by William Boyd
I decided not to follow up this remark any further. I reflected on something Meredith had once told me; one of life’s great verities, she had said: the last thing we ever learn about ourselves is our effect.
I slept well in the census hut, lulled by the bourbon, no doubt, and oblivious to the many rustlings, scurryings and crepitations that emanated from the farther reaches of the long room. The place was full of lizards, and something—I hoped it was a squirrel—was living in the ceiling space. Before I fell asleep I heard the tick and scratch of sharp claws on the plasterboard as it scampered to and fro, to and fro above my head.
I was wakened by João’s knock at six in the morning. We went to the canteen for some tea and to collect my packed lunch. João said he hadn’t seen Liceu for a few days—he was very upset at the sacking, and had gone away. I suggested that whenever he came back we should meet up.
As we crossed the Danube I broke the bad news to João about the loss of my field notes and journal.
“A whole year,” I said, ruefully. Now that I was heading out to work, the loss was suddenly painful. “We’ll just have to start again.”
“Well, I don’t think is necessary,” João said, trying not to smile. “I have my own notes. Plenty. Every night make Alda copy. For his training. You know he is not so good for writing.”
“From the time I came? Everything?”
“Just the daily journal.” He shrugged. “Of course, some days I am not with you.”
“But I was either with you, or Alda…and Alda has his notes?”
“Oh yes. I check him every night.”
I let the smile grow on my face. “I’ll come and get them,” I said. “Tonight.”
“Of course.” He was very pleased with himself. “So nothing is waste.”
“What would I do without you, João?”
He laughed at me, averting his face and making a tight wheezing sound. I clapped him on the shoulder.
“Well done, João,” I said. “We’re going to be famous.”
We came to a junction in the path. Back to work.
“All right,” I said. “Where do we start?”
“Ow.” João smacked a palm against his forehead. “I forgot. Lena and her baby, I saw her. She have a boy.”
“Let’s go and find her.”
We found Lena at midday with a few other members of the southern group. They were resting in the shade of an ironwood tree. Lena was nursing her new baby and around her lounged Mr. Jeb, Conrad, and Rita-Lu. There was no sign of Clovis, Rita-Mae, Lester and Muffin.
João and I approached a little closer than usual, settling down only thirty feet or so from Lena. Her baby was almost hairless, and blue-black in color. Conrad was grooming Mr. Jeb, but I noticed from his regular glances toward Lena that he was clearly fascinated by the baby. Rita-Lu lay idly in the grass. She looked half asleep. I noticed a fresher pinkness on her rump and possibly some signs of swelling.
“We need a name,” João said softly, “for the baby.”
I thought for a while. “Bobo,” I said, finally. I had no idea why. João wrote it down on his record sheet: “Bobo, male, son of Lena.”
Conrad stopped grooming Mr. Jeb and slowly made his way over to Lena. She was leaning back against the trunk of the ironwood tree. Bobo clung feebly to the hair on her belly—through my binoculars I could see his tiny fists clutching tufts of fur—and sucked hungrily on her right nipple. Conrad moved closer, and Lena gave a small bark of warning.
Conrad sat down a few feet away and gazed at them both. Then, with Lena watching him intently, he reached forward very slowly across the gap between them and touched Bobo’s back. I had always assumed that Clovis had impregnated Lena, but now I had a funny feeling that Conrad might be Bobo’s father. Then Lena got up and moved away from him. I saw that the placenta was still hanging from her and the black loop of the umbilical cord was still connected to Bobo.
I shifted my position slightly and the noise I made caused Conrad to turn and look at me. With his white sclerotics, Conrad’s gaze was always the most disturbing I had ever received from a chimpanzee. The whites around the brown iris made his eyes as meaningful as any human’s. I looked at his black muzzle, the wide thin slit of his mouth and his heavy brows…he always seemed to be frowning. Conrad, a rather solemn and dignified character, not given to displays of frivolity. He came toward me a few paces and made some pant-hoots. Then he sat down and stared at me for a full minute, unswervingly. I looked into his eyes for a second or two, and then turned away.
Then, in the distance, I heard more hooting and barking. The other chimps hooted in response. Soon a crashing of branches heralded Clovis’s arrival, followed by Rita-Mae, Lester and Muffin. Like Conrad, Clovis was very curious about Bobo, but Lena would not let him come close, barking and grimacing and even, at one stage, climbing into the ironwood tree. Clovis gave up and moved away. However, when Rita-Mae approached, Lena was much less anxious, even going so far as to lay Bobo down in the grass. Rita-Mae peered closely at him, seemingly fascinated, and stroked him gently once or twice. Then Lena gathered him up and moved away again to the periphery of the group.
After resting in this way for a couple of hours the chimpanzees roused themselves and moved off northward, João and I following behind. They halted at a fig tree above the banks of the Danube, where the river cut a deep ravine through the foothills of the escarpment. We watched them feed for a while. I watched Rita-Lu repeatedly touching her genital area and sniffing at her finger. She was coming into season.
That evening I walked down the track into Sangui to collect all João and Alda’s field notes. João had said that he hoped Liceu might be there.
João’s house was one of the largest in the village, and one of the few to be made of concrete. He was sitting on the narrow veranda with a small baby on his knee. He told me this was his third granddaughter. I took the baby while he went to collect the papers. She was naked, fat, and almost asleep, drugged by her feed. She had small gold earrings in her long, soft lobes and around her hips was a string of tiny multicolored beads. Her belly button was a small hard dome, the size of a thimble. I stroked her hair and thought of Lena and Bobo.
João came back with his wife, Doneta, who relieved me of her grandchild. João had a great bundle of papers, mainly copies of the daily analysis sheets. He turned up the light on the veranda lantern and I quickly sifted through them.
“Is this everything?” I asked him.
“Even today’s follow,” he said.
This was ideal. “Is Liceu coming?” I asked. I was keen to get back home with this material.
“He is already here. Liceu!” he called into the darkness of the compound. After a moment’s pause, Liceu stepped uneasily into the circle of light cast by the lantern. Liceu was a teenager, about sixteen or seventeen, a constantly grinning, rather gormless boy who had wanted desperately to be a field assistant but who had neither the aptitude nor the patience. He came forward reluctantly, his face heavy with hurt and resentment, and started immediately and with belligerent conviction to protest his innocence. I let him go on for a while and began to piece together his version of events.
He had been tidying my tent, he said, and he had taken my dirty clothes to the camp laundry to be washed. He had been sitting chatting in the cooks’ compound when he had heard a commotion and run out to find the tent well ablaze. No, he said, he had not seen any sign of Mr. Hauser or Mr. Mallabar. He had no idea how the fire started.
Doneta brought us all mugs of sweet tea. I lit a cigarette and offered one to João. He accepted. Liceu was still fulminating at the injustice of his dismissal in an unpleasant droning way when I casually offered him the pack. He said at once, “No thank you, Mam,” and carried on talking. Two seconds later he stopped, realized what I had done to him, and looked at me accusingly.
“Ah, Mam, you know I don’ never smoke.” He sucked air disapprovingly through his teeth. He spread his hands. “Tell her that, João.”
J
oão confirmed this. I reassured Liceu, and apologized for testing him in that way. If I had not known it before, I did now: the fire in my tent was not the result of one of Liceu’s cigarette butts.
Later, I walked back alone up the track to Grosso Arvore, hefting a thick bundle of daily field records under my arm. The oval pool of light from my torch shone four feet ahead on the ground as I searched for snakes and scorpions, its beam freckled with dancing night insects. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do with all this data, to tell the truth, but it seemed to me clear that if Mallabar and Hauser wanted my records destroyed, then it would be prudent for me to try and reproduce some copy of my own research, however patchy. Something Roberta had said also nagged at me: if Ginga had delayed publication of the book for a year, did that imply that its publication was now imminent? And could that explain the panic and unseemly coverup of the dead baby chimp? Also, all this talk about money was intriguing. Mallabar had been made wealthy by his work at Grosso Arvore; I wondered how much he would receive around the world for the successor to The Peaceful Primate and Primate’s Progress?
I sat up late that night in the census hut analyzing and summarizing the information in João’s and Alda’s field records. To be secure, I really required copies of all these, but the nearest photocopiers were a six-hour drive away…. Perhaps I could volunteer to do next week’s provisioning run again? I smiled to myself. Usman would be very surprised.
Around midnight I came to the final days’ notes. There was João’s sighting of Lena and her new baby…. I turned the page: here, Alda had seen six unidentified male chimpanzees in southern territory. I frowned—they must have been northerners. I checked the map references. According to Alda’s estimations they were well south of the Danube.
I stood up and paced around the census hut. This was most unusual. Since the community split no northern chimps had ever traveled that far south…I yawned, went back to my desk and tidied up my papers. I wondered if Ian Vail had noticed this migration; if it was temporary, or if the little band of northerners was still in the south?
I undressed, went to bed and forgot about it. That night I dreamed of Hauser, emerging naked from his shower stall and scampering across the grass to my tent with a box of matches in his hand. He struck match after match and held them to the canvas in vain. Then suddenly Mallabar appeared, unzipped his fly, and pissed on the side. His urine ignited like blazing gasoline and soon the tent was burning fiercely. Then with horrible squeals Lena fled from it, Bobo clutched to her belly, her placenta bouncing and dragging on the ground behind her….
I remembered this dream vividly the next morning and wondered vaguely what my unconscious was trying to convey: Hauser could barely strike a light, while Mallabar pissed like a flamethrower. It made no sense to me.
When João arrived he said he felt ill—a fever, he said. I sent him home. I picked up my provisions from the canteen and headed south to look for Lena and Bobo. I found them toward midmorning, with all the other members of the southern group present, at the half-dead fig tree. I noticed that Lena’s placenta had dropped free in the night and that only six inches of dry, shriveled umbilical cord hung from Bobo’s hairless belly. Rita-Lu’s sexual swelling had also grown and both Mr. Jeb and Clovis were intensely interested in it, sniffing and inspecting her genital area whenever possible. Mr. Jeb even squatted down and presented his spiky erection to her, but she screamed at him and he scampered off promptly. The males generally seemed less curious about Bobo today, but Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu constantly approached Lena and her son. Lena was cautious, but she allowed them to hunch over the baby, peering at him and touching him gently from time to time with their fingers.
I took up my position and observed them for almost three hours. My head was full of suppositions and hypotheses about the fire, and the possible role played in it by Mallabar or Hauser. I had temporarily hidden the field notes beneath the mattress of my bed, but the census hut was not well blessed with hiding places and I realized, on reflection, that beneath the mattress was the first place anyone would search. I wondered whether I would be wiser leaving them with João until I had had copies made, but couldn’t decide. All the time, I asked myself, fruitlessly, what on earth was going on.
Then I heard a warning bark that snapped me out of my circling speculations. I looked up. Lena, holding Bobo to her, was now sitting in a low branch of the fig tree. Rita-Lu was approaching her, on the ground, one hand held out. Behind Lena, I saw Rita-Mae climbing higher in the tree. Lena bared her teeth at Rita-Lu. I wondered what I had missed, the mood was now so clearly tense and hostile. Rita-Lu persisted, arm held out, inching closer, as if she wanted to pet Bobo. Lena screamed furiously at her, the noise shrill and ragged, and stood up on the branch, as if she were about to jump to the ground and run off. But before she could move further, Rita-Mae swung down through the branches of the tree above her and threw herself onto Lena’s back. All three fell six feet to the ground.
At this commotion, the other chimps began to scream and display but none intervened in the fight. As Lena hit the ground, still clutching Bobo, Rita-Lu immediately grabbed her free arm and sank her teeth into her hand, working her jaws violently, chewing on the flesh of her palm. Lena screamed in agony, and with rapid jerking movements tried to pull her hand free. Rita-Lu hung on and I saw Lena’s blood falling from the sides of her mouth as her head was jerked to and fro. Meanwhile, Rita-Mae had leapt on Lena’s back again and was trying to rip Bobo from his mother’s grasp. Then she backed off and lunged and snapped at Lena’s rear, her teeth gashing her bare rump badly.
At this new attack, Lena dropped Bobo, her head arched back in a shriek of pain. She whirled round and leapt on Rita-Mae, snapping and punching with her fists. Rita-Lu immediately seized the baby and climbed with it up into the tree. Lena tore herself away from Rita-Mae and raced after her child. She bit Rita-Lu on the shoulder and tore Bobo away from her. Now Lena had Bobo, but Rita-Mae was in the tree beneath her and was snapping and biting at her feet while Rita-Lu, above her, repeatedly hit her about the head and shoulders with her hands. Lena held one arm above her head to protect herself. Rita-Mae, with a sudden lunging movement, grabbed Bobo and shimmied down the tree to the ground with the baby, while Rita-Lu kept up the attack.
Bobo was making a shrill keening sound, his thin arms batting the air uselessly. Rita-Mae bounded away from the tree, holding him out at arms’ length with one hand. Then she squatted on a rock and drew him into her breast as if she were going to cuddle him.
It was at that moment that I knew what she was about to do. I screamed at her: “Rita-Mae! Rita-Mae!” But I was just another sound in the cacophony of sounds, and she didn’t hear me, or was not bothered by my desperate shouts. Bobo wriggled and squirmed in her grasp, then Rita-Mae hunched forward and bit strongly into his forehead. I heard a distinct cracking sound as the frail skull was crushed by her teeth.
Bobo died instantly. At this, Rita-Lu immediately broke off the fight with Lena, retreating higher into the fig tree. Lena lowered herself slowly to the ground, exhausted and bleeding from the bad wounds on her hand and rump. The noise subsided.
I looked round. Rita-Mae was eating Bobo. She tore into his belly and pulled out his entrails with her teeth. She flung his guts away onto the rocks. Rita-Lu, meanwhile, climbed out of the tree, circled round Lena—who started to scream, loudly and monotonously—and rejoined her mother. They both fed on Bobo’s body while Lena screamed vainly at them. Then, abruptly, she stopped. She seemed to lose all interest; all her outrage disappeared. She gathered up some leaves and dabbed at the wound on her rump with them.
Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu continued to eat the baby. Lester came up to his mother but she pushed him away vigorously. The other chimps also seemed to grow indifferent to what was going on. Only Lena kept staring at Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu. Then she left the tree and made her way over the rocks toward them. She stopped about six feet away, and watched them silently as they ate her dead baby. Then she began to whimpe
r and extended her hand. At first Rita-Mae ignored this gesture. Lena circled around the two of them. She found a fragment of Bobo’s entrails on a rock, picked it up, sniffed it and let it fall. She whimpered again. Rita-Mae dropped Bobo’s body and went toward her. Lena whimpered submissively. Rita-Mae embraced her, holding her in her arms for a full minute. Then she released her and returned to the baby’s corpse. Lena sat and watched Rita-Mae and Rita-Lu for the rest of the afternoon as they fed idly on the body. At dusk, when they moved off to their nesting site, Rita-Mae draped the shreds of Bobo’s body over her shoulders like a scarf.
Mallabar’s face remained still and emotionless as I told him what I had seen. We were in the census hut, alone; the evening meal was over. I sat on the bed, he sat by the desk. I finished talking. He looked down; I could see his jaw muscles working busily beneath his neat beard.
“Was the field observer with you?” he asked, formally.
“No. He was ill so I sent him home.”
“So there was no other witness.”
“For God’s sake, I’m not on trial. I saw—”
“I’m sorry, Hope,” he interrupted me. “Deeply sorry that you should feel this way.”
“Feel what way? What’re you talking about?”
“I’m prepared, just this once, to accept that the shock of the fire and the loss of a year’s research may explain this…this fantastical story.”
He looked at me, his face full of concern. I said nothing.
“On a personal level,” he went on, “I can only record my deep hurt that you should feel such resentment and bitterness toward us here, your friends and colleagues. And whatever you may think, we are your friends.” He stood up. “You’ve changed, Hope.”
“Good.”
“No, it’s not. And I’m sorry for you.”
This made me mad, but he started speaking again before I could interrupt.