The People in the Trees

  Tallent’s visit disturbed me more than I thought, more than it should have. He had been angry about the dreamers. “Norton, what happened to them?” he demanded after trying and failing to excite them with the hunonos, which not so long before would have inspired fits of salivating and anticipatory teeth-clacking, and before I had a chance to answer, he said, “Mua doesn’t even speak anymore. Eve won’t even stand up! And they’re obese—what on earth have you been feeding them?” I will admit now that I had not been spending anywhere near the amount of time with the dreamers that I ought to have, but at the time I mostly thought it very unjust that Tallent should be holding me responsible for their decline. Would he have been able to do any better in such an environment? (I thought briefly of the dreamers we had left behind tied to the manama tree; were they in better health, livelier, than the ones we had taken with us? Were they even alive?)

  He left in a fury, and I found myself abruptly devastated. Of course it was ridiculous; I had moved far past the point where I needed Tallent’s help, much less his approval, not to mention the fact (I had to remind myself) that I didn’t even much respect his field of study. And yet I did crave from him something he seemed unwilling or unable to give.

  However, this did not stop the elation I experienced when I heard shortly thereafter that I was to return to Ivu’ivu. Along with bestowing on me instant and permanent legitimacy, Sereny’s paper had the added benefit (or, if you asked Tallent, detraction) of making every medical school in the country eager to send its own research team to Ivu’ivu, this time for the sole purpose of retrieving as many turtles as possible and bringing them back to its laboratories. Although I had nowhere near official or permanent status at the university—a fact I made sure to remind the president of at every opportunity—I was, as the school’s “honored guest,” being respectfully asked to go on Stanford’s behalf. I would be accompanied, I was told, by someone I knew well: Tallent. And, unfortunately, Esme.

  I wasn’t quite sure how to react to this news. My attraction to Tallent, my desire to be near him when even I could see that the feeling was not mutual, was something that had grown out of my control: I thought of it as a gigantic mushroom, puffy and misshapen and tumorous, ploofing out into strange and fantastic formations. I also feared, from our last interaction, that he must have been made to agree to this arrangement somehow and that it would not be a welcome pairing for him. (Less conflicted were my feelings for Esme, but when I asked the president if it was wholly necessary that she should go, he frowned and looked confused and I hurriedly decided to drop the matter.)

  And so a month later there I was, deplaning in U’ivu on the same bumpy, makeshift ersatz polo field, mounting the same ridiculous little horse (or one just like it), and being led by a man, Pava, who could have been Tu’s or Uva’s clone, so similar was he in appearance to them. But this time, instead of going straight to the fetid shack and from there to the boat, I was taken to Tavaka to meet the king. I was, naturally, excited about this, just as much about seeing Tavaka as I was about seeing the king.

  Decades later I would be in Valparaiso, Chile, for a conference and would be standing in the hotel’s lounge, looking out the window. In front of me was the port, where crayon-colored storage containers were stacked one atop another as easily as child’s bricks by a Jurassic crane, and around me was the neatly inverted ziggurat of the city, the tiers of houses and buildings forming tidy geometric steps as they ascended into the woolly wet gray of the sky. I had never been to Valparaiso, but the scene was somehow familiar to me, like a place I had experienced before. But it was not until much later that day, when I was sitting through yet another endless speech, that I realized why I had recognized it: it was because this was what I had hoped Tavaka might look like.

  Of course it was a ridiculous idea. Valparaiso is a busy port city that moves thousands of tons of cargo, whereas to call Tavaka a hub of any kind would have been to stretch the truth until it snapped and split in two. But at the time—for all my worldliness, I was, you will remember, still quite untraveled—it seemed to make sense: Tavaka was the capital of an island and would somehow reflect its position.

  Needless to say, it did not. In fact, the most striking thing about Tavaka was how much it resembled the village. Here was the same basic layout—rings of houses surrounding an unpaved town circle—and here were hogs (albeit smaller and more petlike) trotting untethered around the houses, and children (half clothed) wandering about as well, calling to one another and falling down and giggling and crying and generally doing all the things that children do everywhere. The houses were sturdier and more sophisticated—simple structures made of wood, with doors (but no locks) and thatched palm-leaf roofs—and there were more of them, but from a distance it could have and in fact did pass for Ivu’ivu. The essential differences here were the presence of the sea, whose waves licked the same stretch of flat sand again and again and which was only about fifty yards or so from the farthest ring of houses, and the king’s palace, which sat approximately where the ninth hut would have been, and the fact that this town was surrounded not by forest but by large squares of tilled land, the deep brown of its loam stitched with bright green fists of young crops. There was jungle nearby, of course, but it had been thinned so aggressively that you could see straight through it to the mountains, whose tops were covered with a crust of wildly tangled trees.

  I had at the very least expected something grander from the king’s palace, and while it is true that it was significantly larger than the other structures—about seven times the size of a standard house—and raised slightly above the others, its architecture was consistent with the others’, and it was by no means particularly kingly. Over its door hung an opa’ivu’eke carapace, handsome but not nearly as beautiful as the one in the ninth hut had been, and draped over it a braided swag of leafy vines, which gave off a lemony, peppery scent as I walked beneath it. As I did, I noticed that the turtle’s shell was cracked in one section and that it had been repaired with little butterflies made from wood.

  I was surprised by how pleasant it was inside. The house was arranged something like a Japanese temple, just one long, deep, low-ceilinged room, with two small antechambers at either end, the doorways to which were concealed with woven-palm mats. There was no privacy here, and yet there was no sound either. Where were the wives and their numerous children? Where was the king? Also resembling a Japanese temple were the floors, which were covered as well with palm mats. On the far wall, the one facing the entrance, hung a second opa’ivu’eke shell, this one much larger than the one outside. I could tell from the depth of its color and the way the plates had faded and softened at their edges that it was very old, and probably very treasured as well; in the gloom it was little more than a shadow if you were looking at it straight on, but if you moved just a few inches to the right or the left, you could see the plasticky gleam it made as it reflected the sunlight.

  Then there was a stirring from the antechamber on the left, and here, suddenly, was the king. Upon his appearance, Pava scurried backward roachily in a crouch that was half bow over the lip of the doorframe and out of sight.

  The first thing I thought was that he was far less impressive than the chief had been. He had a pleasant enough face, if such a thing could be said of the U’ivuans—a wide, amused mouth and very round, very dark eyes, like those of a marmoset. His hair was spotted with white and tied into a frizzy tumbleweed, and around his waist he wore a sort of triangular flap of lustrous satiny cloth that I later saw was actually thousands of crimson and black feathers woven into a zagging pattern. The only exceptional things about him were, first, the beautiful crown he wore, an exuberant wreath of what I recognized were lawa’a ferns and through which was threaded some of the citrusy vine that adorned his doorway—which reminded me of the a’ina’ina—and second, his spear, which was very long, at least nine feet, and slender, swelling into a large white tip. Even from a distance I could see that the spear was elaborately carved with shap
es of opa’ivu’ekes, and its base was etched with a series of whorls that Tallent later told me were meant to represent waves.

  There was only one man with him, one who was skinny and very brown and wore around his waist a leather pouch made of what seemed to be boar skin, and around whose head was a single loop of the vine. He waited until the chief had sat down cross-legged before me and then nodded at me before sitting as well.

  “I am translator,” he said.

  In subsequent years I would be asked and reasked about this interview with the king, as if he were the last unicorn and I the last to see him alive. And each time I would have to send my inquisitors away disappointed, for the truth is that the conversation with the king was rather banal. (Later, when I was to meet other monarchs of other countries, I would realize that the dullness of the conversation had perhaps less to do with Tuimai’ele’s capabilities in particular and more to do with the position itself.) He asked if I liked U’ivu and I said yes. He asked what in particular I liked about U’ivu and I, savvy enough at least to know not to reference Ivu’ivu, said I liked the beautiful trees and flowers and his lovely house. He nodded. I thought then, fleetingly, that I might have an opportunity to turn the conversation toward the opa’ivu’eke carapace, but as anyone who has met a head of state knows, trying to introduce any topic of interest—which, as a general rule, they seem not to want to discuss—is next to impossible if one wants to maintain good relations. He said he understood that I worked with Tallent, and I, not knowing what he had been told, replied with great caution: Yes, I worked with Tallent. Yes, he was a good man. Yes, he loved U’ivu very much.

  And then it was over. The king, who had not smiled once but whose large, toady mouth made it appear as if he had been grinning throughout, gave a firm and somehow conclusive nod, and the translator gave a subtle flick of his fingers at me, and I crawled backward and out in the same rounded, beetley squat my guide had adopted. Outside, I found Pava at once—he had been leaning against a manama tree and staring intently at the door—and when he saw me, he gave a wide grin that I was left to interpret as I followed him. Were there some people who, upon meeting the king, never emerged? Clearly I had passed some sort of crucial test, but of what—and what punishment I had apparently eluded—I couldn’t guess.

  He led me toward one of the huts closest to the beach and stopped and called out. I heard a rustling from inside, and then the door pushed open and a woman emerged to stand before me, blinking in the light. Behind her I could see the inside of the house, which was dark and whose circumference was rimmed with things: palm-leaf mats and no’aka half-shells stacked one inside the other like bowls; a collection of bamboo poles; a series of woven baskets, their lids askew. Like Pava, the woman wore a single piece of useless clothing, one that seemed to evade altogether the purpose of clothes; in her case it was a long necklace strung with what looked like hog’s teeth, which drooped beneath but did not conceal her teats. Two children—one a boy of maybe eleven (he could not have been much more, for he was spearless), the other a girl of about nine—came out and stood beside her, not touching her, and what was notable about them was their silence, their watchfulness. A few yards from us, a group of children ran by in a noisy flock, but these two did not watch them go, only raised their eyes to me.

  Pava was looking at me expectantly, as if I should know them, and when I said nothing, only looked at them and then at him, his expression changed to one of impatience.

  “Who are they?” I asked him in U’ivuan.

  “Fa’a no ohala,” he replied, surprised. Fa’a’s family.

  I was startled and irritated and confused. Why had I been brought here? Was it possible—but no, it wasn’t—that I had asked to meet them?

  And so I began my second strange interview of the day. I asked questions and the woman, Fa’a’s widow, answered them, so briefly and dully that I would later wonder if she might be mentally impaired in some way. All the while, my discomfort was overshadowed by a sort of bright rage. Why was I being made to feel guilty about this, to meet Fa’a’s family, to see their sad hut (what I had seen as a disciplined, well-ordered space now struck me as a poor one, bereft of belongings and color and busyness), when I had had nothing to do with his death, which had been, after all, years ago? Had Tallent been subjected to the same meeting? What did they want? Money? Goods?

  Any respect I had managed to earn from Pava after my successful encounter with the king quickly dissolved, and after some minutes of this—he looking between the two of us in growing incredulity—he interrupted and spoke at length to Fa’a’s widow, so quickly that I was unable to comprehend. He seemed to be half lecturing, half pleading with her, but I was unable to tell which, for she never lifted her head to look at him. The two children stepped closer to her, but neither looked up. I noticed too for the first time how their skin had a dusty cast, as if they’d been rolled in talc, and how the other children, running past them, did so without even acknowledging their presence. From behind the hut strolled two women, carrying baskets and talking loudly, and although they walked within inches of Fa’a’s hut, neither of them thought to greet the widow or even to look in her direction. It was impossible to feel completely physically isolated from the others—they all inhabited such a small space, after all—but clearly the rest of the villagers had done their best to exclude Fa’a’s family from their society. Even the hut’s location, pushed back as it was to the far perimeter of the circle, seemed freighted with meaning; the only place its inhabitants could go from here was the sea. I looked toward the water and saw, perfectly framed between Fa’a’s house and its neighbor, the conical mass of Ivu’ivu; this view would be the family’s daily reminder of where their husband and father had gone and been lost and the answer, as I would later guess, to their ostracism.63

  Finally, seeing that he was unable to convince the woman to do as he’d hoped, Pava grabbed the boy by the arm and shoved him toward me. “Do you want him?” he asked me.

  “What?” I asked. Naturally, I was shocked. “No, no, of course not!”

  He pushed the boy back toward his mother (who was still looking at her feet) and this time pinched the girl around her skinny arm. “This one, then.”

  “I don’t know what you’ve been told,” I said to Pava, “but I don’t want either of these children.”

  “But she cannot keep them,” Pava told me.

  “Well, I can’t keep them either!”

  I was expecting him to argue with me further, but instead he turned and spoke to Fa’a’s widow once more—a long, diarrhetic stream of words out of which I could pluck only a few unhelpful terms: you, Fa’a, children, no, etc.—and then looked back at me. “Let’s go,” he said, and began strolling out of the village.

  As I trailed him, I fretted and seethed. What was that encounter supposed to mean, and how was I to interpret it? The lesson, clearly, was that Fa’a’s death had left his family in a state of penury, for which I was somehow being blamed (though surely the blame belonged equally, if not more, to Tallent—had the children first been offered to him?). Or was that the lesson? And did such a thing as penury even exist here? I had always assumed from the way the village on Ivu’ivu had been run, days and people tumbling into one another with no apparent laws or nuance, that U’ivu too was governed by a sort of lax, unevolved version of socialism, in which everything was shared and no one save the king had anything more exceptional than anyone else. Why, then, were things so difficult for Fa’a’s family? And more importantly, and troubling as well, why was I being offered his children, of all things? Surely it would be more feasible to ask me to procure goods (although I would have had little idea of how to go about doing that either, as I had no notion of U’ivuan money or how to get it) or, at the very least, food? Somewhere inside me, a small fern of fear unfurled: had Fa’a seen me with the boy in the woods and formed some sort of impression of me, one that he had passed on to the others? But I could not think that way. The old wearying sensation of being on these
islands was returning to me, the one in which I felt I was forever being asked questions I couldn’t understand, locked into my end of a one-sided, inexplicable exchange in which all my responses were incorrect.

  A week later—or more?—I was back at Tallent’s camp, in the same—or was it?—scrub of forest just on the edge of the village. This time my guide uphill had been not a U’ivuan but an actual Ivu’ivuan, a man I remembered from my last visit here, only because he had a terrible cleft palate that made him look as if his lower face had been gnawed on by a beast and then spat up and reassembled. Of course, this did not make him much of a conversationalist, first because he was not given to talking anyway, and second because everything he said was so garbled and slurpy-sounding that he may as well have been speaking underwater.

  It had been clear to me from the rapidity with which Uva and Tu had left us to hurry back to their families upon our last return to U’ivu that they would not soon or willingly make another trip to Ivu’ivu, but I missed them and their good-natured ways. The new guide, however—I could not tell if his name was Uo or Uvu—was a wonderful naturalist, and although he could not speak intelligibly, I soon grew to admire and appreciate his ability to spot the smallest of wonders in the forest, which he would either bring to me or point out for my enjoyment. One day he brought me a scarlet petal as small as a chickpea, which upon examination I realized was an orchid, scaled down until it was impossibly tiny, its lip a pale, unearthly gray. When he saw that I liked it, Uo beckoned me to a kanava tree a few yards off our path, and I saw that a small lake of them was painting the jungle floor a vibrant, bloody crimson. But what I loved most was their scent, one that mingled sweetness and decay at once and filled one’s nostrils so completely that its very memory lingered for hours afterward.