Euphoria (5 page)

‘You must let me apologize for what I said earlier,’ she said, ‘about the leaves.’

‘Formal amends would require an oath that you two don’t run off to the Aborigines.’

She raised her bandaged hand. ‘I swear.’

‘Now, tell me what happened with the Mumbanyo. Unless you want to sleep.’

‘I got my rest in the canoe. Thank you for the tending. Everything feels better.’ She took her first sip of whiskey. ‘Do you know of them, the Mumbanyo?’

‘Never heard of them.’

‘Fen will give you a very different account than mine.’ Her wounds glistened with the ointment I had put on them.

‘Give me yours.’

She seemed daunted by the question, as if I’d asked her to write a monograph about them on the spot. Just when I thought she’d say she was too tired, she launched in. They were an affluent tribe, unlike the Anapa, who struggled to get enough to eat each day. The Mumbanyo’s tributary was full of fish, and they grew all the tobacco in the area. They were flush with food and shell money. But they were full of fear and aggression, bordering on paranoia, and terrified the region into submission with their impulsive threats.

‘I’ve never had an aversion to a people before. Almost a physical repulsion. I’m not a neophyte to the region. I’ve seen deaths, sacrifices, scarrings that end badly. I’m not—’ She looked at me wildly. ‘They kill their firstborn. They kill all their twins. Not in a ritual, not with emotion and ceremony. They just toss them in the river. Toss them in the bush. And the children they keep, they barely tend to. They carry them under their arm like a newspaper or plunk them in stiff baskets and close the lid, and when the baby cries they scratch the basket. That’s their most tender gesture, the scratching on the outside of the basket. When the girls are seven or eight,
their fathers start to have sex with them. No surprise they grow up distrustful, vindictive, and murderous. And Fen—’

‘He was intrigued?’

‘Yes. Enamored. Utterly compelled. I had to get him out of there.’ She tried to laugh. ‘They kept telling us they were on their best behavior for us, but that it wouldn’t last forever. They were blaming everything that went wrong on the lack of bloodshed. We left seven months early. Maybe you noticed—there’s sort of a stench of failure about us.’

‘I hadn’t caught that, no.’ I would have liked to tell her about my own sense of failure, but it felt too vast to explain. Instead I looked at her shoes, leather schoolgirl lace-ups nearly as worn out as my own. I couldn’t be sure she had all her toes in there. Toes were the first things to get eaten away by those tropical ulcers.

‘You have a letter to your mother in the typewriter,’ she said.

‘I often do. Dear Mum, leave me alone. Love, Andrew.’

‘Andrew.’

‘Yes.’

‘No one ever calls you that.’

‘No one. Except my mum.’ I felt her waiting for more. ‘She would like me to be in a laboratory in Cambridge. Threatens to cut me off in every letter. And I can’t do this work without her support. We don’t have the kind of grants you have in America. Nor have I written a best-selling book, or any book for that matter.’ She’d ask next about the rest of the family, so I thought I should head her off. ‘Everyone else is dead so she seems to have a great deal of energy for me.’

‘Who is everybody else?’

‘My father and brothers.’

‘How?’

There was an American anthropologist for you. No delicate changing of the subject, no
You have my deepest condolences
or even
How ghastly for you
, but just a no-nonsense, straight-on
How the heck did that happen?

‘John in the war. Martin in an accident six years later. And my father of heart failure, most likely due to the sad fact that runty old me was all that was left of his legacy.’

‘Hardly runty.’

‘Runty in the brain. My brothers were geniuses in their own ways.’

‘Everyone becomes a genius when they die young. What were they smart at?’

I told her about John and his boots and pail, the rare moth, the fossils in the trenches. And about Martin. ‘My father thought it showed inordinate hubris for Martin to try and write a poem.’

‘Fen told me your father coined the word
genetics.
’

‘He didn’t mean to. He wanted to teach a course on Mendel and what was then called gene plasma. He felt it needed a more dignified word than plasma.’

‘Did he want you to continue where he left off?’

‘He wasn’t capable of imagining anything else for us. It was all that mattered to him. He believed it was our duty.’

‘When did he die?’

‘Nine years this winter.’

‘So he knew you’d transgressed.’

‘He knew I was reading ethnography with Haddon.’

‘He thought it was a soft science?’

‘It wasn’t science at all. Not to him.’ I could hear my father clearly.
Pure nonsense.

‘And your mother is of the same persuasion?’

‘Stalin to his Lenin. I am nearly thirty but entirely in her thrall. My father left it that she hold the purse strings.’

‘Well, you’ve managed to build your jail cell at a good distance from her.’

I felt I should encourage her to sleep. You need rest, I should have said, but did not. ‘It wasn’t an accident. With Martin. He killed himself.’

‘Why?’

‘He was in love with a girl and she didn’t want him. He’d gone to her flat with a love poem he’d written and she wouldn’t read it. So he went and stood under the statue of Anteros in Piccadilly Circus and shot himself. I have the poem. It’s not his best. But the bloodstains give it a little dignity.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘I thought it was Eros in Piccadilly.’ She plucked at a pencil on my desk. For a second I thought she was going to start taking notes.

‘Many people do. But it’s his twin brother, the avenger of unrequited love. Poetic to the last.’

Most women like to fuss around a wound of your past, pick at the thin scab, comfort you after they’d made it sting. Not Nell.

‘Do you have a favorite part of all this?’ she asked.

‘All what?’ I said.

‘This work.’

Favorite part? There was little at this point that didn’t make me want to run with my stones straight back into the river. I shook my head. ‘You first.’

She looked surprised, as if she hadn’t expected the question to come back at her. She narrowed her grey eyes. ‘It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion—you’ve only been there eight weeks—and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.’

‘Bloody hell.’ I laughed.

‘You don’t get that?’

‘Christ, no. A good day for me is when no little boy steals my underwear, pokes it through with sticks, and brings it back stuffed with rats.’

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilization, right and wrong.

She told me I sounded as skeptical as my father. She said no one had more than one perspective, not even in his so-called hard sciences. We’re always, in everything we do in this world, she said, limited by subjectivity. But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl. Look at Malinowski, she said. Look at Boas. They
defined their cultures as they saw them, as
they
understood the natives’ point of view. The key is, she said, to disengage yourself from all your ideas about what is “natural.”

‘Even if I manage that, the next person who comes here will tell a different story about the Kiona.’

‘No doubt.’

‘Then what is the
point
?’ I said.

‘This is no different from the laboratory. What’s the
point
of anyone’s search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s. Someday even Darwin will look like a quaint Ptolemy who saw what he could see but no more.’

‘I’m a little mired at the moment.’ I wiped my face with my hands, healthy hands—my body thrived in the tropics; it was my mind that threatened to give out on me. ‘You don’t struggle with these questions?’

‘No. But I’ve always thought my opinion was the right one. It’s a small flaw I have.’

‘An American flaw.’

‘Maybe. But Fen has it, too.’

‘A flaw of the colonies then. Is that why you got into this line of work, so you could have your say and people would have to travel thousands of miles and write their own book if they wanted to refute you?’

She smiled broadly.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘This is the second time tonight I’ve remembered this tiny thing I haven’t thought of for years.’

‘What’s that?’

‘My first report card. I wasn’t sent to school until I was nine, and my teacher’s comment at the end of the first term
was: “Elinor has an overenthusiasm for her own ideas and a voluble dearth of enthusiasm for those of others, most especially her teacher’s.” ’

I laughed. ‘When was the first time you thought of it?’

‘When we first arrived, and I was poking around your desk. All your notes and papers and books—I felt a rush of ideas, which is something I haven’t felt in a while. I thought maybe it was gone for good. You look like you don’t believe me.’

‘I believe you. I’m just terrified by what overenthusiasm might look like. If what I am seeing now is underenthusiasm.’

‘If you’re anything like Fen, you won’t like it much.’

I guessed I wasn’t anything like Fen.

She looked at her husband, who was in a deep concentrated sleep beside her, lips pursed and brow wrinkled, as if resisting being fed.

‘How did the two of you meet?’

‘On a ship. After my first field trip.’

‘Shipboard romance.’ It came out almost as a question, as if I were asking if it had been too hasty, and I quickly added, weakly, ‘The best kind.’

‘Yes. It was very sudden. I was coming back from the Solomons. A group of Canadian tourists on the boat was making a great fuss about me having studied the natives un-chaperoned and I was full of stories for them and Fen sort of skulked around in the shadows for a few days. I didn’t know who he was—nobody did—but he was the only man my age and he wouldn’t dance with me. And then out of the blue, he came up to me at breakfast and asked what I had dreamed the night before. I learned he’d been studying the dreams of a
tribe called the Dobu, and he was heading to London to teach. Honestly it was such a surprise, that this burly black-haired Aussie was an anthropologist like me. We were both coming back from our first field trips and we had a lot to talk about. He was so full of energy and humor. The Dobu are all sorcerers so Fen kept putting spells and hexes on people, and we’d hide and see if they worked. We were like little kids, giddy at having found a friend among all these stuffy grown-ups. And Fen loves to live with an us-against-the-world mentality that is very alluring at first. All the other passengers fell away. We talked and laughed our way to Marseille. Two and a half months. You really think you know a person after that kind of time together.’ She was looking somewhere over my left shoulder. She didn’t seem to notice she’d stopped talking. I wondered if she’d fallen asleep with her eyes open. Then they drifted back. ‘He went on to London to teach for a semester. I went home to New York to write my book. We were married a year later and came here.’

She was exhausted.

‘Let me sort out a bed for you,’ I said, getting up.

I went into the small mosquito room I slept in. The sheets on the mat hadn’t been changed for weeks and my clothes were strewn everywhere. I shoved everything in the crate I used for a bedside table and spread clean sheets on the mat in the best version of a real bed that I could manage. I had a nice pillow, one from my mother’s house, but the humidity had stuck the feathers together so it felt more like clay than down.

I heard laughing behind me. She was standing on the other side of the netting, observing my attempts to fluff it up.
‘Please don’t worry about that. But point me in the direction of the latrine, if you have one.’

I took her out to it. You had to have them built a good distance from the house in the tropics. I’d learned that the hard way with the Baining. The sky had lightened and we didn’t need a torch. I wasn’t sure what state the latrine would be in, having never expected a woman to use it, and I planned to have a look before I let her in, but she reached it first and jumped in before I could stop her.

Now I was in a predicament. I felt I should stay close by, in case there was a snake or a bat, both of which I had encountered in that small space before, as well as a flying fox and an enchanting red and gold bird Teket thought I had imagined. But I also felt one needed privacy to perform one’s duties. Before I could decide the proper distance at which to stand, her water began to flow at an astonishing rate and kept on for a great while. Then she was out the door and back on the path with me, limping along but with a new burst of energy.

When we returned, Fen had shifted over to one side and was releasing his breath in great suspended puffs, like a surfacing whale. It felt to me like a terribly intimate noise and I wished I’d gotten him to the bedroom before he’d entered such a deep sleep. I thought Nell would go to bed then, but she followed me to the back of the house, where I was planning to make a cup of tea and think of where I could take them to find a decent tribe.

She asked me what the last piece of the puzzle here was, and I told her about a Kiona ceremony called Wai I’d seen only once, when I first arrived, and my nascent thoughts about the
transvestitism involved. She asked if I’d ever tried my ideas out on them.

I laughed. ‘ “I say, Nmebito, did you know that by embracing your feminine side that night you have provided an equilibrium for this community that the overdeveloped masculine aggression of your culture often threatens?” Is that what you mean?’