Easter Island (34 page)

“Allie.” Elsa’s fingers inch toward Alice’s jaw. “Allie, look at me. What’s wrong?”

But Alice only sways.

“We must get you out of these wet clothes.” Elsa continues to unbutton the blouse, then unclasps the skirt. In the steamer trunk, she finds a fresh towel and rubs it over Alice’s head, works it around her neck and arms. When Alice is dry and blanket-wrapped, Elsa crouches before her, takes her hands. “Allie, has anything . . . happened?”

Alice’s eyes return from their inward stare, taking in the room, taking in Elsa.

“I mean, with Beazley . . .”

Alice’s eyes flash to full alertness. “Beazley does not
does not
love you!”

Elsa nearly falls back from the anger in Alice’s voice. But her fingertips, by instinct, reach for Alice’s cheek. “Allie.”

Alice flinches, then swats at Elsa, her nails scratching Elsa’s neck. “He loves Alice! Do you hear me?” A bitter sadness rings through her voice. “He loves Alice!”

Elsa sits at the table by the beach. Across from her is Edward, who has wiped all traces of rain from his face, but now sweats. Several red splotches have erupted beneath his skin, spilling over his cheeks. Alice is asleep now, in her tent.

“I am not a sick man,” he says. “Please do not look at me like that. I am not a sick man.”

Elsa is silent.

“You asked me to care for your sister and I have cared for her. I have watched her and waited on her. You wanted me to love her and I loved her. I’ve never . . . never
done
anything . . .” He produces a handkerchief from his pocket and pats his forehead. “She plays around, you know her games. She grabs and kisses. Play, Elsa. Just play. You mustn’t think I would do anything inappropriate.”

Elsa does, in fact, believe what he is saying; but something larger, something she can’t place, disturbs her.

He crumples his handkerchief into a ball. “I have always tried to be a good man, Elsa. I am not an exciting man, not an entertaining man, not a passionate man, but I am a good man. After all this time, I’d think you would know that. Please allow me that one credit.”

Elsa looks up at the sky—a dim blue dome above them. A good man. Yes, and what of it? Does he want her to soothe
him
now? To make
him
feel better?

Edward’s eyes follow the path of her own. He looks at the sky, the grass, then finally at her.

“Elsa, I harbor no delusions. It is the benefit of being a perpetual scholar. I do not daydream, and I do not let desire deceive me. Let us at least admit to each other that you never wanted to marry me. That has always been clear. You never would have married me if you hadn’t had Alice to look after.”

Elsa holds her hand in front of her face, spreads her fingers, and examines the web of lines and grooves in her skin.

“I am old, but not a fool, Elsa. I know where you stand. I’ve known from the beginning.”

Yes. She asked them to tolerate each other, to be kind to each other, but nothing more.

“What would you like? Would you like me to apologize? Because I care for Alice, just as you asked? Well, I refuse to. You cannot control us. You cannot dictate the terms of lives for three people. Do you insist that she show me the same polite indifference as you? You cannot decide that for her.” He stops as if to gather the scraps of disparate thoughts. “Elsa, I have never been loved. I know you care for me, but I am not the kind of man people fall in love with. But Alice loves me, is in love with me, and I refuse to disdain that simply because she’s different, or because you didn’t factor that into your arrangement. How could Alice’s affections come between us when you have seen to it, from the beginning, that there is nothing between us . . . ? Are you hearing any of this? Elsa?”

Elsa recalls what her father said years before:
Old Beazley has suffered his fair share of amorous afflictions. Enough to send him all the way to the African continent.
Afflictions so great he could find comfort only in a girl incapable of hurting him?

“Well,” says Elsa. Her lips feel rigid, her tongue swollen. Each word is a stone. “Alice—does—love—you.” She looks at Edward’s furrowed brow, his sunken cheeks. He is like a man awaiting absolution. Is
she
supposed to absolve him? Is she once again supposed to attend to someone else? But how
easy
it would be to give it all up, to walk away, from Edward, from Alice, from herself. What, in the end, binds her to goodness, to love, to anything, but her own will to be bound? Duties are not facts; they are feelings. She takes a deep breath. It seems so frightening, so simple. She can sense her lips curling into a nervous smile: “But Alice has the mind of a
child.
”

“Elsa—”

“She cannot love you. Really. You mustn’t fool yourself, Edward.”

“You yourself have always said she comprehends more—”

“Amentia, madness, stupidity. Call it what you like. It doesn’t change—”

“Please, Elsa—”

“Don’t you understand? After all this time? With all your degrees and books and your anthropological studies you can’t see what she really is? Why don’t you study
her
? Interview her and see what theory you come up with. You wouldn’t even have to travel. Research in-bloody-situ, Edward. Write a five-hundred-page volume, have a glossary, but it will say just one thing—”

“Stop.”

“Imbecile!” This is the word people have always used. With each syllable, her palm smacks the table. “Im-be-cile!”

Edward reaches across and grabs her shoulders. “Stop it, Elsa. Stop.”

Elsa wrenches free, but then slumps lifelessly over the table. She has exhausted everything inside herself.

A tear rolls down the sharp line of Edward’s cheek, catching at the top of his beard. He shakes his head as though to disperse it, but this only releases another. “Do you want me to be ashamed? I assure you that nothing you say to me can be worse than what I’ve said to myself.” He looks down at the table. “I will not protest any accusations you make against me. But don’t do this. Not to Alice. You love her, Elsa. I’ve never for a moment doubted that. But”—he looks up and seeks her eyes—“I don’t think you fully understand her.”

“I don’t understand
you
.”

“What would you like me to say? All I can tell you is that this is real. No argument, no explanation, can make it go away. Alice is furious with you, because of what you have and she doesn’t.”

Alice, in love with him. “No,” she says.

“Perhaps you’ve loved her too much to let yourself imagine what she really feels, to imagine her pain.”

Elsa rubs the scratch on her neck, and the salt of her fingers awakens the wound.

“Elsa, I want you to know that I’ve been firm with her. I’ve told her that I cannot be like a husband to her. But when I tell her, she says she hates you. Of course she doesn’t mean that, but she has a strong sense of what she’s missing. She wants the things you want, wants to have the things you have. Elsa, you’ve known her since she was a child, and you think of her as a child, but she isn’t a child. Part of her is a woman. A very despondent woman.”

“
Woman?
I think you
have
let desire deceive you.”

“You say she understands more than it seems, you
know
she understands, and yet you refuse to consider the fact she may actually understand something of her own deficiencies. Alice knows she’s different. No amount of encouragement or kindness or love will prevent her from recognizing what she has been denied.”

“Denied?”

“That’s not an accusation.”

“What is it, then? Since the day she was born, and I do mean that literally, she has been loved, and cared for, and watched over, and entertained—”

“Don’t you see? You think of her needs only in terms of the ones
you
can tend to. You believe that her happiness, her health, and her well-being are completely dependent on you. I know the sacrifices you’ve made for her. You could make all the right choices, make endless sacrifices, but, Elsa, no person can provide contentment or safety to another the way you want to believe you can. Especially to Alice. She will always have longings and sadnesses you cannot remedy. You let the boy love her. Biscuit Tin. While you have a husband, a man you—”

“Allie loves Biscuit Tin,” says Elsa, though she knows this is not his point.

“She wanted to be in the tent with us. She wants a companion.”

“Alice. In love with you. With anybody. And jealous of me. After everything, she hates me.”

“She doesn’t hate you.”

“I did this,” Elsa says, gesturing to Edward, to the island, “for her.”

“I know,” Edward answers without anger. “And . . . I think
she
knows.”

Elsa refuses to believe this. It is too much.

“I do love you, Elsa, no matter what you may feel for me.”

She wants to say something kind, something to make him feel better, but she can’t find the energy. She doesn’t know what she feels for him.

“I can’t stay in the tent with you,” says Elsa.

“Elsa, you have been a good companion.”

It is on the tip of her tongue to say she has been a
convenient
companion, but she looks at his swollen eyes, and restrains herself. The venom of what she’s already said rises in her throat.

They sit in silence, the echoes of their conversation hovering above them. Elsa finally stands and wanders up to the rise above their camp. She lies down in the rough grass, listening to waves lap at the shore below. She closes her eyes and tries to picture herself before she came to the island, before she married Edward, before her father died. What was she like? Was she really kind to Alice? Images flood her mind: cycling in the afternoon through St. Albans, sitting in Dr. Chapple’s office, walking together through Hyde Park in the rain, their kiss in the dark. Did she understand Alice? And Alice—was she happier before Elsa became her guardian?
Guardian.
The word roams her mind, her memory. A breeze, carrying the chill of descending night, sweeps across her face. Slowly, the sky darkens, blackness seeping like tar to the edges of the horizon.

“Elsa!”

It is the following morning, and Elsa is lying, once again, atop the hill. She knows Kasimiro is awaiting her return, but she is too fatigued to budge. It feels like months since she was at the leper colony, excited simply by the translation of one small tablet. How happy she was, riding back along the coast, the
kohau
in her lap. But it now seems impossible another translation could give her such pleasure, that anything could. She cannot bring herself to go down to the camp again and see Alice, not yet.

“Elsa!” Edward calls from below. She can hear his boots clambering up the hill, can hear him panting.

“I just need to lie here.” But she only whispers this to herself, shutting her eyes. The symbols of the
rongorongo
float before her, clouds forming and dissolving.

“Elsa.” His voice is directly above her.

“Please. I’ll be down soon. I just want to be alone a little longer.”

“You must get up.”

“Edward—”

“Just tell me I’m not mad. You must see this.”

Begrudgingly, she opens her eyes. The symbols vanish, replaced by the gray sky, the grass. She doesn’t want to be here. She doesn’t care what color tern Edward has sighted, what marking he has found on a
moai.
She doesn’t care about his apologies or regrets. She simply needs solitude, but she hasn’t the strength to fight him. Edward’s face, crooked with bewilderment, hangs above her.

“I must be going completely insane,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Elsa, please. Sit up.”

Elsa sighs. “All right. What?”

“Just tell me. Please. Do
you
see that?” Edward points toward the water.

She props herself up on her elbows and looks down at the sea. What appears to be a fleet of warships is steaming toward the island.

20

The Sociedad de Arqueología de América del Sur had sent word that a small conference would be held on the island in October in which the four researchers would present their work to one another and to any islanders or tourists who wished to attend. To coordinate this, SAAS had sent Isabel Nosticio, a humorless but seductive middle-aged Argentinean woman with thick black hair to her waist, who always wore pink and an abundance of makeup. At the end of any conversation, about overhead projectors or hors d’oeuvres, she would reapply her lipstick. “Remember,” she would say, sliding her glossy lips together, “it is in the interest of the island community that we work.” Her main task was to make sure the eccentric researchers roaming the SAAS halls came through in the end, making the Sociedad appear efficient, charitable, and, ultimately, pro–Rapa Nui. In the wake of a Rapa Nui petition to Chile demanding land rights outside Hanga Roa, the conference, it quickly became clear, was meant as an appeasement.

Mahina was not impressed. “They ask you to tell us of your work, the work they decide for the island, so that we not complain of their government.
Pasto!
”

Greer was having breakfast in the dining room.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She sipped her tea and turned to Mahina, seated at the next table, drinking a tall glass of apricot nectar. Every morning they ate together at sunrise, as Greer was the first to wake of all the guests. Mahina would gather eggs from the yard, pluck fruit from the trees. Then Greer would hear the crackle of eggshells from the kitchen, the rhythmic thump of the knife as a guava was quartered. Greer couldn’t help but think that Mahina would have made an excellent scientist. Precision and procedure governed her life.

“It is our island,” said Mahina, who, out of some strict sense of professional boundaries, always refused to sit at Greer’s table. So they spoke across the space between them like solo travelers. Over the past few months, Greer had learned that Mahina started the
residencial
six years earlier, when the Lan Chile flights began. Before that she had been a schoolteacher, making sure the island’s children learned the Rapa Nui language; sometimes, on the street, if they were out walking together, a teenager would approach Mahina with great deference, and Greer could tell the person was a former student. Mahina, she was sure, had been a demanding but inspiring teacher. Her knowledge of the island’s folklore was encyclopedic, and she took her responsibility as a storehouse of history seriously; she made Greer write down the legends she recited, then read them back for verification. Over the past few weeks, roused by late-arriving news of the military coup in Chile, they had spoken often of politics, concerned about the new regime’s effect on the island. Greer’s sympathy for Rapa Nui’s predicament increased daily, but she knew little could be done. Chile, no matter who held office, was too large and powerful, Rapa Nui too small to exist on its own. The annual supply ship collected wool from the island’s Chilean sheep ranch. If Chile had no wool to collect, why send the boat? Who, then, would bring supplies—cement and furniture and food? Still, their conversations were not about pragmatism but political idealism and the right to live freely. To speak of the logistics, Greer thought, would seem offensive.