Forest of the Pygmies(27)
"Party! Music! Food!" Kosongo ordered through his Royal Mouth, and indicated to the frightened group of foreigners that they were to take a seat on the stools.
The king's bead-curtained face turned toward Angie. Feeling that she was being examined, she tried to disappear behind her companions, but her bulk was rather too substantial to conceal.
"I think he's looking at me. His gaze doesn't kill, as they say it does, but I feel like he's stripping me with his eyes," Angie whispered to Kate.
"Maybe he wants you for his harem," Kate replied jokingly.
"No way!"
Kate had to admit that though Angie wasn't young anymore, she could hold her own in beauty compared with any of Kosongo's wives. In this village girls were married while still in their early teens, and in Africa the pilot was considered a mature woman. Her tall, voluminous body, however, and her white teeth and lustrous skin, were very attractive. The writer pulled one of her precious bottles of vodka from her backpack and laid it at the feet of the monarch, who was not impressed. With a scornful gesture he authorized his subjects to claim the modest gift. The bottle passed from hand to hand among the soldiers. Then the king took a carton of cigarettes from beneath his mantle, and the soldiers distributed one to each man in the village. The women, who were not considered to be of the same species as the males, were ignored. None were offered to the foreigners. Angie, who was experiencing the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal, was desperate.
The king's wives received no more consideration than the rest of the female population of Ngoubé. A strict old man had the responsibility of keeping them in line, a task for which he kept at hand a slender length of bamboo he did not hesitate to use for whipping their legs whenever it pleased him. Apparently mistreating queens in public was not frowned upon.
Brother Fernando found courage to ask about the missing missionaries, and The Royal Mouth replied that there had never been any missionaries in Ngoubé. He added that no foreigners had visited the village for years, except for an anthropologist who had come to measure the heads of the Pygmies but had beat a fast retreat a few days later because he couldn't bear the climate and the mosquitoes.
"That would have been Ludovic Leblanc," Kate said, and sighed.
She recalled that Leblanc, her archenemy and colleague in the Diamond Foundation, had given her his essay to read, a study on the Pygmies of the equatorial jungle. According to Leblanc, they had the freest and most egalitarian society on earth. Men and women lived in close companionship, the husbands and wives hunting together and equally sharing in the care of the children. There were no hierarchies among them, the only honorific posts being "leader," "healer," and "best hunter," and those positions did not carry power or privilege, only responsibilities. There were no differences between genders or old and young, and the children owed no obedience to the parents. Violence among members of the clan was unknown. They lived in family groups, and no one owned more than anyone else; they produced only what was indispensable for the day's livelihood. There was no incentive to accumulate goods because as soon as someone acquired something, the relatives were entitled to take it. The Pygmies were a fiercely independent people who had not been subjugated even by European colonizers, but in recent times many of them had been enslaved by the Bantus.
Kate was never sure about how much truth was contained in Leblanc's academic writing, but her intuition told her that the pompous professor could be in the right regarding the Pygmies. For the first time, Kate missed him. Arguing with Leblanc was the salt in her life. It kept her in fine fighting form; it wasn't good to spend too much time out of touch with him, or her character might grow soft. The aging writer feared nothing so much as the idea of turning into a harmless little old grandmother.
Brother Fernando was sure that the spokesman was lying about the lost missionaries and persisted with his questions until Angie and Kate reminded him of the proper protocol. It was obvious that the subject annoyed the king. Kosongo seemed to be a time bomb just waiting to explode, and they were in a very vulnerable position.
To honor the visitors, the villagers offered them gourds of palm wine, some leaves that looked like spinach, and a kind of pudding made from cassava. There was also a basket of large rats that had been roasted over the open fire and seasoned with streams of an orange-colored oil obtained from palm seeds. Alexander closed his eyes, thinking nostalgically about the cans of sardines in his knapsack, but a kick from his grandmother jolted him back to reality. It was not prudent to refuse the king's dinner.
"But they're rats, Kate!" he exclaimed, trying to contain his nausea.
"Don't be squeamish. They taste like chicken," she replied.
"That's what you said about the snake in the Amazon, and it wasn't true," her grandson reminded her.
The palm wine turned out to be a disgustingly sweet and nauseating brew that the International Geographic group tasted out of courtesy but couldn't swallow. On the other hand, the soldiers and other men of the village gulped it down, drinking until no one was left sober. All attempts to guard the prisoners were abandoned, but they had nowhere to escape to. They were surrounded by jungle, the miasma of the swamps, and the danger of wild animals. The roasted rats and the leaves turned out to be more acceptable than appearances would suggest. The cassava pudding, however, tasted like bread soaked in soapy water, but they were hungry and ate everything down to the last crumb. Nadia limited herself to the bitter spinach, but Alexander surprised himself sucking the leg bones of a rat with great pleasure. His grandmother was right: It did taste like chicken. More specifically, like smoked chicken.