The People in the Trees: A Novel Page 9

  And then finally it was the day I was to meet Tallent. He had sent a telegram to the hall where I was staying at the university, informing me of his arrival time and suggesting that we meet in the lounge area at six p.m.; we would leave the next morning at eight. The flight to the Gilbert Islands would take nine hours, followed by another three-hour-long transfer to U’ivu.

  I was nervous before meeting Tallent, uncomfortably so; I was not usually anxious about meeting people, and after all, I had been requested, I was a doctor, I was (I told myself) essential to his operation. Yet this was a false sort of confidence, because as I was aware but unable to admit, it was Tallent who had allowed me to even dream of this adventure, and without him I would be back in Boston, jobless, grounded, scrabbling for a second-rate internship at a third-rate hospital. Shortly before six I got dressed (I had even brought a suit, one of the first things I would later discard) and went down to the lounge, which had cool cement floors and two orange-cushioned bamboo sofas separated by a dirty woven-palm mat.

  There was already someone sitting there, bent over a book, and as I walked toward him, he looked up.

  There is really no satisfying or new way to describe beauty, and besides, I find it embarrassing to do so. So I will say only that he was beautiful, and that I found myself suddenly shy, unsure even of how to address him—Paul? Tallent? Professor Tallent? (Surely not!) Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another’s appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty. As the months I spent in Tallent’s presence dragged by, I would alternately be tortured by and find solace in his beauty, and would find myself by turns surrendering to it, enjoying my proximity to it, and, less happily, trying to argue against it, as fruitless and pointless an activity as trying to convince yourself that sugar is sour.

  “I’m Paul Tallent,” said Tallent, unnecessarily, as I gaped at him. I mumbled a hello. We shook hands. “So you landed all right, I see.” I made a grunting noise. We were standing at the edge of the filthy mat, Tallent an inch or two taller than I. I stared at my shoes. “You’re ready to go, then,” he continued. I nodded. “Well, I’m very happy to have you on this mission,” he said. He had a particular way of talking, I noticed—there were no question marks in his sentences, no exclamation points, and yet his voice was not toneless but rather shaded and rich and somehow substantial, something that conjured a dense forest of variegated trees, all lush and stately and grand. It was a voice that betrayed nothing—not approval, not happiness, not fear or anger—but that might make you crazy with its promise of mysteries. I wanted to hear him speak some more, but I was also afraid to ask him anything, was suddenly unable to say anything at all. “Well,” said Tallent at last, no doubt worried by my monosyllabism, “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  At that moment I realized what I could have said to him—“Would you like to have some dinner?”—but he had already walked away, of course, and I was left standing there on my own.

  I was able to study Tallent more closely on our flight.21 The plane was a military vessel, so hugely bulky and bloated in its hangar that landed and Tallent stirred, I was exhausted and exhilarated, abrim with a sweet, private sadness. “Next stop, U’ivu,” said Tallent as we disembarked, and I thought he sounded happy; I was happy too.

  From the Gilberts we were flown above U’ivu in a buzzing gnat of a plane, its loudly whisking propellers so vigorous that the trees, stalky clumps of date palms, blew backward as we descended. The plane dipped around a bend, over and along a long, curved stretch of mountain range, and for a second, suspended over the frayed, tender line where the ocean met the land, I looked toward the horizon and found myself unable to determine where the sky ended and the water began: it was all a dazzling, indistinct wash of blue, an audacious blue with no name, so insistent and unvaried I had to close my eyes.

  U’ivu, as I have mentioned, is a group of three islands, but only two were officially inhabited. The first was U’ivu, the main island, baguette-shaped, about twenty miles long and half as wide, split lengthwise by a single, unbroken mountain range called Ta’imana. This was where the king lived, as well as the majority of the country’s 35,000-odd occupants. Sixty miles to U’ivu’s east was the second island, Iva’a’aka, the same approximate shape and size but whose entire northern side was made inviolable by a wall of cliffs; even from the sky I could see how the waves slapped against them into fat white plumes, like handfuls of feathers being tossed into the air, and see the haloes of broad-winged birds that circled their sharp lava-rock peaks. But the rest of Iva’a’aka was low green hills, and so it was here that the country did most of its large-scale farming: we flew over acres of neatly stepped fields, the soil freckled with barely distinguishable dots of green and gold.

  “Taro,” said Tallent, pointing at one and then, at another, “Sweet potato.”

  “How can you tell from here?” I asked him. The fields with their rows of vegetation looked the same to me.

  He shrugged. “I can,” he said, and I felt somehow ashamed of myself for having asked.

  We passed over some huts, simple structures with what I could tell even from the air were palm-leaf roofs, and an occasional wooden house, but most of Iva’a’aka’s farmers were seasonal, and the island had few full-time residents. Only the plantations’ overseers—for all of these farms were owned by the king, and their produce was given to the government, which then distributed it to the U’ivuan citizens—lived here year-round, Tallent explained; the pickers and growers and gardeners worked on Iva’a’aka only for three-month shifts before returning by boat to their homes and families on the main island. The plane sank in the sky, and as I looked down again, I saw a blur of deep brown streak through one of the fields. “Boars,” said Tallent, and I turned in my seat to look back and stare at them. There they were, the famous U’ivuan boars, and even from a distance one could tell they were monstrously large. There must have been a hundred of them in the pack, and I could see the dirt spraying up around them, an echo of the water breaking against the island’s cliffs.

  “And that is Ivu’ivu,” Tallent shouted to me, and I followed where he was pointing. The angle was not ideal—I saw a slant of black mountain, its façade brushed with vegetation—and I crouched in my seat to try to get a closer look at the place where I would be spending the next few months of my life, at the Forbidden Island that would now be our home.

  But then the plane turned again and descended once more, and we were above U’ivu. “This is the south side of the island,” Tallent called over the noise of the propellers. “We’ll land here.” And so we did, bumpily, juddering over what I would later see were small hillocks of grass and soil; the runway was no runway at all, just a long stretch of plain earth—that was how few planes landed here.

  As we were lifting our bags out of the plane, I saw a short, round figure walking toward us, and when it was about a hundred yards away, it hollered “Paul!” and I realized it was a woman.

  “Esme!” Tallent called back, and I was upset and unnerved to see him smile, to see his face fall momentarily into happiness.

  The woman came closer and the two all but flung themselves into each other’s arms. Then there was a quick exchange in a language I couldn’t understand but that sounded like pops of gunfire, followed by the two of them laughing, the first time I had heard Tallent laugh.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Norton,” Tallent apologized (it seemed that he would call me Norton and I would call him Tallent, though neither of us had formally established this). “Esme Duff, this is our doctor, Norton Perina. Norton, this is Esme Duff, my research associate.”

  “Oh,” said Esme, “Norton. Welcome! Welcome to U’ivu. Have you ever been to the Pacific?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, you’re in for a big surprise! Many big surprises, actually,
” she said, laughing.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “Esme is the real U’ivu expert,” said Tallent, while Esme smiled and preened. “She speaks the language much better than I do22 and has arranged all our guides, everything. She’ll be indispensable to you.”

  “I’m sure,” I repeated. And in that moment I promised myself two things: first, that I would hate Esme Duff, and second, that within a few months it would be I, not Esme, whom Tallent would consider the expert.

  I was very kind to allow myself such a generous timeline to usurp Esme in usefulness and knowledge, for the next few days were bewildering and dizzying. For one thing, it was soon revealed that there were no cars on U’ivu: from the field where we had landed (which, Esme informed me, had been kindly lent for our use by the king, who sometimes used it to practice boar hunting—a dozen boars would be rounded up and released, and the king would charge around on horseback, hurling spears at their ridged, humpy spines) we hoisted our bags onto horses, which had also been lent by the king and which had been tethered to palm trees at the far edge of the field. Even the horses—which were about a half foot shorter than the horses I knew, stumpy-legged and broad-shouldered, more like ponies—were unfamiliar.

  As we made the half-hour ride toward town, I learned of all the things U’ivu did not have. There were no roads, for one—trails, yes, with patches of grass and struggling flowers tamped down by horses’ hooves—nor was there a hotel, or university, or grocery store, or hospital. There were, dismayingly, churches, quite a few of them, their white wooden spires the only thing taller than the palms, which cast stripes of black shadow against the dirt but offered no comfort from the sun, which washed the sky a hard, glaring white. I asked Tallent—who was managing to look graceful on his small horse—if there were many missionaries on the island, but it was Esme who answered, telling me that although a hundred or so had made their way to U’ivu in the early 1800s, most of them had died in a terrible tsunami that had destroyed the northern half of the island in 1873. The rest returned home soon after, and U’ivu was once again left to the U’ivuans, the way it had been for the thousands of years prior to the missionaries’ arrival.

  “The U’ivuans won’t build their homes on the northern side by the sea—they consider it bad luck,” she said. “But the missionaries wanted those views, and they paid the price.”

  I said I was surprised by the number of churches—I had counted four in about twenty minutes—which also seemed to suggest a high conversion rate. But this time it was Tallent who answered. “They weren’t as successful as it appears,” he said. “The U’ivuans enjoyed the novelty of the churches, and when the first one—St. Jude’s, just beyond that crooked frangipani tree—was built, a great many of them came, including the king at the time, the current king’s grandfather. They thought it was funny, I think. So the missionaries took this as a sign that they were ripe for conversion and built more. There are five—right, Esme?—on this side of the island, and there were an additional three on the north side, but the tsunami destroyed those.”

  “Did the U’ivuans help in the construction?” I asked.

  “No. The missionaries had to do everything themselves. The king gave them the land and the wood—if you look at them, you’ll realize it’s all palm wood, a difficult and impractical material to build with, and the construction is poor—but he refused to let them employ any of his people. They were lucky to get even that.”

  “No one tells an U’ivuan what to do,” Esme called out from the head of the line. “We know that well by now.” She laughed, sounding smug.

  “No one tells the king what to do,” Tallent clarified. “Every privilege we have here—the mission we’ll undertake, the guides we’ll have—is with the king’s permission. He is involved in everything that goes on here, and nothing can be done without his blessing.”

  But we would not meet the king this time, he said. A daughter was getting married, and His Highness was too busy with the preparations to see us. I would have liked to meet the king, to see his wooden palace, but I was happy for one thing, at least—Esme hadn’t met the king either, and so was unable to inform me of all that I was missing: a mansion with dark floors that gleamed with oil, a bevy of silent wives seated on palm mats like a clutch of nesting doves, the king with his fierce, knowing smile.

  My first night in U’ivu was spent in an arid, stifling hut whose ceiling was made of dried palm fronds plaited together so snugly that although I heard the rain clattering on a sheet of stray aluminum outside (what its eventual use might be, I had no idea), the only moisture inside came from my own sweat, which was intense and seemed to worsen as the sultry night crept by. I was on my own—it was unclear to me (and I did not wish to discover) whether Esme and Tallent were sharing a hut or slept separately—and all night my mind buzzed, and I worried and was unable to close my eyes without seeing the herringbone pattern of the ceiling floating behind my lids.

  The next morning, the three of us hauled our supplies to a small launch with a diesel engine unconvincingly appended to the rear. A man, our captain, his skin a burnished walnut (although I think his shine was due not to superior health but to perspiration, a layer of which seemed to slick everything he touched), watched us climb in and then started the engine with a sharp tug and nosed the boat toward Ivu’ivu.

  Had I known how long it would be until I would once again see the relative sophistication of U’ivu, I might have turned around and watched the land as I was dragged from it, but at the time I was too busy staring at Ivu’ivu, which seemed, curiously, not to draw any closer even as the water pleated away from beneath us. It was a dreary day, I remember, and the sea appeared as a flat disk of tin, storm-colored and dull. Above, the sky was the same sullen gray, and the spray on my tongue tasted of metal as well. I stared into the sea and once saw, or thought I saw, some swift shadows shimmering underneath the surface, but when I looked back down after having called Tallent’s attention to them, they were gone.

  Slowly, excruciatingly, the island came into view. We had approached it from its backside, which faced U’ivu’s south and which made it appear as inhospitable in its physical reality as it was in my imaginings. This was the part we had seen from the air in our descent: a vast, sheer cliffside of, I was told, almost six thousand feet, rising assertively from the waters beneath it, which collected at its base in a thick, beery foam. It was so covered with layers of greenery—trees tiered upon layers of grasses, and mosses, and snaky snarls of succulents, all of them colored those improbable parroty shades of green you encounter only in jungles—that it was only when we drew closer that I could see the stone underneath, which was slate-black in some parts and the pale gray of wet newsprint in others and was revealed only in small gaps. If you looked directly up at the sun, it was possible to see, blurred against the white sky, a feathery skyline of trees at the island’s peak. As the boat turned and headed eastward into the sun, the island sloped steeply downward and began to appear as a massive wedge of cake that had been tipped to its side. But perhaps in compensation for the physical dimensions of the land, which became more pregnable the farther down its length we traveled, the plant life grew wilder and denser, so that the forest pushed all the way to the very edge of its earth, and the water surrounding it was covered with a busily kaleidoscopic skin of its leavings—wind-tattered hibiscus flowers and sunburned mango leaves, hard little nuts of unripe guavas and scraps of ferns—so thick that you felt for a minute frightened of the jungle, its voracious appetite and ambition, its hunger to consume every surface it encountered.

  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, casti
ng 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.23