The People in the Trees (28 page)

But if they were unsentimental about animals, they
were
sentimental about their own existence. I was struck time and again by the smallness of the society, by what it must be like to live a life in which everyone you knew or had ever seen might be counted on your fingers. And yet although it was small, it was not in any way incomplete: every ritual that might have been practiced in a civilization a thousand times its size had been accounted for here as well. Indeed, it sometimes seemed as if there were a surplus of rituals and rules, as
if to compensate for the number of people who would be able to participate in them. Life—a brief life, at that—unfolded as a series of bright-dazzled occasions, a drumbeat of celebrations marking events and milestones that would in a more crowded, busier society be considered everyday events, worthy of nothing more than a comment.

For example: There was a ceremony each month to mark the start of the women’s menses, and another to mark their conclusion. There was recognition of sexual intercourse. The first time I saw a man and a woman disappear into a hut together, the rest of the village broke into wild ululating, and the children—it was very late—raised their bushy heads and looked around them with sleep-squinted eyes. The couple seemed not at all embarrassed, and when they were done, they came out of the hut to more ululating and then laid down their mats and went to sleep themselves. In the first few weeks in the village, I witnessed celebrations to mark a baby’s first steps (in fact, the little girl I had seen with a craving for dangerous foodstuffs) and to celebrate a boy’s receiving his first spear, and to celebrate a girl’s birthday, and to mark the hunters’ return to the village with what looked like a whole generation of vuakas, who wept and scritched from within a bulging, ad hoc palm-leaf sack that two men dragged behind them, and another, the purpose of which I was never able to decipher, in which four men and four women danced (jogged, really) arrhythmically around the fire, holding up to their foreheads one of the grinning lizardy things I had seen in the dried-goods hut before tossing them into the flames while everyone else watched solemnly.
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One evening I wandered back over to the village after my shift
bathing the dreamers and saw that the entire population was standing around the ninth hut, and that they were collectively emanating a low, almost metallic hum, like the throb of a generator. In the opening to the hut stood the village chief, looking relatively tall and relatively stately and wearing a crown of pale fern leaves, whose tips bent and lifted in the limp breeze like a beetle’s antennae. He said something, and one of the women gently pushed forward a young boy. It was still, at the time, very difficult for me to guess any U’ivuan’s age, but later I would learn that he had just made maku o’ana, or eight o’anas, which meant that he was around ten by the Western calendar.

The boy and the chief turned to face each other, and the chief placed his hands on the boy’s shoulders and said something to him, and the boy bent his head. The chief spoke again and then stepped to the side of the door, and the boy went in, followed by the chief.

The crowd began to move closer around the hut, and their humming grew louder. The woman who had plucked the boy from behind her sat directly in front of the entryway, facing in, and next to her sat a man—I assumed they were the boy’s parents.

I drew closer as well, until I was crouching directly behind the parents, following their gaze into the hut, which had been lit by a small fire built directly under the turtle carapace. In the faint light, it looked waxen and somehow evil, like a trophy from a conquered beast that had been made talismanic over time.

Inside, the boy lay down on the mat on his back. His face was expressionless, but I saw his right hand, the hand that was visible from the door, opening and closing, the way the men’s did around their spears, although of course the boy was clutching at nothing but air. The chief stepped over him so that he was straddling him and chanted a few words. The humming grew louder yet. And then the chief slowly lowered himself down, first onto his knees and then on top of the boy entirely, where he lay, quite still, for several minutes. He was not a big man, but the boy was very small, and the chief’s body blanketed him so completely that I could see only the boy’s hand, opening and closing against the palm mat.

Did I know what was to happen next? I suppose. But the whole thing seemed so much the stuff of fever-dreams—the chanting, the weird light, the humming, the distant snorting of the hogs, the chief’s naked, sweat-shined back and thighs—that when the chief finally said something brief and the boy turned onto his stomach, I was shocked by the violence with which it happened.

Although perhaps
violence
is not the correct word, because while it is true that the chief was assertive, he did not seem needlessly aggressive. I noticed before he began that there was a small no’aka-shell dish of fat by his side, with which he rubbed the boy, and his sodomizing of him, while thorough, did not appear to be in any way vicious. The boy, for his part, lay very still and utterly silent, his arms down by his sides, his hand opening and shutting, his face turned into the mat.

After the chief had finished, he stood and walked to the entryway and bowed his head to the parents, who bowed back. And then he said something, and a group of eight men, among them two of the boys who had brought back those stacks of vuakas on their spears, joined him at the opening. The chief lifted the crown of ferns from his head and placed it on the head of one of the older men, whom I recognized from our arrival-day negotiations, who then went into the hut and repeated the chief’s actions. When he was done, he bowed to the boy’s parents (and they to him) and the crown was passed to the next man, and then the next, until all of them had visited the boy.

When everyone had had his turn, the chief spoke, and the boy moved onto his hands and knees and then stood, slowly, and walked to the entryway to join him, the two of them silhouetted by light from the fire. The chief brought the boy before him and turned him around in one slow revolution before his parents, and I could see that the insides of his legs were tattooed with dried blood. But otherwise he looked the same boy he had been when he went into the hut: the same solemn expression, the same perfect form, the same dark, inscrutable eyes. And then the chief spoke to him again, perched on his head the bushy fern crown, and placed his hands on the sides of the boy’s head in a kind of benediction.

And then, abruptly, it was over. The humming stopped, the crowd, yawning and stretching, dispersed, the chief rejoined his cronies and wandered off toward the hogs, and the boy, his small head
aflame with ferns, was swallowed by a group of his peers, who strode off toward the meat house as a pack. Besides the crown, the only thing that marked him as different was the slight bowleggedness of his walk. So anticlimactic was the denouement that I was left wondering for a minute whether I had hallucinated the entire thing.

I know it is not a very popular thing to say, but I have always believed, even before this occasion, that certain ethnic groups are predisposed to certain types of behavior or, perhaps more accurately, naturally endowed with certain characteristics. The Germans and Japanese, for example (and I don’t think it possible to dispute this), have an organic predilection for a particular brand of refined cruelty, the French for a kind of glamorous laziness that they have managed to pass off as languor, the Russians for alcoholism, the Koreans for surliness, the Chinese for parsimoniousness, the English for homosexuality. The Ivu’ivuans, for their part, had a special interest in and inclination toward sexual promiscuity. A week or so after that evening, I was walking deep in the woods, bored and a bit claustrophobic from the many hours spent in the village, and saw the boy from the hut with one of the spear-carrying adolescents. This time the older boy was leaning against a tree and the younger one was fellating him. Now, the natural assumption here (which was, predictably, the one Esme made when I later told her and Tallent about what I’d seen) was that the boy was some juvenile sex slave. But I do not believe that to be the case. Over the months we remained in the village, I witnessed a sort of pervasive sexual freedom and openness that I was surprised at not having noticed before: I saw couples (men and women, but other permutations as well) rutting in huts and in the woods, and children of all ages nuzzling other children, of course, but adults too. It had never occurred to me before Ivu’ivu that children might enjoy sexual relations, but in the village it seemed wholly natural, as indeed it was.

But to return to the ceremony. As soon as it was over, I trotted back to Tallent, who was reading by the precious glow of his flashlight over one of his notebooks, and tried quietly to tell him what I’d seen. As I have noted before, I often found it difficult to read Tallent’s face, but this time, for once, it was easy: I saw shock, and disbelief,
and disgust, and excitement, and envy, each emotion replacing the next as neatly and wholly as images in a slideshow.

Unfortunately, Esme awoke midway through my recitation and I was made to recount the entire incident again. Not surprisingly, she did not receive the information well, and essentially accused me of lying, her voice rising higher and higher until Tallent was forced to tell her to compose herself.

“I just don’t believe it,” she finally hissed (we were all speaking in whispers so as not to wake the dreamers). “There’s been no indication of this type of behavior, there’s been no mistreatment of the children, there’s been—”

“But that’s just it,” I told her. “It’s not mistreatment. The boy seemed completely fine afterward.”

She scoffed. “You’re going to tell me that a young boy who’s just been raped by nine men—”

“You’re not listening, goddammit,” I snapped back at her. “He wasn’t being raped. His parents were right there. It wasn’t a violent occasion.”

“It’s by its very
nature
violent, Norton! I don’t care if the parents were there or not!”

Anyway, it was a very tedious conversation, and round and round it went, and it might have gone on for much longer if Tallent, who had been watching us, had not put an end to it by promising he would talk to the village chief about it the next day.

And he did. According to the chief, what I had witnessed was a ritual called a’ina’ina, and it was bestowed upon each boy when he reached maku o’ana. The point of the ceremony was to instruct boys in the ways of lovemaking, and who better to teach a boy than another man? And what better way to help a boy relieve some of his preadolescent aggression and anxiety than to show him an outlet toward manhood? Girls, being less sexually charged, had no equivalent ritual, but they were thought to need less sexual instruction than the boys. The chief also invited us to witness the next a’ina’ina, which would take place in three nights. It was highly unusual, the chief said, to have two boys whose eighth o’anas were so close together, but that was what had happened this year.

I found the chief’s explanation of a’ina’ina perfectly reasonable. Esme, of course, did not. I couldn’t tell what Tallent thought. But
three nights later we were all back at the ninth hut, watching as this time a different boy, a little more cushioned and somehow not as attractively alert as the boy I’d seen, was greeted by the chief at the entryway and taken in for his initiation. And even though everything was exactly as I’d described it—the humming, the chanting, the burning fire, the boy’s acquiescence, the wreath of ferns—Esme adamantly refused to speak of it later. She marched back to our mats like a teenager in a fury, and if there had been a structure with a door available, she would have stomped into it and slammed it shut. As it was, she flung herself down and rolled onto her side and pretended to be asleep, even though she woke me twice in the night with her muffled sobbing.

Years later, when all of our lives were very different, Esme published a book about her time on Ivu’ivu
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in which she neglected entirely to mention the ritual. I wanted to ask her why she hadn’t addressed it at all, and even started a letter to her, but I was of course by that point very occupied with more urgent matters and so never completed it. However, I considered her omission the worst sort of intellectual hypocrisy: when documenting a culture, one cannot simply leave out details that one finds distasteful or shocking
or that do not fit into the tidy narrative one has constructed. But then, later still, I wondered if her reaction had not been born primarily from jealousy. After all, as far as such events went, the a’ina’ina was an anthropological treasure, and it had been I, not she, who had observed it first. That certainly was something I could understand and even sympathize with, especially considering the events that would follow, which would render her presence increasingly irrelevant.

As for me, I did not feel it was my position to pass judgment on the ritual. I had certainly found it a surprise, even a shock, but I cannot deny that it made me rethink certain assumptions I’d always had about childhood, and sex in general, and how there was no single correct attitude to either. This may sound very naive, but I suppose I had thought until that point that there were a few absolutes in the world—that certain behaviors or acts, like murder, were inherently wrong, and others inherently correct. But my time on Ivu’ivu taught me that all ethics or morals are culturally relative. And Esme’s reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.
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