The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest

by David Quammen

  Instead he stared. His legs didn’t go. He lingered, unsure why. He sensed terror in the scene somewhere, but the terror wasn’t his. Then he realized what seemed wrong—the elephant was down, and not in a position that might suggest sleep. Its face lay smashed into the mud, its trunk sideways, its hip canted up. He approached carefully. He noticed the purplish red holes along its lower sides and belly. Protruding from one of those holes was a Baka spear. He could see the awful way the beast had collapsed down over its left shoulder, its front leg on that side bent out at a ruinous angle. By the time he had crept within ten yards, he knew that it was dead.

  A sizable male, a youngish adult, with good ivory. Left to die alone in a stream bottom and rot. Quickly the Voyager made some deductions. Probably it had been killed by a hunting party of Baka men—but not quite killed, just mortally wounded. It had broken away, escaped, and to do that, presumably, it would have had to kill one or two of the Baka who surrounded it. The others must have lost heart for the chase. Maybe this had occurred on the north side of the river. Maybe the elephant, wounded and desperate, had swum across. But if the Baka took up the trail, got themselves over here, and reappeared now—that could be bad for him. Finding the Voyager with their costly trophy, the Pygmies might fill him with purple spear holes. Assuming they could summon the audacity to murder a Bantu. So he worked fast. He whaled into the elephant’s face with his machete, hacking through flesh and gristle, opening an ugly maw that no longer looked elephantine but like something else, something exploded and ogrish, and within half an hour he had twisted both tusks free. They surrendered with ripping noises, like any tooth drawn from its jaw.

  He shaved the tusks free of tissue, then rubbed them with sandy mud and rinsed them white in the stream. Held in his hands, each one seemed huge. Bounteous. Maybe fifteen kilos. He had never experienced such an armload of wealth. He could only handle one at a time. He examined each in turn, passing his hand down the smooth white curve to the point. Then he gathered up both and staggered back to his canoe, crouching and dodging through the vines, and dropped them into the bilge with his few fish. Untied the boat quickly, caught the current, headed downstream. Having rounded one bend, he began to ease, his heart slowing back to normal.

  What had just happened? He had stumbled upon half a fortune and stolen it, that’s what. Claimed it, rather. Now what?

  Back at his camp, the Voyager cached the tusks hastily beneath leaves and branches in a recess beside a fallen tree. Midway through the first night he woke, suddenly aware that his hiding place was inadequate, stupidly so, and he waited out the darkness impatiently. At daylight he rose, scraped away the coals and embers and ash from his campfire—his hearth site of several years’ custom—and dug a pit on that spot, cracking through the layer of baked earth with his machete, slapping deep slices into the clay beneath. He went down four feet. He shaped a deep, narrow slot. He wrapped the two tusks in ngoungou leaves for protection and nestled them at the bottom of the trench. Then he refilled it, leveled the ground carefully, spread the old ashes back where they’d been, replaced the charred logs, and lit a new fire. Now his treasure was safe, maybe, for a while. And he could think about what to do.

  There were no easy answers. There was opportunity and there was risk. He was not a man who hunted elephant, and everyone who knew him knew that. He was not supposed to have tusks. If he took them to Moloundou the agents of the French concessionaires, greedy for ivory, leaching it from the forest by all manner of compulsion and threat, would simply impound them. He might even be punished. Others would try to steal them, or to trade for them while cheating him of their value. He thought through the scenarios. He wasn’t a cunning man but he was tough and stubborn.

  Six months passed. He continued to live as before: fishing the river, drying fish at his camp, spending his days alone, making infrequent stops at Ngbala or Moloundou for trading. There was one man in Moloundou, a merchant, not a local Bantu and not a concessionaire’s agent but a half-Portuguese outsider with connections, notoriously clever, known to deal discreetly in elephant meat and ivory. One day during a transaction over fish, salt, and fufu, the Voyager asked this merchant about the price for tusks. It was just a question! The merchant looked at him slyly and mentioned a number. The number seemed high but not very high, and the Voyager’s face may have flickered with disappointment. He said nothing more.

  Two nights later, the Voyager returned from upriver and found his camp wrecked. The half-Portuguese merchant had spoken with someone, and that someone had gone straight to rob him.

  His hut had been ripped apart, his drying racks broken. His few possessions—his second net, some tin pots, a camp knife, a shirt, his raffia mat, and the rest—had been scattered disdainfully. His little tin box had been broken open and the fishhooks and tobacco dumped out. Dried fish lay on the ground, willfully trodden upon. There were signs of digging here and there—beside the fallen log, in the floor of his hut, a couple other places too. Desultory, petulant searching. The Voyager’s campfire had been scattered, logs and ashes kicked away. His breath caught when he saw that. But the dirt beneath the ashes hadn’t been disturbed. They hadn’t found what they had come for.

  So he turned his mind toward Ouesso. He waited out the night in his ruined camp, beside a fire burning low, with his machete in hand. At dawn he excavated his tusks and, leaving them leaf-wrapped and dirty, without pausing to savor their cool precious weight, put them into his canoe. He covered the tusks with dried fish, of which he had plenty, and smoked fish, of which he had just a bit, then covered the fish with more ngoungou leaves in neat bundles, as though he were taking them to market. Ngoungou leaves had their value as wrapping, but it was minimal; a pathetic, countryman’s product, and therefore plausible. Atop the leaves he placed his mat. He pushed off, paddled out, and let himself be swung downriver on the Ngoko, putting Moloundou behind him. He paddled steadily for hours, reached the Sangha, turned downstream there, and continued straight to Ouesso.

  Half a mile below the town, he found an eddy and pulled his boat up into the forest. There was no landing, no trail, no camp, no sign of human presence—which was good. Next day he concealed the canoe beneath leafy branches and bushwhacked northwest until he struck the outer lanes of Ouesso. He walked straight to the market by following other people. He had never seen such a concentration of humans and, once he was amid the crowd, his heart began thumping as it had when he stood over the dead elephant. But no one hurt him; no one even looked at him twice, despite the fact that his clothes were shabby and he carried a machete. He saw other men in dirty clothes, a few, and one or two of them carried machetes also. He began to relax.

  The market, sheltered in a huge round building with a metal roof, was wondrous. You could buy meat, you could buy fish, you could buy colorful clothing and dried manioc and vegetables and fishnets and things he had never seen. The Voyager had no money of any sort, not francs, not brass rods, but he wandered among the goods as though he might want something. He admired the duikers and the monkeys. He picked up a gorilla hand, while the seller woman watched him closely, and set it back down. The people spoke Lingala. He exchanged a few words with a man selling fish. The Voyager was more cautious than he had been in Moloundou. Do you buy smoked fish if I have some? he asked. Maybe, when I see it, the man said. The Voyager took note of another man nearby, behind a plank table upon which sat large chunks of elephant meat, smoky and gray. A man who sold elephant meat might also deal in ivory. The Voyager memorized that man’s face but didn’t speak with him. He would do it tomorrow.

  He walked back out of town and into the forest, satisfied by his judicious preliminary excursion, and when he emerged through the undergrowth to his riverbank hiding spot, he was horrified to see the cut branches cast aside and someone bent over his boat. Horrified and enraged: at himself for his redoubled stupidity, at the world, and especially at the man coveting his tusks. The Voyager raised his machete, ran forward, and struck before the interloper had half turned around,
splitting the man’s skull like a dry coconut. That made a sickening, fateful sound. The man fell hard. Where his head had broken open, pink brains showed and blood surged around the pinkness, then stopped.

  It was scarcely midafternoon of the Voyager’s first day in Ouesso and he had killed someone. What sort of hellish place was this?

  His next shock came when he rolled the dead man over. It wasn’t a man’s face; it was a boy’s. Smooth skin, baby cheeks, long jaw, barely old enough for initiation. The Voyager had been fooled by height. He had killed a tall youngster, a gangly boy who had dared to stoop over his canoe. A boy from the town, with relatives who would miss him. This wasn’t good.

  The Voyager stood for a moment, exhausted and pained, calculating his situation. Then again he moved quickly. He dragged the boy’s body to the river. Splashing into the shallows, stumbling, he pulled it offshore just enough to be sure of current, released it, and watched it drift away. The body floated low in the water but it floated. Back on the bank, he rifled down into his canoe and confirmed that the tusks were still there. They were. He gripped each individually at the tip, assuring himself: one, two. He peeled back the leaf wrap and looked. Yes, ivory, two tusks. He dragged his canoe to the water, climbed in, and began paddling downstream. Within fifty yards he caught up with the boy’s body and passed it by. He did not glance back toward Ouesso.

  Now he was launched, untethered, no going back. For three weeks he journeyed downstream. Or maybe four weeks; he didn’t keep a tally of the days. He had his canoe and his tusks, his machete, his fishing line and hooks, little else. His immediate purpose was to stay alive, day by day. His driving goal was to recoup a life from the ivory. He resumed fishing as he went, trolling with his line, seldom stopping except for the night. He ate what he caught, saving the dried and smoked fish for contingency. He was on the water again every morning by full light. He passed another town, avoiding it along the far bank, and paddled through a stretch where the river meandered slowly amid swamplands. He could see it was taking him generally south. There were adventures and mishaps and some further narrow escapes along the way. Maybe you can imagine them as well as I can. There was the encounter with the men on the log raft, drifting downriver, to whom he sold fish and by whom he was warned about the Bobangi, an imperious people controlling trade and passage at the mouth of the Sangha. He didn’t know what that meant, the mouth of the Sangha; he pictured this river going on forever. There was the ambush by the crocodile, another hateful moment, but he had been lucky that morning. It was a nasty animal, not large, barely six feet, presumptuous and stupid to attack a human, and he’d had his revenge. He ate the belly meat and tail of the crocodile for six days afterward. He had never eaten chicken so to him it tasted like fish. He placed the crocodile’s severed head into a column of driver ants and they cleaned it of flesh within an afternoon. Now the sun-bleached skull rode atop the other cargo in his canoe, toothy and grinning, like a totem. He reached the mouth of the Sangha and tried to elude the Bobangi, running midriver at night and laying up by day. But he couldn’t stay with his treasures every moment. He left the boat unguarded once, for only a short time, to gather fruit beneath a mobei tree, and so there was his standoff with the solitary Bobangi man whom he found, as he had found the Tall Boy, committing an outrage: looking into his canoe. Unlike the Tall Boy, this man heard him and turned around.

  The man had gray hair at his temples and his left eye was milky blue. His right eye was normal. He was old but not too old to be dangerous; his body appeared still strong. He carried a small iron knife, but no machete, and a little packet in animal hide strung around his neck. He looked like a magus or a sorcerer. He had unwrapped the Voyager’s ivory. The Voyager knew that there were many other Bobangi on the river, maybe even some within earshot. The Voyager felt trapped. He remembered the sickening sound of his machete on the Tall Boy’s head. He decided, very quickly, upon a desperate compromise. He addressed the blue-eyed man in Lingala, not sure whether a Bobangi would understand.

  I give you one tusk, the Voyager said.

  No sign of response.

  I give you one tusk, he repeated, speaking very clearly. You deliver it to your chief. Or . . . you don’t.

  He waited, letting the blue-eyed man ponder.

  One tusk, he said. He held up a finger. Or I fight you and I kill you for two.

  It seemed a long delay. The Voyager began wishing he had simply cracked the man’s skull, at least tried to, whatever the consequences. Then the blue-eyed man turned back to the Voyager’s canoe. He rummaged, shoved away leaves, and, with an effort that showed in his back muscles, lifted out one tusk. He stroked it, testing the smooth cool surface, and appeared satisfied. The Voyager watched him; willed him on his way. All right. Take it. Go. But then, no, the man stooped again. He picked up a single smoked fish. He gaped back at the Voyager with an expression of shameless, bemused defiance. The blue eye twitched—or was that a wink? He took the tusk and the fish and he departed.

  That night the Voyager passed onward through Bobangi territory, slipping by their big village near the mouth of the Sangha, where this river debouched into another, unimaginably huge: the Congo. He was astonished when daylight revealed the extent of its braiding channels, islands, and strong currents. It was like a bundle of rivers, not just one. He paddled harder than ever now, but also more carefully, learning wariness of the eddy lines that could knock a canoe sideways, the whirlpools that could suck it under. He kept a distance between himself and other canoes. When he saw men on a raft, he paddled within shouting distance, offered to sell fish, sought information. Once he encountered a steamboat, like a great house proceeding upriver under power, with a machine inside thumping stupidly, passengers and bundled cargo on the deck. It was a strange sight. But the Voyager had seen other strange sights—the spilled brains of a boy, the Ouesso market, a blue-eyed Bobangi thief—and by now felt almost inured to astonishment. The boatman on this noisy, belching vessel, he could see, was a white man. The Voyager hugged the opposite shore.

  The river continued south. He entered the territory of the Tio, a more tractable people than the Bobangi—eager for trade but not demanding monopoly, according to what the Voyager heard. Maybe the Tio were humbler because the river was now so vast. No one could imagine himself owning such a river. No tribe, even. Here the Voyager saw dozens of other boats. It was a new universe. Many canoes, several more steamboats, people hollering and trading from one boat to another. The maze of channels and the traffic, plus the increasing distance from Ouesso, gave a sense of jumble and anonymity and security that allowed the Voyager to travel by daylight, which was fortunate in these formidable waters. He sold fresh fish to Tio boatmen and swapped fish for manioc. He chatted. Yes, I’ve come from the upper river, very far. But he didn’t say which river. He didn’t mention ivory. He gathered intelligence without revealing much. He was tired.

  He had an intermediate goal now, between the daily purpose of survival and the dream of due reward for his troubles. He had a destination: a place called Brazzaville. It was a large town, downriver, some days ahead. It sat on the right, beside a great pool. He would know it when he saw it—so he’d been told. Another big town sat on the left bank, across the pool, but that one was owned by the Belgians. Who are the Belgians? he asked. Are they a tribe like the Bobangi? Worse. Yes, he heard, Brazzaville was a good market for fish or whatever you had.

  And so the Voyager arrived. He rounded a last bend, came to a great pool where the river seemed as wide as it was long, put a large island to his left as advised, and saw white buildings on the right bank, some of them twice as tall as a house, taller even than the circular market hall at Ouesso. He paddled toward the white buildings. Coming near, he held himself some distance out, drifting, observing, until he was well past the docks and the big boats and the bustle of workingmen, then beached his canoe in a quieter place. Several children gaped, as children do, but no one else noticed him. People were busy and no adults diverted their attention t
o the sight of a strong young Bakwele coming ashore in tattered clothes with a crocodile skull, a single fine tusk, and half a boatload of rotten fish.

  He stepped out of the water and stood alone. No one greeted him.

  No one knew what he had done. No one compared him to Lewis and Clark. No one hailed him as the Marco Polo of the upper Congo basin. No one knew that he was Huck Finn and Jim, John Wesley Powell on the Colorado, Teddy Roosevelt on the River of Doubt, Frank Borman circling the moon in Apollo 8, and Dr. Richard Kimble at large. No one knew.

  The Voyager walked into town and sold his tusk the first afternoon, receiving 120 brass rods, which was a good price, he thought, but also somehow anticlimactic and unsatisfactory. For his crocodile skull, at the benign whim of the ivory buyer, he received another ten brass rods. He bought some palm wine, got drunk, found that experience not to his liking, and never did it again. The rest of his money he saved, or rather set aside, spending it slowly and variously until it was gone. He had arrived.

  He found lodging in Poto-Poto, a neighborhood east of the city center, full of others from the upper river, and got work on the waterfront. He made friends. He settled in. Urban life suited him. He became something of a colorful figure, confident, charming in his river-man way, with stories to tell. No one viewed him as the pariah son of a sorceress. No one guessed that he had ever been a surly young loner. No one knew his real name because he had invented another. And the other thing no one knew, not even he, was that he had brought a new element, a new circumstance, to Brazzaville. A virus, in his blood. More specifically: He had brought HIV-1 group M.

  Seven and eight and nine years later, near the end of his life, the Voyager would tell some of his stories to friends, acquaintances, and a few of the women with whom he had relationships, transient or longer: about the Dead Elephant, the Half-Portuguese Merchant, the Tall Boy, the Crocodile, and the Blue-Eyed Bobangi. In his telling, the Tall Boy became an adult and the Crocodile was very large, a leviathan. No one doubted his word. They knew he had come down the river and it must have been perilous. The crocodile skull wasn’t there to belie him. During those years he slept with thirteen women, all of whom were femmes libres to one degree or another. One of those, a young Tio girl who had recently arrived in Brazzaville from upriver, and who found that she fancied him more than she did her freedom, became his wife. Eventually he infected her with the virus. He also infected one other, a rather more professional woman who lived in a small house in the Bacongo neighborhood, west of town, where he visited her on an intermittent basis when his wife was pregnant. The other eleven women had only fleeting sexual contacts with him and were luckier. They remained HIV-negative. The Voyager’s personal lifetime contribution to the basic reproduction rate was therefore precisely 2.0. People liked him and were sorry when he fell ill.