Forest of the Pygmies(29)
The so-called chambers turned out to be a rectangular, straw-roofed, mud building located at the far end of the village, at the very edge of the jungle. Two holes in the walls served as windows, and the entrance was a larger opening with no door. The men with the torches stepped inside to light the interior and, to the revulsion of those who were going to have to spend the night there, thousands of cockroaches scurried across the floor toward the corners.
"Cockroaches are the oldest creatures in the world; they've existed for more than three hundred million years," said Alexander.
"That doesn't make them any more agreeable," Angie pointed out.
"Cockroaches are harmless," Alexander added, although he wasn't sure whether that was true.
"So what about snakes?" Joel asked.
"Pythons don't attack in the dark," joked Kate.
"What is that awful smell?" Alexander asked.
"It could be rat urine or bat excrement," Brother Fernando clarified in a conversational tone; he had run into similar situations in Rwanda.
Alexander laughed. "It's always a treat to travel with you, Grandmother."
"Don't call me Grandmother! If you don't like the accommodations, go to the Sheraton."
"I'm dying for a smoke!" moaned Angie.
"This is your chance to give it up," Kate replied, without much conviction, because she was badly missing her old pipe.
One of the Bantus lighted other torches placed around the walls, and the soldier ordered them not to come out until morning. If they had any doubts about his words, the threatening gesture with his weapon dissipated that.
Brother Fernando wanted to know if there was a latrine nearby, and the soldier laughed; he found the idea amusing. When the missionary insisted, the tall African lost patience and pushed him with the butt of his rifle, knocking him to the ground. Kate, who was used to commanding respect, intervened decisively by stepping in front of the aggressor and, before he could give her the same treatment, placing a can of peaches in his hand. The man took the bribe and left. After a few minutes, he returned with a plastic pail and handed it to Kate with no further explanation. That battered receptacle would function as indoor plumbing.
"What do those leopard skin ties and scars on their arms represent?" Alexander queried. "All the soldiers have them."
"Too bad we can't get in touch with Leblanc; I'm sure he could give us an explanation," said Kate.
"I think it means that those men belong to the Brotherhood of the Leopard," Angie told them. "That's a secret society that exists in several African countries. They recruit their members while they're teenagers and mark them with those scars so they can be recognized anywhere. They're mercenaries; they fight and die for money. Its members have a reputation for brutality. They take an oath that they will help one another all through their lifetimes and kill their mutual enemies. They don't have families, or ties of any kind, except for their brothers in the society."
"Negative solidarity," Brother Fernando amplified. "To them it means that anything any one of them does is justified, no matter how horrible. That's the opposite of positive solidarity. In that people join together to build and plant and provide food and protect the weak… all to better their conditions. Negative solidarity is a brotherhood of bullies, and of war and violence and crime."
"I see that we've fallen into very good hands," said Kate, who was exhausted.
The group prepared to spend a bad night, watched from the door by two Bantu guards armed with machetes. The soldier left. As soon as they tried to get comfortable on the ground, using their packs as pillows, the cockroaches returned and crawled all over them. They resigned themselves to little feet probing into their ears, scrabbling across their eyelids, and poking beneath their clothing. Angie and Nadia tied kerchiefs around their heads to prevent the insects from nesting in their long hair.
"You don't find snakes where there are cockroaches," said Nadia.
The idea had just occurred to her, but it had the desired result: Joel, who up to that moment had been a bundle of nerves, calmed down as if by magic, happy to have the cockroaches as bedfellows.
?
During the night, when her companions finally surrendered to sleep, Nadia decided she had to do something. The others were so fatigued that they were able to rest at least for a few hours—despite the rats, the cockroaches, and the menacing proximity of Kosongo's men. Nadia, however, was too upset by the spectacle of the Pygmies to be able to sleep, and so she decided to find out what was going on in those pens the women had returned to after their dance. She took off her boots and picked up a flashlight. The two guards sitting outside with machetes across their knees would be no obstacle, for she had spent three years practicing the art of invisibility learned from Indians in the Amazon. The body-painted People of the Mist silently disappeared by blending into the surrounding nature, moving with a lightness and a mental concentration so profound that it could be sustained for a brief period only. That "invisibility" had helped Nadia out of trouble on more than one occasion, which was why she practiced so often. She went in and out of her classes unnoticed by other students or the teachers, and later no one remembered whether she had been in school that day. She rode the crowded subways in New York without being seen, and to test it she would stand a few inches from a fellow passenger and stare straight into his eyes, without getting a reaction. Kate, with whom Nadia lived, was the main victim of this tenacious training; she was never sure whether the girl was there or whether she had dreamed her.