Nell was nodding as I read. ‘Beautiful,’ she said.
‘Terrible!’ Fen hopped to his feet, pointing at the page. ‘That’s it right there. That’s the line she can’t cross. She loses all her authority right there.’
‘She is bringing us into the moment,’ Nell said. ‘Into the heart of the culture.’
‘It’s a fake. She knows full well the pounding of the feet doesn’t bring the rain.’
‘Of course, Fen. But she is capturing right there how the Zuni see it, telling it from their point of view.’
‘That’s just sloppy. It’s catering to a mass audience and not the scholar. She’s too good to make that mistake.’
This last shut Nell up.
‘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.
Looking at our faces you might have said we were all feverish and half mad, and perhaps you would have been right, but Helen’s book made us feel we could rip the stars from the sky and write the world anew. For the first time I saw how I might write a book about the Kiona. I even made a small outline of how it might be shaped. And just these few words in my notebook made many things feel possible.
There was a pale violet light in the sky when Fen read the last pages, Helen’s final push toward the understanding that every culture has its own unique goals and orients its society in the direction of those goals. She described the whole set of human potentialities as a great arc, and each culture a selection of traits from that arc. These last pages reminded me of the finale of a fireworks show, many flares sent up at once, exploding one after the other. She claimed that because of the emphasis in the West on private property, our freedom was restricted much more than in many primitive societies. She said that it was often taboo in a culture to have a real discussion of the dominant traits; in our culture, for example, a real discussion of capitalism or war was not permitted, suggesting that these dominant traits had become compulsive and overgrown. Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was ‘a major means to the good life.’ She claimed that conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.
‘Written by a true deviant,’ Fen said, tossing the last page down. ‘A true paranoid deviant. She gets a little hysterical at the end there, as if the whole world’s just about to go down the gurgler.’
Nell caught me looking at her. ‘What?’
‘You look like you are trying to follow about nine different strands of thought.’
‘More like forty-three. We should go to bed before our heads explode.’ She went down the ladder to drape a banana leaf across the bottom rung, which discouraged visitors. ‘All right. We are closed for business until further notice.’
Fen drained the last of the rubber wine into his mouth. It dribbled down his chin and he wiped it with the back of his hand. He took off his shirt, scrubbed his armpits with it, and tossed it in a pile for Wanji.
‘To Bedfordshire, my lady,’ he said in my accent, taking her arm as they moved to their room. ‘Nighty-nighty.’
I went off to my mat in their study feeling a bit like the family pet who’d been put outside for the night. I lay awake as the animals woke up first, snapping branches and blundering through leaves and hollering out and the greeet greeet greeet of the monkeys, then the humans, coughing, grunting, whining, shouting. Cackles from the women going down to their canoes and their paddling and their songs that carried across the water. Gongs and scoldings and laughter, the thunk of gulls into the water and flying foxes smashing into trees. Finally, I fell asleep. I dreamt I was on an ice floe, squatting like a native, carving a large symbol into the ice. But it was melting, and though I carved deeply — something with two lines crossed in the middle, a glyph representative of whole paragraphs of thought — the ice was turning to slush, and my feet slipped into the sea.