Russell Banks - The Darling

The dreamers had come to trust me, to welcome my twice-daily arrival with a joyful chorus of pant-hoots and hand-claps. We communed together, usually for an hour, sometimes more, in the mornings after my sons had been washed and fed at home and dressed for the day and placed in Jeannine’s care, and again in the late afternoon, when it had begun to cool and I did not mind riding my bike out to the compound and back, a thirty-minute ride each way that took me to the edge of the city and the beginning of the jungle. My time with the dreamers was the most peaceful, restorative two hours of the day for me, and I had quickly become dependent on the visits for what little peace of mind I had then. Without it, I feared I would come undone, for, despite the leisurely pace and apparent stability of my daily life as wife and mother, that life felt fragile, as if it were someone else’s and at any moment I would be exposed as a fraud, a counterfeit wife and mother, not at all who I seemed or claimed to be. And not anyone whom I knew, either. It was only when alone with the dreamers that I knew myself.

In those years, there were, as there is now, a large number of baby chimps being bought and sold illegally on the streets of Monrovia and in the marketplaces all over West Africa and many more babies being captured and smuggled out to labs in Europe and North America. I knew about this terrible trade, knew that to capture a single baby in the wild it was first necessary to shoot its mother and as many as three or four of the other adults who always tried to protect the baby from the human beings. Over the years, whenever I came upon one of the little wide-eyed, terrified creatures locked in a tiny cage or at the end of a chain in the market or alleyway, I purchased it myself, and after nursing it back to health, for the babies I bought were almost always malnourished and swarming with parasites, carried it out to the compound, where, with a terrible sadness, I imprisoned it with the others.

A baby chimp cannot survive alone in the forest, and I had no way of returning it to its lost and probably scattered and decimated family. The best I could do for it was provide a less cruel form of imprisonment and deprivation than the one that would lead inevitably to an early death. Baby chimps are like young humans, playful and clever and eager to please, and they respond to kindness with delight and gratitude. But after a few years they become troublesome, hormone-fueled adolescents and then adults, very powerful, willful, and highly intelligent creatures for whom the human order of things is perceived as a challenge, a regime to be overthrown. An adult male chimpanzee can weigh as much as an adult male human and is five times as strong and capable of extreme violence against objects and other animals, including human animals and its fellow chimps. When a pet baby or even a laboratory chimp becomes an adult, unless it is caged, it is almost always executed, killed simply for being itself.

In purchasing the babies I came across in the marketplace and locking them into a prison, I was saving their lives. But for what? Every time I walked along the rows of cages and pushed melons, bananas, cucumbers, and armloads of greens through the bars or passed the food directly into the hand reaching through the bars towards me, every time I returned the direct, deep-water gaze of the dreamers in my charge, and every time we spoke together, they in their language, and I in mine, I asked myself, why can’t I set them free? Lord knows, I wanted to do it, and hundreds of times I imagined doing it, simply unlocking the cages and taking them by the hand — for all of them now let me hold hands with them, and we even groomed one another — I would lead them under cover of darkness to the edge of the forest and there let go of their hands and turn and walk alone back into the city.

But it was too late for that. They were like ruined children, incapable of surviving on their own. Humans and chimpanzees have to be taught by their kith and kin how to be a human or a chimpanzee, how to find proper food and shelter, how to relate to others of its species in ways that are mutually useful and satisfying, how to reproduce, how to care for the young and the old and infirm — or else we perish as a species. Every chimp in my care had been captured as a baby and had been confined for its entire life so far, and did not know, therefore, how to be itself. And I had made myself the warden of their prison, and by default had become their caretaker and had made them dependent on me for their food and shelter and protection from the humans who would as soon neglect them and let them starve and die in their own filth as sell the babies for pets and kill the adults and sell their bodies for meat, their hands and heads for souvenirs. And now I was about to abandon them.

They greeted me that morning with their usual clamor and applause and loud declarations of hunger and thirst, which I quickly satisfied. Neither Elizabeth nor Benji had shown up yet and possibly wouldn’t arrive till evening, if at all, but I had arranged with Woodrow to have our yardman, Kuyo, who had developed an affection for the chimps, replace me as caretaker. Woodrow promised me that he would see to this, but I carried his promise to Kuyo myself, to impress upon him the seriousness of the job. Starting this very evening, I told him, his job as yardman would include purchasing the chimps’ food in the marketplace once a week and feeding them and washing down the floor of the Quonset hut twice daily. Woodrow’s office paid for the food from the general fund supplied by the grant from NYU, the same fund that paid Elizabeth’s and Benji’s salaries every month. Kuyo said he’d like that. “The monkeys-dem, we come to be friends now for a long-long time.” I felt, therefore, replaceable in the lives of my dreamers. But were they replaceable in mine? I wasn’t sure. Everyone else in my life, even my children, saw me as replaceable. Somehow I felt that in my sons’ eyes, just as in Woodrow’s, I had become extraneous to their lives, merely a witness, a sympathetic bystander. To Jeannine I was a pretender to the throne. To everyone in Liberia who knew me I was Woodrow Sundiata’s white American wife. I was a woman whose absence would barely be noticed.

Except by the dreamers. When I was no longer there mornings and afternoons with armloads of food and plenty of fresh water and kindly murmurings and filial touches on the hand and arm, they would know I had left them. And they would miss my pale shadow on the far side of the bars greeting their dark shadows, my blue eyes peering into their brown eyes and seeing there some essential part of myself, some irreducible aspect of my being, which in turn gave them back the same reflected version of themselves, revealing to me and to them the face of our ancient, common ancestral mother, caught and given shape here and now in her descendants’ mirrored gaze. The dreamers and I took each other out of the specificity of personal time and physiognomy. When in their presence I was in sacred time and space, and they were, too. I was convinced of it.

I know how this probably sounds to you, but I don’t care. Any more than a born-again Christian cares what she sounds like when she tells an atheist of her personal relationship with an itinerant Jewish preacher who was crucified in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. There are parallels between my meetings with the chimpanzees and the Christian’s encounter with Christ. When I first saw the dreamers, like a Christian touched by her savior, I wept uncontrollably. Later, through the daily rituals associated with caring for them, like any steadfast acolyte, I gradually got myself close enough to see them for what they truly were, a gate that led me straight to that ancestral mother. The spirit of the river, the one they call Mammi Watta.