The Signature of All Things (55 page)

She learned to bathe in the river in the mornings with the other settlement women, all of whom were as thickset and strong as Alma herself. They were fiends for personal cleanliness, the Tahitians, washing their hair and
bodies every day with the foaming sap of the ginger plants along the banks. Alma, who was not accustomed to bathing every day, soon wondered why she had not been doing this her entire life. She learned to ignore the groups of little boys who stood around the river, laughing at the women in their nakedness. There was no point in trying to hide from them; there was no hour of the day or night when the children would not find you.

The Tahitian women did not object to the children’s laughter. They seemed far more worried about Alma’s wiry, coarse, faded hair, which they fussed over with both sadness and concern. They all had such beautiful hair, which fell in black, billowing sweeps down their backs, and they felt simply terrible for Alma that she did not share this spectacular feature. She felt simply terrible about it herself. One of the first things Alma learned how to convey in Tahitian was an apology for her hair. She wondered if there was any place she could go in the world, ever, where her hair would not be considered a tragedy. She suspected not.

Alma picked up as much Tahitian as she was able, from anybody who would speak to her. She found the people to be warm and helpful, and they encouraged her efforts as a kind of play. She started with the words for the commonest items around Matavai Bay: the trees, the lizards, the fish, the sky, and the sweet little doves called
uuairo
(a word that sounded exactly like their soft, bubbling cry). She moved on to grammar as quickly as she was able. The inhabitants of the mission settlement spoke English at varying levels of proficiency—some were quite fluent, some simply inventive—but Alma, always the linguist, was determined to keep her interactions in Tahitian whenever possible.

But Tahitian, she found, was not a simple language. It sounded to her ears more like birdsong than speech, and she was not musical enough to master it. Alma determined that Tahitian was not even a reliable language. It did not have the sturdy injunctions of Latin or Greek. The people of Matavai Bay were especially kittenish and rascally with words, changing them by the day. Sometimes they mixed in bits of English or French, inventing imaginative new words. The Tahitians loved abstruse puns that Alma could never have comprehended unless her grandparents’ grandparents had been born here. Moreover, the people at Matavai Bay spoke differently from the people in Papeete, a mere seven miles away, and
those
people spoke differently from the people in Taravao or Teahupo. You could not trust a sentence
to mean the same thing on one side of the island as across it, or to mean the same thing today as it meant yesterday.

Alma studied the people around her carefully, trying to learn the disposition of this curious place. Sister Manu was the most important, for she not only tended the pigs, but policed the entire settlement. She was a strict mistress of protocol, that one, keenly alert to manners and missteps. While everyone at the settlement loved the Reverend Welles, they feared Sister Manu. Sister Manu—whose name meant “bird”—was as tall as Alma, and as heavily muscled as a man. She could have carried Alma on her back. There were not many women about whom one could say
that
.

Sister Manu always wore her broad straw hat, dressed with different fresh flowers every day, but Alma had seen during bath time in the river that Manu’s forehead was covered with a hash of blunt white scars. Two or three of the older women had similar mysterious marks on their foreheads, but Manu was scarred in another way besides: she was missing the last phalanx of each of her pinky fingers. It seemed such a strange injury to Alma, so neat and symmetrical. She could not imagine what a person could have been doing, to have lost both pinky tips so tidily. She dared not ask.

Sister Manu was the one who rang the bell for worship every morning and evening, and the people—all eighteen of the settlement’s adults—dutifully came. Even Alma tried never to miss religious services at Matavai Bay, for it would have offended Sister Manu, and Alma could not have survived long without her favor. In any case, Alma found that the services were not difficult to sit through; they seldom lasted more than a quarter of an hour, and Sister Manu’s sermons in her stubborn English were always entertaining. (If the Lutheran gatherings in Philadelphia had been as simple and diverting as this, Alma thought, she might have become a better Lutheran.) Alma paid close attention and in due course pulled out words and phrases from the dense Tahitian-language chants.

Te rima atua
: the hand of God.

Te mau pure atua
: the people of God.

As for the boy who had brought Alma her microscope eyepiece the first night, she learned that he was one of a pack of five small boys who roamed the mission settlement with no apparent occupation other than to play ceaselessly until they collapsed with exhaustion onto the sand, and—like dogs—slept where they fell. It took Alma weeks to tell the boys apart.
The one who had shown up in her room and handed her the microscope eyepiece was, she learned, named Hiro. His hair was the longest and he seemed to hold the highest status within the gang. (She later learned that in Tahitian mythology, Hiro was the king of thieves. It amused her that her first encounter with Matavai Bay’s little king of thieves was when he returned something that had been stolen from her.) Hiro was the brother of the boy called Makea, although perhaps they were not actual brothers. They also claimed to be brothers with Papeiha and Tinomana and another Makea, but Alma thought this could not possibly be true, because all five boys appeared to be the same age and two of them had the same name. She could not for the life of her determine who their parents might be. There was not the slightest sign that anyone took care of these children but themselves.

There were other children around Matavai Bay, but they approached life far more seriously than the five boys whom Alma came to think of as “the Hiro contingent.” These other children came to the mission school for classes in English and reading every afternoon, even if their parents were not residents of the Reverend Welles’s settlement. These were little boys with neat, short hair, and little girls with beautiful braids, long dresses, and bright smiles. They took their classes in the church, where they were taught by the bright-faced young woman who had called out to Alma on her first day, “We speak English here!” That woman’s name was Etini—“white flowers strewn along the road”—and she spoke English perfectly, with a crisp British accent. It was said she had been personally taught as a child by the Reverend Welles’s wife, and now Etini was considered the best English teacher on the entire island.

Alma was impressed by the tidy and disciplined schoolchildren, but she was far more intrigued by the five wild and uneducated boys of the Hiro contingent. She had never before seen children as free as Hiro, Makea, Papeiha, Tinomana, and the other Makea. Tiny lords of liberty, they were, and mirthful ones at that. Like some mythical blend of fish, bird, and monkey, they seemed equally at home in the water, in the trees, and on land. They hung from vines and swung into the river with fearless cheers. They paddled out to the reef on little wooden boards and then, incredibly, they
stood up
on those boards, and sailed across the foaming, billowing, breaking waves. They called this activity
faheei
,
and Alma could not imagine the
nimbleness and confidence they must have felt to ride the breaking surf with such ease. Back on the beach, they boxed and wrestled each other tirelessly. Another favorite game was when they would build stilts for themselves, cover their bodies with some kind of white powder, prop open their eyelids with twigs, and chase each other across the sand like tall, queer monsters. They also flew the
uo—
a kite made of dried palm fronds. At quieter moments, they played a game like jacks, using small stones instead of jacks. They kept as pets a rotating menagerie of cats, dogs, parrots, and even eels (the eels were bricked up into watery pens in the river; at the sound of the boys’ whistles, they would raise their heads up eerily above the surface of the water, ready to be fed bits of fruit by hand). Sometimes the Hiro contingent ate their pets, skinning them and roasting them on a makeshift spit. Eating dog was common practice here. The Reverend Welles told Alma that Tahitian dog was just as tasty as English lamb—but then again, the man had not tasted English lamb in decades, so she was not sure he could be trusted. Alma hoped nobody would eat Roger.

For Roger, Alma had learned, was the name of the little dog that had visited her that first night in her
fare.
Roger did not seem to belong to anyone, but apparently he had been somewhat fond of Ambrose, who had bestowed upon him his dignified, robust name. Sister Etini explained all this to Alma, along with this unsettling bit of advice: “Roger will never bite you, Sister Whittaker, unless you try to feed him.”

For the first few weeks of Alma’s stay, Roger came to her small room night after night, to bark at her with all his heart. For a long time, she never saw him during the day. Gradually, and with visible reluctance, his indignation wore away, and his episodes of outrage became briefer. One morning, Alma awoke to find Roger sleeping on the floor right next to her bed, which meant that he had entered her house the previous night without barking at all. That seemed significant. At the sound of Alma stirring, Roger growled and ran away, but he was back the next night, and was silent from then on. Inevitably, she did indeed try to feed him, and he did indeed try to bite her. Other than that, they fared well enough together. It was not that Roger became friendly, exactly, but he no longer appeared desirous of removing her throat from her body, and that was an improvement.

Roger was a dreadful-looking dog. He was not only orange and mottled,
with an irregularly shaped jaw and a bad limp, but it appeared that something had worked rather relentlessly to chew off a large section of his tail. Also, he was
tuapu’u
—hunchbacked. Still, Alma came to appreciate the dog’s presence. Ambrose must have loved him for some reason, she thought, and that intrigued her. She would gaze at the dog for hours and wonder what he knew about her husband—what he had witnessed. His companionship became a comfort. While she could not claim that Roger was protective or loyal toward
her
, he did seem to feel some sort of connection to the house. This made her feel somewhat less afraid to fall asleep alone at night, knowing that he was coming.

This was good, for Alma had abandoned hope for any other measure of security or privacy. There was no gain to be had in even attempting to define boundaries around her home or her few remaining belongings. Adults, children, fauna, weather—at any hour of the day or night, for any reason at all, everybody and everything in Matavai Bay felt quite free to enter Alma’s
fare
. They did not always come empty-handed, to be fair. Pieces of her belongings reappeared over time, in bits and fragments. She never knew who brought these items back to her. She never saw it happen. It was as if the island itself were slowly coughing up portions of her swallowed luggage.

In the first week, she recovered some paper, a petticoat, a vial of medicine, a bolt of cloth, a ball of twine, and a hairbrush. She thought, If I wait long enough, it will all be returned. But that was not true, for items were just as likely to vanish as to appear. She did get back her one other travel dress—its hemful of coins amazingly intact—which was a true blessing, though she never recovered any of her spare bonnets. Some of her writing paper found its way back to her, but not much of it. She never again saw her medicine kit, but several glass vials for botanical collection showed up on her doorstep in a neat row. One morning she discovered that a shoe was gone—just one shoe!—though she could not imagine what somebody wanted with just one shoe, while, at the same time, a quite useful set of watercolors had been returned. Another day, she recovered the base of her prized microscope, only to see that somebody had now taken back the eyepiece in exchange. It was as if there were a tide ebbing and flowing in and out of her house, depositing and withdrawing the flotsam of her old life. She had no alternative but to accept it, and to marvel, day after day, at what she found and lost, and then found and lost once more.

Ambrose’s valise, however, was never taken from her again. The very morning it was returned to her doorstep, she placed it on the little table inside her
fare
, and there it remained—absolutely untouched, as though guarded by an invisible Polynesian Minotaur. Furthermore, not a single one of the drawings of The Boy ever disappeared. She did not know why this valise and its contents were treated with such reverence, when nothing else was safe at Matavai Bay. She would not have dared to ask anyone,
Why do you not touch this object, or steal these pictures?
But how could she have explained what the drawings were, or what the valise meant to her? All she could do was keep silent, and understand nothing.

A
lma’s thoughts were on Ambrose at all times. He had left no trace in Tahiti, other than everyone’s residual fondness for him, but she sought signs of him ceaselessly. Everything she did, everything she touched, caused her to wonder: Had he done this also? How had he spent his time here? What had he thought of his tiny house, the curious food, the difficult language, the constant sea, the Hiro contingent? Had he loved Tahiti? Or, like Alma, had he found it too alien and peculiar to love? Had he burned under the sun, as Alma now burned on this black sand beach? Had he missed the cool violets and quiet thrushes of home, as Alma did, even as she admired the lush hibiscus and the loud green parrots? Had he been melancholy and sorrowful, or was he full of joy to have discovered Eden? Had he thought of Alma at all when he was here? Or had he forgotten her rapidly, relieved to be free of her discomfiting desires? Had he forgotten her because he fell in love with The Boy? And as for The Boy, where was he now? He wasn’t really a
boy—
Alma had to admit this to herself, especially when she studied the drawings again. The figure in them was more of a boy on the brink of manhood. By this time, some two or three years later, he must be a fully grown man. In Alma’s mind, though, he was still The Boy, and she never stopped looking for him.