Forest of the Pygmies(16)

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.





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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.





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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.