Forest of the Pygmies(8)
"How do you know?" Nadia inquired.
"Because that's what I was told by a fortune-teller who could read the future. Má Bangesé has a reputation for never being wrong," Angie replied.
"Má Bangesé? The fat woman who has a stand in the market?" interrupted Alexander.
"That's the one. And she isn't fat, she's… robust," clarified Angie, who was sensitive on the matter of weight.
Alexander and Nadia looked at each other, surprised at the strange coincidence.
Despite her considerable girth and her rather brusque manner, Angie was very coquettish. She wore flowered tunics and draped herself in heavy ethnic jewelry she bought at craft fairs, and her lips were always painted bright pink. Her hair was combed into elaborate cornrows studded with colored beads. She said that her line of work was lethal to a woman's hands, and she wasn't about to let hers look like a mechanic's. Her fingernails were long and brightly painted, and to protect her skin she rubbed on turtle fat, which she considered miraculous. The fact that turtles are pretty wrinkled did not diminish her confidence in the product.
"I know several men who're in love with Angie," commented Mushaha, but he refrained from adding that he was one of them.
Angie winked and explained that she would never marry because she had a broken heart. She had fallen in love only once in her life, and that was with a Masai warrior who had five wives and nineteen children.
"He had long bones and amber-colored eyes," she said.
"And what happened?" Nadia and Alexander asked in unison.
"He didn't want to marry me," she concluded with a tragic sigh.
Mushaha laughed. "What a stupid man!"
"I was ten years older and thirty pounds heavier than he was," Angie explained.
The pilot finished her coffee and got ready to leave. All his friends made their farewells to Timothy, whom the previous night's fever had so weakened that he could not even find the strength to lift his left eyebrow.
?
The last days of the safari raced by very quickly amid the pleasure of the elephant excursions. They ran into the small nomadic tribe again and saw for themselves that the young boy was cured. At the same time, they learned by radio that Timothy was being kept in the hospital with a combination of malaria and an infected mandrill bite that was resistant to antibiotics.
Three days after taking Timothy, Angie returned for them; she stayed that night in the camp so they could leave early the next morning. From the moment they met, she and Kate had struck up a strong friendship: Both were hearty drinkers—beer for Angie and vodka for Kate—and both had a well-stocked arsenal of rip-roaring stories to enthrall their audiences. That night when the group was sitting in a circle around a bonfire, feasting on roast antelope and other delicacies the cooks had prepared, the two women held a verbal tourney to see who was the best at bedazzling listeners with her adventures. Even Borobá was listening to their tales with interest. The little monkey had been dividing his time between hanging around with the humans, whose company he was accustomed to, watching Kobi, and playing with a family of three pygmy chimpanzees Mushaha had adopted.
"They're twenty percent smaller and much more peaceful than normal chimps," Mushaha explained. "The females take the lead in that society. Which means that the pygmy chimps have a better life; there's less competition and more cooperation; they eat and sleep well in their community; and the babies are protected… In short, they live a carefree life. Not like other groups of monkeys, in which the males form gangs and do nothing but fight all the time."
"I wish that's how it was with humans!" Kate sighed.
"Those little creatures are a lot like us: We share most of our genetic material with them; even their brain is similar to ours. We obviously have a common ancestor," said Mushaha.
"Then there's hope that someday we may evolve like them," added Kate.
Angie smoked cigarettes that according to her were her only luxury, and she took pride in the fact that her plane smelled of smoke. "Anyone who doesn't like the odor of tobacco can walk," she always told clients who complained. As a reformed smoker, Kate followed the hand of her new friend with avid eyes. She had stopped smoking over a year ago, but the desire was still there, and as she watched the cigarette moving back and forth to Angie's lips, she wanted to weep. She pulled out her empty pipe, which she always had in her pocket for such desperate moments, and chewed on it sadly. She had to admit that the tubercular cough that had made it so hard for her to breathe had gone away. She attributed that to her vodka-spiked tea and the powders that Walimai, Nadia's shaman friend in the Amazon, had given her. Her grandson, Alexander, gave credit for the miracle to an amulet of petrified dragon excrement that had been a gift from Dil Bahadur, who was now king of the Kingdom of the Golden Dragon; he was convinced of its magical properties.
Kate didn't know what to think of her grandson, who once had been extremely rational but now was given to fantasies. His friendship with Nadia had changed him. Alex had such confidence in that fossil that he had finely ground a few grams to powder, dissolved that in rice liquor, and insisted that his mother drink the potion to fight her cancer. Lisa, his mother, also had worn what was left of the fossil around her neck for months, and now it was around Alexander's, who didn't take it off even to shower.