The Aye-Aye and I

by Gerald Durrell

  It was Madame’s birthday that day and, in the evening, she threw a small party for us all. We put on clean shirts and shorts and I drew her a birthday card with an aye-aye on it, only thinking afterwards that perhaps this was unwise as she may have shared the local people’s belief in its malignity. However, she seemed pleased. She was dressed exquisitely for the occasion and her raven-black hair was coiffured to perfection. Indeed, she had that extraordinary chic which some women carry around with them like scent.

  We had a sumptuous meal, accompanied, miraculously, by champagne. To be eating so well and supping such wine in those extraordinary surroundings was a curious experience. At the end of the evening, Madame announced that on the morrow she was taking us for a picnic on an island in the nearby river. It was here, we knew, that the indefatigable Roland had released an aye-aye he had caught and our chances of seeing it, Madame informed us, were good. As we could really do nothing sensible until the errant Roland appeared, the idea of a picnic on the river appealed to all of us, especially as we might catch a glimpse of an aye-aye.

  On the following morning, Madame left before us in a small van loaded down with comestibles and taking almost her entire staff with her. We followed on about an hour later. Opposite the island, the river was quite narrow and the colour of very strong coffee, moving sluggishly between the banks. We crossed the river in a large pirogue that was matronly in appearance and of extremely doubtful seaworthiness. When we reached the island, it turned out to be some thirty-five acres in extent, surrounded by an apron of reeds and papyrus and a botanical shambles of coffee, clove trees, coconut palms and a mass of bananas; the whole landscape was overrun by pigs and chickens.

  Under one of the coconut palms there were some small huts. As I’ve said, the Malagasy are of small stature and build according to their needs, so most of their constructions look to our eyes like children’s ‘Wendy houses’ (a revolting term brought on by a surfeit of Peter Pan). Near the huts, they had assembled some comfortable Malagasy chairs that look like small ‘barrel’ chairs, only these are woven with fine reed. They are the most hospitable of chairs, welcoming you into their gentle embrace, but once they had engulfed your posterior you did not dare move suddenly. It was rather like being embedded in a coracle (as I once was) where any sudden shifting or an ill-timed grandiloquent gesture precipitates you sideways or, worse still, backwards, with the chair clinging to you like a burr. However, if we sat quite still in these chairs and lifted food and drink to our mouths with extreme caution, these chairs were a delight.

  Once we were all installed, Madame gave instructions, like some Asian Cleopatra, and the feast commenced. There was chicken done in a heavy sauce with tomatoes, fish fried and garnished with various vegetables and the pièce de résistance, huge bowls of pigs’ trotters, beautifully cooked, gelatinous and delicious. We had just done justice to this sumptuous array of food when who should appear from the riverbank, sauntering up in a debonair manner, but the Invisible Man, Roland himself, his big blue eyes shining, his face and partially bald head the colour of a sun-ripe pippin, his shorts and shirt immaculate.

  ‘ ’Allo, Gerrie,’ he called cheerfully ‘I ’av’ come, as you see. ’Ow are zings wit’ you?’

  When his hand had been wrung and he had been kissed on both cheeks, he was installed in an unsafe chair and given a drink.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ I asked, as he beamed at me. ‘From all the rumours we heard you have been everywhere from Nosy Be to Fort Dauphin.’

  ‘I ’av’ been everywhere,’ he said. ‘Now I am adviser to the Biosphere Reserves I am ’ere, zere and everywhere at every minute. It is terrible. I am exhaust.’

  Looking the relaxed picture of health and well-being, he refilled his glass.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘ ’Ow ’as it been going wiz you?’

  ‘Well, so far, so good,’ I answered. ‘We got the lemurs at Lake Alaotra, and at Morandava we got the tortoise and the jumping rat. They’re all safely down at Tsimbazaza. Now all we have got to do is catch those damned aye-aye.’

  ‘Pas de problème,’ said Roland, sipping his wine. It was heartening to hear this, his favourite phrase. On a previous trip, when he had been helping us, ‘pas de problème’ was his answer to what seemed the most insoluble of problems which he had promptly solved for us. So frequently did he use this exclamation that we had christened him Professeur Pas de Problème and I had thus dedicated a book I had written about that trip to him. With his vibrant personality, you felt that, even if your labours were as multifarious as those of Hercules, Roland would banish them with a wave of his hand and a cry of ‘Pas de problème’.

  ‘Our main problem is where to have our base camp,’ I said.

  ‘ ’Ere,’ said Roland, succinctly.

  ‘On this island?’ I asked, in astonishment.

  ‘No, no,’ said Roland, impatiently. ‘I mean ’ere near Mananara, and you may hunt just outside the Biosphere Reserve. If you do not ’ave success I will get you permission to hunt in the outer ring of the reserve. I know there are aye-aye there and that the people kill them, even though they know they should not.’

  ‘They eat them too,’ I said gloomily.

  ‘Eat them?’ said Roland, shocked. ‘That is very bad. It is one thing to kill them if they eat coconuts but if they start hunting them for food, that is terrible.’

  ‘We had thought of making a base camp at a village somewhere along that bit of macadam road,’ I said. ‘At least it means we can get into town for supplies.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Roland. ‘That is best idea.’

  ‘The trouble is that the TV team have so little time,’ I said, ‘so we must get an aye-aye to film before they leave.’

  ‘Pas de problème,’ said Roland, soothingly. ‘I ’ave already got you one.’

  ‘You’ve done what?’ I cried, moving incautiously. The chair went over backwards, carrying me with it, and I lay there with my legs in the air.

  ‘Gerrie, you ’ave to pay attention and not ’urt your ’ips,’ said Roland with concern as he helped me up, dropping more aspirates than usual.

  ‘You’ve really got an aye-aye?’ I asked, so astounded that I ignored the protest of my hips.

  ‘Yes, yes, we ’ave one. You may borrow it for the film and then you give it back to me so I can release it ’ere on this island with the other one.’

  I broke the good news to the team and they were delighted for, having come so far and at considerable cost, if we had not obtained an aye-aye, it would have meant the loss of a great deal of money, to say nothing of our disappointment at not having a foot of film of one of the rarest and most bizarre creatures on earth.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get back to town and see it.’

  ‘It is not docile,’ warned Roland. ‘It ’as not the calm disposition of ’Umphrey.’

  ‘I don’t care if it’s a man-eater,’ I said, ‘as long as we can film it.’

  ‘I’m not insured for meeting a man-eating aye-aye,’ said Frank, thoughtfully.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘The aye-aye’s not insured for meeting you.’

  ‘I don’t wish to seem awkward,’ said Frank, ‘but I promised my new wife that I would return from this trip like a lithe jungle animal, not a mutilated wreck.’

  ‘We don’t care if you’re a mutilated wreck of a lithe jungle animal, as long as we get the film,’ said Bob Evans who, for some reason best known to himself, Frank had christened Captain Bob – an appellation which seemed to suit Bob’s brisk, dapper character.

  ‘Well, let’s stop chuntering on about Frank’s sex life and get back into town and see the animal,’ I said.

  ‘It is a big one,’ said Roland.

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘It means that even the cameraman we’ve got won’t be able to miss it.’

  Tim gave me a wounded look.

  ‘They talk about women being gossips,’ said Lee. ‘For heaven’s sake, let’s go.’

  So we pil
ed into the pirogue and went.

  Chapter Seven

  Verity the Vespertine

  Along the main street from the hotely was a clapboard house up on cement pillars, which was the office of the Biosphere Reserve. Here, under the house, in the cool and the shade, reposed a large box and peering out of it, whiskers a-twitch, sat the biggest aye-aye I had ever seen. She regarded us with mild curiosity like someone’s favourite cat sitting on a window-sill. You would have thought that she had been in captivity from birth.

  ‘I think she is old,’ said Roland. ‘She ’as the ambience of being old, or if not old, ’alf old.’

  ‘Well, from the point of view of the film, it doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Really, Roland, we are most grateful to you.’

  ‘Pas de problème,’ said Roland.

  ‘What are we going to call her?’ asked Lee.

  ‘Verity,’ I said firmly

  ‘Why Verity?’ asked John.

  ‘Well, firstly, it’s a fine old Victorian name. Secondly, Frank’s films are famous for being cinéma vérité.’

  ‘Hum,’ Frank grunted. ‘You wouldn’t have said that if you had seen me trying to get Gene Autry onto a horse.’

  ‘Nevertheless, Verity she shall be,’ I said, and Verity she remained, even when we discovered that she was a he.

  Now that Professeur Pas de Problème had arrived in our midst we could galvanize ourselves into some sort of activity. As always in Madagascar, the first thing we had to do was to go and see the president of the whole Mananara region. He was a pleasant, quiet personality who, with typical Malagasy good manners, almost concealed his secret thought that we were all eccentric in the extreme, perhaps bordering upon madness. Since we appeared benignly deranged, he was content that we should invade his area of jurisdiction and welcomed us with charm.

  Having made our mark with the higher echelon, we travelled the macadam ancestor road until we came to the village of Antanambaobe, which is where Lee had spotted an area which might serve us as a campsite. Along the road, of course, one gave up any hope of seeing real forest and had to try to enjoy what man had made of it. It had a curious charm. There was a bright-green lushness about it, with ravenala spreading their fans and, in the tiny ravines where erosion had cuddled a pocket of mud, suddenly a tiny paddy field, square like an emerald-green pot spilt from a child’s watercolour paintbox. In the villages with their neat gardens the lychee trees were orange-red with fruit and the clove trees were such perfectly elongated egg-shapes that they looked like fairytale efforts at topiary.

  As we drove along, we got all the scents of sunlight on leaves, the rich plum-cake smell of earth and rotting vegetation until, suddenly, we were in a village. Immediately, we were enveloped in delicious aromas – coffee, cloves, vanilla – each seed of these aromatic plants laid out carefully on reed mats to dry in the sun and fill the air with a magical mixture of perfume.

  Antanambaobe was a large village of some thousand souls but it did not seem intrusive, for the village lay so scattered among the coconut and clove plantations that, except for the string of houses along the road, we were unaware of such a large conglomeration of human beings. Here, we met the délégué of the region. These are government appointees, not necessarily from the region, and generally (as we soon found out) at odds with the locals. From the point of view of the locals they have two black marks against them: they are not local and they are government personnel.

  Our particular délégué was called Jerome – a man whose smile made you feel instinctively for the safety of your wallet. He was obviously delighted at the thought that we had chosen ‘his’ village and his eyes rambled appraisingly and delightedly over our well-loaded vehicles.

  He had a broad and ready grin which, like most Malagasy, displayed a mass of huge rotting teeth. Any dentist paying a visit to this beautiful island would either have a nightmarish time surrounded on all sides by these disintegrating fangs or would decide to take up residence and make himself a fortune. After the beautiful, solid white teeth of Africans, gleaming like Italian tombstones, this Malagasy display of stalagmite and stalactite dentures in shades of black, yellow and green comes as something of a shock. Jerome, however, was different, for in the forefront of his mouth, positioned carefully among the crouched rotting stumps, was a gold tooth shining like a sun in a stormy sky. The person responsible for this adornment to his face appeared to have been either an amateur or so overwhelmed with the importance of handling this fortune that he had planted it awkwardly so that the tip peeped coyly over Jerome’s lower lip.

  Instantly we christened him Snaggletooth, but never used this unbecoming sobriquet to his face, always calling him Monsieur Jerome with a reverence that seemed to surprise him. We did not, we said, wish to disrupt village life more than we had to and, therefore, we would like to camp on the sandbanks down by the river. We needed some shade, not only for ourselves but for the living quarters we intended (with his help) to erect so that we were self-sufficient. Then we went down to survey the area.

  We were greatly cheered because while we were discussing the pros and cons of the site a large, glistening snake made a sinuous appearance from out of the bushes and slipped, as slowly and seductively as a Balinese dancer, right across the area we had decided on. Q caught it and we all let its lovely warm, dry length, smooth as silk, slide through our hands like water coloured green and brown with a hint of gold. We let him go and wished him well on his journeyings. Not being a superstitious crowd, we decided that this was a good omen.

  The site was certainly very beautiful, with the broad brown river moving at a stately speed between rocky and sandy dunes. The opposite shore looked to the uninitiated eye like thick, untouched forest, but this effect was produced by a few large old trees that – by some miracle – had been left standing. Around their massive trunks small growth had sped upwards to twenty or so feet in height, and from this erupted groups of smaller trees, coconut palms and the inevitable Ravenala.

  Carefully we paced out and marked the area which would be our communal dining-sitting-room-kitchen, and another area on which the animal shelter was to be erected. By now, Snaggletooth had a cohort of villagers around him, all giving expert advice and telling him how the thing should be done and he was getting more and more irritated, his gold tooth flashing like a dagger in the sun as he endeavoured to retain his leadership over what was, after all, a cataclysmic event in the history of the village. Never before in recorded history had no fewer than nine vazahas taken up residence in Antanambaobe, bringing with them four cars, each stuffed to the gills with unimaginable treasures. Moreover, it was well known to all that vazahas were stupid and that money fell from them like leaves from the trees if they were shaken properly. We were assured by a chorus of eager voices that the bamboos for the supports and the palm fronds for the roofs would be ready first thing in the morning and that building would commence the moment we arrived. I wanted us to be there when work started, to make sure we were not enthusiastically given a triangular building when we had asked for a square one. Such things happen, not only in the tropics, but in Europe as well, as I have found out to my cost. I have friends who, building a house in Greece, left everything in the hands of their builder and, on their return, were horrified to find the house facing away from the entrancing view that had made them want to build there in the first place. The excuse given was that the winds in winter blew from the view to the house. When it was pointed out to the builder that my friends were not there in winter, so did not care about the winds, he looked crestfallen and burst into tears. It had taken a lot of ouzo to heal the wound to his amour propre and I did not want to have such an experience happen to us in Antanambaobe.

  I also enquired into the peregrinations of the local zebu herds, as I had no wish to step out of my tent of a morning to find that twenty or thirty large zebu had left calling cards as big as soup tureens, the size and consistency of which would bear testimony to their splendid health and the magnificent state of their bowels.
After this, we repaired to the road, where we repeated all our instructions yet again. Jerome spent his time listening to this repetition with great attention, nodding his head in agreement while picking his nose voluptuously, presumably to aid concentration. Finally, we were ready to go and he removed his forefinger from its profound and comprehensive archaeological excavations and, beaming with goodwill, shook hands all round. I noticed that I was not the only member of our party to surreptitiously wipe my hand on my shorts.

  When we drove back to the hotely the sky was the palest and softest blue. Then, suddenly, it was invaded by battalions of cauliflower-shaped, belligerent-looking, dark grey clouds. They extinguished the sun as if blowing out a candle, bustled the blue away and opened their copious bosoms to feed us rain. No one who has not been to the tropics can imagine the fierceness and suddenness of a tropical downpour. When we reached the hotely the thrumming of the rain on the roof and the palm fronds made speech almost impossible. I saw a beautiful scarlet and black butterfly take refuge under a leaf and then, as the rain increased in volume and its leaf began to bend and shake, it decided that it had chosen unwisely and attempted to fly to a more protected spot. Immediately it was pelted to the ground by the raindrops and within seconds its body was mashed into the ground before I could rescue it. In this sort of rain, the drops beating on your head and face become almost painful. The roar of the water hitting the palm fronds was like the sound of a giant waterfall. The road disintegrated, turning within seconds from candy pink to an almost scarlet sludge. Raindrops the size of twenty-nine-carat diamonds (but much more beautiful) dripped from the curves of the corrugated-iron roof. The temperature dropped ten degrees. Then, suddenly, the clouds moved majestically away, the sun emerged rather shamefacedly and everything started to steam gently like a kettle summoning up the lung power to boil.