Forest of the Pygmies Read Online Free PDF Page A

healthy, tall, strong, and always laughing. Her age was anyone’s guess; she could be anywhere between twenty-five and forty. Her easy laugh and fresh beauty captivated people from the first moment they saw her. She told them that she was born in Botswana and had learned to pilot planes in Cuba, while she was there on a fellowship. Shortly before he died, her father had soldhis ranch and cattle in order to provide her with a dowry, but instead of using the capital to snag a respectable husband as her father wished, she had used it to buy her first airplane. Angie was an uncaged bird that had never built a nest anywhere. Her work took her all over; one day she flew vaccines to Zaire, the next she carried actors and technicians making an action film on the highlands of the Serengeti, or ferried a group of daring mountain climbers to the foot of the legendary Mt. Kilimanjaro. She boasted that she was strong as a buffalo, and to prove it she armwrestled any man willing to accept her challenge and ante up his bet. She had been born with a star-shaped birthmark on her back—according to Angie, a sure sign of good luck. Thanks to that star, she had survived a number of adventures. Once she was on the verge of being stoned to death by a mob in the Sudan; another time she had wandered in a desert in Ethiopia for five days, lost, alone, on foot, with no food and only one bottle of water. But nothing compared to the time that she’d had to parachute from her plane and landed in a crocodile-infested river.
    “That was before I had my Cessna Caravan,” she hastened to clarify when she told that story to her International Geographic clients. “It never fails.”
    “And how did you get out of that alive?” asked Alexander.
    “The crocodiles were kept busy snapping at the chute, and that gave me time to swim to shore and get myself out of there. I made it that time, but sooner or later I’m going to be eaten by crocodiles. It’s my destiny.”
    “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