TEN

Our cash killed Bedo

Sunday, July 2, 1989, Perinet.

Saturday night when the Bank arrived in Perinet he was in the bar of the Buffet de la Gare—where else to be available for tourists except Perinet’s one hotel? (It has fifteen rooms, and doubles as the railway station.) Would he take the World Bank people out Saturday night in the rain? Of course. He sat with a bottle of beer, playing dominoes in English with two elderly ladies until we were ready—a 19-year-old professional guide, working on his English over the domino game.

I gave him the present I’d brought—Stephen Nash’s portrait of thirty kinds of lemur saying Arovy izahay, ‘Protect us!’ I also had one for the hotelkeeper, Josef Andrianajaka. ‘How pretty!’ Josef exclaimed, ‘I’ll put it up and the tourists will be delighted!’ But Bedo sat studying it, reading off to himself the animals he knew.

He took a few of the Bank group out that night, spotting a tenrec in the undergrowth. He took the elderly ladies out at 6 next morning, Sunday, even though we had booked him for another Bank tour, doubling his profit for the day. He escorted the women back and caught up with us in the rain-spattered woods.

I first heard of Bedo four years ago in 1985, standing in a windy airplane hanger waiting for a dawn flight with Amoco’s Twin Otter to the stone pinnacles of the Tsingy. Photographer Frans Lanting paced up and down, saying ‘I wish Bedo had come. There are two great naturalists in Madagascar. One is Georges Randrianasolo, and one is a 14-year old boy named Josef Bedo. I so wanted to take them out to the Tsingy together, and to see that boy realize there are other people in the world who think like him.’

At 19 he was a dandy—orange-tan leather jacket, suede desert boots, and a reddish umbrella to keep the rain off his finery when not actually plunging through the woods. But he did plunge through, enthusiasm undimmed by rain, the drizzle in little drops perched on his bushy black hair. In his caramel-colored jacket and red umbrella he led our party of World Bank people through the Perinet rainforest. The Bank group peered up into the leafy sky, with grey-white cloud above and faces full of rain. They kept saying ‘Where? Where? Where?’ as Bedo told them which tree-trunk to locate, which branch to follow out, and then, see, in the fork below that bunch of epiphytes, two wet, immobile, nearly invisible indri—a trivial task for him, an eye-opener for the Bank mission.

He died because of jealousy. We, the foreigners, were responsible.

Bedo was the son of the chief forester at Perinet. The tiny natural reserve and larger forestry plantation were overseen by Bedo senior, who lived in a two-room wooden house and scrupulously kept the threadbare uniform issued to him ten years before. Little Bedo was a natural naturalist. He knew where the tenrecs had their burrows, what hid in hollow logs, where couas nested and where the indri slept. He was the one who discovered that aye-ayes live at Perinet where no one expected them, and claimed that they are more social than scientists’ wisdom pretends. I’ve seen him look across a valley at a velvet tapestry of trees, and spot the branches move, and know that kind of movement meant Lemur fulvus, and patiently explain to those of us with binoculars how to see what he’d seen.

Frans Lanting, balked at taking him to the tsingy, signed him on as a field assistant on the next trips—to Berenty in the south and Ranomafana in the east. Frans paid for his secondary schooling and spoke of future prospects if he would try to train formally. Bedo’s friend Hubert hosted him in Antananarivo, trying unsuccessfully to steer him away from the temptations of alcohol and pot.

Bedo worked hard at English. He dreamed of someday visiting the States, perhaps even the fabled Duke University. But school was hard to stick to. Guides from Tana would turn up and stop in the school: ‘Hey, Bedo! Hop on the bus! We have tourists to tip you if you come with us for the day!’ The tourists didn’t know how to tip any guide, let alone a sharp-eyed, English-speaking teenage boy. They gave him 5,000, 10,000 francs—three dollars, six dollars, even more for a morning. More than his father ever made; far more than the jealous other guides who tried to succeed by mere dogged learning, without Bedo’s passion for nature.

Frans published a four-page story about him in the National Geographic children’s magazine. Bedo at 16, stocky, grinning as Berenty’s ring-tails, bounded up a sapling toward him. Bedo with Frans’s headlamp, wide-eyed, watching one of Perinet’s foot-long, rococo stick insects poised beneath a twig. Tourists came to Perinet from Kansas and California and asked for Bedo.

Bernhard Meier, co-discoverer of the golden bamboo lemur, spent three weeks in Perinet with a German film team. Bernhard asked Bedo to sign on with them at 7,500 francs per day—very good money for his age, though it translates to only $7. Bedo refused. He boasted that he could get 50,000 francs a day from tourists. Even though Bernhard did not believe it, the boy could drink up 20,000 francs in an evening. Bernhard had come bringing an offer of a scholarship abroad in his briefcase. After three weeks no more was said. Bedo blew his chance.

He gave money to his family; he bought a punk hairdo and a radio and flashy clothes. He was like a teenage pop star: rich beyond imagining, and rich with no idea what his talents could lead to in a wider, adult world.

Bedo went drinking at the bar after the Bank party left. We left him there with his beer after his two well-tipped sorties on a Sunday morning. There was a fight—not a confused brawl but a stand-up fight against someone jealous of Bedo’s wealth and boasting. To everyone’s surprise Bedo won.

The man he’d defeated swore he’d get him.

He caught up with Bedo at the river. He hit the boy on the head with a big stone and threw him in the river. Or else he waited as Bedo tried to flee across the stream, and threw large rocks, which hit Bedo in the head. Or else he threw small pebbles. The only place Bedo could find to hide was under the bridge. There is a deep whirlpool or eddy there, where the water sucks in beneath the bridge.

Maybe a stone hit his head.

Maybe it was the whirlpool.

Maybe he was just drunk.

Anyway, he could not swim. He had always been afraid of water.

Or something else, because in Madagascar, every happening turns instantly into myth.

Divers from Fanalamanga found the body five days later.