Forest of the Pygmies (18 page)

The only person he could share his problems with was Nadia. In the coded language he used in his e-mails, he could describe the things happening to him and not feel embarrassed, something he wasn't able to do in person. She accepted him as he was and never judged him. She read his messages without offering an opinion, because in truth she didn't know what to answer; her worries were different ones.

Alexander felt that his obsession with girls was ridiculous, but he couldn't help it. A word, a gesture, brushing past a girl, was all it took to fill his head with images and his heart with desire. The best treatment was exercise: He surfed winter and summer in the Pacific. The shock of the icy water and the marvelous sensation of skimming over the waves brought back the innocence and euphoria of childhood, though that state of mind did not last very long. The trips with his grandmother, on the other hand, kept him distracted for weeks. He was able to control his emotions in front of her, and that gave him a little hope. Maybe his father was right, and this madness would not last forever.

Ever since they had met in New York at the beginning of this trip, Alexander had looked at Nadia through new eyes, although he excluded her completely from his romantic fantasies. He couldn't imagine her in that light; he thought of her in the same way he thought of his sisters, with a pure and possessive affection. His role was to protect Nadia from anyone who might do her harm, especially other males. Nadia was pretty—at least he thought so—and sooner or later there would be a swarm of guys hitting on her. He would never allow all those drones to get near her; the mere idea made him frantic. He was aware of Nadia's body, the grace of her movements, and the concentration of her expression. He liked her coloring: the dark blond hair, the toasty skin, the eyes golden as hazelnuts. An artist could paint her portrait with a minimal palette of yellow and chestnut. She was different from him, and that intrigued him: her physical fragility, which hid great strength of character, her quiet way of listening, the way she harmonized with nature. She had always been reserved, but now she seemed mysterious. He was enchanted to be near her, to touch her occasionally, but it was much easier to communicate with her from a distance. When they were together, he bumbled and stumbled; he didn't know what to say to her and had begun to weigh his words. It seemed that sometimes his hands were too heavy, his feet too big, his voice too domineering.

Sitting there in the darkness, surrounded by the tombs in a centuries-old Pygmy cemetery, Alexander felt the nearness of his friend with painful intensity. He loved her more than anyone in the world, more than his parents and all his friends put together. He was afraid of losing her.

“Tell me more about how you like New York. Are you enjoying living with my grandmother?” he asked, just to start a conversation.

“Your grandmother treats me like a princess, but I miss my father.”

“Don't go back to the Amazon, Eagle. It's too far away; we can't keep in touch.”

“Come with me,” she said.

“I'll go wherever you want, but first I have to get through med school.”

“Your grandmother says that you're writing about our adventures in the Amazon and in the Kingdom of the Golden Dragon. Will you also be writing about the Pygmies?” Nadia asked.

“It's just notes, Eagle. I don't pretend to be a writer; I'm going to be a doctor. I got the idea when my mother was ill, and I made up my mind that time in the Himalayas when I watched Tensing heal your shoulder with needles and prayers. I realized that science and technology aren't enough to make someone well; there are other, equally important, factors. Holistic medicine. That's what I want to do,” Alexander explained.

“Don't you remember what the shaman Walimai told you? He said that you have the power to cure people, and that you should use that gift. I think you will make the best doctor in the world,” Nadia assured him.

“And what about you? What do you want to do when you finish school?”

“I'm going to study the language of animals.”

Alexander laughed. “There isn't any institution for that.”

“Then I'll start the first one.”

“It would work out well for us to travel together. Me as a doctor and you as a linguist,” Alexander proposed.

“That will be when we're married,” Nadia replied.

The sentence lingered on the air, visible as a flag. Alexander felt his blood racing like an army of ants in his veins, and his heart was pounding out of his chest. He was so surprised he couldn't answer. Why hadn't he thought of that? He'd always been “in love” with Cecilia Burns, but he had nothing in common with her. This last year he had stubbornly pursued her, stoically accepting her moods and whims. While he was still behaving like a kid, Cecilia Burns had turned into a full-blown woman, even though they were almost the same age. She was very attractive, and Alexander had lost any hope of her ever noticing him. Cecilia wanted to be an actress; she swooned over movie stars and planned to test her luck in Hollywood the minute she turned eighteen. Nadia's comment unveiled a horizon that he had never considered until that moment.

“What an idiot I am!” he blurted out.

“What do you mean by that? That we're not going to marry?”

“I . . .” Alexander mumbled.

“Look, Jaguar. We don't know whether we'll ever get out of this jungle alive. Since we don't have much time, let's speak with our hearts,” she proposed earnestly.

“Of course we'll get married, Eagle! No question about it,” he replied, with his ears blazing.

“All right, then,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “We have a few years before that happens.”

For a long time, they had nothing more to say. Alexander was shaken by a hurricane of conflicting ideas and emotions, which ranged from the anxiety of looking Nadia in the eye in broad daylight to the temptation to grab her and kiss her. He was sure that he would never dare do that. The silence was unbearable.

“Are you afraid, Jaguar?” Nadia asked a half hour later.

Alexander didn't answer, thinking that she had read his mind and was referring to the new fear she had awakened in him, the thoughts that were paralyzing him that very minute. With her second question, he understood that she was talking about something much more immediate and concrete.

“Tomorrow we have to face Kosongo, Mbembelé, and maybe the witch man Sombe. How do we do that?”

“It will work out, Eagle. As my grandmother says, you must never fear fear.”

Alexander was grateful she had changed the subject, and decided that he wouldn't speak of love again, at least not until he was safe in California, separated from her by the breadth of the continent. It would be a little easier to talk about emotions by e-mail, when she couldn't see his red ears.

“I hope that the eagle and the jaguar will come to our aid,” said Alexander.

“We'll need more than that this time,” Nadia concluded.

They were interrupted by the sense of a silent presence that had appeared as if answering a call. Alexander grabbed his knife and switched on the flashlight. The beam of light revealed a terrifying figure.

Immobilized by shock, they saw, no farther than ten feet from them, a witchlike form wrapped in tattered rags. The skeleton-thin body was topped with a great mane of tangled white hair. Their first thought was that it was a ghost, but Alexander immediately reasoned that there had to be another explanation.

“Who's there!” he shouted in English, jumping to his feet.

Silence. He repeated the question and again focused the flashlight on the figure.

“Are you a spirit?” Nadia asked in a mixture of French and Bantu.

The apparition answered with an incomprehensible murmur and backed away, blinded by the light.

“I think it's an old woman!” Nadia exclaimed.

And then they understood what the supposed ghost was saying: Nana-Asante.

“Nana-Asante? The queen of Ngoubé? Are you alive or dead?” Nadia asked.

They quickly learned the truth.
This
was the former queen in the flesh, the woman who had disappeared, apparently murdered by Kosongo when he usurped the throne. The woman had hidden for years in the
cemetery, living off the offerings the hunters left for the ancestors. She was the one who had kept the place clean; she entombed the corpses pushed through the opening in the wall.

She told Alex and Nadia that she wasn't alone but in very good company—the company of the spirits, whom she expected to join soon. She was tired of inhabiting her body. She told them that once she had been a
nganga
, a healer who moved in the world of the spirits after she fell into a trance. She had seen them during ceremonies and had always been afraid of them, but since she had been living in the cemetery she had lost that fear. Now the spirits were her friends.

“Poor woman, she must have gone mad,” Alexander whispered to Nadia.

Nana-Asante was not mad. To the contrary, those years of seclusion had given her exceptional lucidity. She was informed about everything that was happening in Ngoubé. She knew about Kosongo and his twenty wives, about Mbembelé and his ten soldiers of the Brotherhood of the Leopard, about the sorcerer Sombe and his demons. She knew that the Bantus of the village hadn't dared stand up to them because they inflicted horrible torture at the least sign of rebellion. She knew that the Pygmies had become slaves, that Kosongo had taken their sacred amulet, and that Mbembelé sold their children if they did not bring him ivory. And she knew, too, that just recently a group of foreigners had come to Ngoubé looking for the missionaries, and that the two youngest had escaped from Ngoubé and would come to visit her. She had been waiting for them.

“How could you know that!” Alexander burst out.

“The ancestors told me. They know many things. They do not go out only at night, as people believe. They also go out during the day; they walk with other spirits of nature, here and there, among the living and the dead. They know that you will come to them to ask for help,” said Nana-Asante.

“And will they agree to help their descendants?” asked Nadia.

“I don't know. You will have to speak with them.”

An enormous full moon, yellow and radiant, rose over the clearing in the jungle. While it was shining, something magic happened in the cemetery, something that in years to come Alexander and Nadia would remember as one of the pivotal moments of their lives.

The first sign that something phenomenal was occurring was that Alex and Nadia could see perfectly, as if the cemetery were lighted by enormous stadium lamps. For the first time since they'd been in Africa, they were cold. Shivering, they hugged each other for courage and warmth. A growing murmur, like bees, filled the air, and before the young people's astounded eyes the clearing filled with translucent beings. They were surrounded with spirits. It was impossible to describe them because they had no defined form. They seemed vaguely human, but they changed constantly as if sketched in smoke. They were neither naked nor clothed; they had no color but were luminous.

The intense musical hum of insects vibrating in their ears had meaning; it was a universal language they understood, a kind of telepathy. They had to explain nothing to the spirits, tell them nothing, ask them nothing—in words. Those ethereal beings knew all that had ever happened and all that would take place in the future: Time did not exist in their dimension. There were souls of dead ancestors and of beings yet to be born, souls that remained indefinitely in a spiritual state and others ready to take on physical form on this planet or on others.

The friends learned that the spirits rarely intervene in events of the material world, although sometimes they assist animals through intuition and humans through imagination, dreams, creativity, and mystic or spiritual revelation. Most people live their lives without any link with the divine and do not note the signs, coincidences, premonitions, and small daily miracles in which the supernatural is manifest. Alex and Nadia learned that the spirits do not cause illness, misfortune, or death, as they had heard; suffering is caused by the wickedness and ignorance of the living. Neither do they destroy people who violate or intrude into their domains, because they have no domains and it is not possible to offend them. Sacrifices, gifts, and prayers do not reach them; their only usefulness is to mollify the mourners making the offerings.

The silent dialogue with the ghosts lasted for a time impossible to calculate. Gradually the light grew brighter still, and the space around them opened to a larger dimension. The wall they had climbed to get
inside the cemetery dissolved, and they found themselves in the midst of a forest, although it seemed different from where they had been before. Nothing was the same; everything emitted a radiant energy. The trees no longer formed a compact mass of vegetation; now each had its own character, its name, its memories. The tallest among them, from whose seeds other, younger trees had grown, told them their stories. The longest-living plants revealed that imminently they would die and replenish the earth, while the newest stretched out tender shoots to grasp onto life. Nature's continuous murmuring denoted subtle forms of communication among the species.

Hundreds of animals surrounded Alexander and Nadia, some they had never known existed: strange okapis with long necks like small giraffes; musk deer; civet cats; mongooses; flying squirrels; golden cats; and antelopes striped like zebras. There were scaly anteaters and a horde of monkeys in the trees, chattering like children in the magical light of that night. A parade of leopards, crocodiles, rhinoceroses, and other beasts passed before them in perfect harmony. Extraordinary birds flooded the air with their songs and lighted the night with their bold plumage. Thousands of insects danced on the breeze: many-colored butterflies, phosphorescent scarabs, noisy crickets, delicate fireflies. The ground seethed with reptiles: snakes, turtles, and large lizards, descendents of the dinosaurs that observed the two young people through three-lidded eyes.