Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

During these early days, while Esme and Tallent were taking notes and conducting more fruitless interviews with the dreamers and then taking more notes, I explored the village in greater detail. Initially Esme and Tallent were reluctant to disrupt or contaminate the villagers’ daily routines and so spent hours sitting like gargoyles on opposite edges of the village, watching its inhabitants toddle about their daily activities and filling entire notebooks with minute descriptions of the most mundane of activities. (Once, while Esme was bathing, I peeked inside one of her notebooks and found a six-page narrative of observing one woman’s shit, down to a many-paragraphs-long detailing of the shit itself: its consistency, color, odor, tone, texture, etc.) I, however, was bound by no such ethics, real or otherwise, and was happy to step over the forest’s boundary and into the circle of the village.

I liked to watch the children most. They were smaller than the children I had seen in America and, unexpectedly, more handsome: the features that looked odd on their parents — the squat, bricky legs, the inappropriate volume of hair, the large, batty ears, the coarsely chiseled messiness of their features, like something half melted — were charming on them, and they wore their nakedness well. They were bolder than American children too; the boys, even the toddlers, played with bits of stick sharpened into points, which they pretended were spears and with which they charged at one another, shrieking, and both boys and girls had the habit — which I initially found alarming — of running full speed toward their parents’ hogs and then landing atop them with a whump (the hogs seemed accustomed to such treatment and merely flicked their tails, as at a fly, or twitched their ears).

Remarkable too was their almost total lack of supervision. There were twenty-six children in the village, 37ranging from four infants to three who I knew were at least fourteen, for each — they happened to be boys — carried at all times his palm spear, which was about a foot and a half longer than he was tall. Unlike the case in other primitive societies, the children here were not made to do any work, not even the eldest among them; instead they seemed to spend their days simply playing. Sometimes the older ones would slip into the forest singly or in groups and return hours later with a whole clan of vuakas impaled on their spears and stacked one on top of the other like linens on a shelf, or with a palm leaf wriggling with harvested grubs. Sometimes I watched them play at the stream — the same stream we had followed uphill, although here it was wider and faster still, hurrying its way over rocks and twigs, ferrying briskly down-island the scraps of flowers and leaves the children tossed into it. 38I knew from Tallent that they had been told to avoid the dreamers, and curiously — for this would certainly not be my experience with children later — they complied without challenge. There were days when I myself was told to avoid the dreamers, because Tallent or Esme was engaged in allegedly important interviews with them, and on those days I felt myself drifting almost inexorably toward them despite Tallent’s request to keep away.

The women spent their days sorting: beans, vuakas, manamas, palm leaves, palm wood, palm braids. Whenever I saw them, they were engaged in busy organizational work. They took pride and comfort in being well prepared: at the end of their day, as the air began to gray, they would heave their baskets back to the appropriate hut and place their supplies within and then stand in the doorways, making a satisfied clucking sound as they regarded the way the day’s labor had added to their stores, which, given their steady work, seemed never to diminish. Unlike Esme, whom I overheard enthusing to Tallent one night that their efficiency must be attributable to some obscure and superior technique, I quickly realized that the reason they had so much time available to them was that they weren’t wasting it doing things that women spend hours doing elsewhere in the world: they had no clothes, for example, and so did no laundry. Their hair, like the men’s, was folded into a simple roll at the back of their heads, and I never saw them washing or brushing it. They never cleaned their huts or did repairs on their mats: when one was frayed, it was bent and snapped apart for kindling and placed on the fire, and a new mat was fetched from the hut. And they certainly, as I have mentioned, never minded the children.

I watched one morning as two of the women — one so fat that she could not even bring her hands to meet over the globe of her stomach — braided some palm leaves outside one of the palm-storage huts. A few feet away, an infant, a little girl, was pulling herself with her elbows toward a splinter of dried bean pod that had fallen from one of the baskets. Upon reaching it, she of course put it in her mouth, and when she did so, she of course began choking on it. I watched, fascinated, as her breaths grew shorter and wheezier, and then as she flipped onto her back, her stubby legs and arms pinwheeling, her face painting itself a radishy hue. Finally she gave a great cough, and the piece jumped out like a hiccup, and the girl began wailing. Neither woman moved the entire time. It is certainly possible that they hadn’t seen her — they seemed quite focused on their palm braids — but even after she cried, they didn’t look up. In the end, it didn’t make a difference, as after a few minutes the girl rolled back onto her stomach and pulled herself off again, presumably in search of something else dangerous to gnaw on. 39

The men hunted daily. Half the group would remain in the village, polishing their spears and talking to one another and stroking their hogs, and the other half would disappear, their hogs following them, between the trees. Watching them return with their catch — which was always disturbingly unidentifiable, as they skinned the animals on-site and returned with only the carcasses, already hacked into large ragged hunks — I always found it difficult to remember that we were on an island. Except for the stream, which was too shallow to support anything but the smallest slips of minnows, there was no sense of water, no sense of the sea. We were of course surrounded by it, but I had no concept of what the villagers knew of it: how and whether they conceived of it, or how much experience they had of it, or whether at any time in their village’s history they had turned to it for food or exploration. 40

The only animal they valued was the hog, and even those they did not fetishize. In later decades, after I had visited my share of remote and backward civilizations, I would come to recognize the animals and decorations and behaviors that mysteriously unite them, as if they had all outfitted their societies from some inner-jungle department store that catered exclusively to primitive peoples. They all had beads of one sort or another, for example, which were either worn or traded, and they all had body decorations of one sort or another, and finally, they all had dogs: mangy, hungry, patchy creatures, some thin and some very thin, and every one of them dumb with exhaustion and neglect and a vague, persistent malnutrition that was never quite remedied. But there were no dogs in the village (or body decoration, for that matter), and when an animal was on occasion brought back to the village alive (usually because it was too big or there had been too many for the men to kill and dismember themselves), it was promptly attacked, killed, and cut up. Once they brought back a sloth, dangling by its paws from one of the men’s spears. It was so large that the two men holding the ends of the spear had to rest the spear on their heads rather than on their shoulders, and even so the sloth’s back dragged on the ground, its silvery fur tracing sad and graceful patterns in the dust. The men staggered to a spot behind the meat house, where the dirt was stained a permanent rust color, and began pummeling the creature with what seemed unnecessary avidity and force, thrusting their spear tips randomly into its pelt, while the reinforcements beat it with the blunt ends of their weapons. The sloth did not fight back but simply lay there on its side, its front and hind legs still bound to one another, and let out high, kittenish chirps that seemed to bother no one but me. After everyone had enjoyed beating the life out of it, the women joined the men and they collectively worked at peeling off the skin — which they tossed, its inside pearly and satiny with fat, to the hogs, who immediately set about slurping at it — and then hacking it into pieces, which were wrapped in fresh palm and banana leaves and stored in the meat pit. The whole thing was done very matter-of-factly, with something more than contentment but less than glee, and afterward they all cleaned their hands and the women began to prepare dinner.