The morning when we let her into the cage with N’Pongo was a red letter day, but fraught with anxiety. He had by now become so well-established and was such a fearfully extroverted character that he obviously considered he was the only gorilla in the world and all human beings were his friends. We did not know how he would react to Nandy’s sullenness and anti-human attitude. Although for twenty-four hours he could see her in the cage alongside him, he had shown absolutely no interest in her presence. Thus when the great moment of introduction came we stood by with buckets of water, brushes, nets, and long sticks just in case the engagement party did not come off with the same romantic swing that one expects from reading women’s magazines. When all was ready, we opened the shutters and Nandy, looking thoroughly distrustful, sidled her way from the small cage into N’Pongo’s comparatively palatial quarters. There she put her back to the wall and squatted, her eyes darting to and fro with a curiously suspicious yet belligerent expression on her face. Now that she was actually in the cage with N’Pongo, who was sitting up on a branch, watching her with the same expression of uninterested mistrust that he reserved for some new item of diet, we could see that she was very much smaller than he—in fact, only about half his size. They sat steadily contemplating each other for some minutes, while we on the other side of the wire did hasty checks to make sure that all our buckets of water and so on were easily accessible.
This was the critical moment: the two gorillas and ourselves were frozen into immobility. To any spectator who did not know the circumstances we would have appeared like one of the more bizarre of Madame Tussaud’s exhibits. Then N’Pongo stretched out a black hand with fingers like great sausages, clasped the wire, and rolled himself carefully to the ground. There he paused and examined a handful of sawdust, as though it were the first time he had ever come across such a commodity. In a casual, swaggering manner, he sauntered in a semicircle which took him close to Nandy, and then, without looking at her, but with the utmost speed, he reached out a long powerful arm, gripped a handful of her hair and pulled it, then hurried along the perimeter of the cage as though nothing had happened. Nandy by nature has always been—and I fear will always be—a little slow in the uptake, and so N’Pongo was some six feet away before she realized what had happened. By then the baring of her teeth and her grunt of indignation were quite useless.
The first round, therefore, went to N’Pongo, but before he could get exalted views of male superiority I felt that we should bring up our second line of defence. We removed the buckets and nets and produced two large dishes full of a succulent selection of fruits. One was presented to N’Pongo and one to Nandy. There was one slight moment of tension when N’Pongo, having examined his own plate, decided that possibly Nandy’s contained additional delicacies which his lacked, and went off to investigate. Nandy, however, still smarting under the indignity of having had her hair pulled, greeted N’Pongo’s investigation of her plate with such a display of belligerence that N’Pongo, being essentially a good-humoured and cowardly creature, retreated to his own pile of food. For the next half-hour they both fed contentedly at opposite ends of the cage.
That night N’Pongo, as usual, slept on his wooden shelf, while Nandy, looking like a thwarted suffragette, curled up on the floor. All through the following day they had little jousts with each other to see who would occupy what position. They were working out their own protococlass="underline" should Nandy be allowed to swing on the rope when N’Pongo was sitting on the cross-beam? Should N’Pongo be allowed to pinch Nandy’s carrots even though they were smaller than his own? It had the childishness of a general election but was three times as interesting. However, by that evening, Nandy had achieved what amounted to Votes for Female Gorillas, and both she and N’Pongo shared the wooden shelf. Judging by the way N’Pongo snuggled up to her, he was not at all averse to this invasion of his bedroom.
It was obvious from the first that the marriage of the gorillas was going to be a success. Although they were so different in character, they quite plainly adored one another. N’Pongo was the great giggling clown of the pair, while Nandy was much quieter, more introspective and watchful. N’Pongo’s bullying and teasing of her was all done without any malice and out of a pure sense of fun, and Nandy seemed to realize this. Occasionally, however, his good-humoured teasing would drive her to distraction: it must have been rather like being married to a professional practical joker. When she reached the limit of her endurance she would lose her temper, and with flashing eyes and open mouth would chase him round the cage while he ran before her, giggling hysterically. If she caught him, she would belabour him with her fists while N’Pongo lay on the ground curled up in a ball. Nandy might as well have tried to hurt a lump of cement—in spite of her strength—for he would just He there, laughing to himself, his eyes shining with good humour. As soon as she tired of trying to make some impression on his muscular body, Nandy would stalk off to the other end of the cage, and N’Pongo would sit up, brush the sawdust from himself, and beat a rapid tattoo of triumph on his breast or stomach. Then he would sit with his arms folded, his eyes glittering, working out some other trick to annoy his wife.
To have acquired such a pair of rare and valuable animals was, I considered, something of an achievement, but now, I discovered, we were to live in a constant state of anxiety over their health and well-being; every time one of them got sawdust up his nose and sneezed, we viewed this with alarm and despondency—was this a prelude to pneumonia or something worse? The functioning of their bowels became a daily topic of conversation. I had had installed a magnificent communication apparatus in the zoo, for, small though it was, it could take a considerable length of time to locate the person required at the moment you wanted him. So at various salient points throughout the grounds, small black boxes were screwed to the walls, through which the staff could speak with the main office and vice versa. One of these boxes was also installed in our flat, so that I could be apprised of what was going on and be warned should any crisis arise. The occasion when I had doubts as to the wisdom of this system was the day when we were entertaining some people we did not know very well. In the middle of one of those erudite and futile conversations one has to indulge in, the black box on the bookcase gave a warning crackle, and before I could leap up to switch it off a sepulchral and disembodied voice said, “Mr Durrell, the gorillas have got diarrhoea again.” I know of no equal to this remark for putting a blight on a party. However, N’Pongo and Nandy grew apace, and to our relief developed none of the diseases that we feared they might contract.
Then came N’Pongo’s first real illness. I had just arranged to spend three weeks in the south of France, which was to be a sort of working holiday, for we were to be accompanied by a BBC producer whom I hoped to convince of the necessity for making a film about life in the Camargue. Hotels had been booked, numbers of people, ranging from bullfighters to ornithologists, had been alerted for our coming, and everything seemed to be running smoothly. Then four days before we were due to depart, N’Pongo started to look off colour. Gone was his giggling exuberance; he lay on the floor or on the shelf, his arms wrapped round himself, staring into space, and taking only enough food and milk to keep himself alive. The only symptom was acute diarrhoea. Tests were hurriedly made and the advice of both the vet and medical profession acted upon, but what he was suffering from remained a mystery. As with all apes, he lost weight with horrifying rapidity. On the second day he stopped eating altogether and even refused to drink his milk, so this meant we could administer no antibiotic. Almost as we watched, his face seemed to shrink and shrivel and his powerful body grow gaunt. What had once been a proudly rotund paunch now became a ghastly declivity where his ribs forked. Now his diarrhoea was quite heavily tinged with blood, and at this symptom I think most of us gave up hope. We felt that if he would only eat something, it might at least give him some stamina to withstand whatever disease he was suffering from, as well as rouse him out of the terrible melancholia into which he was slipping, as most of the anthropoids do when they are ill.