getting anywhere. Also you’ll have to get off the edge of that tub or get splashed. I want a bath.”
“Oh, all right. If you don’t want me. I sort of like it in here, though. Intimate.” She got up rather stiffly and straightened herself with the smallest bit of difficulty. “You’re just trying to get rid of a fading missionary who has few enough sentimental pleasures as it is,” she grumbled, “but I’ll go. I’ll be outside. And I do want you to talk. And if you change your mind and call me, I’ll scrub your back.”
She gave me a grin and went out. In a minute I heard the bedsprings creak, then a long sigh. “I’m listening,” she said, and by the time I had finished shaving and bathing and dressing I had told her about the scandal of the “Congo Venus” as I had heard it first in letters from Schmitty, and in bits here and there after I had returned to Léopoldville:
Schmitty was a very spotty correspondent, and he spent a lot of what he did write in telling me how much satisfaction it gave him to know that I was sitting on my dead south-end under a palm tree doing nothing at all, with nobody to see me in uniform except a bunch of uniform-hardened Filipinos, since he always claimed I had been a chump and fallen for the glory-boy stuff when I went into the service. And he was perfectly right when he said that in one hour a day I could have done more for flag and country at my job in Léopoldville than I did during my total duty hours in the service, even if I had been able to fire an M-1, which Schmitty claimed to doubt. It was a great satisfaction to anyone who was 4-F on as many counts as Schmitty was, that nothing at all in the way of excitement happened to me while I was in the service.
Schmitty did admit that I was missed in Léopoldville, at least by him around eleven o’clock in the mornings, since he had been forced by the decimation of good company to take his daily Kaffeeklatsches solo, which certainly is no way to do a klatsch. He reported that the Equatoriale was “a vale of tears.” And then he began writing me about Gollmer, who had always been somebody we knew by sight and reputation but, until then, not anybody either of us had ever had much to do with. He had coffee with Gollmer one morning and ended up by ordering a picture from him, although he said that Gollmer was drinking more heavily all the time to such an extent that a whisky- klatsch would have been more to the point.
Gollmer’s picture-painting developed after I had left Léopoldville. When he became de trop among the local musicians, he turned to this Sunday-type painting for creative relaxation, and although Schmitty said that none of his pictures would ever make the Louvre, they had a certain interest, and Gollmer had a small local success with them.
In Léopoldville they used to hold a variety of charity auction that I haven’t seen anywhere else. You would bid, say, ten francs on an object, and pay your ten francs into a pot. Then somebody would raise to, say, fifteen, and pay that, and so forth and so on, until finally nobody was willing to go above the last bid that was made (and paid) and the last bidder got the object, although nobody got his money back. These auctions were really brutal, and in his letters Schmitty complained that they had multiplied so that he was being bled white, it being his diplomatic duty to attend them, and the only thing that allayed his resentment was that he personally had almost got his money’s worth out of them because he was lucky enough to be present at the auction of the “Congo Venus,” which was the biggest scandal in town since the E-string fracas.
They asked Gollmer to donate some of his masks or fetishes for the first of the series of war-relief auctions, but instead he donated a couple of his pictures, the first anybody had seen. The resemblan
ce to Douanier Rousseau might or might not have been accidental, but Gauguin was definitely recognizable somewhere in the woodpile. Even so, the pictures were bright and direct enough to have some quality of their own, and the bidding was lively on them at the auction. The reason Schmitty bought his direct from Gollmer was that the old man was extremely hard up, with all his patients dropping away and most of what he did collect going for whisky.
It had come to be an accepted thing that a picture or two by Gollmer would be donated at every auction, and people began to look forward to their being put up. But when the particular picture called “The Congo Venus” was put up, there was a dead stunned silence.
The picture was a variation on Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” but the Venus was immediately recognizable as Liliane Morelli—standing, as Schmitty wrote, “stark raving naked” in the middle of the picture. Instead of Botticelli’s shell she was standing on a big Watusi war shield floating up to the edge of the water, and instead of a nymph receiving her there was a long narrow Mont Hawa black girl wearing some blue beads, and she, Venus, was being blown along over the Congo by a kind of flying witch-doctor instead of the zephyrs or what not, with palm trees and pineapple plants instead of the laurel grove or whatever it is in the Botticelli.
It was a fairly big picture and was carried up to the platform in heavy paper wrappings. Then when it was unwrapped and people began to realize what they were looking at, the stunned silence was broken by a few small incredulous giggles, nervous, and then everybody began getting confidence from other people laughing until, Schmitty said, the whole room was roaring.
Then somebody yelled out one thousand francs, which was around thirty-five dollars and unheard of for a starter, and actually dropped the thousand into the contribution box. Madame de St. Nicaise wasn’t there, which was unusual; she was at home “with a headache” she said later, and Gollmer wasn’t there either, but that wasn’t unusual because he never came to the auctions anyway. But Liliane was there, not only there but passing the money box. Schmitty said she was fiery red, but the bids began coming in so fast that if she was trying to figure out what to do, she didn’t have a chance, but kept going around carrying the money box from bidder to bidder as the bids climbed up around two thousand.
Then all of a sudden she froze and stared at the back of the room, and everybody in the place turned to see what she was staring at, and there was another sudden absolute silence as everybody sat craning around to look at Morelli standing up in the back row and leaning on the seat in front of him, ghost-white, trying to say something, and finally saying ten thousand francs, which was as much as he could be making in a month at his job.
There still wasn’t a sound except a couple of little gasps and maybe, Schmitty says, a groan of pity from Schmitty himself, because he felt like giving one. He thought Liliane was going to buckle at the knees. Morelli began squeezing his way out to the aisle and she just stood there watching him, as if she didn’t know whether he was going to knock her in the head or what, but she looked ready to take whatever he gave her. When he got up to her, he pulled out his pen and a scrap of paper and scribbled something on it—an IOU which he paid off later—and dropped it into the money box. Then he marched up to the platform and said Wrap it. Those were bad minutes, while they were wrapping the thing. Then he said Bring it, and turned his back on them and went back to Liliane. He said Come, Liliane, and she put her arm through his and they left the room.
The next time Schmitty wrote me he told me that Liliane had been carted off to South Africa for what looked like an indefinite stay. Officially she went down there to put young Jeanne in school, but you heard everything, from divorce—which is a very serious thing indeed with the Belgians and would have made a real outcast of Liliane—to “amicable separation.” All Schmitty could report, outside rumors, was that the daughter Jeanne wouldn’t show her face in public and, presumably, had insisted on leaving Léopoldville for the school in South Africa; that Liliane tried once to brazen it out, one night at the Club, and got such an over-warm reception from the men and such a cold one from the women that you didn’t see her around any more, either, from then on until she left town; and as for Madame de St. Nicaise, Schmitty said, she seemed to be everywhere all the time, hardly able to conceal her jubilation beneath a phony stiff upper lip.
Morelli looked haggard and distracted, and his work at the offices was so disorganized that everything he did had to be done over again by somebody else. This was at first. But a month or two later, after Jeanne and Liliane had been gone for some week, Schmitty mentioned that Morelli was looking a lot better, perhaps because he had been going on weekends to Thysville where, for whatever reason, he seemed to be finding some kind of relief from the pressures of his disturbed household.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I WANT TO TAKE a minute here to point out something that might get lost sight of in going over this story. Telling it as I am, telling nothing about my life in Léopoldville except what had to do with the Morellis and Dr. Goilmer and the other people connected with them, it is easy to forget that my association with these people was very brief and casual and incidental. Even the business with Liliane Morelli on the diving platform was something isolated from the rest of my life at that time, and although I remembered it with pleasure and with some kind of affection for Liliane, it certainly was not one of the important things that happened to me, and it was only in going back and telling things to Miss Finney—or thinking them over to myself, as I did about Liliane at the Funa—that their importance seemed to increase, because I thought of them all together for the first time, in relationship to one another, as part of the same thing, instead of as unrelated fragments of my life in Léopoldville.
It has made some difference too in the picture of life in Léopoldville in general that I must have given here. The big comfortable houses, the parties at the consulates which really had some kind of elegance, the refugees who came with plenty of money and with a real experience of the things Madame de St. Nicaise only yearned toward and talked about—all these were a part of the city, but they were not a part of the story of Liliane, which I have been piecing together here as I did for Miss Finney.
In spite of what Schmitty liked to say about how little work I had to do, we were busy at the mission, and on the nights before the planes left we usually worked all night without stopping. We went out a lot, too, and going to these parties was part of our job—not the Saturday night free-for-alls at the Club, but parties people gave for us, or official receptions and so on, and unless these were very big parties we never saw the Morellis or Dr. Gollmer there. And of course we were all of us involved in the kind of personal activities you are bound to get involved in when you live in a place a year and see a lot of people.
There were people in Léopoldville who became important to me, and there were people I got involved with much more seriously than I even began to be with Liliane Morelli, in spite of the feeling between us that day at the Funa. If that hadn’t been my last day in Léopoldville, it might have been different. But as it was, Liliane and all the other people in the story as I had been telling it to Mary Finney—with the exception of Schmitty, because I saw quite a bit of him—were so removed from what I suppose could be called the main stream of my life in Léopoldville that during my time away from there I hardly thought of them at all. Eventually I would practically have forgotten all of them, if Miss Finney’s curiosity about Liliane’s death hadn’t brought them all into focus with a new importance.
Take your own experience: right now you could think of somebody you know fairly well as an acquaintance, but who isn’t important to you one way or another. But if there were suddenly a reason for you to gather together everything that had happened between you and that person, or that you had heard about that person, you might discover that it had a lot to do with this new thing of importance, and hence began to take on some importance itself.
The reason I am saying all this is that otherwise it might sound od
d when I say that the visit Miss Finney and I had with Dr. Gollmer that day was really the first one I had ever had with him. We had met and that was about all. Also, considering what I had thought and felt about Liliane Morelli before I left, it would seem, in the light of this story only, that the first thing I would do when I got back to Léopoldville would be to look her up. But that didn’t happen for the double reason that when I first got back, she was still in South Africa, and because by the time she got back herself, I was caught up in that main stream again and circumstances just didn’t happen to bring Liliane Morelli into its current. She seemed much changed—much quieter, for one thing, although she didn’t give me the impression of being chastened by the affair of Gollmer’s “Congo Venus,” and all the subsequent excitement, so much as she gave me the impression of having developed, for reasons I could only have guessed at, beyond the naïve social and emotional ignorance that had led her into such imbroglios in spite of what I was certain was a real innocence.
I tried to say this to Miss Finney, after I had finished telling her about the affair of the “Venus.” If she had anything to say, she wasn’t ready to say it yet. She looked impatiently at her big heavy wrist-watch from time to time, muttering about Madame de St. Nicaise.
I said, “What makes you so sure Madame de St. Nicaise will send back an O.K. for right away?”
Miss Finney said, “With Liliane dead only two weeks she won’t be going out. She may be rejoicing, but officially she’s mourning.”
“She entertained the Society for the Et Cetera.”
“That was different. She’s President. And it’s good works, not entertainment.”
“Phooey.”
“I know. You all ready now?”
“Sure. How do I look?”