A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
it was over, Nébride had already turned his back on the spectacle and started riding off, but he thought he heard Sorfos laughing behind him and he looked back to see. The guides too prompted us to continue on our way, but I felt Vandren’s hands on top of mine, as if he wanted to detain the horse for another moment; I couldn’t look at his face to find out if his emotion and his interest came from curiosity or trembling compassion. In the end, I brought my horse up next to the guide’s and asked him: “What was that?” “Those are the begging baboons,” he said, “animals who’ve suffered a long and sad history.” He told me that breed had previously only occupied the forests along the Barcial delta. When a group of Sesemnesces farmers tried to colonize one of those areas, the baboons had apparently ravaged their crops, which had been planted in an area the baboons considered part of their own territory. Having no experience hunting them and not feeling it right to start killing a breed of animal they had never killed, and seeing that they were not unfriendly nor fearful, the farmers opted—in their words—to make an agreement with them, to the extent that you can talk about an “agreement” between men and animals, and to teach them how to gather food in designated areas, showing them how to maintain crops and take advantage of them. And that was the beginning of their domesticity; they ended up moving into the villages and even became laborers, thanks to their intelligence, in some collection jobs, in the use of waterwheels, transporting loads, and in a great diversity of tasks, tasks more diverse and difficult than those any other domestic animal, or all of them combined, are capable of doing. But around nine years ago, a sudden flood washed away the villages and drowned the majority of their inhabitants, while the baboons, numbering close to one thousand, had almost all lived, because they slept in trees and had superior survival skills. The survivors searched for their village and could not find it, they called for their masters, they wept, they grew desperate and ended up scattering. But a small group of some fifty or sixty found the eleven humans who survived the flood: two families and two men who had lost their families and joined the others. There was nothing left for the people to do there; they were too few to start over, and they had no desire to stay in that horrible place. So they left in search of a new life, but the monkeys did not abandon them; they went and begged in Sea-bound towns, but the people did not want them coming near the village with the monkeys because they claimed they carried diseases. To abandon the monkeys was unthinkable; they couldn’t even fool one of those animals, how would they be able to fool forty or fifty of them? So they decided first to separate the women and children, one of them at a time, so that when they had gotten away they would reunite with their husbands, one at a time as well, so the baboons would not notice, assuming they would stay wherever the greatest number of humans stayed, wherever they thought the center was. But before putting this plan into practice, they discovered, by fortuitous circumstance, that for the baboons the center was one of the men, the oldest of the eleven, that it was to him they were fundamentally connected and they would not go anywhere unless he went as well. So his companions, the two families and the other man, parted ways with him amid many apologies. They showed him the great need they had—fearing for the children, condemned to a life of begging, expelled from everywhere—for him to stay with the monkeys, the pointlessness of sacrificing all of them, and a thousand other things, offering the final hope that he might manage to escape from the baboons too if he waited for the right moment, and with many blessings, they left in search of another life. The baboons remained impassive seeing them depart and gathered affectionately around their master and protector. It was this man who came to settle where the two paths leading to the ramp of the Iscobascos came together, hoping to beg, since the monkeys grew weaker every day—many had died already, although others had been born—and their appearance was totally repugnant, which would keep him from approaching any city or village with them, he feared too that they might go into the countryside and steal, and he would be the one captured and held responsible for any damage they caused and be beaten or pardoned for their thefts, since everyone knew the monkeys were with him. So, always accompanied by the monkeys, he approached travelers passing through the desert, and asked for alms for the monkeys and for himself, recounting his unfortunate story in words and with a voice more and more the same every day until he only told a single identical tale. And they said that he was totally deranged, because although what he said sounded clear and intelligible, he could not answer a single question posed to him; he seemed to be mute and deaf to everyone else. Because of this man the history of the begging baboons was known, but three years ago he had died of consumption and sickness. The baboons did not know how to leave that place and now they came out to the path on their own to beg, and the speech delivered by the oldest male of the tribe was nothing but an imitation of that man’s tale, including his hand gestures, to the point where many heard that same tale or believed to recognize it perfectly in the senseless, inarticulate, and unintelligible harangue of the oldest baboon. At last the courtier told me how the Iscobascos, whenever they passed through that region, often remembered to carry provisions for those miserable animals, like the sack that he himself had brought on this occasion, although it wasn’t always guaranteed that they would come out to the path, because during some periods, at the foot of the Meseged wall, where the great curtain of rain that ran down cliff face kept the slope permanently damp, there grew a few nutritious plants that the baboons knew how to identify and collect. But they would end up extinct, in spite of the babies that were born, because the land and conditions were not adequate for their lives, and even more so because, having shaped themselves according to the teachings of man, they’d become more like children, less able to fend for themselves. This oldest baboon that today asked for alms for his own, imitating the role and even the mannerisms of the man who he’d known as father and protector, would perhaps pass down, upon his death, his incongruous speech to the oldest male who would succeed him, and the begging and the reliance on the aid of strangers would be perpetuated among the baboons, undoubtedly, like a human condition from which they no longer knew how to return, with a great reduction in the use of their own unique faculties with which they would be able to survive and prosper. And if, for example, those unhappy creatures would just travel a distance of six thousand horses to the west, along the wall of the Meseged, they would come to the lush and ample walnut groves that extended to the regions of the Aldeas Soberanas, whose production the Atabates or the Aldeanos de Soberanía, in whose territories the forests grew, were unable to exhaust; but the baboons found themselves inevitably tied to the desert and the path where their master, or more precisely, their father had given them a way of life that, as precarious as it was, continued to constitute for them an inescapable condition.
Translated by Will Vanderhyden
2 Each vertical unit equals 2/3 of a horse—measured lengthwise.
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