Monkeys

Edmond is small and wrinkled, but I am not fooled; I've seen the strength in wizened African men. Leading me easily through the jungle, I see my gauge of his strength is correct. My breath comes quickly, and I mop my damp brow with my damp handkerchief, while he tells an impeccable remembered history of the sanctuary. In 1827, he says, a fetish was spotted at the river, with four monkeys guarding it; two black and white, and two mona. It was a hunter that happened upon the fetish, and his presence initially scared away the naturally small monkeys. The hunter took the fetish home. Later the monkeys came to his house. They were not disruptive; they simply kept watch over the small, carved fetish. A priest was found, an he explained that the fetish was the child of the monkeys. The villagers could either keep it, and thus adopt the monkeys, or return it to the jungle and not be bothered by them again. They kept the fetish, and with it, made a vow not to kill anything in the jungle they lived in, regardless of whether the creature was monkey or snake, zebra or rat. As he finished the story, the branches began to shake. Water droplets whipped off of leaves and rained onto us. I am nearly certain one threw a stick at me. It was small, so I interpreted the gesture playfully. We bought bananas and fed them. The first few bananas I held too loosely, and rambunctious monkeys pulled them easily from my hand, to eat them a few feet away. Edmond showed me how to hold them tighter, and the next few monkeys carefully peeled back my fingers to get to the sweet fruit. One, distracted, sat holding my finger while he munched on the banana. His hands were leathery-soft. We ended with a visit to the monkey cemetery, where both monkeys and priests were laid to rest. Next to a wooden sign stating “young male Colobo. Buried 14-3-81” was another sign for a woman who had been the monkeys intermediary. The sign says she died at one hundred and twenty years old. Edmond whispers to me that she’d been a virgin, and had brought messages from the monkeys to the community. No one had replaced her since her death, he said. Shaking his head with disappointment, he explained “these days, it is hard to find a grown virgin”