20
The Sociedad de Arqueología de América del Sur had sent word that a small conference would be held on the island in October in which the four researchers would present their work to one another and to any islanders or tourists who wished to attend. To coordinate this, SAAS had sent Isabel Nosticio, a humorless but seductive middle-aged Argentinean woman with thick black hair to her waist, who always wore pink and an abundance of makeup. At the end of any conversation, about overhead projectors or hors d’oeuvres, she would reapply her lipstick. “Remember,” she would say, sliding her glossy lips together, “it is in the interest of the island community that we work.” Her main task was to make sure the eccentric researchers roaming the SAAS halls came through in the end, making the Sociedad appear efficient, charitable, and, ultimately, pro–Rapa Nui. In the wake of a Rapa Nui petition to Chile demanding land rights outside Hanga Roa, the conference, it quickly became clear, was meant as an appeasement.
Mahina was not impressed. “They ask you to tell us of your work, the work they decide for the island, so that we not complain of their government.Pasto! ”
Greer was having breakfast in the dining room.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She sipped her tea and turned to Mahina, seated at the next table, drinking a tall glass of apricot nectar. Every morning they ate together at sunrise, as Greer was the first to wake of all the guests. Mahina would gather eggs from the yard, pluck fruit from the trees. Then Greer would hear the crackle of eggshells from the kitchen, the rhythmic thump of the knife as a guava was quartered. Greer couldn’t help but think that Mahina would have made an excellent scientist. Precision and procedure governed her life.
“It is our island,” said Mahina, who, out of some strict sense of professional boundaries, always refused to sit at Greer’s table. So they spoke across the space between them like solo travelers. Over the past few months, Greer had learned that Mahina started theresidencial six years earlier, when the Lan Chile flights began. Before that she had been a schoolteacher, making sure the island’s children learned the Rapa Nui language; sometimes, on the street, if they were out walking together, a teenager would approach Mahina with great deference, and Greer could tell the person was a former student. Mahina, she was sure, had been a demanding but inspiring teacher. Her knowledge of the island’s folklore was encyclopedic, and she took her responsibility as a storehouse of history seriously; she made Greer write down the legends she recited, then read them back for verification. Over the past few weeks, roused by late-arriving news of the military coup in Chile, they had spoken often of politics, concerned about the new regime’s effect on the island. Greer’s sympathy for Rapa Nui’s predicament increased daily, but she knew little could be done. Chile, no matter who held office, was too large and powerful, Rapa Nui too small to exist on its own. The annual supply ship collected wool from the island’s Chilean sheep ranch. If Chile had no wool to collect, why send the boat? Who, then, would bring supplies—cement and furniture and food? Still, their conversations were not about pragmatism but political idealism and the right to live freely. To speak of the logistics, Greer thought, would seem offensive.
“It’s an injustice,” said Greer.
“You do not have these problems,” said Mahina. “In America.”
“Oh, we do,” said Greer, slicing into her omelet. “Plenty. Long ago, we fought the British for independence. That was cut-and-dry at least. Now we have more complicated problems. The funny thing is, in the U.S., the wordrevolutionary has such a negative connotation. But we were revolutionaries.”
“Con-no-ta-tion?”
“A hint. A suggestion.”
“A clue?”
“Sort of,” said Greer. Mahina wrote the word on the notepad beside her—each morning they exchanged vocabulary: English for Rapa Nui, Rapa Nui for English.
“Con-no-ta-tion,” Greer enunciated. “It’s a nice word. But I promise, you could travel across the whole U.S. and never have to use it.”
“I would like to travel!” said Mahina, suddenly animated. “I would like to have money to go somewhere. People come here now from all over. Germany, Australia, and New Jersey. I am lucky to meet so many different people. I am”—Mahina looked to Greer and pronounced, slowly, one of her new vocabulary words—“privileged.” Greer nodded. “God is good to me. But still I would like to go somewhere.”
“What about Santiago? Could you go there?”
“It is the money,” Mahina said. “I have the old English books. I could sell them, yes?”
“Depends on what they are. There’s a market for old books. I could try to find a dealer in the States.”
“Yes, but of course I cannot leave. I must wait for Raphael to come back.”
“Raphael?”
“My husband.”
“Husband!” In the five months Greer had been there, this was the first Mahina had mentioned a husband. “When on earth did you get married?”
“Oh,treinta y cinco . . .”
“Thirty-five?”
“Thirty-five years ago. Saturday.”
“But where is he?”
“Tahiti.”
“Will he be back for your anniversary?”
“I hope so,” she said, nodding forcefully. “He said if Tahiti was as lovely as we heard, he would come back and bring me too.”
“He’s your exploring party.”
“Sí, sí,” she said, looking out the window. The sun lit her face and she let her eyes drift closed.
“But theresidencial ? Your home? You’d give it up for Tahiti?”
Mahina shrugged, opened her eyes. “No more talk of him.” She piled her fork and knife on her empty plate, swiped her napkin across the tablecloth.
“I have to tell you,” Greer said, “I think Ramon has a thing for you. A crush.”
“Crush?”
“Romantic interest. Love interest. He watches you all the time.”
Mahina shook her head. “Ramon is the brother of my husband.”
“That doesn’t mean he can’t think of you that way.”
“Ramon?”
“Yes, Ramon. Haven’t you noticed?”
Mahina gave a quickhmph. “And you,Doctora ? You have a crush as well, I think.Amor for thedoctora , no?”
“Me?”
“Me? Thedoctora would like to be so innocent! Vicente,Doctora ! He is always leaving books, a note, a thing for you.”
“He’s just a colleague. He’s trying to be helpful.”
“You are not married. What is wrong? You do not like him? He is too short, you think?” Mahina shrugged. “The Chilean men are tiny, it is true. Not like the Rapa Nui men.”
“No, Mahina, he’s not too short.” He was taller than Mahina, and taller than Greer. But Greer laughed, amused by the suggestion that after months of examining her feelings for Vicente, talking herself out of attraction, it might come down to something so simple, so definable: his height. “I was married, though.”
Mahina tilted her head. “Your husband? He left you?”
“He died,” said Greer. “He died ten months ago. From a heart attack.”
“Oh, my deardoctora. ” Mahina rose from her chair and moved behind Greer. “So sad.” Shifting Greer’s hair to one side of her neck, she rubbed Greer’s shoulders, then rested her chin on Greer’s head. The sweet smell of gardenia washed over Greer, and she felt her eyes drift closed. She hadn’t expected to be comforted by this—her admission, the warmth of Mahina’s sympathy, by simple touch.
“Thank you,” said Greer.
“Doctora,” said Mahina. “Never feel alone.”
What Mahina had said about Vicente was true—he did come by often, with books and journals and articles. He’d supplied Greer with all the reading material she could possibly need. At the weekly dinners, or in passing at the lab, he updated her on hisrongorongo work and his investigations into the Germans. By now she even knew his daily routines. In the morning he did sit-ups and push-ups on the coast; on the nights the Lan Chile flight arrived, he read the newspaper by thecaleta with Mario and Petero, exchanging finished pages one at a time, all of them sharing a bottle of pisco. Greer in fact knew everybody’s routine. Ramon tended to his garden after tea each morning; he took great pleasure in trimming his avocado and guava trees, in pinching the withered blooms from his flower garden and slowly pacing his rows of manioc bushes. As Greer passed the Espíritu, Sven could be heard singing in the shower. The island had a small-town intimacy. After five months, people knew where Greer went, and when. Twice a week she bought groceries from Mario, the red-haired man she’d met her first day. Once a week she went to thecorreo to post research requests. She found comfort in these rhythms, in the intricate web of greetings that underlay her daily lab work.
At night, after dinner at theresidencial, Greer would sometimes gather with the other guests to listen to Mahina’s island stories, or to offer advice on sight-seeing routes. But usually, she went back to her room, took a long shower, and climbed into bed with a book. She was now rereading Captain Cook’s log. He had anchored off the coast in 1774, about fifty years after Roggeveen:
. . . As the master drew near the shore with the boat, one of the natives swam off to her, and insisted on coming aboard the ship, where he remained two nights and a day. The first thing he did after coming aboard was to measure the length of the ship, by fathoming her from taffrail to the stern; and as he counted the fathoms, we observed that he called the numbers by the same names that they do at Otaheite; nevertheless, his language was in a manner wholly unintelligible to all of us. . . .
Before I sailed from England I was informed that a Spanish ship had visited this isle in 1769. Some signs of it were seen among the people now about us; one man had a pretty good broad-brimmed European hat on, another had a Grego jacket, and another a red silk handkerchief.
Greer set the book down and watched the curtain billow in a breeze. She looked at the wicker nightstand, the mahogany desk, the plaque of the Virgin Mary hanging above her. It wasn’t just the ecosystem; objects as well suffered from the island’s isolation. Things didn’t disappear, they changed hands. Everything in her room would remain on the island. That red silk handkerchief and the Grego jacket, she thought, were probably in the back of someone’s closet.
They also seemed to know the use of a musket, and to stand in much awe of it. But this they probably learnt from Roggeveen, who, if we are to believe the authors of that voyage, left them sufficient tokens.
. . . The greatest part of the distance across the ground had but a barren appearance, being a dry hard clay, and everywhere covered with stones . . .
On the east side, near the sea . . . three platforms of stone-work, or rather the ruins of them. On each had stood four of those large statues; but they were all fallen down from two of them, and also one from the third; all except one were broken by the fall and in some measure defaced . . .
Greer had already noted this: Most of themoai had been toppled by 1774. Yet Roggeveen had seen them standing. So the statues must have fallen between Roggeveen’s and Cook’s visits, 1722 to 1774. If a natural disaster brought down themoai, it wasn’t the same one that wiped out the biota, for even Roggeveen noted barrenness. So what had actually toppled them? A disaster with that kind of force would surely have entered the island’s oral history, but there was no such record. Had the islanders themselves done this? After ages of carving and construction and moving? Throughout history monuments were destroyed—churches burned, idols smashed, portraits defaced—but as acts of violence inflicted by an enemy, an invader, a new regime. The Europeans hadn’t touched themoai . Mahina had spoken of two vying tribes on the island—the long-ears and the short-ears. Could one have vanquished the other? Even so, why destroy the island’s greatest achievements? Western investigators speculated endlessly about the building of themoai, amazed a primitive people could erect and transport such magnificent idols. But how could a people, any people, allow them to fall? This was the more interesting question. Greer continued:
No more than three or four canoes were seen on the whole island; and these very narrow and built with many pieces sewn together with small line. They are about eighteen or twenty feet long, head and stern carved or raised a little, are very narrow and fitted with outriggers. They do not seem capable of carrying above four persons, and are by no means for any distant navigation . . .
In all this excursion, as well as the one made the preceding day, only two or three shrubs were seen. The leaf and seed of one (called by the natives Torromedo) were not much unlike those of common vetch; but the pod was more like that of a tamarind in its size and shape. The seeds have a disagreeable bitter taste; and the natives, when they saw our people chew them, made signs to spit them out; from whence it was concluded that they think them poisonous. The wood is of a reddish colour, and pretty hard and heavy; but very crooked, small, and short, not exceeding six or seven feet in height. At the southwest corner of the island, they found another small shrub, whose wood was white and brittle in some matter, as also its leaf, resembling the ash. They also saw in several places the Otaheitean cloth plant, but it was poor and weak, and not above two and a half feet at most. They saw not an animal of any sort, and but very few birds; nor indeed anything which can induce ships that are not in the utmost distress to touch at this island. . . .
Again, Greer noted that they had observedtoromiros, a cloth plant likely related to the Polynesian mulberry used for making tapa cloth. Her thoughts were interrupted by voices from the courtyard—a woman and a man. The woman was speaking Spanish, and Greer could barely make out the phrases, but she was almost certain it was Isabel Nosticio. She was staying at Mahina’s, and seemed to be out every evening. Greer pulled two pieces of tissue from her nightstand, twirled them into small cones, and slid them into her ears.
. . . No nation need contend for the honour of the discovery of this island, as there cannot be places which afford less convenience for shipping than it does. Here is no safe anchorage, no wood for fuel, nor any fresh water worth taking on board. Nature has been exceedingly sparing of her favours to this spot.
Greer marked this last page and closed the book. She was thinking about Admiral von Spee, who had become, as predicted, Vicente’s new fixation, therongorongo for the time being forgotten. Vicente seemed a man in constant pursuit of obsessions—hot air ballooning, cryptography, German military history—appetites never quite sated. For now von Spee’s squadron truly excited him, and he spoke of it so incessantly, wondering what they might have made off with, that Greer’s own imagination had been ignited. A fleet of warships anchoring off the island, scores of German officers wandering among themoai. But the question in her mind as she drifted toward sleep was: If mariners found the island so inhospitable, why had the Germans stopped, of all places, at Rapa Nui?
At the SAAS dinner the next night outside the Hotel Espíritu, Greer showed Vicente the Cook excerpt. “I’m with you, Vicente. When you think about it, why would anyone come here to provision a whole fleet? How many men were we talking about?”
“Two thousand,” he said.
“You couldn’t pick a worse spot.”
Vicente smiled. “Unless,” he said, “you wished to stock up on something other than coal and food.”
“Or,” said Sven, “if you wanted to lay low and hide. If you haven’t noticed, it’s a pretty out-of-the-way spot. Not bad for a fleet running from the whole world.”
“Soon you will see,” Vicente said calmly. “I’m awaiting proof, papers, that will show definitively where the tablets went.” This was Vicente’s usual retort. It was amazing—he never suffered a moment’s doubt.
Still, Greer agreed with his theory. “Just think. Admiral von Spee was a man of the world. A naturalist. He wrote about the flora and fauna of places where he was stationed. Wouldn’t he have read Cook’s log? His job was to prepare for all possibilities. He wouldn’t just drop anchor and play it by ear.”
“You shouldn’t feed his frenzy this way,” said Sven. “You indulge him.”
“She happens to be right,” Vicente said. “Von Spee came here for one reason: therongorongo. ”
“So did you,” laughed Sven. “But that clearly means nothing.”
“All right. New topic,” announced Greer. This was how they managed the weekly dinners. Everyone was limited to five minutes of work talk, otherwise they would sit and argue for hours.
“The mysterious cores?” asked Vicente.
“Still mysterious,” said Greer. “Same as last week. Same as the week before that. Counting grains. It’s a slow and boring process. I’ll save you the details.”
Greer shook salt and pepper onto her chicken, then reached for Sven’s most recent condiment concoction: cilantro and mango sauce. They’d all been eating the same basic meal of chicken for months now, and any new flavor, even a strange one, was a welcome change. She dipped a forkful of chicken in the sauce. It was sugary, with a hint of spice. “Not bad, Sven.”
“What we really need is a nice plate of gravlax, maybe some Hasselback potatoes.”
“Well, then, the conference,” said Vicente. “Se?orita Nosticio asked me to make my presentation first, and I’d like to make sure we’re all in comfortable agreement on that.”
“Do you really think people will show?” asked Sven. “I’ve an image of standing up there, babbling about my work to just the three of you.”
“Just like our dinners,” said Greer.
“Touché.”
“Kidding.” But she hoped people would show. She liked the idea of participating in a conference.
“People will come, Sven. Mario and Petero, and I’m sure Mahina. And others. But first: Are we settled on my commencing the program?”
Just as they arranged the order—Vicente, Sven, Burke-Jones, Greer—Luka Tepano walked by. Greer saw him often, passing Mahina’s, or the Espíritu, strolling pensively. Sometimes, if she went to thecaleta at night to watch the ocean, she would spot him sitting on the rocks. He now held a bunch of daisies.
“That’s the saddest bouquet I’ve ever seen,” said Sven. “No woman in the world would be impressed by that. Even women in caves have standards.”
“It is the thought that counts,” said Vicente. “It is the thought that matters to women.”
At this, they all instinctively turned to Greer.
“Speaking on behalf of all women: absolutely.”
“Well, for men as well,” said Vicente. “For anyone. It’s the thought.”
“Excellent recovery, Vicente—” Sven grinned. “You should have been a diplomat.”
“You’ll be pleased to know I’ve considered it.”
“People give flowers because they’re pretty. Plain and simple. They signify beauty. Why do artists paint flowers? Because they’re pretty. Am I right, Greer?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“This is no time for the flower expert to go silent.”
“Botanist, Sven. Palynologist. You do understand that I’m not a florist?”
“Yes, but science requires too many dull technical terms,” he said. “Come on, a little something. One small floral opinion to tide us over.”
“All right. In my mind, the only artist who can paint flowers is O’Keeffe.”
“What about Van Gogh and his sunflowers?” asked Vicente.
“I think the only true picture of flowers should be of a single flower. Quantity only obscures beauty. Examine one thing closely, and all things will be revealed. One flower. One grain of pollen.” She gestured to them. “Evenone island.”
“Be careful,” teased Sven, “you speak as though we’re doing something meaningful here. People will get the wrong impression.”
“Weare , though.” Greer leaned back in her chair and sighed. The strain of her work was catching up with her. “Even though we’re all at an impasse, we’re asking the right questions. Important questions.”
They basked for a moment in this reminder of the meaning of their daily lives, the months of small, tedious tasks. They needed it, especially Greer.
“Let’s have Greer go first,” said Sven, “get the crowd worked up.”
“I’m already thinking of calling in sick as it is,” she said. “I’ve got zilch to report.”
Burke-Jones pushed his chair back and stood. “I’m fatigued.” Before they could offer good-byes, he began to walk off down the street.
“Isn’t he staying here at the Espíritu?” asked Greer.
“Yes, but he likes to roam. It relaxes him.”
“An endlessly intriguing man.”
“Well, we give him a long rope,” said Sven.
“Can I ask why?”
“You haven’t told her?” Sven asked. “You bombard her with every detail of Admiral von Spee, dead for sixty years, and say nothing of our living colleague?”
“His wife,” Vicente said to her. “She died almost two years ago. And he’s been here since, studying the transport of themoai . He is, or was, quite a well-known architect in London. He was commissioned to build a new theater. It would have been the largest in London, but when his wife passed on, that was the end of it. He walked away.”
“Poor Randolph,” said Greer.
They all sipped the last of their drinks, then attempted to rekindle the conversation with complaints about SAAS, predictions about when the Chilean navy boat would arrive with supplies, thoughts on the Pinochet coup. Vicente pulled out his newspaper and showed them the headline:La Muerte de Pablo Neruda.
“Five days ago now,” he said. “They say it was from sadness at seeing his homeland fall into the hands of such a dictator. And they say he had just published a poem about Rapa Nui.”
This and Burke-Jones’s story made them all pensive, and they soon said their good-nights.
Greer went back to the lab to check on a sample soaking in potassium hydroxide. In the hallway she saw a line of light beneath Burke-Jones’s door. She hadn’t spoken with him outside of the SAAS dinners, but now she felt she should check on him. After all, she knew something of grief, of the desire to escape. The door was ajar and she gently knocked, but there was no answer. She eased it open, and saw him hunched over a table at the room’s far end; his hands, out of sight, were occupied. Stepping forward, she saw what lay before him: a miniature landscape—the island littered with six-inchmoai, toothpick ladders, and ringlets of what appeared to be dental floss. There were bottles of opened glue, scissors, cardboard, colored construction paper, and in the corner a bucket of papier-maché. He hummed forlornly as he moved about, adjusting and altering the miniature landscape.
“Randolph,” she called. “It’s Greer.” But there was no response.
“Randolph,” she said again.
Was he simply ignoring her? Or was he so entranced in the island he had built for himself that there was no room for a life-size visitor, who would seem, no doubt, like a giant come to wreck his perfect world?
The conference, as Sven had predicted, was poorly attended. It had rained earlier that day—unusual for October—and the three semicircular rows of chairs Isabel Nosticio had arranged were slick with water, the tablecloths on the sandwich tables were drenched, and the white sheet for the slide projections lay soiled on the ground. Everyone was in good spirits, though, having shared two bottles of pisco sour by thecaleta beforehand, watching the fishing boats come in. They walked with linked arms along the coast to the conference area, exchanging anecdotes about other symposiums. Sven claimed to have once performed the Heimlich on a colleague in the middle of a presentation; Vicente had at one event met three other linguists who’d also made balloon voyages over the Andes. Greer couldn’t help but wonder what they would make of her dissertation committee story. As she’d been getting ready in her room at theresidencial earlier that day, she realized the SAAS conference would be her first public presentation since Wisconsin. Looking at herself in the mirror, she tried to catch some glimpse of that younger woman who had been so fearless and so trusting, a version of herself she could hardly remember.
As they arrived at the site, the wet wreckage of their outdoor conference room brought laughter from all of them, including Isabel, who, when she saw the size of the audience, was beginning to realize the hopelessness of the event.
They took their seats, and Vicente, as planned, went first. He wore a white dress shirt and brown tie, carried a stylish briefcase, and as he stepped to the torchlit podium he looked, Greer thought, almost like an actor, like someone accustomed to attention.
Vicente began with the formalities, in Spanish and English: thanks to the Sociedad, to Isabel, to his sponsors, his colleagues. “Test. Test.” Vicente tapped the microphone and smiled. “Can everybody hear in the back?” There were only about fifteen people there, mostly friends, plus a few tourists who’d passed them earlier at thecaleta. “Way in the back? Row Z, are you with us?” Everyone laughed, even Isabel. “Excellent,” he said. “As we all know, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The embryo evolves in the same pattern as life itself. And the same is true in the evolution of the human race.” He went on to say that mankind’s major turning points—the discovery of fire, the beginning of burials, the cave paintings, and the invention of written language—were all mirrored in personal development. For each individual, he said, there was a moment of discovering fire—a talent, a passion, or a love—and then a moment of learning to bury the past, and then to represent, and to record feelings about the world through writing. He finally stepped back from the podium and said: “Therongorongo is a perfect example of how society invents a way to protect its stories.”
A clap came from behind the seats and Greer turned to see Mahina in a purple dress. She had let her hair down from its usual bun, and it fanned out in waves over her bare shoulders. Greer beckoned to her, and Mahina waded through the chairs, offering a brief greeting to everyone she passed. She checked that the chair was dry and sat beside Greer.
Sven then strode up to the podium and pitched a torch beside him. He wore blue jeans and a faded yellow T-shirt, carried no notes or cards. He offered a special thank-you to Isabel, then spoke briefly of the geological status of the volcanoes and weather patterns, alluded to his need for satellite data, his abundant supply of ballpoint pens, and thumped both palms against the podium and said, “This is boring the hell out of me.” As he sat down, Isabel’s high-pitched laugh sprang into the night.
Next, Burke-Jones began what was his most animated display since Greer had met him. He had put on a fresh suit, and the light revealed distinct comb-tracks across his hair. According to island legend, he said, the finishedmoai had walked from the quarry to the coast, a distance, in places, as great as six miles. Since volcanic tuff bruised easily, and since no scrapes appeared on the statues’ backs or fronts, themoai must have been transported upright. Ropes, Burke-Jones hypothesized, had been lashed around the statues’ necks to “shimmy” them to the island’s periphery. Then he made his final announcement: He would simulate this in exactly one month. His eyes were full of life as he spoke. He said he hoped the people of Rapa Nui would join him in his investigation of their ancestors’ feats.
Greer went last, stepping into her leather sandals that she had let rest in the grass, her pisco buzz now gone. Since her data were still incomplete her talk would be brief. The past few weeks she had been preparing samples, centrifuging, counting the known grains and unknown grains—doing the work it had once taken a team of lab assistants to do. She had ordered pollen books on Polynesia and herbarium samples from Kew, which still hadn’t arrived. It would be another month, at least, before she had any comprehensive numbers on the island’s former biota.
When she arrived at the podium, she, too, thanked SAAS and Isabel. She thanked her colleagues, and offered a special thank-you to Mahina Huke Tima, whose face registered a sudden burst of pride. The acknowledgment also brought a clapping from the darkness—Ramon stood behind the chairs, watching, not the podium, but Mahina.
Greer opened her folder, and began. “One of the first things that was understood about evolution, about the theory of organisms maturing and changing, was that isolation was key. For significant change to occur, an organism needs to be on its own, separated, so to speak, from its parents. Islands have long been the ideal studies of isolation, and with Rapa Nui, we have an island so isolated geographically, so isolated in its human history, it is, in essence, a perfect test tube for examining patterns of speciation, migration, and evolution. In particular, the island is unique in its utter deficiency of natural resources . . .”
A disapproving silence had fallen over the crowd. Greer looked up to see a frowning Isabel, clipboard held to her chest. What Greer was saying clearly didn’t sound very pro–Rapa Nui. She was telling them their island was worse than half-empty. It was completely empty.
“But this deficiency couldn’t be more meaningful. Moreperfect. ”
She proceeded with the coring details, hoping to bury her negative remarks in a catalogue of numbers.The ratio of Gramineae to Filices in the base core layer to 26,000 yearsB .P. . . . Forty-three percentage herbs and Pteridophyta at six meters in the primary borehole. When she at last looked up from her paper, Mahina smiled, but then broke into a yawn. Vicente was rubbing his eyes. Greer thanked them all for their time, their attention, and gathered her things.
“You are an honest woman, Greer” came Vicente’s voice behind her. “You said coring was a slow and boring process, and you spoke the truth.”
“I think you missed some sleep in the corner of your eye, Vicente.”
“It is not my fault. I have a medical condition. When I am bombarded by numbers and statistics, my brain becomes overworked and needs to rest itself.”
“Ha-ha.”
“I was diagnosed at a cryptography conference when someone gave a five-hour talk on the relationship between prime numbers and cuneiform. Saved by sleep.”
“Well, Burke-Jones was very inspiring. I had a tough act to follow.”
“Yes, he was excellent, I thought.”
They both turned and looked for him, but he’d already left. People were milling about the chairs. Mahina was by the snack table, holding what looked like a potato chip up to the light. Ramon whispered in her ear, and Mahina laughed.
“Your proprietress is having a good time,” Vicente said.
“He likes her.”
“Ah, Ramon. Since I first came here I could see he was in love with her.”
“They seem good together. I was going to encourage her. But I try not to endorse infidelity.”
“He’s not married.”
“No, I mean Mahina. Her husband’s away.”
Vicente shook his head with dismay. “In . . . Tahiti?”
“Yes.”
“Poor, dear Mahina.”
“Why?”
“I told you that in the fifties and sixties, when Chile forbade the islanders to leave, men stole boats, built rafts, and tried to sail to Tahiti. Mahina’s husband was one of them. Lost at sea.”
“But that’s over ten years ago. God, she can’t really think he’s coming back.”
“Who knows? But she won’t look at another man. Several have tried. And she is quite an attractive woman. It’s a shame.”
Greer looked over at Mahina. Her hands were clasped behind her back, and Ramon leaned into her. The purple dress brought out a deep flush in her cheeks, and a smile lit her face. Vicente was right—an attractive woman.
“Poor Mahina,” said Greer.
A few people began to leave. Two teenagers—Claudio and César—whom Isabel had hired for the evening, began folding the chairs. Isabel and Sven were sitting side by side, their knees touching.
“I guess I should get back,” said Greer. “I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”
“More counting pollen?”
“What else?”
“Walk with me.” Vicente took her hand. “You cannot keep clinging to these foolish American habits of independence.”
“It’s what my nation was built on. Think of it as my form of patriotism.”
“Come, Greer. You must let me at least walk you to theresidencial. I know my way there very well. Too well, perhaps.”
Greer looked at him, his face soft and generous in the moonlight. She wanted him to walk her home, but it would be harder to say good-bye there. “Another night, Vicente. A rain check.”
“A rain check? For when the weather is better? I warn you, Greer, summer is upon us.”
“Ah, yes. The dry season. I think I can handle that.”
“It’s funny, I know everything about your research, your acid washes, your pollen counts. I know when you like to work, what you like to eat, to drink. Months we’ve been here, learning all these little things about each other, but I would like to know the other things.”
“Little things are important.”
“But I would like to know what your life is like outside of your work. Is that so very awful to ask?”
She had never seen him so sincere. “No, it’s not at all awful to ask. But sometimes it’s hard to answer.”
“It is the way with all the important questions, no?”
“You’re right,” she said. She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll work on an answer.”
And with that she left him.
Greer woke early the next morning to a loud knocking. She pulled herself out of bed and opened the door to Mahina, who announced an urgent visit from Vicente. (Mahina forbade men from approaching the doors of women guests.) The previous night’s revelation about Mahina’s husband came fuzzily to mind as Greer threw on her robe and followed her through the courtyard into the main room.
There was Vicente, in blue jeans and a white T-shirt. He was waving a piece of paper in the air. He looked buoyant.
“What? No hangover?” Greer asked.
“One of my many talents: pisco tolerance.” He handed her the paper. “Not the original, of course. A translation. But direct from the German archives. You see?”
Urgent. Precious cargo onboard. No chance for return. Need safe harbor for drop-off. Cargo cannot remain on ship.
It was a telegram from von Spee’s ship, theScharnhorst , dated 22 October 1914. Greer’s mind twisted its way through the calculation. “Two days after they left the island?”
Vicente nodded, clearly trying to contain his excitement.
“This is really something. Is there a reply?”
“If there was, it went down with the ship. But there may be another telegram from von Spee. About the ‘cargo.’ It should arrive soon.”
“Oh, Vicente!”
He smiled. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
And behind him Mahina rested her hands on her hips and tilted her head. “Doctora,yourcolleague has brought you another something?”