THE MONKEYS OF GÁVEA

 

I know monkeys are in the area when I hear their high-pitched chatter followed by startling and angry jungle screams. Then a band of young brown monkeys - the kind I remember from reading CAPS FOR SALE aloud for my son when he was little, swing through the tall jackfruit trees on our property. With long tails curling at the end and little squished faces surrounded by stiff beards they bend the branches and release them in swishing flow of movements. As they move, they jump by instinct, traversing even quite large open spaces without hesitation, at the last minute grasping the nearest branch. Birds flutter away in alarm, and our German Shepherd, who seems more attuned to the birds, runs back and forth on the terrasse beneath the trees barking with a tennis ball in her mouth. She jumps heavily trying to catch the birds but ignores the monkeys unless a different sound makes her crash trough the undergrowth in search of whatever she heard. Then she too leaves a trail of moving foliage behind her as she plummets forward - and one only hopes she does not return with something in her mouth. 

 

Once past our garden, the band of monkeys congregates in a neighbor’s jackfruit tree, leaping from branch to branch and eventually on to a large deserted veranda. The house belongs to Gilberto Gil, a famous singer from the state of Bahia, but he stopped coming long ago, and the house seems abandoned now after a period of occupation by a several small production companies. All we hear from there is the burglar alarm that goes off after any oscillation in the electricity, which happens a lot in our area. A man sweeps the garden from time to time and recently reported that the monkeys had managed to get into the house, without stipulating the damage they did. There’s an alpha male in the group, a husky grey monkey with a big square face. I spotted him the other day, sitting upright next to the tree trunk. I was so startled by his size, I had to call my son for verification. I had never seen a monkey this large in our neighborhood and we all stared at each other for a long time. 

 

The monkeys are usually active in the mornings. In the early afternoon they move back though our trees, stopping to examine the ripeness of our jack-fruits – they are not ripe yet – and mischievously hurling the hard, green fruit grenades down into our garden. They’re headed for the other side of the road to the large properties there which border the rain fores. They have discovered a shortcut, jumping onto our roof and scampering across 48 solar panels to leap onto a jackfruit tree in the front garden. In my upstairs office on the street-side of the house I hear them execute their impressive jumps across the more than four meters which separate the roof from the tree, and from my window I can see them land safely. Sometimes we stare at each other, the monkeys and me. They look me over with their intelligent dark eyes, and then dismiss me, stretching and leaping from tree to a nearby palm frond, clambering up the trunk to another palm frond overhanging the street and from there taking a dizzying jump to the forest of trees on the other side. Then the sounds recede, and the jungle feeling has gone.