"The cave was used as part of the bird man rituals, tangata manu. Young girls, virgins, were highly valued, and they were sent to Ana o Keke for weeks, if not months, before the birds came. The cave is several yards down from the top of the cliff out on Poike. It is a rather hazardous place to get to and a very long way to fall. It would have been crowded, too, but it was a great honor to be chosen. The idea was that the girls were to become pale and fat. Their fathers brought them their food."
"Okay," I said. I could feel my impatience growing. "Is there a point to this?"
"In 1862 slavers came to Rapa Nui," he said, ignoring me. "The islanders came to the beach to greet the ship. The slavers threw trinkets down on the sand, and everyone scrambled around to get them. While they were down on the ground, the slavers grabbed as many able-bodied men as they could, tied them up, and took them away. They were taken to work the guano mines in the Chincha Islands. The conditions there were terrible, and many of them died. But then—"
"I know this," I said."Your old friend Gordon Fairweather told me. The bishop of Tahiti intervened and insisted they all be sent back. They were, but they brought smallpox with them."
"Did he tell you about the girls?" he said.
"No," I said.
"I guess he wouldn't," he said. "Cuts a little too close to the bone."
"So, what happened to the girls?" I said.
"Almost everyone on the island came down with smallpox," he said. "Most of them died. There was no one to bring the little girls food and water."
"They starved!" I gasped.
"They did," he said.
"Tell me this is just a fable," I said.
"It may be, but the people here believe it to be true," he said. He turned his head away from me, and spoke so quietly I could barely hear him. "I don't imagine she'd starve in three days," he said. "Dehydration, though, or maybe just exposure."
I had this sense of impending disaster, a kind of tightening in my chest, and an intense desire to run away, not to listen to the rest of this. "Are we talking now about the 1860s?" I said, very quietly.
"No," he said, and a tiny rivulet of wet mascara ran down his cheek. "We are talking about little Flora Pedersen."
Please don't tell me a little girl died in a cave, I thought. Please don't tell me that.
He took a few moments to compose himself. "We came out from Valparaiso on a Chilean supply ship," he said, finally. "Five of us, all classmates at Veritas College—Gordon Fairweather, Dave Maddox, Jasper Robinson, Seth Connelly, and me. We'd all studied anthropology together, hung out together all semester, and when one of our professors was looking for students to assist with his work here, we volunteered. I was trying very hard to be one of the boys in those days, as futile as that may have been. I hadn't quite figured out why I felt the way I did.
"Jasper was especially keen on the trip. He'd read all of Thor Heyerdahl's books, and to go to the site of one of them was something he just had to do. The supply ship anchored off Anakena Beach, and we were taken in on a small boat with our sleeping bags and the rest of our gear. Jasper was over the moon, because Anakena was where Heyerdahl set up camp. Gordon and Jasper were the serious ones. For Dave and Seth and me, it was all a bit of a lark. While our classmates were waiting tables at resorts in Michigan, or something, we were on Rapa Nui looking for treasure.
"I don't mean we didn't take our work seriously. We did. Professor Pedersen worked us very hard, and we had some tremendous success. We found a cave on Poike and excavated there. There were some ritual carvings in it, a skeleton, too, and best of all, a rongorongo tablet. Those things are scarce as hen's teeth, but we found one."
"That wouldn't be the one that is now being called the San Pedro rongorongo tablet, would it?" I said.
"How would you know that?" he said. I pointed to the photograph. "I think they were one and the same. Seth and Dave did, too. In any event, we worked very hard, much harder than most of us expected, I think. Except Gordon, of course. He was really into it. We had fun, too. We drank ourselves silly every night, The others found themselves Rapa girlfriends. Pedersen and his wife kind of adopted us, made sure we ate, that sort of thing. We stayed in the same guest house they did. They lived in the main house, and the four of us shared a bunkie out the back. Mrs. Pedersen was really very kind. I'm sure she had a first name, but we called her Mrs. Pedersen, even though she wasn't that much older than we were. She was very much younger than her husband. These were more formal times. But then," he said and stopped.
"Then," I said.
"Something terrible happened," he said finally. "The Pedersens had a little girl. Her name was Flora, but the native workmen called her Tavake. Tavake is the name of a little bird on Rapa Nui, and she flitted around like one, I suppose. The name kind of stuck."
It would have had to be a little bird, wouldn't it?
"I think it was Felipe Tepano who actually gave her that name. He was the foreman on the project. I notice he's still around, but now he's making predictions of impending doom."
"True predictions," I said.
"Apparently."
"I take it you really don't believe in tarot cards and Lemuria?"
"Yes and no. It's all part of the act, literally. We should never have come back you know. Never. But at least I knew enough to come back as someone else. Do you know what I do for a living? I have a cabaret act that I perform in bars, the sort of place I don't expect you frequent. Men dressed up as women. It's a transvestite act. Queen Mu is the name I use. I'm very good at it."
"I can see that," I said. "But maybe you should stick to answering my question."
"We had Sundays off. The workmen all went to Mass, and we just hung out, usually drinking a whole lot of beer, and carousing with the girlfriends, those of us who had them. On that particular Sunday the Pedersens asked us if we would watch Tavake while they went to visit some people they'd met. We said yes, of course, but after a beer or two, we decided we wanted to go to the beach. We debated about it, but the Pedersens had said they wouldn't be back until dinner time, and we figured we'd be back by then, too. We took Tavake with us."
"By beach, you mean Anakena?" I said.
"Yes," he said. "The day went wrong, right from the start. We were drinking a lot of beer. We'd taken two trucks because we had Tavake with us. Dave took one and loaded up on beer. We drank all afternoon. Jasper and Gordon had a huge blowup. Gordon thought Jasper was sloppy and was going for the glory instead of doing the methodical work that we needed to do. He was right, of course, but Jasper has always been like that. He was then, and he is, or was, right up until the day he died. They never really got along, the two of them. Two strong personalities, I guess. Gordon was really meticulous about the work we were doing, and Jasper just wanted to go for the big find. You can't be slapdash in archaeology you know and Jasper may well have been. Gordon took the keys to one of the trucks and left in a huff.
"I had so much to drink that I did the unthinkable. I made a pass at Jasper. It was an eye-opener for both of us. Jasper was absolutely disgusted, and Dave and Seth were appalled, too, I know. These were the 1970s, and this was unheard of in his circles. He yelled at me, threw sand in my face, and told me to stay away from him. I was devastated. I didn't know why I had done it in the first place, of course. I remember I went and threw up. Jasper demanded that we go back.
"I don't know how it happened," he said. "Maybe we thought Gordon had taken Tavake with him, I don't know. I guess we had too much beer, but we just forgot about Tavake, all of us. One minute she was flitting around, the next she wasn't."
He stopped talking for at least a minute. I should have pressed him, but part of me didn't want to hear what he had to say.