Forest of the Pygmies (7 page)

The sun went down, the shadows of the nearby trees lengthened, and finally it was cool.

“Don't look over this way, Brother Fernando, because I'm going to take a dip and I don't want to entice you.” Angie laughed.

“I would advise you, miss, not to go near the river. You never know what you might find in the water,” the missionary replied dryly, not looking at her.

But Angie had already taken off her slacks and blouse and was running toward the riverbank in her underwear. She had sense enough not to go into water any deeper than to her knees, and she was watchful, ready to fly out of the river in case of danger. With the same tin cup she used to drink her coffee, she began emptying water over her head with obvious pleasure. The others followed her example, except for Borobá, who hated getting wet, and the missionary, who stood with his back to the river, concentrating on preparing a meager meal of beans and tinned sardines.

Nadia was the first to see the hippopotamuses. In the shadows of dusk, they blended into the dark water, so the group became aware of their presence only when they were very near. There were two adults—smaller than those on Michael Mushaha's preserve—enjoying the water a few feet away from where they were bathing. The third animal, their offspring, they saw only later, peering from between the monumental rear ends of its parents. Quietly, doing nothing to provoke them, the friends stepped out of the water and returned to camp. The huge animals showed no curiosity at all toward the humans; they continued to bathe calmly for a long while, until it was so dark that they disappeared in the blackness. Their deeply creased skin was thick and gray like that of the elephants. Their ears were small and round, and their mahogany eyes very bright. Two pouches swung from their upper jaws, cushioning the enormous, square canines that were capable of biting through an iron pipe.

“They take a mate, and they are more faithful than most humans,” explained Brother Fernando. “They have one calf at a time and look after it for years.”

After the sun went down, night had fallen very quickly and the group was surrounded by the impenetrable darkness of the forest. Only in the small clearing on the shore where they had crash-landed could the moon be seen in the sky. The solitude was absolute. They set up a schedule to sleep in shifts while one of them stood guard and fed the fire. Nadia, who had been excused from responsibility because of her age, insisted on sitting up with Alexander during his turn. Many of the animals that came during the night to drink at the river were confused by the smoke, the fire, and the scent of human beings. The most timid retreated, frightened, but others sniffed the air, hesitated, and finally, prodded by thirst, approached. The instructions of Brother Fernando, who had studied the flora and fauna of Africa for thirty years, were not to disturb them. Usually they did not attack humans, he said, unless they were hungry or provoked.

“That's in theory. In practice they're unpredictable and might attack at any moment,” Angie refuted.

“The fire will keep them some distance away. I think we're safe here on the shore. It will be more dangerous in the forest,” said Brother Fernando.

Angie cut him off. “Yes, but we don't plan to go into the forest.”

“Are you thinking of staying here forever?” the missionary asked.

“We can't get out of here by land. The only possibility is the river.”

“Swimming?” Brother Fernando persisted.

“We could build a raft,” Alexander suggested.

“You've read too many adventure novels, young man,” the missionary replied.

“We'll decide that tomorrow; right now, let's rest,” Kate ordered.

Alexander and Nadia's shift began at three in the morning. With Borobá they would watch the sun come up. Sitting back to back, weapons on their knees, they talked in whispers. They always stayed in contact when they were separated, but even so they had a thousand things to tell each other when they met. Their friendship was profound, and they were sure that it would last throughout their lifetimes. True friendship, they believed, survives the passing of time, is selfless and generous, and asks nothing in return except loyalty. They had never actually discussed it, but both protected their affection from the curiosity of others. They loved each other without making a great show of it, discreetly and quietly. They shared dreams, thoughts, emotions, and secrets by e-mail. They knew
each other so well that sometimes words weren't necessary to express what they were thinking.

More than once Alexander's mother had asked him if Nadia was “his girl,” and he always denied it more emphatically than was necessary. She wasn't “his girl” in the common sense of the term. The mere question offended him. His relationship with Nadia could not be compared to the fits of love that struck his friends or to his own fantasies about Cecilia Burns, the girl he had thought he would marry ever since he started school. The feelings between Nadia and him were unique, untouchable, precious. He realized that such an intense and pure relationship was not common among teens, and that is why he didn't talk about her. No one would understand.

An hour later the stars began to disappear, one by one, and day began to dawn: first a soft glow in the sky that soon became a spectacular blaze flooding the landscape with orange reflections. A variety of birds filled the sky, and a concert of birdsong waked the rest of the party. They immediately sprang into action, some stirring the fire and preparing something to eat, others helping Angie remove the propeller with the hope that it could be repaired.

They had to pick up sticks to stave off the monkeys that descended on the small camp to steal food. The battle left them exhausted. The monkeys withdrew some distance down the beach and watched from there, awaiting a moment's inattention to attack again.

The heat and humidity were crushing: Everyone's clothing stuck to their bodies, their hair was wet, their skin burning. The forest exuded a strong odor of decomposing organic matter that blended with the stench of the excrement they had used for their fire. They were besieged with thirst, but they had to conserve the last reserves of bottled water they had in the plane. Brother Fernando suggested using water from the river, but Kate said that it would give them typhus or cholera.

“We can boil it, but with this heat there's no way to cool it down; we'd have to drink it hot,” Angie added.

“Then let's have tea,” Kate concluded.

The missionary used the jug hanging from his pack to bring water from the river and also to boil it. The water was the color of iron oxide, metallic in taste, and had a strange sweetish, almost nauseating smell.

Borobá was the only one of them to venture into the forest; everyone else was afraid of getting lost in the thick undergrowth. Nadia noticed that he kept darting back and forth, with a look that at first seemed to be of curiosity but soon resembled desperation. She called Alexander, and they went after the monkey.

“Don't go far, children,” Kate warned.

“We'll be right back,” her grandson replied.

Without a moment's hesitation, Borobá led them through the trees. As he jumped lightly from branch to branch, Nadia and Alexander fought their way forward, beating a path through thick ferns and praying they wouldn't step on a snake or come face-to-face with a leopard.

Alexander and Nadia plunged through the vegetation, never losing sight of Borobá. It seemed to them that they were following a faint path through the forest, maybe a very old trail that had filled in with plants but was still used by animals going to the river to drink. The pair was covered with bugs from head to foot; faced with the impossibility of getting rid of the pests, they had no choice but to resign themselves to them. They tried not to think of the number of illnesses transmitted by insects, from malaria to the lethal sleep induced by the tsetse fly, whose victims sank into a deep lethargy in which they languished until they died, trapped in the labyrinth of their nightmares. In places, they had to sweep aside enormous spiderwebs before they could continue, and from time to time they sank up to their calves in gluey mud.

Suddenly through the unrelenting sounds of the forest they could hear something similar to a human lament, shocking enough to make them stop and listen. Borobá began jumping up and down nervously, indicating that they needed to keep going. Some yards farther on, they saw what was disturbing him. Alexander, who was in the lead, came within a few feet of falling into a pit yawning at his feet, a kind of deep trench. The cry was originating from a dark form that at first sight they took to be a large dog.

“What is it?” murmured Alexander, stepping back and not daring to raise his voice.

Borobá's screeches grew louder; the creature in the hole moved, and then they could see it was some kind of simian. It was tangled in a net that had
completely immobilized it. The animal looked up and when it saw them began to roar and bare its teeth.

“It's a gorilla,” said Nadia. “It can't get out.”

“It looks like it's in a trap.”

“We have to get it out,” Nadia said.

“How? It might bite us. . . .”

Nadia leaned down toward the trapped animal and began to talk to it as she did with Borobá.

“What is it saying?” Alexander asked her.

“I don't know whether it understands me. Not all apes speak the same language, Jaguar. On the safari I could communicate with the chimpanzees, but not the mandrills.”

“Those mandrills were scoundrels, Eagle. They wouldn't have listened to you even if they did understand you.”

“I don't know the language of these gorillas, but I suppose it must be something like that of other apes.”

“Tell it to stay quiet, and we'll see if we can free it from the net.”

Little by little, Nadia's voice calmed the imprisoned animal, but when they tried to come closer, it bared its teeth again and growled.

“It has a baby!” Alexander cried.

The gorilla's offspring was tiny—it couldn't have been more than a few weeks old—and it was clinging desperately to its mother's shaggy coat.

“We need to go get help. We're going to have to cut the net,” Nadia decided.

They hurried back to the river as quickly as the terrain allowed and told the rest of the party what they had found.

“That animal could attack us,” Brother Fernando warned. “Gorillas are peaceful, but females with young are always dangerous.”

Nadia, however, had already laid her hands on a knife and started back, so everyone followed her. Joel could scarcely believe his good fortune: He was going to photograph a gorilla after all. Brother Fernando armed himself with his machete and a long stick. Angie carried the revolver and the rifle. Borobá led them straight to the trap, but when the gorilla saw herself surrounded by human faces she became frantic.

“This is a time when Mushaha's tranquilizer gun would come in very handy,” Angie observed.

“She's terribly afraid. I'll try to get near her; you wait back there,” Nadia directed.

Everyone stepped back several feet and crouched down among the ferns as Nadia and Alexander moved forward inch by inch, pausing, waiting, creeping a little closer. Nadia kept up a constant, soothing monologue, which seemed to calm the poor trapped animal, because after several minutes, the grunting stopped.

“Jaguar, look up there,” Nadia whispered into her friend's ear.

Alexander looked up and high in the treetop saw a black, shiny face with close-set eyes and flattened nose observing them attentively.

“It's another gorilla. And it's much bigger than this one!” Alexander replied, also in a murmur.

“Don't look it in the eye. That's a threat to them; it might get angry,” she counseled.

The other members of the group also saw the great ape, but no one moved. Joel's hands were tickling to focus his camera, but Kate dissuaded him with a sharp glance. The opportunity to be at such close proximity to these large creatures was so rare that they couldn't ruin it with a false move. A half hour passed and nothing happened; the gorilla in the tree did not move from its observation post, and the figure entangled in the net below was silent. Only her agitated breathing and the way she was holding her baby close betrayed her anguish.

Nadia began to crawl toward the trap, watched by the terrified female from the pit and by the male overhead. Alexander followed with the knife in his teeth, feeling vaguely ridiculous, as if he were in some Tarzan movie. When Nadia reached out to touch the netted animal, the tree branches where the larger gorilla sat swayed ominously.

“If he attacks my grandson, kill him right where he sits,” Kate breathed to Angie.

Angie didn't respond. She was afraid that even if the animal were only three feet away she wouldn't be able to shoot it: The rifle was trembling in her hands.

The female never took her eyes off Nadia and Alexander as they crawled toward her, but she seemed a little more calm, as if she had understood the reassurances that Nadia repeated over and over that those humans were not the same ones who had set the trap.