The People in the Trees (46 page)

The opa’ivu’ekes had not fared much better, and I admit now that I had underestimated how important their context was to their survival and well-being. There were many failed attempts to encourage them to mate, and still more to make them adhere to a regular diet. It occurred to me (belatedly) that I had never thought to properly investigate exactly what the opa’ivu’ekes ate, and so much time was lost in trying to find the right combination of food—the closest we got was a mix of sardines and various lettuces and fiddleheads—that would both tempt them and help them maintain their equilibrium. But as time went by they grew steadily more listless, and finally we killed the two older ones—one we preserved,
⁷⁰
one we dissected—and concentrated our efforts on the younger ones, although the results were not encouraging.

I was more and more away from the lab, giving lectures here and there, writing papers, and so on, and therefore it was not until the end of 1961 that I was able to make my next visit to Ivu’ivu. Stories had reached me from different sources about how the number of researchers on the island at any time now surpassed the population
of villagers themselves, about how a small settlement of tents had gone up for the roving brigades of Pfizer and Lilly scientists who traveled to and fro on their own planes and own motorized boats and who glared at one another across their self-imposed demarcation lines, each group determined to beat the other, about how swaths of the jungle had been trampled and cleared and the lives of animals and plants disrupted. Meyers called me from Cal one night, his stammer worse than ever; he had just returned from the island, he said, and described a scene that sounded like something out of a hellish version of Brueghel: a filthy village square, dirt-smeared and fetid, and choking black fires and people everywhere.

I hoped Meyers might be exaggerating—I did not consider him wholly reliable on non-fungus-related matters—but it was with some trepidation and even reluctance that I set out on my journey. Now that I was a government employee, there was no waiting about for a transport to the island on which I might be able to beg a spot, and I sat in my seat at the back of the tiny plane, waiting for the jouncy landing that greeted one’s arrival on U’ivu. But to my surprise, our touchdown was smooth, silken almost, and when I stepped out of the plane, I saw the first major change: a runway, albeit just a length of perfectly planed dirt, but with all the bumps and stones and bits of shrubbery I remembered from the past removed. Indeed, the whole field had been razed and was now just a great acreage of emptiness: no grass, no little white flowers, just dirt so flat and clean it looked swept. I could feel something shift deep inside me: the first stirrings of dread.

I was met by a guide, one I’d not had before. He could have been anyone, but he spoke a little English, and he was wearing a sarong in dull mustard below a white man’s undershirt that was far too long for him. His hair was cut, cropped close around his ears. He led me not to a horse but to an orange-rusted jalopy, a Frankenstein of a car, cut and soldered from many pieces and makes, of which he was very proud, and drove me haltingly over to the dock, where a new deck had been clumsily built. There stood the boatman—the one from my original trip all those years ago, who pretended now, as ever, not to know me—but his vessel was, if not new, newer at least, and fitted with a proper motor that roared and belched as we bounced across the sea. And then, in half the time as before, there was Ivu’ivu, but
as we rounded the corner to pull into the lagoon, another shock: the jungle had been pruned back so far that there was now a real beach, a scoop of mucky gray sand, the greenery forming an untidy hairline to its rear. On the sand was a beaming man, waving his arms at me as the boat dredged itself up onto shore.

“No-ton! No-ton!” said the man, and I realized with a start that it was Uva, though not the Uva of my memory.
⁷¹
This Uva was wearing pants—khakis, far too large for him—and a real button-down shirt, albeit one that had obviously been washed and rewashed and patched with runnels of stitches so dense they looked like scar tissue. His hair, like the boatman’s and the guide’s, had been hacked away at as well, and the bone had been removed from his nose, though on either side of his nostrils he carried a dark brown stain where the holes had closed over and healed.

“How you?” asked Uva, smiling proudly, and this—his newly acquired English, and his pride in it—made my skin prickle for some reason, and the enormity of the island’s changes loomed large and clear in my mind.

Everywhere were differences. A real path had been dozed uphill, and although we still had to traverse it by foot, Uva now pulled my supplies in a wheeled cart. He was not used to wearing so much clothing and sweated copiously. At one point he fumblingly unbuttoned his shirt partway, and when I took off my own to encourage him, he gazed at my nakedness longingly before turning away and buttoning back up: you could almost see the determination in his face, his new dedication to being fully clad.
But why?
I wanted to ask. One of the things the Ivu’ivuans had gotten right, after all, was their adherence to their own nudity; in such humidity, clothes were not only foolish but ill-advised.

As we went, I could not help but study the treescape around me, trying to map the developments. Was it quieter than it had been last time, less filled with birdcall and monkey screech and insect flutter? Were there fewer manama trees and less fruit on the ground? Did the kanava trees seem less grimed with vuaka shit than they had before? Did that moss always look so trodden, or had someone recently walked across it? Was the passage between that stand of
palm trees always so forgiving, or had it been widened recently by hand? Was that a white card, a botanist’s label, affixed to that orchid, or was it in fact a butterfly, its wings folded into a flat square?

We smelled and heard the village before we saw it, but the smells were ones I recognized from the States, not from here, and the sounds were not of Ivu’ivu either. There was the tart, burned tang of bacon frying, and the hiss of a slosh of grease sliding against a hot pan. There were men’s voices, all speaking English, and the bright, aggressive scent of laundry detergent, and the
ching
of metal pinging against stone.

And then we were upon them, their neat clean tents and their laundry—stretched-out T-shirts and cotton pants, all the same linty color—draped over the low manama branches, and the fire over which one of them held aloft with a pair of metal tongs a can of baked beans, whose contents burbled diarrhetically over the rim.

I introduced myself—I couldn’t not—and learned that they were the Pfizer group; the Lilly group was apparently to the right of the village, although about the same distance removed. They were respectful, they were hostile, they were surprised; I could see them regarding me with envy, for while they spent their days trying to develop drugs and cold creams, I was doing real work, and they knew I was their superior. And yet they had all the resources—it was clear, from my single rucksack resting in Uva’s cart, that I did not—and it was already clear that the ones who had the resources would win. This is always true in science. It was true even then. I excused myself as soon as I could.

But it was when we reached the edge of the village that the horror, the severity, of the island’s transformation really assaulted me. The huts were the same, as were the dirt floor’s well-drawn boundaries, but those were the only things that had remained as I remembered. Lanced on a stick over the fire was a cube of Spam sweating lardy drops into the flames, and an already roasted block of it sat nearby, its heat wilting and curling the palm leaf on which it rested. And a few feet off, a group of men hovered over a third brick, squeezing off pieces of it with their fingers and feeding their hogs a bite for every two or three they took. But somehow the worst thing was the clothesline that had been stretched between two manama trees on the left side of the village; the line had been made using
some of the twisted palm-leaf rope—a precious rope, a rope meant for repairs and hauling and hog-leashing—and draped all across it was a junky selection of used clothes: yellowed undershirts and torn-pocketed trousers and plain, prim, long-sleeved cotton dresses that would have been useless in America, much less in tropical Ivu’ivu. And all around me the villagers went on their way in clothes, sometimes worn correctly and sometimes not, but always worn in earnest and with real effort—which was in many ways the most alarming thing of all, for it meant that it was not a lark, not a game, but that somehow they had been convinced that this was a habit worth adopting, a necessary adaptation. But who had told them so, and why had they believed them?

I found myself walking toward the ninth hut. To one side, two of the pharmacists were kicking a soccer ball to each other and laughing as some of the village children—some in shirts so big that they resembled kimonos, the fabric of the arms sailing as they jumped and ran—joined in. Inside, the hut was as I remembered it: silent and cool and somehow somber. I was relieved, momentarily. But then I thought, was it
too
unchanged? There was something about it that felt
dusty
almost, and I found myself absurdly studying the dirt floor for signs of neglect. It was as if in the context of such enveloping changes, the ninth hut’s sameness made it appear less, not more, relevant. It was clear that what had once been—from dress to food to even the children’s play—was no longer valued, and the fact that no one had thought to update the hut with some recognition of the new world that had been visited upon them made me fear that it remained not as a symbol of something cherished but as a relic of something outgrown.

Later I would realize that what had taken me weeks to find had taken teams of researchers only days. Later I would hurry uphill toward the lake—the path now an abandoned parade route, all staked with yards of fluttering bright red tape strung from tree to tree—and run crazily toward the two scientists (these from a German outfit that had set up camp some distance from the Lilly group) lifting a large opa’ivu’eke from the lake, the turtle’s limbs pinwheeling in fear. Later, after they had left, I would lean over the edge of
the lake, its once-clean border made mucky with the stamped-sole imprints of a dozen men’s boots, and see only five heads break the surface of the water, and as long as I waited, they would not come to me but would only hover in the center of the pond, and I would have to try to stop myself from howling. Later I would learn (from one of those same German pharmacologists) that Tallent was missing, and had been missing for at least two weeks: he had been on the island alone, without Esme, and had met only some of them. And then one day he was gone. It had taken them a while—two days? three?—to notice his absence, but once they had, they had ventured into the forest in small groups and then sent their guides in after them. But they could find no evidence of him. He had carried only a knapsack, which he had taken with him, and although they had searched, they had been unable to find anywhere that he might have disturbed the jungle: no fields of moss bearing the ghost impressions of his feet, no scattered manama seeds, no smudges of earth and stick where once a fire might have burned.

And then I knew—
this
was the worst thing of all. Worse than the turtles, who had learned not to trust the new humans too late and were now much reduced in number. Worse than seeing the boy, my young friend who had slept leaning against me just a short while before and who seeing me now turned from me, his too-long pant legs sweeping behind him like a bride’s gown. I could not believe, could not accept, the fact that Tallent might be gone from me, from us, forever. By day I spoke to everyone I could—Ivu’ivuans, the pharmacologists—asking them for information. The latter group, seeing that it distracted me from getting in their way, indulged me, but they had such little information, such frustratingly little information, that many days I wished I had never asked. How had he seemed in the days before his disappearance? Fine, they said, but because they had not known him (and, I had to admit to myself, neither had I), they could not say whether his behavior was normal or not. He was calm and contemplative and kept to himself. What had he been researching? What had they seen him observe? They didn’t know, they said; he spoke sometimes to members of the village, but most of the time he was observing them, writing in his notebook, writing by himself. Had he spoken to any one villager in particular? No, they didn’t think so. Had he looked—and here I had to stop until
I was certain I wanted to know the answer—unkempt, or seemed ill or illogical or delusional? No, they said. No, no.

By night I looked for him, taking meandering, meaningless walks through the jungle. They were useless walks, for I never went too far and I never called his name, just swung my flashlight before me in arcs, the flat disk of light skittering across the various surfaces it encountered, illuminating bark here, leaves there, ground there, in jittery sequence. I do not think I seriously thought I’d find him. But on those walks I always remembered how I had first encountered Mua, stepping out of the shadows of the jungle like a nightmare come to life, and I suppose some part of me felt that it might happen again, that one night I’d move the flashlight just an inch to the right and there, centered in its beam, would be Tallent, his beard obscuring his expression, saying, “Well, Norton, what brings you here?”