‘IN THE eighth week we came deep into the forest where the people had made clearings for plantation,’ said mother. ‘The villagers there were naked by day and the Professor was much charmed by their innocence. He took notes, of course, as if the villagers were bats or beetles, and he was struck by the absence of sexual playfulness or arousal. “They are immodest like infants,” he wrote in the ledger. But all our observations seemed inconsequential once the villagers had become used to our presence and their women felt free to go about their business. As you can see from the photograph, all of them except the children and the elderly were pregnant. Not surprising, perhaps, in a society where there were few constraints on fertility. But look closely at the women. Here is the oddity which so engaged the Professor. All these women are over eight months pregnant and they are ready to produce offspring in near unison.’
This observation set my father’s mind racing. Birth in unison indicated conception in unison, the impregnation of the village’s fertile women in one concentrated period of communal — if not public — sexual intercourse. What could be the purpose of such a congress? And were the mechanisms of its control social or biological? ‘The Professor, to my cost, found the subject stimulating in every way,’ complained mother. ‘But there were lessons there for me also. I determined that the moment we returned to the city I would take charge of our conjugal lives. We would economize.’
NOW consider this. A trapper from the valley whom my father employed to transport his specimens and supplies to and from Etar claimed to understand a little ‘forest’, a tongue so labio-plosive that linguists had titled it vabap-vabap. To hear it spoken in jostling conversation was to hear a flock of doves take wing. The trapper had been hunting amongst these same trees four years previously. And he had witnessed — had, indeed, participated in — a period of communal sexual intercourse amongst the small forest community with whom my parents were now lodged. ‘You imagine them to be simple and cold,’ he said, recounting his many previous attempts to find or buy a partner amongst the native women. ‘Lovemaking does not interest them, it seems. But when their moment comes they are like dogs in heat.’ I will not recount the scenes which he described or comment, either, on the opportunism of the trapper. After three days their sexual agitation, however, was reported to have ceased as readily and as inexplicably as it had begun. ‘And the women with whom you had consorted?’ asked my father. ‘How many women … personally, may I ask … in those three days?’ The man’s reply is marked in my father’s ledger and heavily circled. ‘Fourteen!’
‘The Professor’s interest in the unrecorded smaller species in which the forest abounded was abandoned,’ said mother. ‘He postponed our return home for a further six weeks. He was determined to witness the communal birth for himself. I was left relatively unpestered in the charge of a girl whom the Professor nicknamed Puppy, because she could pronounce the word. She was, perhaps, a month or so too young for pregnancy, poor thing. She was quite happy to collect and cook our food and, indeed, to wear the dresses which I loaned her. I could not have her naked at our table. I taught her cat’s cradle and hopscotch. It was foolish, perhaps. But she was sweet — an awkward, bony little thing — and I was bored beyond endurance. I had no tasks, and though the Professor and his trapper were huddled in conversation and much laughter until late at night, I was excluded. Except from Puppy.’
In the meantime — and with the trapper’s vabap-vabap at his shoulder — my father busied himself with monitoring the pregnancies and with keeping a journal. We start with the notion of menstrual synchrony’, he wrote. ‘It is well established amongst the women of even the most civilized households throughout the world. The monthly cycles of women in close and regular physical proximity harmonize and correspond. They run in parallel. They ovulate simultaneously. The aetiology of such a phenomenon is not established, though olfactory and glandular agencies are most likely. Nature is neither wasteful nor gratuitous. The mechanism for reproductive synchrony is latent in humankind. We must take this as evidence that such a mechanism was at one time fully active as confidently as we must presume an ancient tail implicit in our own vestigial coccyx or a full pelt of hair as ancestral to those few strategic tufts which still endure. Any synchrony of sexual intercourse, pregnancy and birth amongst the forest people, a community otherwise free of profligacy or baser passions, suggests a practice too fettered and precise to bear an anthropological interpretation of custom or taboo. Here, cut off from humankind for centuries beyond number, is a species whose reproductive natures are as different from our own as a gibbon’s from a chimp’s. Are we to witness a mass human parturition as brief and ordered in duration as that observed by shepherds amongst their sheep? Is this the natural, primitive pattern of human reproduction from which our own sexual connivance has evolved and which was thought lost amongst the orchards of what the Christians label Eden?’
‘IT WAS a wearying experience,’ said mother. ‘As you would expect, the men made all the noise, with their own backache and sickness and their stomachs distended with phantom offspring. The women were silent and out of sight, of course.’ Her recollections were bitter and, perhaps, distorted too. She described a village barmy with pregnancy. And then one morning the men went off into the forest to give mimed birth to the stones which they decorated or to the wooden dolls which they had carved. And in the shelters of the village the first curious skirlings of the babies began. It was an orphan chorus of human gulls, she said, the clutter rather than the mystery of birth. ‘The Professor, of course, was not welcome at that time with his calipers, camera and notebook. Nor would they accept assistance from me, though my presence, with Puppy at my side, was at least ignored. The births themselves seemed relatively easy; labour was short — as if the stones and dolls now produced by their men had freed the women from a punishing confinement. Or so your father said. For myself I have never discovered the attraction of small babies. And here were two hundred or so, pupped like seals within three days.’
How many survived? How many bore healthy offspring? Some were stillborn, cordulated or drowned. Others perished within minutes or hours or days. The unlucky mothers — children some of them, a month or so older than Puppy; in a kinder world they would have been schoolgirls — ruptured or haemorrhaged. For some the placenta tore and there was bleeding, pain and slow death. But for every bereaved mother there was an orphan child to suckle. ‘Left to its own devices, nature is cruel but tidy,’ my father noted. And once the men had returned and the waste had been buried and the dead separated from the living, the forest people went back to their business, as gentle and as calm and as casual as sheep without rams.
My father whispered his proposition to mother in the darkness of their bedding — that they had encountered humankind in its sexual infancy, that the forest people were specialists in the brief encounter, like that observed amongst bullfrogs, hammer-headed bats, kakapo parrots and the mass aerial dance of mosquitoes. And, of course, his dreadful legions of tiger crabs. ‘Where is the evidence?’ my mother asked him, dutifully displaying the cynicism on which he as her teacher had insisted. ‘All you have is a host of shared birthdays and the four-year-old gossip of a trapper. His testimony might not impress a scientific seminar in quite the way you hope.’ ‘We will gather evidence,’ he said. ‘How?’ My father patiently listed the rituals and procedures of scientific field study to his bride, his student. ‘And for this, of course,’ he said, ‘a cadaver is required.’