The dance went on and on, with no sense of form, of beginning or end. At one point Fen gave her a smile. His anger had passed. She felt herself falling asleep with her eyes open. And then she noticed, off to the left beyond the dancing and close to the water, a flicker of light. She looked hard. It was a tiny orange glow just above the rock that jutted out from the shore. A cigarette? She got up and moved toward it casually, as if she were heading up the path to her house, then she turned into the bushes toward the rock. Through the leaves she could see she was right: it was a cigarette, and hunched over it was the barely discernible shape of a man.
Alone was not something you saw among tribes she’d studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil. The culture often had proverbs against it. Not even a monkey walks alone was the Tam’s most repeated one. The man on the rock was Xambun, not squatting the way another Tam would be, but sitting, knees drawn up slightly and his torso curled over them, eyes fixed on a point across the water. His body had grown fleshy and pear-shaped from the rice and bully beef they fed mine workers. Shoes were louder than bare feet—he would know it was her—but he did not turn. He lifted the cigarette to his mouth. He was still wearing the mine’s green trousers, but no adornments, no beads or bones or shells.
An informant like this in the field, a man who has been raised in the culture but removed for a time so that he is able to see his own people from a different angle with the ability to contrast their behaviors to another set of behaviors, is invaluable. And one who has been exposed to a Western culture—she couldn’t think of anyone who had ever accessed that kind of informant in as remote a place.
She wanted to move toward him. She might never get this opportunity again. And yet she felt his need for this solitude. She felt she knew his story already: the child hero, the false promises of the blackbirders, the slavelike treatment at the mine, the perilous escape back here, and the exhaustion of trying to hide it all from his family, to whom he was returning in glory. But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one. She wanted his real one. What would he say about it all? She could imagine writing a whole book on him alone.
She hadn’t moved but he turned suddenly, looked directly at her, and told her to go away.
It wasn’t until she was halfway up her steps that she realized he’d said it not in Tam or in pidgin but in English.
19
3/15 The celebration of Xambun’s return does not end. Each morning I think surely they have fished out every fish & shot every fat bird & wild pig, surely they have exhausted their own bodies if not their food supply. And each night I think surely tomorrow everything will return to normal, the women will go out on the lake at sunrise, my morning visitors will come back, the traders will go off trading, but it never happens. They sleep all day because they have been up all night. Just before sunset the drums start up again and the fires get lit and it all goes on for another night: feasting, drinking, dancing, screaming, singing, weeping.
Someone from the next hamlet just returned from the coast having brought several new beach dances. Until now beach dances had been forbidden by the elder generation here but everyone has learned them this week. Given that their standard dance includes swinging the penis hard & fast & imitating copulation with precise & lengthy accuracy, the new dances seem to be as harmless as the Hokey Pokey. The men have painted each other in an intricate design that I haven’t seen on their most expensive pottery. Everyone is festooned in their fanciest shells, strings & strings of them, and you have to shout over the din they make.
I have gone through about 50 notebooks in 5 days and yet I feel on the cusp of death by boredom. I know I am a strange bird, fatigued by frenzy, visions, and public fornication. I know as an anthropologist I am supposed to live for these opportunities to see the symbolism of the culture played out. But I don’t trust a crowd—hundreds of people together without cognition and only the basest impulses: food, drink, sex. Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain you find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is my point exactly.
Not to mention my impatience to get to X, to talk to him, to assault him, as Bankson would say. Malun promises she will secure me an interview as soon as the ceremonies are over. She keeps thanking us, and I can’t seem to convince her that we had nothing to do with his return.
I wish B hadn’t left before X arrived. I could use someone to talk to, someone who is not a mile high on morning glory seeds & something called honi & who knows what else. I have given Tadi a note to give to the Kiona when she goes to market, but she has not gone. No one has left the lake for over a week.
I have come to think of this celebration for Xambun as a wild animal that shifts & eats but might never go away.
20