‘You’re off on your rounds now?’
‘I’ll keep it short today. I won’t go to the other hamlets, just the women’s houses here.’
‘Don’t change your plans for me. I’ll go and find Kanup. Follow him around a bit.’
‘I’m sorry Fen has done this. Made off with your canoe. Kept you stuck here.’
‘I’m not stuck. I could pay someone to get me back if I wanted to go.’ I flushed at my honesty.
She smiled. She was beautiful standing there in a ripped shirt over wide cotton trousers, a bilum bag slung over her shoulder. ‘Take cigarettes with you,’ she said, and left.
Kanup was eager to hear what I knew of Fen and Xambun’s hunt. That is what they all thought—that Fen and Xambun had gone on a boar hunt. He led me to a back room of his men’s house where, he told me, the men were discussing this expedition. I sat on a thick cane mat and passed out the cigarettes, which quickly made me many pals. Chanta was there and broke into laughter every time our eyes met. Kanup did his best to translate, though it was clearly not a skill of his and I got only fragments of the long conversation. Now that Xambun was gone, they felt free to speak of him. Some of the men felt slighted not to have been included on the trip, but the general feeling was that it was a good thing he had gone. His spirit has gone wandering, they said. He had not returned with it. He was once a man on fire and he came back a man of ash. He is not the same man, they said, and he has gone to find his spirit and bring it back into his body. They appealed to his ancestors, reciting their long names, and to the land and water spirits. I watched how fervently they prayed to all their gods for the return of Xambun’s soul to his body. Tears sprung from their clenched eyes and sweat beaded on their arms. I doubted anyone had ever prayed for me like that, or any other way for that matter.
I didn’t hear her come up. I was typing up the day’s notes.
‘I love that sound,’ she said just outside the netting, and I jumped.
‘I hope you’re not bothered. My notes turn to mush quickly if I don’t get them down.’
‘Mine too.’ She was bright and lovely, grinning at me.
‘I’m nearly through.’
‘Take as long as you like. That’s Fen’s machine anyway.’
She went to her bedroom and came back with another typewriter. She set it on the adjacent desk. I tried to concentrate, though I was aware of her legs to the left of mine beneath the table and her fingers feeding a page into the platen and her lips fluttering slightly as she read over her notes. Once she began typing, at a furious rate that was not at all surprising, the sound concentrated my thoughts and our keys thundered together. I noticed that she was manually advancing the paper at the end of each line. It was a lovely instrument, dove grey with ivory keys, but it was dented in one corner and the silver arm had broken off at its base.
She ripped out a page and snapped in another.
‘I don’t believe you’re writing actual words,’ I said.
She handed me her first page. There were no paragraphs, barely any punctuation, the thinnest sliver of a margin. Tavi sits still her eyes drooping nearly asleep body swaying and Mudama carefully pinching the lice flicking the bugs in the fire the zinging of her fingernails through the strands of hair, concentration tenderness love peace pieta.
I looked down at my own words: In light of this conversation with Chanta, and the proximity of his native Pinlau to the Kiona, one concludes that there were other tribes in the vicinity who also once practiced some sort of transvestite ritual.
‘You’re writing some sort of avant-garde novel,’ I said.
‘I just want to be able to put myself back in that moment when I read it over a year from now. What I think is important now might not be important to me then. If I can remember the feeling of sitting next to Mudama and Tavi on this afternoon then I can recall all the details I didn’t think important enough to write down.’
I tried it her way. I wrote a full description of Chanta and his tumor and his hands without fingers and his wet clear eyes. I wrote down all the dialogue I could remember, which was much more than I had in my notes, though at the time I thought I was getting everything down. I loved the sound of our two typewriters; it felt like we were in a band, making a strange sort of music. It felt like I was a part of something, and that the work was important. She always made me feel that the work was important. And then her typewriter stopped and she was watching me. ‘Don’t stop’ I said. ‘Your typing makes my brain work better.’
When we finished we ate dried fish and old sago pancakes. Through the doorway there were long flashes of lightning. There was a rumbling that I thought was thunder.
She lit a mosquito coil and we sat in the doorway with mugs of tea.