Forest of the Pygmies(43)

Alexander laughed. "There isn't any institution for that."

"Then I'll start the first one."

"It would work out well for us to travel together. Me as a doctor and you as a linguist," Alexander proposed.

"That will be when we're married," Nadia replied.

The sentence lingered on the air, visible as a flag. Alexander felt his blood racing like an army of ants in his veins, and his heart was pounding out of his chest. He was so surprised he couldn't answer. Why hadn't he thought of that? He'd always been "in love" with Cecilia Burns, but he had nothing in common with her. This last year he had stubbornly pursued her, stoically accepting her moods and whims. While he was still behaving like a kid, Cecilia Burns had turned into a full-blown woman, even though they were almost the same age. She was very attractive, and Alexander had lost any hope of her ever noticing him. Cecilia wanted to be an actress; she swooned over movie stars and planned to test her luck in Hollywood the minute she turned eighteen. Nadia's comment unveiled a horizon that he had never considered until that moment.

"What an idiot I am!" he blurted out.

"What do you mean by that? That we're not going to marry?"

"I…" Alexander mumbled.

"Look, Jaguar. We don't know whether we'll ever get out of this jungle alive. Since we don't have much time, let's speak with our hearts," she proposed earnestly.

"Of course we'll get married, Eagle! No question about it," he replied, with his ears blazing.

"All right, then," she said, shrugging her shoulders. "We have a few years before that happens."

For a long time, they had nothing more to say. Alexander was shaken by a hurricane of conflicting ideas and emotions, which ranged from the anxiety of looking Nadia in the eye in broad daylight to the temptation to grab her and kiss her. He was sure that he would never dare do that. The silence was unbearable.

"Are you afraid, Jaguar?" Nadia asked a half hour later.

Alexander didn't answer, thinking that she had read his mind and was referring to the new fear she had awakened in him, the thoughts that were paralyzing him that very minute. With her second question, he understood that she was talking about something much more immediate and concrete.

"Tomorrow we have to face Kosongo, Mbembelé, and maybe the witch man Sombe. How do we do that?"

"It will work out, Eagle. As my grandmother says, you must never fear fear."

Alexander was grateful she had changed the subject, and decided that he wouldn't speak of love again, at least not until he was safe in California, separated from her by the breadth of the continent. It would be a little easier to talk about emotions by e-mail, when she couldn't see his red ears.

"I hope that the eagle and the jaguar will come to our aid," said Alexander.

"We'll need more than that this time," Nadia concluded.

They were interrupted by the sense of a silent presence that had appeared as if answering a call. Alexander grabbed his knife and switched on the flashlight. The beam of light revealed a terrifying figure.

Immobilized by shock, they saw, no farther than ten feet from them, a witchlike form wrapped in tattered rags. The skeleton-thin body was topped with a great mane of tangled white hair. Their first thought was that it was a ghost, but Alexander immediately reasoned that there had to be another explanation.

"Who's there!" he shouted in English, jumping to his feet.

Silence. He repeated the question and again focused the flashlight on the figure.

"Are you a spirit?" Nadia asked in a mixture of French and Bantu.

The apparition answered with an incomprehensible murmur and backed away, blinded by the light.

"I think it's an old woman!" Nadia exclaimed.

And then they understood what the supposed ghost was saying: Nana-Asante.

"Nana-Asante? The queen of Ngoubé? Are you alive or dead?" Nadia asked.

They quickly learned the truth. This was the former queen in the flesh, the woman who had disappeared, apparently murdered by Kosongo when he usurped the throne. The woman had hidden for years in the cemetery, living off the offerings the hunters left for the ancestors. She was the one who had kept the place clean; she entombed the corpses pushed through the opening in the wall.

She told Alex and Nadia that she wasn't alone but in very good company—the company of the spirits, whom she expected to join soon. She was tired of inhabiting her body. She told them that once she had been a nganga, a healer who moved in the world of the spirits after she fell into a trance. She had seen them during ceremonies and had always been afraid of them, but since she had been living in the cemetery she had lost that fear. Now the spirits were her friends.

"Poor woman, she must have gone mad," Alexander whispered to Nadia.

Nana-Asante was not mad. To the contrary, those years of seclusion had given her exceptional lucidity. She was informed about everything that was happening in Ngoubé. She knew about Kosongo and his twenty wives, about Mbembelé and his ten soldiers of the Brotherhood of the Leopard, about the sorcerer Sombe and his demons. She knew that the Bantus of the village hadn't dared stand up to them because they inflicted horrible torture at the least sign of rebellion. She knew that the Pygmies had become slaves, that Kosongo had taken their sacred amulet, and that Mbembelé sold their children if they did not bring him ivory. And she knew, too, that just recently a group of foreigners had come to Ngoubé looking for the missionaries, and that the two youngest had escaped from Ngoubé and would come to visit her. She had been waiting for them.