And then in 1974 I won my Nobel and once again I was the hero, my “miscalculations” (as the Times characterized my apparent failing of the dreamers; in the same article I was also blamed in a roundabout way for Tallent’s disappearance and the destruction of Ivu’ivu) balanced against my obvious humanitarian inclinations, the one-man charity show I was running with as much color and élan as P. T. Barnum. In the months of interviews that followed, I was asked about the island, the dreamers, Tallent, and the turtles (and to a lesser extent about my work and its implications), but mostly I was asked about my children: Could I pose with them? Had they had a hard time adjusting? Did I have any favorite stories about them? They were always looking for these stories, anecdotes about the children’s adorableness, and I never had any to provide: they were children, after all, and their store of adorableness was rather shallow. Again and again I was asked why I had adopted them, a question I found difficult to answer. The truth would be distasteful, and the lies — because I wanted to help the less fortunate; because I loved their company — seemed laughably simplistic and banal. But to my surprise, the interviewers all jotted down my responses without question, and later I would read my own words back to myself in their papers or magazines and see myself called “a loving papa” or “a doting father” and marvel.
On U’ivu, my Nobel made no difference; there, I was the white man who came twice a year and on whom all sorts of unwanted children could be foisted. It was one of the central ironies of the place that the very people who had enabled me to discover immortality were so far from immortal themselves. Uva had died in 1965, at the age of fifty-six; Tu had died shortly after. Some of their children — Uva’s son, who had pressed his child on me; Tu’s daughter, whose twin sons were now in my care — were dead as well, their brief lifespans hurried to a premature close by alcohol.
I had the strange sense sometimes as I walked through Tui’uvo, its thoroughfares wide tracks of footstep-engraved mud, its boundaries stacked with the debris of long-abandoned and improbable projects — here a sagging sack of concrete, slit down the middle and dribbling silt that was once meant to built a roadway; there a pyramid of orange-rusted rebar bound together with frayed lengths of palm-leaf rope — that I had landed in the wrong place, and that somewhere on the other side of the island lay the capital as I had known it. What was this town, with its increasing number of beggars (I always wondered whom they were begging from, as no one in the town had any money and the foreign visitors who had once descended here in great busy flocks were long gone, a decade gone, never to return) burning small, sullen fires by the road’s edge, and the slumping shacks, the palm leaf freckled with dark dots of mold? The only new structure was the king’s residence, with its long, ugly façade of cement, its surface perforated by small glassless windows. The king had run out of money before he could complete its painting or roofing, and so the whitewash stopped abruptly halfway through, and the entire thing was crowned with a flat top of layered palm leaves; they were new, at least, but the effect was curiously like a toupee, because no one in the village remembered quite how to knit together a roof that would be both protective and elegant.
I stayed where I always did, in the second grandest and only other cement building in town, a six-room inn in which I was always the only guest. In my room was an approximation of a bed (an ancient iron bed frame, a large muslin pouch half stuffed with crunchy bits of palm husk for a mattress) and a crucifix, made from bamboo and easily the prettiest thing in town, hanging on the wall. The inn was near the water, and from its roof, where I ate my dinner of Spam and chunks of boiled sweet potato, I would watch the sky turn so dark that eventually Ivu’ivu would seem to disintegrate into the night, its bulk receding into the black. No one was allowed to travel there any longer, on penalty of death; the king was rumored to be convinced that someday the scientists and the money would return and was planning to offer it to them for a huge ransom when they did. In the meantime, though, it was the property of whichever government had paid him for its use. But then I heard other rumors as welclass="underline" that on the far side of Ivu’ivu was a team of scientists (from where, no one could say) who were scouring the island’s underwater caves for any remaining opa’ivu’ekes, or that the king was using the island as a penal colony, where the punished would live the rest of their lives in near isolation. And sometimes I thought, There too is Tallent, and I would picture him, his face lifted to the sun, moving uphill through a mist of ivoried butterflies.
Because I had grown to realize that I made these trips as a form of self-punishment, I never spared myself anything. I sought out the most depressing sights: the squalor of the town, of course, and the contrasting tidiness of the missionary camp on the north side of the island, where the jungle had been so eradicated that you often felt like you were in Montana. Here there was a different kind of awfulness: no alcohol, no begging, no fires, but U’ivuans working as messengers, and farmhands, and housemaids, and always smiling, smiling, smiling. But the worst thing was that none of the U’ivuan men who worked for the missionaries had their spears; they had given them up to become Christians, and the sight of them without their spears was somehow obscene, as if they were missing their heads. Even the most destitute, the most unrecognizable of men in Tui’uvo kept their spears; often it was the only thing they had.
I went to Iva’a’aka, where once were great fields of vegetables and groves of trees, destroyed long ago when Lilly bought rights to the land to begin a turtle breeding farm. Now the lake it had created was a brackish swamp, its water as black and thick as petroleum, the earth around it foul and greasy with poison, the air ahum with the ever-present tornadoes of flies drawn to the smell of death. The few seasonal workers from U’ivu who lived there stood guard over this sewagey mess, their eyes fixed on the horizon, waiting for the plane that would bring their employers back.
It was an island of waiters, where once waiting had been a foreign concept. This had never been a culture obsessed with the past, and why should it have been? Nothing ever changed. But now that everything had, all its inhabitants could think about was what they had lost. And so they remained frozen in their vigilance, toggling between hope and despair, waiting for their world to be restored.
