Easter Island (35 page)

“It’s an injustice,” said Greer.

“You do not have these problems,” said Mahina. “In America.”

“Oh, we do,” said Greer, slicing into her omelet. “Plenty. Long ago, we fought the British for independence. That was cut-and-dry at least. Now we have more complicated problems. The funny thing is, in the U.S., the word
revolutionary
has such a negative connotation. But we were revolutionaries.”

“Con-no-ta-tion?”

“A hint. A suggestion.”

“A clue?”

“Sort of,” said Greer. Mahina wrote the word on the notepad beside her—each morning they exchanged vocabulary: English for Rapa Nui, Rapa Nui for English.

“Con-no-ta-tion,” Greer enunciated. “It’s a nice word. But I promise, you could travel across the whole U.S. and never have to use it.”

“I would like to travel!” said Mahina, suddenly animated. “I would like to have money to go somewhere. People come here now from all over. Germany, Australia, and New Jersey. I am lucky to meet so many different people. I am”—Mahina looked to Greer and pronounced, slowly, one of her new vocabulary words—“
privileged.
” Greer nodded. “God is good to me. But still I would like to go somewhere.”

“What about Santiago? Could you go there?”

“It is the money,” Mahina said. “I have the old English books. I could sell them, yes?”

“Depends on what they are. There’s a market for old books. I could try to find a dealer in the States.”

“Yes, but of course I cannot leave. I must wait for Raphael to come back.”

“Raphael?”

“My husband.”

“Husband!” In the five months Greer had been there, this was the first Mahina had mentioned a husband. “When on earth did you get married?”

“Oh,
treinta y cinco
. . .”

“Thirty-five?”

“Thirty-five years ago. Saturday.”

“But where is he?”

“Tahiti.”

“Will he be back for your anniversary?”

“I hope so,” she said, nodding forcefully. “He said if Tahiti was as lovely as we heard, he would come back and bring me too.”

“He’s your exploring party.”

“
Sí, sí,
” she said, looking out the window. The sun lit her face and she let her eyes drift closed.

“But the
residencial
? Your home? You’d give it up for Tahiti?”

Mahina shrugged, opened her eyes. “No more talk of him.” She piled her fork and knife on her empty plate, swiped her napkin across the tablecloth.

“I have to tell you,” Greer said, “I think Ramon has a thing for you. A crush.”

“Crush?”

“Romantic interest. Love interest. He watches you all the time.”

Mahina shook her head. “Ramon is the brother of my husband.”

“That doesn’t mean he can’t think of you that way.”

“Ramon?”

“Yes, Ramon. Haven’t you noticed?”

Mahina gave a quick
hmph.
“And you,
Doctora
? You have a crush as well, I think.
Amor
for the
doctora
, no?”

“Me?”

“
Me
? The
doctora
would like to be so innocent! Vicente,
Doctora
! He is always leaving books, a note, a thing for you.”

“He’s just a colleague. He’s trying to be helpful.”

“You are not married. What is wrong? You do not like him? He is too short, you think?” Mahina shrugged. “The Chilean men are tiny, it is true. Not like the Rapa Nui men.”

“No, Mahina, he’s not too short.” He was taller than Mahina, and taller than Greer. But Greer laughed, amused by the suggestion that after months of examining her feelings for Vicente, talking herself out of attraction, it might come down to something so simple, so definable: his height. “I was married, though.”

Mahina tilted her head. “Your husband? He left you?”

“He died,” said Greer. “He died ten months ago. From a heart attack.”

“Oh, my dear
doctora.
” Mahina rose from her chair and moved behind Greer. “So sad.” Shifting Greer’s hair to one side of her neck, she rubbed Greer’s shoulders, then rested her chin on Greer’s head. The sweet smell of gardenia washed over Greer, and she felt her eyes drift closed. She hadn’t expected to be comforted by this—her admission, the warmth of Mahina’s sympathy, by simple touch.

“Thank you,” said Greer.

“
Doctora,
” said Mahina. “Never feel alone.”

What Mahina had said about Vicente was true—he did come by often, with books and journals and articles. He’d supplied Greer with all the reading material she could possibly need. At the weekly dinners, or in passing at the lab, he updated her on his
rongorongo
work and his investigations into the Germans. By now she even knew his daily routines. In the morning he did sit-ups and push-ups on the coast; on the nights the Lan Chile flight arrived, he read the newspaper by the
caleta
with Mario and Petero, exchanging finished pages one at a time, all of them sharing a bottle of pisco. Greer in fact knew everybody’s routine. Ramon tended to his garden after tea each morning; he took great pleasure in trimming his avocado and guava trees, in pinching the withered blooms from his flower garden and slowly pacing his rows of manioc bushes. As Greer passed the Espíritu, Sven could be heard singing in the shower. The island had a small-town intimacy. After five months, people knew where Greer went, and when. Twice a week she bought groceries from Mario, the red-haired man she’d met her first day. Once a week she went to the
correo
to post research requests. She found comfort in these rhythms, in the intricate web of greetings that underlay her daily lab work.

At night, after dinner at the
residencial,
Greer would sometimes gather with the other guests to listen to Mahina’s island stories, or to offer advice on sight-seeing routes. But usually, she went back to her room, took a long shower, and climbed into bed with a book. She was now rereading Captain Cook’s log. He had anchored off the coast in 1774, about fifty years after Roggeveen:

. . . As the master drew near the shore with the boat, one of the natives swam off to her, and insisted on coming aboard the ship, where he remained two nights and a day. The first thing he did after coming aboard was to measure the length of the ship, by fathoming her from taffrail to the stern; and as he counted the fathoms, we observed that he called the numbers by the same names that they do at Otaheite; nevertheless, his language was in a manner wholly unintelligible to all of us. . . .

Before I sailed from England I was informed that a Spanish ship had visited this isle in 1769. Some signs of it were seen among the people now about us; one man had a pretty good broad-brimmed European hat on, another had a Grego jacket, and another a red silk handkerchief.

Greer set the book down and watched the curtain billow in a breeze. She looked at the wicker nightstand, the mahogany desk, the plaque of the Virgin Mary hanging above her. It wasn’t just the ecosystem; objects as well suffered from the island’s isolation. Things didn’t disappear, they changed hands. Everything in her room would remain on the island. That red silk handkerchief and the Grego jacket, she thought, were probably in the back of someone’s closet.

They also seemed to know the use of a musket, and to stand in much awe of it. But this they probably learnt from Roggeveen, who, if we are to believe the authors of that voyage, left them sufficient tokens.

. . . The greatest part of the distance across the ground had but a barren appearance, being a dry hard clay, and everywhere covered with stones . . .

On the east side, near the sea . . . three platforms of stone-work, or rather the ruins of them. On each had stood four of those large statues; but they were all fallen down from two of them, and also one from the third; all except one were broken by the fall and in some measure defaced . . .

Greer had already noted this: Most of the
moai
had been toppled by 1774. Yet Roggeveen had seen them standing. So the statues must have fallen between Roggeveen’s and Cook’s visits, 1722 to 1774. If a natural disaster brought down the
moai,
it wasn’t the same one that wiped out the biota, for even Roggeveen noted barrenness. So what had actually toppled them? A disaster with that kind of force would surely have entered the island’s oral history, but there was no such record. Had the islanders themselves done this? After ages of carving and construction and moving? Throughout history monuments were destroyed—churches burned, idols smashed, portraits defaced—but as acts of violence inflicted by an enemy, an invader, a new regime. The Europeans hadn’t touched the
moai
. Mahina had spoken of two vying tribes on the island—the long-ears and the short-ears. Could one have vanquished the other? Even so, why destroy the island’s greatest achievements? Western investigators speculated endlessly about the building of the
moai,
amazed a primitive people could erect and transport such magnificent idols. But how could a people, any people, allow them to fall? This was the more interesting question. Greer continued:

No more than three or four canoes were seen on the whole island; and these very narrow and built with many pieces sewn together with small line. They are about eighteen or twenty feet long, head and stern carved or raised a little, are very narrow and fitted with outriggers. They do not seem capable of carrying above four persons, and are by no means for any distant navigation . . .

In all this excursion, as well as the one made the preceding day, only two or three shrubs were seen. The leaf and seed of one (called by the natives Torromedo) were not much unlike those of common vetch; but the pod was more like that of a tamarind in its size and shape. The seeds have a disagreeable bitter taste; and the natives, when they saw our people chew them, made signs to spit them out; from whence it was concluded that they think them poisonous. The wood is of a reddish colour, and pretty hard and heavy; but very crooked, small, and short, not exceeding six or seven feet in height. At the southwest corner of the island, they found another small shrub, whose wood was white and brittle in some matter, as also its leaf, resembling the ash. They also saw in several places the Otaheitean cloth plant, but it was poor and weak, and not above two and a half feet at most. They saw not an animal of any sort, and but very few birds; nor indeed anything which can induce ships that are not in the utmost distress to touch at this island. . . .

Again, Greer noted that they had observed
toromiros,
a cloth plant likely related to the Polynesian mulberry used for making tapa cloth. Her thoughts were interrupted by voices from the courtyard—a woman and a man. The woman was speaking Spanish, and Greer could barely make out the phrases, but she was almost certain it was Isabel Nosticio. She was staying at Mahina’s, and seemed to be out every evening. Greer pulled two pieces of tissue from her nightstand, twirled them into small cones, and slid them into her ears.

. . . No nation need contend for the honour of the discovery of this island, as there cannot be places which afford less convenience for shipping than it does. Here is no safe anchorage, no wood for fuel, nor any fresh water worth taking on board. Nature has been exceedingly sparing of her favours to this spot.

Greer marked this last page and closed the book. She was thinking about Admiral von Spee, who had become, as predicted, Vicente’s new fixation, the
rongorongo
for the time being forgotten. Vicente seemed a man in constant pursuit of obsessions—hot air ballooning, cryptography, German military history—appetites never quite sated. For now von Spee’s squadron truly excited him, and he spoke of it so incessantly, wondering what they might have made off with, that Greer’s own imagination had been ignited. A fleet of warships anchoring off the island, scores of German officers wandering among the
moai.
But the question in her mind as she drifted toward sleep was: If mariners found the island so inhospitable, why had the Germans stopped, of all places, at Rapa Nui?

At the SAAS dinner the next night outside the Hotel Espíritu, Greer showed Vicente the Cook excerpt. “I’m with you, Vicente. When you think about it, why would anyone come here to provision a whole fleet? How many men were we talking about?”

“Two thousand,” he said.

“You couldn’t pick a worse spot.”

Vicente smiled. “Unless,” he said, “you wished to stock up on something other than coal and food.”

“Or,” said Sven, “if you wanted to lay low and hide. If you haven’t noticed, it’s a pretty out-of-the-way spot. Not bad for a fleet running from the whole world.”

“Soon you will see,” Vicente said calmly. “I’m awaiting proof, papers, that will show definitively where the tablets went.” This was Vicente’s usual retort. It was amazing—he never suffered a moment’s doubt.

Still, Greer agreed with his theory. “Just think. Admiral von Spee was a man of the world. A naturalist. He wrote about the flora and fauna of places where he was stationed. Wouldn’t he have read Cook’s log? His job was to prepare for all possibilities. He wouldn’t just drop anchor and play it by ear.”