Forest of the Pygmies

by Isabel Allende

  “Don’t you remember what the shaman Walimai told you? He said that you have the power to cure people, and that you should use that gift. I think you will make the best doctor in the world,” Nadia assured him.

  “And what about you? What do you want to do when you finish school?”

  “I’m going to study the language of animals.”

  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.

  “How could you know that!” Alexander burst out.

  “The ancestors told me. They know many things. They do not go out only at night, as people believe. They also go out during the day; they walk with other spirits of nature, here and there, among the living and the dead. They know that you will come to them to ask for help,” said Nana-Asante.

  “And will they agree to help their descendants?” asked Nadia.

  “I don’t know. You will have to speak with them.”

  An enormous full moon, yellow and radiant, rose over the clearing in the jungle. While it was shining, something magic happened in the cemetery, something that in years to come Alexander and Nadia would remember as one of the pivotal moments of their lives.

  The first sign that something phenomenal was occurring was that Alex and Nadia could see perfectly, as if the cemetery were lighted by enormous stadium lamps. For the first time since they’d been in Africa, they were cold. Shivering, they hugged each other for courage and warmth. A growing murmur, like bees, filled the air, and before the young people’s astounded eyes the clearing filled with translucent beings. They were surrounded with spirits. It was impossible to describe them because they had no defined form. They seemed vaguely human, but they changed constantly as if sketched in smoke. They were neither naked nor clothed; they had no color but were luminous.

  The intense musical hum of insects vibrating in their ears had meaning; it was a universal language they understood, a kind of telepathy. They had to explain nothing to the spirits, tell them nothing, ask them nothing—in words. Those ethereal beings knew all that had ever happened and all that would take place in the future: Time did not exist in their dimension. There were souls of dead ancestors and of beings yet to be born, souls that remained indefinitely in a spiritual state and others ready to take on physical form on this planet or on others.

  The friends learned that the spirits rarely intervene in events of the material world, although sometimes they assist animals thr
ough intuition and humans through imagination, dreams, creativity, and mystic or spiritual revelation. Most people live their lives without any link with the divine and do not note the signs, coincidences, premonitions, and small daily miracles in which the supernatural is manifest. Alex and Nadia learned that the spirits do not cause illness, misfortune, or death, as they had heard; suffering is caused by the wickedness and ignorance of the living. Neither do they destroy people who violate or intrude into their domains, because they have no domains and it is not possible to offend them. Sacrifices, gifts, and prayers do not reach them; their only usefulness is to mollify the mourners making the offerings.

  The silent dialogue with the ghosts lasted for a time impossible to calculate. Gradually the light grew brighter still, and the space around them opened to a larger dimension. The wall they had climbed to get inside the cemetery dissolved, and they found themselves in the midst of a forest, although it seemed different from where they had been before. Nothing was the same; everything emitted a radiant energy. The trees no longer formed a compact mass of vegetation; now each had its own character, its name, its memories. The tallest among them, from whose seeds other, younger trees had grown, told them their stories. The longest-living plants revealed that imminently they would die and replenish the earth, while the newest stretched out tender shoots to grasp onto life. Nature’s continuous murmuring denoted subtle forms of communication among the species.

  Hundreds of animals surrounded Alexander and Nadia, some they had never known existed: strange okapis with long necks like small giraffes; musk deer; civet cats; mongooses; flying squirrels; golden cats; and antelopes striped like zebras. There were scaly anteaters and a horde of monkeys in the trees, chattering like children in the magical light of that night. A parade of leopards, crocodiles, rhinoceroses, and other beasts passed before them in perfect harmony. Extraordinary birds flooded the air with their songs and lighted the night with their bold plumage. Thousands of insects danced on the breeze: many-colored butterflies, phosphorescent scarabs, noisy crickets, delicate fireflies. The ground seethed with reptiles: snakes, turtles, and large lizards, descendents of the dinosaurs that observed the two young people through three-lidded eyes.

  They were in the heart of the spirit forest, surrounded by thousands and thousands of plant and animal souls. Alexander’s and Nadia’s minds expanded still further, and they perceived the connections among creatures, a universe interlaced with currents of energy, an exquisite network as fine as silk and as strong as steel. They perceived that nothing exists in isolation; everything that happens, from a thought to a hurricane, is cosmic in effect. They sensed the palpitating, living earth, a great organism generating flora and fauna, mountains, rivers, the wind of the plains, the lava of volcanoes, the eternal snows of the highest mountains. That mother planet, they intuited, is a part of other, greater organisms, and is joined to the myriad of stars in the unbounded firmament.

  Alexander and Nadia saw the inevitable cycles of life, death, transformation and rebirth as a marvelous design in which all things occur simultaneously, without past, present or future: now, forever been and forever being.

  And finally, in the last phase of their fantastic odyssey, they understood that the hosts of earthly souls, along with all things in the universe, are particles of a single spirit, like drops of water in an ocean. One spiritual essence animates all existence. There is no separation among beings, no frontier between life and death.

  At no moment during that incredible journey were Nadia and Alexander afraid. At first it seemed to them that they were floating in the nebula of a dream, and they felt a profound calm. As their spiritual pilgrimage expanded their senses and imagination, tranquility gave way to euphoria, uncontainable joy, a sensation of tremendous energy and force.

  The moon continued its course across the firmament and disappeared among the treetops. For a few minutes, the luminescence of the ghosts lingered as the buzzing sound and the cold gradually diminished. The two friends awakened from their trance and were once again sitting among the tombs, with Borobá clinging to Nadia’s waist. For a while neither spoke, or even moved, prolonging the enchantment. Finally they looked at each other, dazed, doubting what they had lived through, but then before them emerged the figure of Queen Nana-Asante, who confirmed that it had not been a hallucination.

  The queen was illuminated from within, resplendent. Nadia and Alexander saw her as she was and not in the guise in which she had at first appeared: a miserable old woman, pure bones and rags. In truth she was formidable, an Amazon, an ancient goddess of the forest. Nana-Asante had grown wise during those years of meditation and solitude among the dead. She had cleansed her heart of hatred and greed; she wanted nothing, she feared nothing . . . nothing disturbed her tranquility. She was brave because she did not cling to life; she was strong because she was motivated by compassion; she was just because she intuited truth; she was invincible because she was supported by a legion of spirits.

  “There is great suffering in Ngoubé. During your reign there was peace. The Bantus and the Pygmies remember those times. Come with us, Nana-Asante. Help us,” Nadia pleaded.

  The queen replied without hesitation, “Let us go.” It was as if she had been preparing for this moment for years.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Reign of Terror

  DURING THE TWO DAYS NADIA and Alexander spent in the forest, a series of dramatic events was developing in the village of Ngoubé. Kate, Angie, Brother Fernando, and Joel had not seen Kosongo again and had had to deal with Mbembelé, who by anyone’s judgment was much more to be feared than the king. When he learned of the disappearance of two of his prisoners, the commandant had focused more on punishing his guards for having let them get away than on the fate of the missing young people. He made no effort to find them, and when Kate asked for help in searching for them, he refused.

  “They’re dead by now; I’m not going to waste time on them. No one survives at night in the jungle—except the Pygmies, who aren’t human,” Mbembelé told her.

  “Then send some of the Pygmies with me to look for them,” Kate demanded.

  It was Mbembelé’s custom not to respond to questions, much less requests, with the result that no one dared pose them. The brazen attitude of this foreign woman amazed more than angered him; he couldn’t believe he was witnessing such insolence. He stood there without speaking, observing her from behind his sinister mirrored glasses, as sweat ran down his shaved head and the naked arms marked by ritual scars. They were in his “office,” where he had had his guards bring the writer.

  Mbembelé’s office was in the jail, furnished with a pair of chairs and a rickety metal desk in one corner. Horrified, Kate took note of the torture instruments and dark bloodlike stains on the whitewashed clay walls. There was no question that the commandant’s purpose in having her brought there was to intimidate her, and he had succeeded, but Kate was determined not to show weakness. She had nothing but an American passport and her journalist’s credentials to protect her, but they would be worthless if Mbembelé perceived how frightened she was.

  It seemed to her that Mbembelé, unlike King Kosongo, had not swallowed the story that they had come to Ngoubé to interview the king. He undoubtedly suspected that the real cause of their presence there was to discover the fate of the disappeared missionaries. Now they were in Mbembelé’s power, but he would have to calculate the risks before he unleashed his cruelty. He couldn’t mistreat foreigners, Kate reasoned with excessive optimism. It was one thing to abuse the poor devils he held in his fist in Ngoubé, but something very different to harass white Americans. He did not want to invite an investigation by authorities. The commandant would have to get rid of them as quickly as possible; if they learned too much, he would be left no alternative but to kill them. He knew that they wouldn’t leave without Nadia and Alexander, and that complicated things. Kate concluded that they would have to proceed very cautiously, because the commandant’s best card would be for his guests
to suffer a well-planned accident. It never occurred to Kate that at least one of them was looked upon favorably in Ngoubé.

  After a long pause, Mbembelé asked, “What is the name of that other woman in your group?”

  “Angie. Angie Ninderera. She flew us here in her plane, but—”

  “His Majesty, King Kosongo, is willing to accept her as one of his wives.”

  Kate felt her knees buckle. Yesterday’s joke was now a disagreeable—perhaps dangerous—reality. What would Angie say about having caught Kosongo’s eye? Nadia and Alexander should be showing up soon, according to her grandson’s note. On their previous trips, too, she had gone through some desperate moments because of those kids, and both times they had come back safe and sound. She had to trust them. The first thing would be to get the whole group back together; then they would figure out some way to get back to civilization. It occurred to her that the king’s sudden interest in Angie could at least help win a little time.

  “Do you want me to pass on the king’s petition to Angie?” Kate asked when she recovered her voice.

  “It isn’t a petition; it’s an order. Talk with her. I will see her during the tournament. That will be tomorrow. In the meantime, you have permission to move about the village, but I forbid you to go near the royal compound, the Pygmies’ corrals, or the well.”

  The commandant waved a hand, and immediately the soldier at the door seized Kate by the arm and dragged her away. For a moment she was blinded by the light of day.

  Kate rejoined her friends and transmitted the declaration of love to Angie, who took it rather badly, as Kate had expected.