Forest of the Pygmies (6 page)

“Fascinating!” said Alexander.

The missionary's description sounded like the mythological Africa he had visualized when his grandmother announced the trip. He had been disillusioned when they reached Nairobi and he found himself in a modern city with tall buildings and bustling traffic. The nearest thing to a warrior he had seen had been in the tribe of nomads who brought the sick child to Mushaha's camp. Even the safari elephants had seemed too tame to him. When he mentioned that to Nadia, she shrugged her shoulders, unable to understand why he felt cheated with his first impression of Africa. She hadn't expected anything in particular. Alexander concluded that if Africa had been populated by extraterrestrials, Nadia would have accepted them as an everyday occurrence, because she never pictured anything in advance. Maybe now, at the place marked on Brother Fernando's map, he would find the magic land he had imagined.

Other than the passenger's thirst, exhaustion, and airsickness, the flight was uneventful. After several hours Angie began to descend through thin clouds. She pointed to the endless green land below, where they could identify the sinuous line of a single river. They saw absolutely no sign of human life, but they were too high to see villages, even if there were any.

“This is it, I'm sure of it!” Brother Fernando yelled.

“Just as I warned you, there's no place to land!” Angie yelled back.

“Take the plane down, miss, and God will provide,” the missionary assured her.

“Well, he better, because we need to refuel!”

The
Super Hawk
began to descend in sweeping circles. As they got closer to earth, the passengers could see that the river was much wider than they'd thought. Angie explained that they would find villages farther south, but Brother Fernando insisted that they had to head northwest, toward the region where his
companions had built the mission. Angie circled a couple of times, still descending.

“We're burning up what little gasoline we have left! I'm heading south,” she decided finally.

“There, Angie!” Kate pointed suddenly.

Along one side of the river, as if by enchantment, appeared the clear fringe of a shore.

“That strip is narrow and very short, Angie,” Kate warned.

“I only need a little over a couple of hundred yards, but I don't think we have that much,” Angie replied.

She circled again to take measure of the open area and check the best angle for her approach.

“It won't be the first time I've landed in less than two hundred yards. Hang on, guys, we're in for a ride!” she announced with another of her typical war cries.

Until that moment Angie had been totally relaxed in her piloting, with a can of beer between her knees and a cigarette between her fingers. Now her attitude changed. She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray fastened to the floor with adhesive tape, settled her corpulence in her seat, gripped the wheel with both hands, and got ready to set her course without ever interrupting the steady stream of curses and Comanche yells and appeals to the good luck that according to her had never failed her—after all, why did she wear a fetish around her neck? Kate chorused Angie, yelling till she was hoarse, because she couldn't think of any other way to calm her nerves. Nadia closed her eyes and thought of her father. Alexander opened his eyes wide, invoking his friend, the lama Tensing, whose prodigious mental powers would have been a great boon to them at this moment, but Tensing was far, far away. Brother Fernando started praying aloud in Spanish, and Joel immediately chimed in. At the end of the short strip of open shore, as forbidding as the Great Wall of China, rose the impenetrable growth of the jungle. They had only one chance to land; if that failed, there wouldn't be enough strip left to allow them to pull up: They would crash into the trees.

Angie lined up
Super Hawk
's nose and dropped abruptly. The first tree branches scraped the plane's belly. The minute she found herself above the impromptu landing field, Angie felt for the ground, praying it was firm and not strewn with rocks. The plane hit the ground skipping and lurching like a great wounded bird, while chaos was unleashed inside: Bundles flew from one side to another, the passengers banged against the roof, beer cans rolled, and gasoline drums danced. Angie, her hands clamped on the controls, hit the brakes with all her strength, trying to stabilize the plane and not tear off its wings. The engine roared a desperate death rattle, and a strong odor of burned rubber filled the cabin. The machine shook from the struggle to stop and covered the remaining distance in a cloud of sand and smoke.

“The trees!” screamed Kate when they were almost upon them.

Angie did not respond to her client's superfluous observation; she was having no difficulty seeing them. She felt the blend of absolute terror and fascination that coursed through her when her life was on the line: a sudden discharge of adrenaline that made her skin prickle and her heart race. That joyful terror was what she loved most about her job. Her muscles locked in the brutal effort to dominate the plane; she was taking on metal and motor personally, like a cowboy riding a wild bull. Suddenly, when the trees were six feet away and the passengers all thought their moment had come,
Super Hawk
tilted forward, gave one last tremendous shudder, and buried its nose in the sand.

“Damnation!” yelled Angie.

“Curb your tongue, woman,” said Brother Fernando in a wavering voice from the back of the cabin, where his weakly kicking legs were all that could be seen from beneath piles of photographic equipment. “Don't you see that God provided us a place to land?”

“Well, tell him to send me a mechanic as well, because we have problems,” Angie bellowed back.

“Let's not get hysterical,” Kate ordered. “First of all we need to examine the damage.” She prepared to jump out as the others crawled and pulled themselves toward the door. The first one outside was poor Borobá, who seldom had been so frightened in all his life. Alexander saw that Nadia's face was covered with blood.

“Eagle!” he cried, trying to dig her out from bundles, cameras, and seats that had wrenched free of the floor.

When at last everyone was outside and they could
evaluate the situation, it turned out that no one was injured; Nadia had no more than a nosebleed. The plane, on the other hand, was damaged indeed.

“Just what I was afraid of. The propeller's bent,” said Angie.

“Is that serious?” asked Alexander.

“Under normal circumstances it wouldn't be. If I can get another propeller, I can change it myself, but way out here, we're in the soup. Where am I going to get a replacement?”

Before Brother Fernando could open his mouth, Angie confronted him, hands on her hips.

“And if you don't want to see me
really
mad, don't tell me that your God will provide!”

Prudently, the missionary held his tongue.

“Where are we exactly?” asked Kate.

“I don't have the faintest idea,” Angie admitted.

Brother Fernando consulted his map and told them that he felt sure they were not far from Ngoubé, the village where his companions had established the mission.

“We're surrounded with tropical jungle and swamps. There's no way out of here without a boat,” said Angie.

“Then let's build a fire. A cup of tea and a sip or two of vodka won't hurt at all,” Kate proposed.

A
S NIGHT FELL, THE
journeyers decided to make camp near the trees, where they would be better protected.

“Are there pythons in this part of the world?” asked Joel, thinking of the near fatal embrace of an anaconda in the Amazon.

“Pythons aren't a problem because you can see them coming and shoot them. Much worse are the Gabon viper and forest cobra. Their poison kills in a matter of minutes,” said Angie.

“Did we bring an antidote?”

“There is no antidote for those bites. I'm more worried about crocodiles; those monsters eat everything,” commented Angie.

“But they stay in the river, don't they?” asked Alexander.

“They're also ferocious on land. When animals come down to drink at night, crocs snatch them and drag them to the bottom of the river. Not a pleasant death,” Angie detailed.

She always carried a revolver and a rifle in her plane, though she had never had to fire them. In view of the fact that they would have to take turns standing guard through the night, she demonstrated to the others how to use them. They took a few shots and found that the weapons were in good condition, but none of them was able to hit a target only a few yards away. Brother Fernando refused to even try, because, according to him, firearms are tools of the devil. His experience in the war in Rwanda had left him badly scarred.

“This is my protection, this scapulary,” he said, showing them a piece of cloth he wore on a cord around his neck.

“This what?” asked Kate, who never had heard the word before.

“It's a holy object, blessed by the pope,” said Joel, showing them a similar one he wore.

For Kate, who had been brought up in the sobriety of a Protestant church, the Catholic faith was as picturesque as African religious ceremonies.

“I have an amulet, too, but I don't think it will save me from ending up in the jaws of a crocodile someday,” Angie said, showing them a small leather pouch.

“Don't compare that witchcraft fetish to a scapulary!” protested Brother Fernando, offended.

“What's the difference?” asked Alexander, who was very interested.

“One represents the power of Christ, and the other is pagan superstition.”

“Our beliefs are religion; everybody else's are superstition,” commented Kate.

She had often repeated that sentence to her grandson, hoping to pound respect for different cultures into his head. Other favorite sayings of hers were, “We speak a
language
, anything else is a
dialect
,” and
“White people create
art
; other races make
crafts.
” Alexander had tried to explain his grandmother's statements in his social science class, but no one had understood the irony.

A passionate discussion about Christian faith and African animism ensued, in which everyone in the group participated except Alexander, who was wearing an amulet of his own around his neck and thought it best to keep silent, and Nadia, who was walking up and down the open shoreline from one end to the other, deeply engrossed and accompanied by Borobá. Alexander went to join them.

“What are you looking for, Eagle?” he asked.

Nadia bent down and picked up some bits of rope from the sand.

“I found several of these,” she said.

“It must be some kind of vine.”

“No. I think they're something someone has made.”

“What can they be?”

“I don't know, but it means that someone was here not too long ago, and maybe he will be back. We're not as isolated as Angie believes,” Nadia deduced.

“I hope they aren't cannibals.”

“Yes, that would really be bad luck,” she said, thinking of what she'd heard the missionary say about the madman who ruled the region.

“I don't see human footprints anywhere,” Alexander commented.

“Or animals', either. The earth is soft, and the rain has washed everything away.”

Several times a day, there was a downpour that drenched them as effectively as standing in a shower, then ended as suddenly as it had begun. Those cloudbursts kept them wringing wet, yet didn't offer any relief from the heat; just the opposite, the humidity made things even more unbearable. The stranded travelers set up Angie's tent, into which five of them could crowd as the sixth stood guard. At Brother Fernando's suggestion, they looked for animal droppings to make a fire; it was the only way to keep the mosquitoes at bay and at the same time mask their scent, which might attract wild animals. The missionary warned them against bugs that lay their eggs under fingernails and toenails; those pockets become infected, making it necessary to pry up the nails with a knife and scrape out the larvae, a procedure akin to Chinese torture. To prevent that, they rubbed their hands and feet with gasoline. He also warned them not to leave any food in the open because the ants it attracted could be more dangerous than crocodiles. An invasion of termites was a terrifying sight; in their passing they wiped out every living thing, leaving nothing behind but bare earth. Alexander and Nadia had heard about those insects in the Amazon, but now they learned that the African species were even more voracious. As dusk fell they were set upon by a swarm of tiny bees, the insufferable
mopani
; despite the smoke, the pests invaded the camp and swarmed over every inch of their skin, even their eyelids.

“They don't bite; they just drink your sweat. It's better not to try to shoo them off,” the missionary told them. “You'll get used to them.”

“Look there!” called Joel.

An ancient turtle with a shell more than three feet across was creeping along the shore at the water's edge.

“He's probably more than a hundred years old,” Brother Fernando calculated.

“I make a delicious turtle soup!” exclaimed Angie, picking up a machete. “You have to swing the minute they stick their head out—”

“Don't even think of killing it,” interrupted Alexander.

“That shell's worth a lot of money,” said Angie.

“We can eat tinned sardines for supper,” Nadia reminded her. She, too, was opposed to the idea of eating the defenseless turtle.

“It's not a good idea to kill it. It has a strong odor, and that will attract dangerous predators,” added Brother Fernando.

The centenarian ambled on along the riverbank at its calm pace, never suspecting how near it had come to ending its days in a pot.