Euphoria

24

I awoke to sobbing. Nell. In pain. I got up off my mat and pushed through the netting. I found her sitting on the floor at the front of the house, a girl shaking and howling in her arms. It was the girl from the night before, the one arguing with Xambun. Nell smiled at me in my underwear, but the girl kept up her crying. I retreated to my room. The girl saved enough breath for a few words and Nell cooed something back to her. Tatem mo shilai, it sounded like. He will come back. After a long while they stood and Nell wiped the girl’s face and led her out and down the ladder. I had got on my trousers and shirt by the time she returned.

‘There’s been a good deal of drama this morning.’ She said something to Bani, whom I hadn’t seen behind the kitchen screen.

‘Tell me.’ I came through the netting and sat at the table with her. She was wearing the pale green shirt again, now streaked with the girl’s tears.

Bani brought out coffee. I thanked him and he smiled and said something to Nell.

‘He says you speak like his Kiona cousins.’ Then she slid a piece of paper toward me.

Bankson—

I know you wanted to get back, but what’s another few days in paradise, right? It’s now or never. Don’t be miffed I didn’t invite you along. Someone needs to stay with Nell and you’re clearly the Southern man for the job.

‘He’s taken your canoe,’ she said. ‘That was Umi, Xambun’s girl. He’s broken it off with her, told her he was going to go away soon. Move to Australia. And now he’s gone with Fen. This whole time — all those times Fen kept leaving the house — he was scheming with Xambun. Not even interviewing him, just plotting to get that goddamn flute.’

I thought of the way he kept disappearing, the way his moods shifted, the way his attention slipped in and out. The way Xambun had moved toward me the night before, expectantly, then shrunk back when he saw I wasn’t Fen.

‘I’m such a dope not to have seen this coming,’ she said. ‘He’s been lying to me for weeks.’

What had he told me? That he knew the route, that it would change the next moon. That he would go in upriver of the village. No one would hear him. No one would know. I’d underestimated him entirely. I’d thought his inertia was permanent, that he luxuriated in his sense of missed opportunity and bad luck.

‘He’s promised Xambun money, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘Money to move to Australia.’

Without an engine it would take more than a day to catch up to them. Maybe I could find a pinnace to take me to the Mumbanyo. I stood. ‘I’ll get some men. We’ll find a way to stop them.’

‘At this point you’ll only give them away, make it worse.’

I remained in place, indecisive, weak.

‘Stay here. Please.’

They were hours ahead of me. This was the only time I would have with her alone. I sat back down.

‘Are you worried for his safety?’ I said.

‘He took his gun. I’m more worried for theirs.’

‘Won’t they follow him back up here?’

‘If they see him, they might. But there are other tribes I think they’d suspect first. The Mumbanyo have a lot of enemies.’ She crushed the note in her hand. ‘Damn him.’

Five or six heads of children appeared at the bottom of the doorway, halfway up the steps, ready to climb up the rest at the slightest invitation.

She looked at them longingly. They were what made sense to her.

‘Let’s get back to work,’ I said.

She waved the children in.

I spent the rest of the morning observing the observer. She was back in her element, cross-legged on the floor with a circle of children fanned out around her and three more squished in her lap. They played a clapping game in which you keep a rhythm and have to shout out in turn some sort of response. She was able to keep the beat against her thigh with her left hand while taking notes with her right and shout out an answer in Tam when it was her turn. When the littlest girl called out her answer everyone collapsed on the ground with laughter. Nell didn’t understand, and once an older boy had gotten control of himself he explained it and Nell let out a big laugh and they all collapsed again.

After a while she moved on to another group, and then another. Somehow they all knew they had to wait their turn for her attention — there was no interrupting her when she was with another group. Bani brought in snacks throughout the morning so the energy remained high. I watched all this from my chair at the table until, after a conversation with an old man, Nell called me over and asked if I’d heard of something called a bolunta. I hadn’t. She said it sounded a bit like a Wai. And this man, Chanta, had seen it once. His mother was Pinlau.

I’d never heard of the Pinlau or of any tribe with anything like the Wai.

‘He was a young boy when he saw it.’

‘How old?’

Nell asked him. He shook his head. She asked again. ‘Five or six, he thinks.’

I tried to calculate how long ago that would have been. He was exceptionally old for the region, his face shrunken, his features collapsing to the center, and his left earlobe nearly horizontal on a large growth coming out of the top of his jawbone. Hairless, toothless, a thumb and one finger on each hand, he had to be over ninety. He understood immediately that although Nell was speaking, the questions were mine, and he looked at me directly when answering, his eyes clear, free of the glaucoma which blued the eyes of so many natives, even children.

‘It was a ceremony?’

‘Yes.’

How often was it practiced?’ I asked.

‘I saw very little,’ Nell translated. She hadn’t asked him my question. She had asked him what he’d seen. I smiled at this and she shrugged. She asked again.

He didn’t know. Nell reminded him that he couldn’t say that. She had put a taboo on that response.

‘I remember little.’

‘What were these little things you saw?’

‘I saw my mother’s skirt.’

‘Who was wearing your mother’s skirt?’

At this Chanta looked ashamed. ‘Tell him it is common,’ I said. ‘Tell him it is very common for the Kiona.’

She did, and Chanta looked back and forth between us with his clear eyes, unsure if we were making a joke. ‘Tell him this is true. Tell him I have lived with Kiona for two years.’

Chanta’s incredulity only seemed to grow. He seemed to be retreating.

Nell chose her words carefully. She spoke for many sentences, pointing to me as she might a blackboard in a lecture hall. Using a careful grave tone, nearly worshipful.

‘I saw my uncle and my father in courting clothes,’ he said.

‘Can you describe them?’

‘Cowrie necklaces, mother-of-pearl collar, waistbands, leaf skirts. The things girls used to wear. In those days.’

‘And what were they doing in these clothes, your uncle and father?’

‘They were walking around in a circle.’

‘And then?’

‘They kept walking.’

‘And what did the people watching do?’

‘They laughed.’

‘They thought it was funny?’

‘Very funny.’

‘And then?’

He started to say something and stopped. We urged him on.

‘And then my mother came out of the bushes. And my aunt and my girl cousins.’

‘And what were they wearing?’

‘Bones through their noses, paint, mud.’

‘Where were they painted?’

‘Their face and chests and backs.’

‘They were dressed as men?’

‘Yes.’

‘As warriors?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were they wearing anything else?’

‘No.’

‘What else did they do?’

‘I didn’t see the rest.’

‘Why not?’

‘I left.’

‘Why?’

Silence. The water in his eyes trembled. This was clearly an upsetting memory. I thought we should stop.

‘What were the women wearing?’ Nell asked again.

He didn’t answer.

‘What were the women wearing?’

‘I have already said.’

‘Have you?’

Silence.

‘Did something upset you then?’

‘Penis gourds,’ he whispered. ‘They were wearing penis gourds. I ran away. I was a silly boy. I did not understand. I ran away.’

‘This is what the Kiona women wear, too,’ I told him. ‘It can be unsettling.’

‘The Kiona?’ Chanta looked at me with relief. And then he laughed, a great bark of a laugh.

‘What is funny?’

‘I was a silly boy.’ And then he was overcome with laughter. ‘My mother wore a penis gourd,’ he squeaked, and his face crumpled even further until he was just a pair of wet eyes and a smooth wedge of black upper gums. He seemed to be emptying his body of a great deal of tension.

Nell was laughing with him and I wasn’t sure what had just happened: who had asked the questions, whose questions were asked, how we got that story out of him when he did not want to tell it, when he had kept it as a secret all his life. Bolunta. They want to tell their stories, she had said once, they just don’t always know how. I’d had years of school, and years in the field, but my real education, this method of persistence I would draw on for the rest of my career, happened right then with Nell.

After lunch she gathered a few things in a bag.

‘You’re off on your rounds now?’

‘I’ll keep it short today. I won’t go to the other hamlets, just the women’s houses here.’

‘Don’t change your plans for me. I’ll go and find Kanup. Follow him around a bit.’

‘I’m sorry Fen has done this. Made off with your canoe. Kept you stuck here.’

‘I’m not stuck. I could pay someone to get me back if I wanted to go.’ I flushed at my honesty.

She smiled. She was beautiful standing there in a ripped shirt over wide cotton trousers, a bilum bag slung over her shoulder. ‘Take cigarettes with you,’ she said, and left.

Kanup was eager to hear what I knew of Fen and Xambun’s hunt. That is what they all thought — that Fen and Xambun had gone on a boar hunt. He led me to a back room of his men’s house where, he told me, the men were discussing this expedition. I sat on a thick cane mat and passed out the cigarettes, which quickly made me many pals. Chanta was there and broke into laughter every time our eyes met. Kanup did his best to translate, though it was clearly not a skill of his and I got only fragments of the long conversation. Now that Xambun was gone, they felt free to speak of him. Some of the men felt slighted not to have been included on the trip, but the general feeling was that it was a good thing he had gone. His spirit has gone wandering, they said. He had not returned with it. He was once a man on fire and he came back a man of ash. He is not the same man, they said, and he has gone to find his spirit and bring it back into his body. They appealed to his ancestors, reciting their long names, and to the land and water spirits. I watched how fervently they prayed to all their gods for the return of Xambun’s soul to his body. Tears sprung from their clenched eyes and sweat beaded on their arms. I doubted anyone had ever prayed for me like that, or any other way for that matter.

I didn’t hear her come up. I was typing up the day’s notes.

‘I love that sound,’ she said just outside the netting, and I jumped.

‘I hope you’re not bothered. My notes turn to mush quickly if I don’t get them down.’

‘Mine too.’ She was bright and lovely, grinning at me.

‘I’m nearly through.’

‘Take as long as you like. That’s Fen’s machine anyway.’

She went to her bedroom and came back with another typewriter. She set it on the adjacent desk. I tried to concentrate, though I was aware of her legs to the left of mine beneath the table and her fingers feeding a page into the platen and her lips fluttering slightly as she read over her notes. Once she began typing, at a furious rate that was not at all surprising, the sound concentrated my thoughts and our keys thundered together. I noticed that she was manually advancing the paper at the end of each line. It was a lovely instrument, dove grey with ivory keys, but it was dented in one corner and the silver arm had broken off at its base.

She ripped out a page and snapped in another.

‘I don’t believe you’re writing actual words,’ I said.

She handed me her first page. There were no paragraphs, barely any punctuation, the thinnest sliver of a margin. Tavi sits still her eyes drooping nearly asleep body swaying and Mudama carefully pinching the lice flicking the bugs in the fire the zinging of her fingernails through the strands of hair, concentration tenderness love peace pieta.

I looked down at my own words: In light of this conversation with Chanta, and the proximity of his native Pinlau to the Kiona, one concludes that there were other tribes in the vicinity who also once practiced some sort of transvestite ritual.

‘You’re writing some sort of avant-garde novel,’ I said.

‘I just want to be able to put myself back in that moment when I read it over a year from now. What I think is important now might not be important to me then. If I can remember the feeling of sitting next to Mudama and Tavi on this afternoon then I can recall all the details I didn’t think important enough to write down.’

I tried it her way. I wrote a full description of Chanta and his tumor and his hands without fingers and his wet clear eyes. I wrote down all the dialogue I could remember, which was much more than I had in my notes, though at the time I thought I was getting everything down. I loved the sound of our two typewriters; it felt like we were in a band, making a strange sort of music. It felt like I was a part of something, and that the work was important. She always made me feel that the work was important. And then her typewriter stopped and she was watching me. ‘Don’t stop’ I said. ‘Your typing makes my brain work better.’

When we finished we ate dried fish and old sago pancakes. Through the doorway there were long flashes of lightning. There was a rumbling that I thought was thunder.

She lit a mosquito coil and we sat in the doorway with mugs of tea.

‘Drums,’ she said. ‘Fen and Xambun’s beats. They are wishing them safety at night.’

I told her about the talk in the men’s house and their hope that Xambun’s spirit would return to him. We could hear people gathering near the drums. A few women passed below the house, their children lagging behind, one with a knitted doll Nell must have given her. Lightning was still flashing, silently, behind the northern hills where the moon would soon rise. I felt the world had finally carved out a little place for me.

We talked of our Grid.

‘Personality depends on context, just like culture,’ she said. ‘Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don’t you think? If I had a husband, for example, who said, “Your typing makes my brain work better,” I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work. You don’t always see how much other people are shaping you. What are you looking at?’

I wasn’t looking at much of anything. I was just trying not to look at her. No sign of the moon, and the lake wasn’t visible save in the few seconds that the lightning flashed. But the air was shifting. I felt something that was almost a cool wind against my arms and face, but not a wind, not even a breeze, just an air current that felt different, as if someone ten feet away had opened the lid of an ice box briefly. I reached out to feel it and, as if I had beckoned it, a great gust struck against my hand. All at once the trees shuddered and the grass skirt about the house swished.

‘Let’s go down to the sand and make the rain come,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Let’s do a dance, like the Zuni.’

And then she was down the ladder, racing to the path. I followed. Of course I followed.

Neither of us knew an actual rain dance, but we improvised. She claimed ami was the Zuni word for rain. It was cheating because the rain was coming, everything was shifting so fast, the wind had worked the tall palms into a froth above us and scudded hard against the water and the sky was low and black. But we stomped on the sand and called out Ami! Ami! and every other word we knew for rain and wet and water, and everything suddenly got blacker and cooler and the wind fierce and the memory of rain, real rain, came on quickly, only a few moments before the rain itself. We held our faces up and spread out our arms. Big drops smacked all over us and drove the insects on our skin to the ground.

The rain hit the lake water loudly and it took my ears several minutes to get used to the roar. You don’t realize in the dry season how much is held in, but now all the sounds and smells came back, stirred up by the wind and humidity, flowers and roots and leaves exhaling their full flavor. Even the lake itself released a pungent peat odor as the rain dug into it. Nell seemed smaller and younger and I could see her easily at thirteen, at nine, a little girl on a Pennsylvania farm, and all I could do was keep looking. I hardly knew I wasn’t speaking. ‘I think we should go in,’ she said.

I thought she meant go back to the house, but she turned from me and unbuttoned her dress and dropped it in the sand. She walked to the water in a brassiere and short American knickers, loose at the thigh. ‘I can’t swim, so you better join me.’

I quickly pulled off my shirt and trousers. The water was warmer than the air and felt like the first bath I’d had in two years. I sank in up to my neck and let my feet float to the surface as the rain hammered the water as if it were a sheet of silver.

She really couldn’t swim. How had I not noticed this before? I paddled around but she remained upright, bouncing on her toes. Of course I wanted to offer to teach her, to hold her as my mother had held me in the River Cam, to feel the weight of her in my arms, the edge of her brassiere against my fingers, knickers thin and wet as they broke the surface. I could feel it far too well without actually doing it, and I found I had to keep swimming away from her to try and subdue the effects, then swimming back to hear what she was saying through the smashing rain.

The rain was still lashing as we ran back up to the house. We put on dry clothes, each in the dark of our respective mosquito rooms. I fished out some old-looking Australian biscuits from the hoard and she asked if I was never not hungry. I said I was twice her size which led to an argument about how many inches were between us which led to measuring each other against a post, marking the spot with a penknife then calculating the difference. I held the measuring tape out flat, my fingers damp from the swim and dusty from all the biscuits. Seventeen inches.

‘It seems like more when it’s horizontal like that. Up and down it doesn’t seem so dramatic, does it?’

We were standing close by the pole and she was cheating by standing on her toes, her face lifted straight up and the rain crashing into the thatch above us and I wasn’t sure how I would kiss her without lifting her up to my lips. She laughed as if I had said this out loud.

We went back to the sofa and somehow I told her about Aunt Dottie and the New Forest and my trip to the Galápagos in ‘22. ‘My father had hoped the trip would make a biologist out of me but the only valuable thing I discovered was that my body loves a hot, humid climate. Unlike yours.’ I nearly brushed my fingers along her scarred arm beside mine.

‘I come from hearty Pennsylvania potato farmers on my mother’s side. You’ll have to see me in winter. The cold gives me energy.’

I laughed. ‘I’m not sure I want to see what that looks like.’ But I did. More than anything I could think of.

She told me more about her potato-growing ancestors and their escape from the Great Famine, which put me in mind of Yeats’s ‘The Ballad of Father Gilligan,’ and we ended up saying poems back and forth.

After the war I’d memorized most of Brooke and Owen and Sassoon, and half convinced myself that they’d been written by John. Or Martin, who actually did write poetry. The war poets were all tangled up with my brothers and my youth and I thought I would cry when I got to the end of ‘Hardness of Heart’ and the bit about tears not being endless, but I didn’t. Nell did the crying for both of us.

I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake. Time for you and time for me, though I never did warm to Eliot. She was married. She was pregnant. And what would it have mattered in the end? What would it have altered to have kissed her then, that night? Everything. Nothing. Impossible to know.

We fell asleep reciting. Who was speaking or what poem I am not certain. We woke to little Sema and Amini poking us in the leg.