Forest of the Pygmies Page 4

  “I’ve never seen you so nervous. You’re getting soft in your old age, Grandmother,” said Alexander, handing the first cup of coffee to Kate.

  “Do not call me Grandmother, Alexander.”

  “I won’t, if you won’t call me Alexander. My name is Jaguar, at least to my family and friends.”

  “Aggh. Don’t be such a pest,” she replied, burning her lips with the first sip of the steaming beverage.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Missionary

  THE SAFARI STAFF LOADED THE equipment into Land Rovers and then by elephant accompanied the International Geographic party to where Angie’s plane waited in an open area, two miles from the camp. For the visitors it was their last ride. The haughty Kobi, who had carried Nadia all that week, sensed the parting and seemed downcast, as were all the guests. Borobá, too, was dejected; he was leaving behind the three chimps that had become good friends; for the first time in his life, he had to admit that there were monkeys almost as clever as he was.

  As they approached the Cessna Caravan, they could see the signs of its years of use and the many miles it had flown. A logo on the side announced its arrogant name: Super Hawk. Angie had painted the head, eyes, beak, and claws of a bird of prey on the plane, but over time the paint had flaked and in the shimmering morning light the vehicle much more closely resembled a pathetic molting hen. The travelers shivered at the thought that it was their only means of transportation—all except Nadia, because compared to the ancient, rusty little plane her father flew around the Amazon, Angie’s Super Hawk looked super indeed. The same band of ill-behaved mandrills that had drunk Kate’s vodka were squatting on the wings of the metal bird busily grooming each other, picking off lice with great concentration, the way humans often do. In many places in the world, Kate had seen the same loving ritual of delousing that united families and created bonds among friends. Sometimes children got in line, ranging from the smallest to the largest, to inspect one another’s heads. She smiled, thinking how in the United States the mere word “lice” evoked shudders of horror. Angie began lobbing rocks and insults at the baboons, to which they responded with Olympian scorn, refusing to budge an inch until the elephants were practically on top of them.

  Mushaha handed Angie a vial of animal tranquilizer.

  “This is the last one I have. Can you bring me a box on your next trip?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Take this one as a sample; there are several different brands, and you might get the wrong one. This is the one I need.”

  “No problem,” said Angie, putting the vial in the plane’s emergency kit for safekeeping.

  They had finished stowing the luggage in the plane when a man no one had ever seen before burst out of the nearby undergrowth. He was wearing blue jeans, worn midcalf boots, and a filthy cotton shirt. On his head was a cloth hat, and on his back a knapsack onto which he had tied a clay pot black with soot and a machete. He was a short man, thin and bony and bald. His skin was very pale, his eyebrows dark and bushy, and the lenses of his eyeglasses were thick as bottle glass.

  “Good day, ladies and gentlemen,” he said in Spanish, and immediately repeated the greeting in English and French.

  He introduced himself: “I am Brother Fernando, a Catholic missionary,” first shaking Mushaha’s hand and then the others’.

  “How did you get here?” Mushaha asked.

  “With the help of some truck drivers, but most of the way walking.”

  “On foot? From where? There are no villages for miles around.”

  “The roads are long, but they all lead to God,” the man replied.

  He explained that he was Spanish, born in Galicia, although it had been many years since he had visited his homeland. Almost as soon as he left the seminary, he had been sent to Africa, and he had been there for more than thirty years, carrying out his ministry in a number of different countries. His most recent assignment had been a village in Rwanda, where he worked with other missionaries and three nuns in a small compound. It was a region that had been devastated by the cruelest war the continent had witnessed. Refugees swarmed from one end of the country to the other, escaping the violence, but it always caught up with them. The ground was covered with ashes and blood; no crops had been planted for years; people who escaped the bullets and knives fell victim to hunger and illness; starving widows and orphans wandered roads straight out of hell, many of them wounded or mutilated.

  “Death is having a ball in those parts,” the missionary concluded.

  “I’ve seen it, too,” Angie added. “More than a million people have died, the slaughter continues, and the rest of the world doesn’t seem to care.”

  “Here in Africa is where human life started. We all descended from Adam and Eve, whom scientists say were African. This is the earthly paradise mentioned in the Bible. God wanted this to be a garden where his creatures would live in peace and abundance, but you see what hatred and human stupidity have made of it,” the missionary added with a preacher’s zeal.

  “And you were escaping from the war?” Kate asked.

  “My fellow workers and I received orders to evacuate the mission after the rebels burned our school, but I am not another refugee. No, the truth is that I have a task to fulfill. I must locate two missionaries who have disappeared.”

  “In Rwanda?” asked Mushaha.

  “No, they are in a village called Ngoubé. Here, look.”

  Brother Fernando unfolded a map and spread it on the ground to show them the point where his companions had disappeared. Everyone grouped around him.

  “This is the most inaccessible, the hottest, and least hospitable area of equatorial Africa. Civilization has not as yet reached here. There is no way to get around other than by canoe on the river, and there are no telephones or radios,” the missionary explained.

  “Then how is it possible to communicate with the missionaries?” Alexander asked.

  “Letters take months, but my brothers were able to send us news from time to time. Life there is hard, and very dangerous. The region is controlled by one Maurice Mbembelé. He is a psychopath, a madman, a brute who has been accused of acts as horrific as cannibalism. We have heard nothing of our brothers for several months. We’re very worried.”

  Alexander studied Brother Fernando’s map, which still lay on the ground. That piece of paper could not give even a vague idea of the immensity of the continent, with its multitude of countries and six hundred million people. During that weeklong safari with Michael Mushaha, Alexander had learned a lot, but he nevertheless felt lost before the complexity of Africa, with its diverse climates, geography, cultures, beliefs, races, and languages. The place the missionary’s finger was pointing to meant nothing to him; he understood only that Ngoubé was in another country.

  “I have to go there,” said Brother Fernando.

  “How?” Angie asked.

  “You must be Angie Ninderera, the owner of this plane, right? I have heard a lot about you. They told me that you can fly anywhere—”

  “Hey! Don’t even think of asking me to take you there, man!” exclaimed Angie, holding up both hands in a defensive gesture.

  “Why not? This is an emergency.”

  “Because,” Angie replied, “where you mean to go is a swampy region covered with trees; there’s no place to land. Because no one with an ounce of sense goes anywhere near there. Because I have been hired by International Geographic magazine to bring these journalists back to the capital safe and sound. Because I have other things to do. And, finally, because I don’t, somehow, see you paying me for my trouble.”

  “God will repay you, I have no doubt,” said the missionary.

  “Listen, it seems to me that your God already has a lot of unpaid debts.”

  As they were arguing, Alexander took his grandmother by the arm and led her aside.

  “We have to help this man, Kate,” he said.

  “What are you thinking, Alex . . . I mean, Jaguar?”


  “That we could ask Angie to take us to Ngoubé.”

  “And who’s going to pay for it?” Kate queried.

  “The magazine, Kate. Just imagine the cool article you can write if we find the missing missionaries.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “It’s still news. Don’t you see? You won’t get another opportunity like this,” her grandson pleaded.

  “I’ll have to check with Joel,” replied Kate, in whose eyes Alex immediately recognized the first glint of awakened curiosity.

  It didn’t seem like a bad idea to Joel, who couldn’t go back home to London anyway because Timothy was still in the hospital.

  “Are there snakes there, Kate?”

  “More than anywhere in the world, Joel.”

  “But there are gorillas, too,” Alex said to tempt him. “Maybe you can photograph one up close. It would make a great cover for International Geographic.”

  “Well, in that case, I’ll go along,” Joel decided.

  Angie was finally convinced by the roll of bills Kate thrust in her face and the idea of a very difficult flight, a challenge she could not resist. The pilot snagged the money with one fist, lighted the first cigarette of the day, and gave the order to toss some of the baggage into the cabin while she checked the plane’s weight distribution and made sure Super Hawk was in top operating form.

  “This machine is safe, right?” asked Joel, for whom the worst part of his job was snakes and the second-worst part was flying in small planes.

  As her only answer, Angie spat some tobacco shreds at his feet. Alex nudged Joel with his elbow. He shared the photographer’s feeling that this conveyance did not seem altogether safe, especially considering that it was piloted by an eccentric woman with a case of beer at her feet, who also kept a lighted cigarette clamped between her teeth only a few feet away from the drums of gasoline carried for refueling.

  Twenty minutes later the Cessna was loaded and the passengers were in place. There weren’t enough seats for everyone, so Alex and Nadia wiggled into a niche among the bundles in the tail; no one used a seat belt because Angie thought it an unnecessary precaution.

  “In case there’s an accident, the belts wouldn’t do anything but keep the bodies from spilling out of the plane,” she said.

  She started the motors; the sound evoked the smile it always did—one of immeasurable tenderness. The plane shook like a wet dog, coughed a little, and began to bump along the improvised landing strip. Angie shouted a triumphal Comanche yell as the wheels lifted from the ground and her beloved Hawk rose toward the skies.

  “May God protect us,” the missionary murmured, crossing himself, and Joel followed suit.

  The view from the air offered a small sample of the variety and beauty of the African landscape. They left behind the nature preserve where they had spent the past week: vast hot, red dirt plains dotted with trees and wild animals. They passed over parched deserts, forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, and villages separated by great distances. The farther they flew toward the horizon, the farther they stepped back in time.

  The noise of the motors was a serious obstacle to conversation, but Alexander and Nadia insisted on talking, shouting above the racket. Brother Fernando replied to their endless questions at the same volume. They were heading toward the forests of an area near the equator, he said. Audacious nineteenth-century explorers, and French and Belgian colonizers in the twentieth century, had penetrated that green hell for a brief time, but the mortality rate was so high—eight of every ten men perished of tropical diseases, crimes, or accidents—that they were forced to retreat. After the country’s independence, when the foreign colonials withdrew, successive governments had reached out their tentacles toward the most remote villages. They built roads and sent soldiers, teachers, doctors, and bureaucrats, but the jungle and terrible illnesses thwarted civilization. Missionaries determined to spread Christianity at any price were the only ones who persevered in their aim to put down roots in that infernal region.

  “You can count fewer than one inhabitant per square mile, and the population is concentrated around the rivers; all the rest is uninhabited,” Brother Fernando explained. “No one goes into the swamps. The natives are convinced that spirits live there, and that there are still dinosaurs.”

  “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 t
hem 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.