‘What do you think, Bankson?’ Fen said. ‘Yes or no on the rain being forced from the earth? Is the good scientist allowed artistic license?’
I chose to continue reading. It was the Dobu section. Fen was the only anthropologist to have ever studied the Dobu, so Helen’s entire portrait of the culture came from his monograph published in Oceania and a series of interviews she conducted with him in New York. I braced myself for Fen’s protests, but he cheered Helen on as she plunged into a disturbing description of a lawless society whose chief virtues were ill will and treachery. Instead of an open communal dance plaza, the center of the village was a graveyard. Instead of communal gardens, each family planted its own yams on rocky private terrain and relied on magic and magic alone for their growth, believing that the yam tubers wandered at night below the ground and only charms and countercharms would entice them home—that the growth of one’s garden depended solely on magic, and not on the amount of seeds one planted.
‘That cannot be true,’ Nell said, slapping the page.
‘Are you doubting your dear friend Helen or your beloved husband or both?’
‘This wasn’t in your monograph. Did you tell her this?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘And you honestly believe that the Dobu did not see a correlation between number of seeds and number of crops?’
‘That is correct.’
I hurried on. Because there was never enough food and they were often half starving, the Dobu had developed a great many superstitions around cultivation. They also felt that the yams didn’t like playing, singing, laughing, or any form of happiness, but that having sex in the garden was essential for growth. Wives were always blamed for the death of their spouse, and it was believed that women could leave their sleeping bodies and do deadly deeds, and as a result, women were deeply feared. They were also deeply desired, and no woman without a chaperone was safe from male advances. They were prudish and reluctant to discuss sex, but they had a lot of it and reported great satisfaction. Mutual sexual satisfaction was important to the Dobu. I could feel my skin burning as I read. Fortunately Fen was concentrating on Helen’s words too closely to tease me about it. One of their most important spells was the spell of invisibility, used primarily for thieving and adultery.
‘They taught me that one,’ Fen said. ‘I still know it by heart. Come in handy someday.’
‘ “The Dobuan,” Helen concluded, “lives out without repression man’s worst nightmares of the ill-will of the universe.” ’
‘I think they’re the most terrifying people I’ve ever read about,’ I said.
‘Fen was a little unstable when I met him,’ Nell said. ‘His eyes were like this.’ She stretched her eyelids as open as possible.
‘I’d been frightened out of my mind every day for two years,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t have lasted half that,’ I said, but it occurred to me that the Dobu sounded a lot like him: his paranoid streak, his dark humor, his distrust of pleasure, his secrecy. I couldn’t help questioning the research. When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis? As usual, I found myself more interested in that intersection than anything else.
At some point Fen brought out cans of sardines and apricots that we ate with our fingers, our stomachs suddenly as ravenous as our minds. We all had our notebooks out by then, making notes for Helen and notes for ourselves, and everything got stained as we tried to read and write and argue and eat all at the same time.