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.