The People in the Trees (25 page)

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A close relation of the coconut, no’akas are a round gourdlike fruit that grows on vines (like watermelons) and are about the size of a large honeydew melon. On U’ivu they’re more commonly referred to as
uka moa
, or “hog food,” for the resemblance the stiff black hair that covers their surface bears to a hog’s bristles.

PART IV: THE NINTH HUT

I
.

I have called it and would call it the village, but it wasn’t a village really, just a large dirt-floored clearing with two-dozen-odd shaggy dried-palm huts ringing its perimeter, which appeared as abruptly as a mirage.

We had come across a particularly impassable-looking scrim of trees, and the guides grunted as they shouldered their way through them, the dreamers shuffling after them in their stumbling, disorganized way. Esme and Tallent and I followed, and although we began in the forest as we pushed our way through a clutch of manamas, we emerged at the edge of the village.

The first thing I saw were the bodies. They were everywhere: women lying flat on their backs, their children’s heads thrust up into the furrows of their armpits; men, their legs spread wide apart, their mouths open; a passel of hogs, their forelegs tucked beneath them like a cat’s, their bristles black and shiny as porcupine’s quills. In the middle of the clearing a small fire snapped and spat to itself. Suspended over the fire was an unidentifiable skinned animal, smaller than the hogs and black where the flames had lapped it, its eyes still intact and staring wretchedly at us.

It was the scene of a massacre, a mass death, and it was only when I looked again, more carefully, that I saw that the women’s chests were moving, and that the men’s thumbs were dreamily stroking the spears they clutched even in their sleep, and that with each exhalation, the quiffs of stiff hair on the hogs’ noses trembled and shifted.

Fa’a was the first of us to speak, and although I didn’t understand
what he said, I did understand that his tone was unsurprised.
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Behind us clustered the dreamers, all of them uncharacteristically silent, and for a minute or so we all, as a group, simply stood and watched the village at sleep.

But then, and for no particular reason, Eve let out one of her echoing, pistoning shouts, and the sleepers burst into movement like
a bundle of tinder catching fire, the men seeming to go from horizontal to vertical in one swift shift, the women adding their voices to Eve’s in fear, the hogs grunting and running to the men’s sides, their eyes small and mean and oily. Only the animal skewered above the fire remained where it was, the flames spitting to themselves. Later I would remember it as a repeat of the day the dreamers had encroached upon us, stepping out of the forest in a gang, and would think how this time we were the intruders, inserting ourselves rudely into a play in which we had no written part.

Later still I would remember this scene and the panic that had ensued when one day—many years after—I was watching one of my children watching television. On the screen was a cartoon: there was a hunter, a potatoey squirt of a man with a speech impediment, who bustled into a village populated by similarly tuberous people, although these people were black, and the only things distinguishable from the black of their bodies were their lips, fat and red and as ridged as an unsplit cacao pod, and the startled bright whites of their eyes. The hunter chased the black creatures, who ran about in frantic wobbling circles, waving their spears and shouting at nothing, while the hunter pranced around, the group of them making a crazy ballet.

And that was us then as well. The villagers ran and screamed, and we ran after and around and above them, probably screaming ourselves—anyone looking at us would have imagined we were playing a children’s game. You can well imagine by this point how many hours it took Fa’a (poor Fa’a!) to reestablish something resembling order, for the men to cautiously lower their spears, for their snarling hogs to sink back to the earth, docile but alert. It took many, many hours, and by the end of it all—the women sitting on one side of the clearing, their children surrounding them, and all of them blinking at us like toads; the dreamers, guarded by Uva and Tu, at the edge of the clearing, somehow managing to drift off to sleep; most of the men sitting on the other side, their hogs beside them; and I, along with Tallent, Esme, and Fa’a, in the center of the village, where the creature
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continued to roast above the fire, its whole backside so
burned now that its skin continually ashed off in little confetti that drifted through the air like flocks of moths—I was exhausted.

Across from us sat three of the villagers, all men, all robust in appearance, their hair dark and exuberant, their arms and legs stripey with tendon and muscle. For a moment the two groups stared at each other a bit shyly, as if one of our group was to be betrothed to one of the other and we were here to make introductions and discuss terms. The men held their spears upright in their right hands and, as I had seen Fa’a do, opened and closed their fingers around them in a gesture that seemed more rhythmic than nervous, so that at some points, when they were all fanning their fingers at the same moment, it appeared choreographed, and I half fancied they might break into song.

It was the man in the center who first spoke, and even were it not for this fact, nor that he sat in the center, I would have assumed he was the superior of the other two: he was slightly taller, even sitting down, and sat with his shoulders pulled back at an almost unnatural angle, and his hog was bigger than his friends’, its coat marvelously shiny, as if it had recently been rubbed with oil.

I was mesmerized by the hogs, which were unlike any I had seen before, either in books or in person. The first thing that distinguished them was, of course, their size: they were as tall as foals and as fat as unshorn sheep, enormous, muscular beasts that might have been magnificent were they not so ugly. Standing, they had been scarcely shorter than their masters but looked much more substantial: their torsos were as round as barrels, and while I had seen that they were not particularly deft—they had a funny way of running, folding in both hind legs at once while flicking out their front quarters, which made them appear to be hopping rather than scurrying—their
hooves were as tough as horn and their legs thick and dense with hair. But I was most struck by their tusks, which curved out and up from either end of their wide, scythelike mouths and were chalky like stone and chipped and splintered at their tips. They sat prettily, like kittens, with their legs folded beneath them—all except for the leader’s hog, who throughout our meeting kneaded with one front hoof a scrap of fur and blood that had once been some sort of living creature. I watched him worry it in the dirt, dragging it back and forth in a lazy arc that was somehow human in its insouciant cruelty, like a fat man in a pinstriped suit playing with a set of dice before his quavering victim. His eyes never left us, however, and as Fa’a and then Tallent spoke, he turned his great head slightly, moving between them, occasionally stopping to look up at his master, as if to gauge his reaction, which was the most unsettling thing of all.

Around me the conversation groaned on. There would be a long, bright spatter of talk from the village leader, then responses from Fa’a and Tallent. Were things going well? Not well? It was difficult to say. I could discern from the softness of Fa’a’s and Tallent’s voices that they were being willfully calm, possibly conciliatory, but was unable to determine whether this was costing them much effort. Next to me, I could hear Esme breathing adenoidally, but she often did that and so that too proved unhelpful. I saw from time to time the men, and then Fa’a and Tallent, turn to look at the dreamers, who did not look back at them, and when this happened, I heard Fa’a’s and Tallent’s voices dip lower, their speech become faster and somehow more beseeching.

Naturally, this interlude would prove to be another to which I wish I had paid more attention, that I had tried harder to fix in my memory every gesture and sigh, but in the actual moment I simply daydreamed. I studied the neatness of the boundary between the village and the forest, the abruptness with which the trees stopped and how they indeed seemed to ring the clearing like people themselves, as if the village were a theater in the round and we the actors. I wished I could turn my head and look at the women and children who were grouped behind us, but I didn’t dare.

And so instead I watched a baby hog, which was about the size of a feral cat, play in the dirt behind the village council. He must have been very young, because his tusks had not begun to grow in and his
eyes were still big and wet in his face. He was playing a game with himself in which he jumped back and forth over the line between the forest and the village: a little hop and he was in society; another hop and he was not. Hop, hop. Hop, hop. It was so easy. I couldn’t take my eyes from him, not for a very long time.

Something about the village had been troubling me, but it wasn’t until that night, when I was lying on my palm-frond mat and waiting for sleep, that I realized what it was.

The negotiations, or whatever they were, had taken time, so much that we all felt the light dim and the air grow cooler and heard the children behind us begin to mewl for their meal. At that point the conversation ended abruptly, and all of us, the three on their side and the four on ours, clambered to our feet, Fa’a and Tallent bowing their heads slightly to the others, who did not bow back. And then we rejoined our group—the dreamers—while the three village representatives went to speak to the other men and the women began to swat at the children and disappeared into various huts for dinner supplies.

It did not feel auspicious, the group of us sitting there, still at the forest’s boundary, the guides passing around manama and kanava fruit to us all while just a few yards away the village went about its life as if we had never existed, but Tallent came over to Esme and me to briefly assure us that all was well. “We can stay, for now,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it once we’ve fed them.”

It was a very grim meal, sitting there trying to swallow the manama fruit, whose squished, squirmy pulp seemed to clot and then expand in my throat. Some of the women had at last taken down the animal from the fire—it was now so charred that its entire back had been scattered to the wind—and replaced it with a large swaying apron of red meat, extravagantly quilted with white threads of fat. The smell of it cooking (indeed, the scent of the fire itself) made the fruit all the more unbearable, and I finally had to put it down so I could let my memory of eating flesh, real flesh, fill my mouth and mind and palate: the feel of meat’s unyielding viscosity, how you could turn it in your mouth for minutes if you chose, how with every chew it seeped blood, so tannic and tart on your tongue.
The women did not cook the meat for very long—just until the red had begun to shade into brown—before two of them plucked it off the fire and laid it on a large lawa’a leaf, and the men and children hurried over to pull at it with their bare hands, stretching it until pieces smacked off into their palms. And then another, smaller curtain of meat was stretched over the flames, cooked, and eaten by the women.

In the end, it took us so long to get the dreamers settled for the night (they seemed oblivious to the smells of the fire) that we were all too exhausted to talk. But as I said, it was only when I was lying there, the dreamers and Esme snoring around me, Fa’a’s back shadowed against the still-burning fire (a truce might have been made with the villagers, but I noticed that Tallent was not abandoning our nightly watch), that I was able to identify what I had noticed but was unable to articulate: there were no old people in the village. The three village representatives had appeared to be in their thirties or at the most their forties. But I had seen no one who looked older. It was a village of the young.

Of course, I had not had a chance to observe them closely, I reminded myself. Tomorrow I would pay more attention. But as I dropped off the edge into sleep, I could hear a small voice asking,
What does it mean?

Nothing
, I told it. I was tired.

But I knew even then that I was wrong.