Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

I was wishing then, as I often would, that I spoke U’ivuan, when I heard my name and then saw Esme stamping into view. “Paul wants to talk to us,” she said— Paul , I thought again, not Tallent ; his name in her mouth seemed a taunt — and I turned to follow her back to the woods. I looked behind me as I left, but no one watched us go.

“Did you have an interesting morning?” Tallent asked me as we walked into view. He was tired, I could tell. The dreamers were nowhere in sight.

Was he being sarcastic? I didn’t know. “Yes,” I said. “I saw something strange,” and I told him about the dish of strange ooze that the men had dipped their hands into, happy and hopeful that I might have discovered something new for him.

“Oh, that,” said Tallent, kneading his forehead with his fingertips. “That was probably animal fat. The U’ivuans render it and polish their spears with it.” He sighed. “Although it is interesting to hear that they do that here as well.”

“Oh,” I said. My discovery was no discovery at all. And of course that was what they were doing — how could I not have seen that? I didn’t dare look at Esme, for I could not bear to see her triumph, her glee at witnessing yet another example of my naïveté.

“Sit down, you two,” said Tallent, and we obediently did. “Are you hungry?” He pulled from behind him a club of yolk-yellow bananas. The entire stalk must have been three feet long, but each banana was only about three inches, though perfectly shaped and as gently curved as a sword. “Fa’a cut these down a little while ago,” he said. “Taste them — they’re delicious.”

And they were: though clearly bananas, there was nothing mealy or starchy about them — they were juicier than I thought the fruit could be, and so sweet they left a burning singe on the tongue.

“I asked the guides to take the others down toward the stream so I could talk to you both,” he continued. He ate a few bananas before he continued. “We’re in a delicate situation here, one I need to explain to you as best I can.” Esme adopted a serious expression, and I tried to as well. “Although we’re welcome to stay — well, perhaps the better way of putting it is that we are to be hospitably tolerated — there are certain rules, and we must be careful to respect them at all times.”

He listed them for us. We could observe the villagers, but should not initiate conversation unless the village chief permitted us to do so. We must never touch the hogs, nor the men’s spears; nor should we feel entitled to their food, although of course if it was offered we could accept it. We must adhere to their schedule, which meant sleeping away most of the morning because we, like they, would be awake late at night (I didn’t quite see the point of this rule). We would remain out of sight of the villagers, well into the forest, until told otherwise. And most important of all, we were not ever to bring the dreamers into the village. This was for their sake as well as the villagers’.

“But why not?” Esme asked.

“I’m not sure,” Tallent admitted. “But I can tell you this — most of yesterday’s negotiations involved the dreamers, and it was their presence that so distressed the villagers.”

“But they are from here,” I pressed.

“Yes,” he said. “They knew them. Well, they knew Mua. And I think they knew Ukavi, and maybe Ivaiva and Va’ana and Vi’iu as well, just from the way they were trying not to look at them. Maybe. But regardless, they didn’t want to see them. And Mua — last night, when you were asleep, I heard him say to Fa’a again and again, ‘I must not go back there. I must not go back there.’ ”

We were all silent for a moment, trying to interpret what Mua could have meant.

“What did Fa’a think he was trying to say?” Esme asked.

“He didn’t know. He only told me — and this I could see for myself — that Mua was frightened. But there was something else,” said Tallent, who stretched his arms above his head, almost as if parodying a casual gesture — but unconvincingly, because he was worried too. “He wanted to be here, he wanted to set foot in the village, but he dared not.” And we were all quiet again.

That night it was the same scene: the unbearable smells of cooking meat, the whine and chatter of the dreamers, the throbbing manama fruit, the darkness of the forest drawing shut around me like the throat of a drawstring purse. And once again, before I fell asleep I tried to seize the scattered thoughts that were flying through my head like bees: What was the significance of the villagers knowing some of the dreamers but not others? Why was Mua craving and fearing the village, both? Why would the villagers not allow them back in? There was something, some kind of connection. I knew it, knew it for certain.

But what?

II.

Time compresses and conflates one’s memories, but I think it accurate to say that soon after our unilluminating talk, things began to happen very fast indeed. In retrospect, I understood that several things were occurring simultaneously, although at the time they seemed semidiscrete events, related to but ultimately independent of one another.

The first thing that happened was that Tallent, Esme, and I were invited by the chief to explore the village and the villagers. I realize I am somewhat understating here the significance of our discovery of the tribe, and that is perhaps because that discovery was soon to be eclipsed, far eclipsed, by my own. But now, many decades later, I must say that even without my own revelation, the village’s mere existence would have been sensational enough. In the moments of discovery, however, we were oddly muted. So many strange things had happened in the course of our journey that I believe all of us had, somewhere along our trek, begun to assume that something astonishing was awaiting us at the end of our walk, an assumption that made us take for granted what we had actually found: a lost people, a microsociety of sixty-six that had never been studied before.

Now, I know, both from listening to some of Tallent’s and Esme’s talk and from the many books and explorations that preceded and followed our own discovery, that many others have purported to have found a lost people as well. It is almost as if every generation or so, a new group of people is unearthed (which, if you look at it from a purely mathematical standpoint, is highly unlikely. The world is quite well explored by now, and yet every decade or so, like clockwork, a new claim is made and much time and money must be spent to disprove it). But if one discounts the fraudulent claims from that number, one is left with a very small population of potentially unknown peoples. And if one looks at that population, one sees that most of those “lost” tribes are actually lost only to the white man: just because civilized society stumbles upon a group of Amazonian people does not mean that those people are unknown to dozens of other, better-documented, neighboring tribes. One of the things that made our discovery so profound was that ours was of a group of people who had not only never been seen by a white man, but rarely by a U’ivuan either. For hundreds of years they had lived and hunted and bred and died while remaining nothing more than a myth, a dark fable, half human and half monster, to the very people from whom they had originated.

Given that, it was startling, almost unnerving, to witness the almost eerie equanimity with which the village accepted our presence. Of all the characteristics and temperamental quirks and oddities that were particular to them, it was this, their ability to readjust and recalibrate to almost anything that they encountered (or, in this case, that encountered them), that I found most compelling. In later years, of course, the village would be rediscovered multiple times by boatloads of civilized visitors, and although they came to learn the secrets of something else the villagers uniquely possessed, I would always think that they should have concentrated instead on isolating whatever gene endowed these people with such an expansive, unshakeable calm, with their ability to absorb (and in many cases simply ignore) whatever was new or disagreeable or even unfathomable.