The People in the Trees (14 page)

A half hour later we had reached the far side of the island, and here, although there was no beach, land and water met on equal level. Our captain, who had not spoken a word to us throughout the journey, dropped a homemade anchor, a lidded tin pail full of jangling nails, about twenty feet from shore. The water was the complex green-of-many-colors of a dirty tourmaline, but so clear that I could see clouds of glassy minnows darting under the boat, casting
pale smears of shadow onto the ocean’s sandy floor. We could not pull closer to shore, not only because there was no shore to be had but because of a series of large boulders, their faces smooth and impassive, that punctuated the waters. As I waded toward the island, my supplies strapped to my back, I passed one that was pitted with small shallow pockets, each of which cupped a glossy, bristling black sea urchin. The last yard or so before land was fiercely pebbled with stones, the water’s surface scummy with handfuls of vivid red seaweed, as if it were the ocean’s last attempt to assert itself before the might and force of the jungle, which was here tauntingly dripping long tails of a peculiar, thick, three-sided cactus over the feeble waves.

There was a shivering in the bushes before us—rather as if in some castaway movie—and then, emerging from the thick of the forest (again, as if in a movie), three men, all U’ivuans. All of them were dressed in that inimitable blend of modern and native—a man’s undershirt worn with what looked like a beaten-bark fabric sarong; a pair of drooping, sacklike pants worn by a man whose nose was, I was excited to see, actually punctured with a thin, reedlike bone; a limp cotton shirt atop nothing at all but a curious penis guard made of loops and loops of woven dried vines—that is particular to places whose relationship with civilization is a new or evolving one: I would see it in the Brazilian jungle, and later in Papua New Guinea, and again in Nagaland. After the boat captain, they were the second, third, and fourth U’ivuans I had met, and after all the stories of their ferocity, I was surprised by their size—the tallest came just to my shoulder—and by the flat ugliness of their faces, the way their noses sprawled sloppily across their cheeks, the way their skin shone like an old grease stain, the way their lower jaws seemed to punch forward from the rest of their features. They were neither fat nor thin, although their legs were corded with stringy muscle and their thighs were enormous, the thighs of people who had spent their lives climbing up and down steep mountainsides.
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The tallest of the three, the one wearing the cotton shirt,
approached Tallent, and the two of them rubbed their noses against one another, hard, before beginning a low, staccato conversation in U’ivuan. The other two men stood staring at us fixedly—Esme, who’d been the last to struggle through the silty muck of sand, now stood a few feet from me, flapping a loafy hand at her face in a weak effort to cool herself—and although they did not appear to be hostile, something about the stillness of their attention made me not want to let my eyes stray from theirs, and I found myself staring back, dizzy in the heat, while little gnats busily orbited my head like planets.

We each had our own guide. Tallent’s was the tall one, Fa’a, and Esme’s the one in the sarong: his name was Tu. Mine was Uva, the man with the bone in the nose, and as he passed before me to hoist my rucksack onto his back, I caught a glimpse of what looked like carving on one end of it. My knapsack was very heavy, but when I reached out to help Uva adjust it on his back—his skin was as textured as rhinoceros hide—he sidestepped me slightly and rocked his shoulders until the bag centered itself between his blades before turning and following the others, who had disappeared between two large trees so thickly pelted with moss that it was impossible to see the bark beneath. He, like his fellow porters, had only a small soft cloth bundle of his own, about the size of a pillow, slung by a fragile rope across his chest.

We walked. There was no path, and so Fa’a, leading the way, pushed back saplings and bushes and leaves the size of frying pans, each of us catching and pushing them behind us in turn as we passed. I was unnerved at how quickly the jungle had swallowed us, at how insignificant our presence was within it; fifteen minutes or so into our journey, I turned around to look at how far we’d come, only to see that our path had already been obscured by armies of trees. Above and around us, the air was vivid with conversation—honks and clucks and shrieks and chirrups—and even after only a half hour, the sky had been all but blotted out by the treetops, the blobby swatches of blue growing tinier and more infrequent with each step. Uva and the other guides were barefoot, the bottoms of their feet crusted and puffy, but Tallent, Esme, and I wore heavy-soled boots, and with every footfall I could hear unseen creatures skitter on the ground beneath us. The trees’ roots had braided themselves into a
slippery latticework, and I had to concentrate on the floor below lest I tripped and fell; in my peripheral vision, all was richly dark green, and so close I felt as if I were walking through a narrowing, furred tunnel, an illusion enhanced by the sunlight, which became ever more inconsistent, dribbling through the dense treetops in trickles.

Our route, which had been uphill, grew suddenly steeper, and the air at once cooler and moister—so thick was the vegetation that there was no breeze, which only made the trees and bushes around me seem more unreal, more like statuary, although all around us was their smell, a complicated and insistent perfume of loam and rot and sugar that made the back of my throat ache—and still we did not stop. Above me, Esme swayed, and Tu grabbed her arm, swiftly and gently, and although she nodded and kept walking, when I passed her I felt and heard her breath, as hot and loud as a horse’s after a long race. I was carrying nothing except for a small rucksack, but the air had begun to feel as substantive and thick as soup (I thought, ridiculously, of chowder, its pearly buttermilk sheen, its surface a wrinkled skin), and when Tallent announced, after we’d reached a shallow plateau at the top of a particularly steep passage, that we’d stop for the day, I wanted to cry with relief.

We dropped to the ground, the three of us, while Fa’a—after speaking with Tallent, who listened and then nodded—and the other two guides veered right off what I had come to think of as our path (although there was no path) and vanished into the forest. I drank the water in my canteen, which had become as warm as the air around me and therefore left me parched; Esme lay down and rested her head against her bag and closed her eyes. Around me the jungle hummed, a low, ceaseless buzz, as if the entire island were some sort of mysterious appliance plugged into an enormous yet invisible energy source.

I must have slept. When I woke, I couldn’t tell how late it was—if such a thing mattered here—although the gloom did seem deeper, more urgently alive. Mats of woven palm had been laid out about three yards from each other, and our bags placed near them; between the first two, Esme and Tallent sat, talking quietly.

“Good evening,” said Tallent, looking up as I walked over. “Have some dinner.”

He, unlike Esme and I, had carried two bags, and from the
larger he drew a packet of crackers. On the ground, lying bright and disconcerting against the moss, was a can of Spam, its tin lid peeled back like a bedsheet and the meat beneath a slimy, nauseous, feminine pink.

“I’m not hungry,” I told him.

“You should eat,” he said. “You’re hungrier than you know, and tomorrow’s another long day. Besides, we should eat these crackers before they get too soggy—nothing stays crisp in this humidity.”

“By the time I left U’ivu the last time, I was longing for crackers,” Esme said, but her voice had lost its triumphant smugness. She seemed not yet to have recovered from the day’s exertion; her face was still an unattractive, splotchy red that made it look stubbled.

So I accepted the crackers, which were floury and mild, and spread some cold meat on them. As I handed the empty plastic wrapper back to Tallent, who shoved it into an outside pocket of his bag, I listened to its lively crackle, which made me think of burning wood. “Shouldn’t there be a campfire in cases like this?” I asked them. I even smiled at Esme, who was too busy hacking off pieces from the brick of Spam to notice.

In answer, Tallent took up a nearby branch and held it to the tip of the flame from his lighter. But the fire almost immediately fizzled, leaving behind a sulky curl of weak smoke. “Oh,” was all I could say. Of course. The wood here was too wet.

“Don’t worry,” said Tallent. “Once we reach higher ground, Fa’a tells me, the forest will clear and everything will be much drier.”

I walked a couple of minutes into the forest behind us, in the direction Tallent had pointed, where I found a thin stream, silvery as a snail’s slime, creeping over the surfaces of a series of notched gray boulders. I relieved myself against a tree that disappeared, branchless and almost comically erect, into the canopy above us, and washed my face in and drank from the water, which was cool and tasted faintly salty, oceanic, as if it had been mixed with fistfuls of ground-up seashells. When I returned, Esme was asleep on her mat, another mat pulled over her, her boots lined up at her feet. Tallent, though, remained where I’d left him, his knees pressed against his chest, his head and neck pitched forward a bit, staring into the forest at something I couldn’t see.

“How was it today?” he asked as I sat down.

“Fine,” I said.

“I realize,” he began, and then stopped, looking down at his hands. “I realize I haven’t told you very much about what I’m—we’re—doing here. You were very good to have come. Or very crazy. Or desperate.”

I laughed, but he didn’t.

“The truth is, I don’t know, really, what we’ll find,” he continued. Another long silence, which I would come to know meant that he was thinking carefully about what he would say—not because he was afraid that I’d misinterpret him, but because he was the sort of person who never spoke unless he was certain; he was not interested in speculation or theoreticals; he never said anything unless he knew it to be true. Which is not to say he was incurious, or arrogant, or sloppy, or that he never doubted, or rethought things dozens, hundreds of times—nothing of the sort. But he did his wondering, his imagining, in silence; to engage someone in his uncertainties was, I think he felt, presumptuous, and perhaps even rude.

And yet he
was
uncertain; he
didn’t
know what he’d find. He was not a man who operated on hunches and intuitions, and yet this time he had—he had guessed at what he might find, and he had asked me to follow him based on that guess.

This did not offend or alarm me. Science itself is guesses: lucky guesses, intuitive guesses, researched guesses. I had worked for people who were certain, and it had felt disquieting, and dangerous. And so I had been happy to come here (well, perhaps not happy, but certainly not worried; although Tallent had not been completely incorrect—I had been desperate as well) not knowing the full story. I suppose this sounds foolish now, unrealistic, but when you are young, planning seems less important, less essential, than it becomes when you have things to protect: money, research, a reputation.

And so I settled back to wait.

It took some time for him to begin.

“As a doctor,” Tallent said, “what do you want the most? You want to cure diseases—you want to eradicate illnesses, you want to prolong life.” (Actually, I had no interest in any of those, at least not in the way I believe Tallent meant it. But I did not contradict him.)
“But what I want—and this will sound childish, but it is ultimately why we are here, and it is an interest many of my colleagues share, even if they are too grand to admit it—is to find another society, another people, one not known to civilization, and, I should say, one that does not know civilization.”

After this came a long disquisition about the discipline of anthropology and its various practitioners and heroes and miscreants and theories, which I mostly ignored, but which I listened to enough to learn that Tallent considered himself—though he did not use the word—something of a maverick, someone who would reshape the field entirely.

But then he said something that would intrigue me for those many months we were on the island together, and to which I would never find definitive answers. “I know what it’s like to be studied,” he said. “I know what it’s like to be reduced to a thing, a series of behaviors and beliefs, for someone to find the exotic, the ritual, in every mundane action of mine, to see—” And then he stopped, so abruptly that I knew he had just revealed something he had not intended to, and that he, who was not an incautious man, was wondering why he had done so, and regretting it as well.

“What do you mean?” I asked, and I kept my voice as gentle as possible, so as not to startle him, so as to lull him into continuing.

But of course he was not a pet or a child, and it would take more persuasion or cleverness than merely a quiet voice to overcome his better instincts. “Nothing,” he said, and fell silent, and I was at once aware of the loud, buggy air, and that I had been holding my breath.
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