Forest of the Pygmies (4 page)

As Mushaha's employees were gassing up the plane and looking after the patient and his luggage, Angie sat down under a tent to rest and enjoy a cup of coffee. She was a brown-skinned African woman, healthy, tall, strong, and always laughing. Her age was anyone's guess; she could be anywhere between twenty-five and forty. Her easy laugh and fresh beauty captivated people from the first moment they saw her. She told them that she was born in Botswana and had learned to pilot planes in Cuba, while she was there on a fellowship. Shortly before he died, her father had sold
his ranch and cattle in order to provide her with a dowry, but instead of using the capital to snag a respectable husband as her father wished, she had used it to buy her first airplane. Angie was an uncaged bird that had never built a nest anywhere. Her work took her all over; one day she flew vaccines to Zaire, the next she carried actors and technicians making an action film on the highlands of the Serengeti, or ferried a group of daring mountain climbers to the foot of the legendary Mt. Kilimanjaro. She boasted that she was strong as a buffalo, and to prove it she armwrestled any man willing to accept her challenge and ante up his bet. She had been born with a star-shaped birthmark on her back—according to Angie, a sure sign of good luck. Thanks to that star, she had survived a number of adventures. Once she was on the verge of being stoned to death by a mob in the Sudan; another time she had wandered in a desert in Ethiopia for five days, lost, alone, on foot, with no food and only one bottle of water. But nothing compared to the time that she'd had to parachute from her plane and landed in a crocodile-infested river.

“That was before I had my Cessna Caravan,” she hastened to clarify when she told that story to her
International Geographic
clients. “It never fails.”

“And how did you get out of that alive?” asked Alexander.

“The crocodiles were kept busy snapping at the chute, and that gave me time to swim to shore and get myself out of there. I made it that time, but sooner or later I'm going to be eaten by crocodiles. It's my destiny.”

“How do you know?” Nadia inquired.

“Because that's what I was told by a fortune-teller who could read the future. Má Bangesé has a reputation for never being wrong,” Angie replied.

“Má Bangesé? The fat woman who has a stand in the market?” interrupted Alexander.

“That's the one. And she isn't fat, she's . . . robust,” clarified Angie, who was sensitive on the matter of weight.

Alexander and Nadia looked at each other, surprised at the strange coincidence.

Despite her considerable girth and her rather brusque manner, Angie was very coquettish. She wore flowered tunics and draped herself in heavy ethnic jewelry she bought at craft fairs, and her lips were always painted bright pink. Her hair was combed into elaborate cornrows studded with colored beads. She said that her line of work was lethal to a woman's hands, and she wasn't about to let hers look like a mechanic's. Her fingernails were long and brightly painted, and to protect her skin she rubbed on turtle fat, which she considered miraculous. The fact that turtles are pretty wrinkled did not diminish her confidence in the product.

“I know several men who're in love with Angie,” commented Mushaha, but he refrained from adding that he was one of them.

Angie winked and explained that she would never marry because she had a broken heart. She had fallen in love only once in her life, and that was with a Masai warrior who had five wives and nineteen children.

“He had long bones and amber-colored eyes,” she said.

“And what happened?” Nadia and Alexander asked in unison.

“He didn't want to marry me,” she concluded with a tragic sigh.

Mushaha laughed. “What a stupid man!”

“I was ten years older and thirty pounds heavier than he was,” Angie explained.

The pilot finished her coffee and got ready to leave. All his friends made their farewells to Timothy, whom the previous night's fever had so weakened that he could not even find the strength to lift his left eyebrow.

The last days of the safari raced by very quickly amid the pleasure of the elephant excursions. They ran into the small nomadic tribe again and saw for themselves that the young boy was cured. At the same time, they learned by radio that Timothy was being kept in the hospital with a combination of malaria and an infected mandrill bite that was resistant to antibiotics.

Three days after taking Timothy, Angie returned for them; she stayed that night in the camp so they could leave early the next morning. From the moment they met, she and Kate had struck up a strong friendship: Both were hearty drinkers—beer for Angie and vodka for Kate—and both had a well-stocked arsenal of rip-roaring stories to enthrall their audiences. That night when the group was sitting in a circle around a
bonfire, feasting on roast antelope and other delicacies the cooks had prepared, the two women held a verbal tourney to see who was the best at bedazzling listeners with her adventures. Even Borobá was listening to their tales with interest. The little monkey had been dividing his time between hanging around with the humans, whose company he was accustomed to, watching Kobi, and playing with a family of three pygmy chimpanzees Mushaha had adopted.

“They're twenty percent smaller and much more peaceful than normal chimps,” Mushaha explained. “The females take the lead in that society. Which means that the pygmy chimps have a better life; there's less competition and more cooperation; they eat and sleep well in their community; and the babies are protected . . . In short, they live a carefree life. Not like other groups of monkeys, in which the males form gangs and do nothing but fight all the time.”

“I wish that's how it was with humans!” Kate sighed.

“Those little creatures are a lot like us: We share most of our genetic material with them; even their brain is similar to ours. We obviously have a common ancestor,” said Mushaha.

“Then there's hope that someday we may evolve like them,” added Kate.

Angie smoked cigarettes that according to her were her only luxury, and she took pride in the fact that her plane smelled of smoke. “Anyone who doesn't like the odor of tobacco can walk,” she always told clients who complained. As a reformed smoker, Kate followed the hand of her new friend with avid eyes. She had stopped smoking over a year ago, but the desire was still there, and as she watched the cigarette moving back and forth to Angie's lips, she wanted to weep. She pulled out her empty pipe, which she always had in her pocket for such desperate moments, and chewed on it sadly. She had to admit that the tubercular cough that had made it so hard for her to breathe had gone away. She attributed that to her vodka-spiked tea and the powders that Walimai, Nadia's shaman friend in the Amazon, had given her. Her grandson, Alexander, gave credit for the miracle to an amulet of petrified dragon excrement that had been a gift from Dil Bahadur, who was now king of the Kingdom of the Golden Dragon; he was convinced of its magical properties.

Kate didn't know what to think of her grandson, who once had been extremely rational but now was given to fantasies. His friendship with Nadia had changed him. Alex had such confidence in that fossil that he had finely ground a few grams to powder, dissolved that in rice liquor, and insisted that his mother drink the potion to fight her cancer. Lisa, his mother, also had worn what was left of the fossil around her neck for months, and now it was around Alexander's, who didn't take it off even to shower.

“It can cure broken bones and lots of other things, Kate, and it wards off arrows, knives, and bullets,” her grandson had assured her.

“In your place I wouldn't have put it to the test,” she replied dryly, but she had allowed him to rub her chest and back with the artifact, growling all the time that they were both losing their minds.

That last night around the campfire, Kate and the others of her party felt sad that it was time to say goodbye to their new friends and to the paradise where they had spent an unforgettable week.

“It's just as well we're leaving; I'm eager to see Timothy,” Joel said to console himself.

“We leave at about nine tomorrow,” Angie instructed, tossing down half a can of beer and inhaling a cigarette.

“You look tired, Angie,” Mushaha remarked.

“These last days have been hairy. I had to fly some food supplies across the border. People are desperate there; it's horrible to see hunger right in front of your eyes,” she said.

“That tribe comes from a very noble race. They used to live a dignified life; they fished and hunted and planted a few crops, but colonization and war and disease have reduced them to misery. They live off charity now. If it weren't for those food packages they receive, they'd all be dead by now. Half the people of Africa live below the subsistence level,” Michael explained.

“What does that mean?” asked Nadia.

“That they don't have enough to live on.”

With that statement the guide put an end to the after-dinner conversation, which had already lasted well past midnight, and announced that it was time to go to the tents. An hour later peace reigned over the
camp.

During the night only one guard was assigned to keep watch and feed the bonfires, but soon he, too, drifted off to sleep. As the camp rested, life seethed around them: Beneath the magnificent starry sky roamed hundreds of animal species that came out by night to hunt for food and water. The African night was a true concert of voices: the occasional trumpeting of elephants, hyenas barking in the distance, the screams of mandrills frightened by a leopard, croaking frogs, and the incessant song of the cicadas.

Shortly before dawn Kate suddenly woke with alarm; she thought she had heard some noise very close by. “I must have dreamed it,” she murmured, turning over on her cot. She tried to calculate how long she had slept. Her bones creaked, her muscles ached, and her legs were cramping. She felt every one of her sixty-seven hard-lived years; her frame was battered from her adventures. “I'm too old for this kind of life,” the writer mused, but almost immediately retracted that thought, convinced that any other life was not worth living. She suffered more lying in bed than from the fatigue of the day. The hours in the tent passed at a paralyzing pace. Then again she heard the sound that had waked her. She couldn't identify it, but it sounded like a scraping or scratching.

The last mists of sleep dissipated completely and Kate sat straight up on her cot, her throat dry and her heart pounding. No doubt about it; something was out there, just on the other side of the cloth tent. Very carefully, trying not to make any noise, she felt in the darkness for her flashlight, which she always kept nearby. When she held it in her hand, she realized she was sweating with fear; her fingers were too moist to switch it on. She kept trying, but was diverted when she heard the voice of Nadia, with whom she shared the tent.

“Shhh, Kate! Don't turn on the light,” the girl whispered.

“What is it?”

“Lions. Don't be afraid,” Nadia answered.

The flashlight dropped from the writer's hand. She felt her bones turn to mush, and a scream from her gut lodged in her throat. A single slash of a lion's claws would rip the thin nylon tent and the cat would be on them. It wouldn't be the first time that a tourist had died that way on safari. During their treks they had seen lions so close that they could count their teeth; she had decided that she didn't care to meet them in the flesh. An image flashed through her mind: early Christians in the Roman coliseum, condemned to be eaten alive by the beasts. Sweat ran down her face as she groped on the ground for the flashlight, by now entangled in the mosquito netting that hung around her cot. She heard the purring of a great cat and new scratchings.

This time the tent shook, as if a tree had dropped on it. Terrified, Kate dimly realized that Nadia was purring back. Finally she found the flashlight and with wet, trembling fingers she switched it on. She saw Nadia crouching down, her face against the cloth of the tent, enthralled, engaged in an exchange of deep purrs with the beast on the other side. The scream that had been stuck inside Kate escaped as a terrible howl that took Nadia by surprise, literally knocking her off her feet. Kate swept up the girl in one arm and began trying to pull her. New screams, this time accompanied by the chilling roars of the lions, shattered the quiet of the camp.

Within a few seconds, staff and visitors were outside, despite the specific instructions of Mushaha, who had warned them a hundred times of the dangers of leaving their tents at night. Kate was still tugging at Nadia, dragging her outside as the girl kicked and struggled, trying to get free. Half the tent collapsed in the tug of war, and one of the nettings broke lose and fell over them, enveloping them completely. They looked like two larvae trying to break out of a cocoon. Alexander, the first to arrive, ran to them and tried to untangle them from the netting. Once she was free, Nadia pushed him away, furious because her conversation with the lions had been interrupted in such an uncivilized fashion.

As that was going on, Mushaha fired his pistol into the air, and the roars of the lions faded into the distance. The guards lighted torches, sheathed their weapons, and set off to explore the area around the camp. By then the elephants were in an uproar, and their keepers were trying to calm them before they escaped their corrals and stampeded through the camp. Crazed by the smell of the lions, the three pygmy chimps were chattering and clinging to the first person who came by. Borobá had leaped onto Alexander, who
was ineffectually trying to pull him off his head by tugging his tail. In all the confusion, no one had any idea what had happened.

Joel had run outside yelling, his heart in his mouth.

“Snakes! A python!”

“Lions,” Kate corrected.

Joel stopped short, bewildered.

“It's not snakes?” He hesitated.