The People in the Trees (20 page)

Temperamentally, she was placid enough until she was not. Sometimes I knew what might upset her (I had assumed my attempted vaginal exam would probably be a failure), but sometimes I did not—she would be agreeable, letting me examine her throat, her mouth, submitting to my tape measure, which I wrapped around her waist, her thighs, her skull, but then she would turn on me, baring her teeth and snarling, her eyes pricked open so wide that the irises seemed to be floating in a jellied egg of white. And then, just as suddenly, she would recede, return to her stupid, dreamy state, her tongue—an unnervingly bright, pretty peony pink—thrusting between her dark and scabrous lips. They never failed to alarm me, these abrupt turns of hers, although after the first few times I no longer saw malice in them, only boredom. She was restless in her own way, Eve; she woke each day without any apparent memory of
the day before, and her patience for and with us was limited. Her curiosity was saved only for food and for the search for food.

At night, after we had fed and bound her—Tallent and Esme and I were in favor of letting her sleep unfettered, but Fa’a had protested strenuously, holding aloft the found spear as argument and speaking so rapidly that Tallent, mostly to appease him, had acquiesced—we talked, sharing the day’s discoveries. The guides (who now slept near us) walked every day deeper and deeper into the jungle beyond, for hours at a time, looking for signs of other abandoned spears, of other Eves, but had so far found nothing. Their minuet with the jungle, their parries and retreats, were doing us no good, and we knew that soon we would have no choice but simply to enter it and move up the island until we found what Tallent hoped for and Fa’a feared.

I would recount my day’s observations of Eve, and although I could sense Esme wanting to interrupt—her impatience, her need to interject, clogged the air like something living—she remained silent, letting Tallent ask for clarifications, letting him question me and react to the things I had seen and recorded.

“How old do you think she is?” Tallent asked one night.

I told him it was difficult to say with any authority, but I thought she was maybe around sixty,
²⁸
given the gray in her hair, the condition
of her teeth, the wrinkles that pulled her lower abdomen into a sorrowful, pleated dog’s face, and the way she relied more on her sense of smell than on her sight, for it had begun to occur to me that her porcine behavior, the way she sniffed everything so deeply and at such close range, may have been a necessity, a skill learned to compensate for her impaired vision. Even in the dusk, when the grubs she so enjoyed glowed whitely like stars, she was unable to pluck them from the ground without first scraping them into a pile and then sorting through the pile, bringing her face close to each object. But of course it was impossible to say; I had no way to verify my hunch, and she had no way to communicate with me. But this nearness of vision seemed to be her only potentially serious disability—besides, obviously, her lack of language and general forgetfulness—and one commensurate with her age. In all other ways she was in good, even excellent health, especially for someone who by all evidence had been living on her own in the jungle for an unidentifiable length of time. She ate well and slept well and shat well. Her limbs were strong and her calves were complicated with muscle. Her hearing was remarkable: she could hear a manama fruit’s windy whistle as it fell through the air, something I would never have thought to listen for myself. Each morning when I took her pulse, I was impressed anew by its steady thrum, like the faraway echo of some primitive drumbeat. (Later, when I was older, I would remember with awe and envy another quality as well—her apparent lack of loneliness, how she seemed to need no one and nothing except food, how our company seemed not to disrupt the unchangeable patterns of her everyday existence.)

“Sixty,” murmured Tallent.

“I could be wrong,” I added quickly.

“No,” said Tallent. “I think you’re probably right. Sixty, though. That makes me wonder.” But he said nothing more, and after waiting for a while for him to continue, Esme mumbled something about getting ready for bed, and I went with her to lay out our mats, leaving Tallent to sit and think his private thoughts, the nature of which I could only try and try to envision.

The average U’ivuan woman is fifty-three inches tall, the average U’ivuan man fifty-six. The average U’ivuan family has four children. U’ivuans are stocky and blocky. They have wide feet (which make them good swimmers), long thighs (which make them good trekkers), thick arms (which make them good throwers), and small, square hands. The women, like all women in tropical climates, begin menstruating early (as early as eight, though usually around ten) and are finished with menopause by forty. As a race, they are known for their excellent auditory sense and their exceptional sense of smell. They are prone to tooth decay. The primary cause of death among both men and women is dysentery, probably from their habit of drinking the same water in which they bathe. The average age of death is fifty-two.
²⁹

Of course, I did not know any of this when I examined Eve. So the next morning, when Tallent asked me to examine the three men as a sort of imperfect control group, I thought nothing of it. I suppose what was surprising to me was how similar—superficially, at least (though superficiality was all I had)—they were to Eve: the state of their gums, for example, their general flexibility, their good hearing and quick reflexes. They submitted to my exams tolerantly, opening their mouths obediently when I opened mine, taking deep breaths
as I pantomimed filling my own chest with air. I even improvised a vision test, in which I drew thick black marks on sheets of notebook paper and then stood about twenty feet away; the men showed me by holding up their fingers how many marks were on the page.

“How are the men?” Tallent asked me that night.

“In good health,” I answered lamely.

“How old do you estimate them to be?” he asked mildly.

“Eve’s age,” I replied. I was very certain about this. “Sixty, give or take. Tu is perhaps a few years younger; his teeth are a little less worn, his vision a little sharper.” I did not add that the vision test had surprised me; all three men’s results were poor, poorer than I had anticipated. At first I thought that they had not understood the test, but when I stepped closer to them, it became clear that they knew what they were to do—they were simply incapable of doing it.

“Ah,” said Tallent, and was silent for a bit. “You’re right about Tu—he
is
younger than the others.” He paused again. “Tu is forty, Uva just turned forty-one, and Fa’a is forty-two.” He said this without triumph, only a sad kind of wonderment.

Then it was I who had nothing to say. “But … they can’t be,” I said uselessly.

Tallent smiled his brief, melancholy smile. “They’re elders in this country,” he said. “They are what forty-year-olds look like here. The question is”—and he nodded in Eve’s direction—“why a sixty-year-old looks like a forty-year-old.”

“Well,” I admitted, “then there’s a simple explanation. I’m wrong. She’s not sixty. She must be closer to their age.”

“I don’t think so,” said Tallent, and he called over to Fa’a, who, once he saw where Tallent was heading, came only reluctantly. All of the guides avoided Eve, but Fa’a perhaps most assiduously. He stopped a few feet short of her, and when Tallent pushed aside her fat beaver’s tail of matted hair to show him the mark, he craned his neck forward, lifting his heels and lowering his torso like a crane rather than taking one step closer to her.

But when he saw the tattoo, his reaction was immediate. For a moment he froze in that strange stance, his hands still held behind his back in a parody of an English gentleman, and then slowly moved closer to her. As Tallent had that first time, he let his fingertips just hover over the mark and then jerked them away as if
he’d been burned. His jabberings to Tallent sounded furious, and although I could not understand his words, I could guess at their meaning—
What is this? Is this a joke?
—and, through Tallent’s soothing, low tones, his reply as well—
No, it’s not a joke. Be calm. Be calm
. (Even all these days and conversations later, U’ivuan still sounded to me like a blur of glottal stops and aggressive
u
’s chopped up by the same three or four graceless consonants. Many years later, in Maryland, I would stand on a playground watching some of my newly arrived sons and daughters be taunted by the neighborhood children, who would scoop their hands under their arms, chasing after them and making noises like cartoon gorillas—“Oo-oo-ah-ah! Koo-oo-ka-ah!”—and would not be able to stop myself from agreeing with their interpretation.)

Fa’a stamped off; he and Tallent seemed not to have resolved their argument.

“Why is he so upset?” I asked.

Tallent sighed. “He recognized Eve’s mark,” he said, pointing at Eve, who was now lowering herself to the earth with a series of hoggy grunts, “as I knew he would. The mark of the opa’ivu’eke is given only to those who reach the age of sixty. It is given in a special ceremony, which is followed by a great feast.” He was quiet. “I have never witnessed it myself.”

I didn’t understand. “But why would that agitate him?”

“Because U’ivuans don’t live to be sixty.”

“
Ever?
”

“Fa’a doesn’t know of anyone. His great-grandmother, the longest-lived person in the known history of his village—that’s what he kept repeating, over and over—was fifty-eight when she died. He has never heard of anyone who has lived to sixty. It is an impossible age, and a coveted one. So you’re right, Norton. Eve is sixty—at least—and we need to figure out why, and how, she has lived this long.”

Esme arrived then, back from the stream, and Tallent told her of what had happened. I sat near them, half listening, but really I was looking at Fa’a, who was standing slightly apart from his cousins (who, as Tallent had predicted, were greedily devouring their salted vuakas, moaning with delight and relish) and looking up into the forest beyond. And suddenly, watching these short-lived creatures
eating another short-lived creature, all of them spending their days searching only for a taste of something delicious, the jungle seemed a very sad place to me, and I longed to urge Fa’a to enjoy his vuaka while he could; he was forty-two, after all, and would surely not return to this island. But instead I only watched the three of them as if they were figures in a diorama, while in low voices behind me Tallent and Esme puzzled over how an Ivu’ivuan could have possibly reached the ancient age of sixty.

The forest was as Tallent had described it—hushed and mossy and magical—and in it I could feel both its lull and its danger: it was dangerous
because
it lulled.

I knew the forest was having its effect because of the way the guides’ behavior changed around Eve. They weren’t exactly friendly or casual—I could still see their small fingers tighten almost imperceptibly around their spears when they drew closer to her—but they talked to her in U’ivuan, and sometimes even reached out to stroke her skin, a gentle skimming pet of a touch, never lingering, never with any pressure.

Only Fa’a remained aloof, his gaze upon her inscrutable, although it was also he who came to me one night after dinner and, pointing at Eve, said, “Iv” (that was how he and Tu and Uva pronounced her name).

“Yes,” I said, “Eve.”

“Iv,” he repeated, and handed me a stick, mimed writing on the ground.

He was the only literate one of the three of them—Esme said his father had for a period attended one of the missionaries’ schools—and he watched, curious, as I etched in the dirt her name in large capital letters.

“Ah,” he said, “Eh-veh,” saying it as a U’ivuan word.

“Eve,” I corrected, but he smiled—the first time I had seen him smile; he and Eve had the same arrowheady teeth—and shook his head. “Eh-veh,” he repeated, and from then on she was Eve to us, Eh-veh to the guides.

And so we worked through the days in a sort of not unpleasant half-truce, each of us taking turns leading Eve—she was so forgetful,
her attention span so limited, that we kept the rope knotted loosely around her neck like a collar—laying out her food, waiting as she dropped to the ground and sniffed and snorted. One evening, after we had stopped for the day and were eating our own meal of manama fruit and Spam and shirs of velvety tree mushrooms that we knew, thanks to Eve, were edible, she suddenly heaved herself to her feet and began her flat-footed stomp into the woods beyond. Eve was capricious, her interest in things unpredictable and often perplexing, and there was always something both funny and irritating about how purposefully she would head off in one direction or another, one of us trotting dutifully behind, only to discover that the object of her fixation was nothing more exotic than a manama fruit trembling with hunonos or a steady drip of water pocking against a large flat leaf.