I spent the rest of the morning observing the observer. She was back in her element, cross-legged on the floor with a circle of children fanned out around her and three more squished in her lap. They played a clapping game in which you keep a rhythm and have to shout out in turn some sort of response. She was able to keep the beat against her thigh with her left hand while taking notes with her right and shout out an answer in Tam when it was her turn. When the littlest girl called out her answer everyone collapsed on the ground with laughter. Nell didn’t understand, and once an older boy had gotten control of himself he explained it and Nell let out a big laugh and they all collapsed again.
After a while she moved on to another group, and then another. Somehow they all knew they had to wait their turn for her attention—there was no interrupting her when she was with another group. Bani brought in snacks throughout the morning so the energy remained high. I watched all this from my chair at the table until, after a conversation with an old man, Nell called me over and asked if I’d heard of something called a bolunta. I hadn’t. She said it sounded a bit like a Wai. And this man, Chanta, had seen it once. His mother was Pinlau.
I’d never heard of the Pinlau or of any tribe with anything like the Wai.
‘He was a young boy when he saw it.’
‘How old?’
Nell asked him. He shook his head. She asked again. ‘Five or six, he thinks.’
I tried to calculate how long ago that would have been. He was exceptionally old for the region, his face shrunken, his features collapsing to the center, and his left earlobe nearly horizontal on a large growth coming out of the top of his jawbone. Hairless, toothless, a thumb and one finger on each hand, he had to be over ninety. He understood immediately that although Nell was speaking, the questions were mine, and he looked at me directly when answering, his eyes clear, free of the glaucoma which blued the eyes of so many natives, even children.
‘It was a ceremony?’
‘Yes.’
How often was it practiced?’ I asked.
‘I saw very little,’ Nell translated. She hadn’t asked him my question. She had asked him what he’d seen. I smiled at this and she shrugged. She asked again.
He didn’t know. Nell reminded him that he couldn’t say that. She had put a taboo on that response.
‘I remember little.’
‘What were these little things you saw?’
‘I saw my mother’s skirt.’
‘Who was wearing your mother’s skirt?’
At this Chanta looked ashamed. ‘Tell him it is common,’ I said. ‘Tell him it is very common for the Kiona.’
She did, and Chanta looked back and forth between us with his clear eyes, unsure if we were making a joke. ‘Tell him this is true. Tell him I have lived with Kiona for two years.’
Chanta’s incredulity only seemed to grow. He seemed to be retreating.
Nell chose her words carefully. She spoke for many sentences, pointing to me as she might a blackboard in a lecture hall. Using a careful grave tone, nearly worshipful.
‘I saw my uncle and my father in courting clothes,’ he said.
‘Can you describe them?’
‘Cowrie necklaces, mother-of-pearl collar, waistbands, leaf skirts. The things girls used to wear. In those days.’
‘And what were they doing in these clothes, your uncle and father?’
‘They were walking around in a circle.’
‘And then?’
‘They kept walking.’
‘And what did the people watching do?’
‘They laughed.’
‘They thought it was funny?’
‘Very funny.’
‘And then?’
He started to say something and stopped. We urged him on.
‘And then my mother came out of the bushes. And my aunt and my girl cousins.’
‘And what were they wearing?’
‘Bones through their noses, paint, mud.’
‘Where were they painted?’
‘Their face and chests and backs.’
‘They were dressed as men?’
‘Yes.’
‘As warriors?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were they wearing anything else?’
‘No.’
‘What else did they do?’
‘I didn’t see the rest.’
‘Why not?’
‘I left.’
‘Why?’
Silence. The water in his eyes trembled. This was clearly an upsetting memory. I thought we should stop.
‘What were the women wearing?’ Nell asked again.
He didn’t answer.
‘What were the women wearing?’
‘I have already said.’
‘Have you?’
Silence.
‘Did something upset you then?’
‘Penis gourds,’ he whispered. ‘They were wearing penis gourds. I ran away. I was a silly boy. I did not understand. I ran away.’
‘This is what the Kiona women wear, too,’ I told him. ‘It can be unsettling.’
‘The Kiona?’ Chanta looked at me with relief. And then he laughed, a great bark of a laugh.
‘What is funny?’
‘I was a silly boy.’ And then he was overcome with laughter. ‘My mother wore a penis gourd,’ he squeaked, and his face crumpled even further until he was just a pair of wet eyes and a smooth wedge of black upper gums. He seemed to be emptying his body of a great deal of tension.
Nell was laughing with him and I wasn’t sure what had just happened: who had asked the questions, whose questions were asked, how we got that story out of him when he did not want to tell it, when he had kept it as a secret all his life. Bolunta. They want to tell their stories, she had said once, they just don’t always know how. I’d had years of school, and years in the field, but my real education, this method of persistence I would draw on for the rest of my career, happened right then with Nell.
After lunch she gathered a few things in a bag.