Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

Though she was aboriginal, Hafay had pretty much spent her whole life in the city, and even after returning to the east coast she still passed most of her time in Haven. When she opened the Seventh Sisid, Pangcah friends invited her to join her age set, participate in the local Pangcah tribal order, and live there with them. But after taking part in a few age set activities, she still didn’t feel like she fit in, no matter how friendly the people were, even when she was dancing. Sometimes she would run into former customers. So, to avoid embarrassment, Hafay started to withdraw from tribal village life.

But the first time she set foot in the Forest Church, the damp air and the smells of the roots and the grass made her feel that she was in her element. She liked the way the weeping figs survived by growing aerial roots that went down, down, down until they reunited with the earth and helped prop up the parent tree. She liked the scarred old trees even more. A split in the bark was sealed and healed by the tree’s own sap. As if all pain would pass.

If Ina were still alive she would like it here.

Ina died because she just would not take her girlfriends’ advice. After her life settled down again, Ina fell in love with another customer, assuming every guy was like Old Liao, who had loved her in his own way. Hafay did not get too worked up when she finally got the call from the madam at the massage parlor, maybe because she had already foreseen Ina’s death when Ina dove into the creek and finally found Old Liao’s body. Except this time Ina ended up dying underwater, as she had countless times in Hafay’s dreams. The black flower of Ina’s long hair bloomed forever, and Ina would never float back up again.

The girls in the massage parlor said that Ina had gone out with Big Tom. Nobody knew who Big Tom was, except that he was a new guy Ina was seeing. And nobody knew how or why she’d died. Only one thing was certain, that the money in Ina’s account had all been withdrawn, and by Ina herself, so that the police had no leads, no way of pressing the investigation. Luckily Ina had opened another account for Hafay, so her life did not have to start from zero.

Now, under cover of darkness, hiding out for the time being in the cave, Hafay felt so much better. It was dark in here but not like in the little rooms in the massage parlor. This small cave insulated you from the sound outside, so when you first came in you heard your own heart beating as well as a slight ringing in your ears. Hafay had drunk quite a bit tonight, and she just needed to be by herself in the cave for a little while, for a brief respite from the rain.

Dahu noticed Hafay was not with the group when he was helping everyone rope climb up that humungous weeping fig. But he guessed she had gone into the cave for some alone time, something he often did himself. That cave was inviting. It made you want to crawl in and see what it was like. He decided to keep quiet so as not to disturb her. Whatever the forest was doing to her he did not need to interfere.

Anu was telling the two foreigners the tale of the Vavakalun . Over the past two decades he had told this story a thousand times at least. But every time Anu tried to tell it for the first time.

“In the old times, the Bunun people used to choose big rocks and trees as landmarks. One time the ancestors chose a big tree as a boundary marker. A while later they looked and thought, Hey, that’s strange, that marker appears to have moved. And it doesn’t look quite the same as it did before. Well, as soon as they paid attention they discovered that when this kind of fig tree is mature it dangles its aerial roots all the way down to the ground. Sometimes the parent tree dies but the aerial root survives and becomes a new tree. When it’s been too long since the previous visit, the tribespeople might mistake the new tree for the old one. That’s why we call it Vavakalun , meaning a walking tree.”

Anu asked Detlef and Sara to touch the roots to see if they could “hear the tree sucking water out of the ground or dividing into two.” They caressed the roots very obligingly. This kind of tree, with its twisting, branching roots, was totally new to them, because it was a species seldom seen in northern countries.

There in the darkness, feeling the root system of the tree on the boulder, Detlef had realized that one day the roots would crack the rock. There should be some kind of noise when the roots got inside the rock, and when it was finally split asunder there might be an earsplitting sound. Of course, as an engineer, Detlef had confidence in his own expertise, but he had never been so impressed as he was now by what the power of nature, so much greater than his own, was capable of. In this case, the forces involved were beyond calculation. Including the force exerted by the leaf-cutter ant that had just crawled onto the back of his hand.

Detlef searched in the darkness, and at some moment his eyes found hers and they gazed at one another a brief while.

The hike had not been that strenuous, but actually they’d been walking down a shadowy hunting path through a miniature tropical wilderness. Detlef had been noticing myriad tiny sounds along the way. He often said that he wasn’t really good at anything, except that he had really good hearing. In this respect he had a gift. He had grown up in a cultivated family. His father was a business manager, his mother a middle-school teacher, and he, an only child, had always been academically inclined. With his exceptionally keen hearing, his favorite activity as a boy was to find something apparently silent and try to “dig” by pressing his ear close to it, trying to hear the subtle sound it was actually making. One time, late at night, he stole out into the garden and dug up an anthill in the flower patch until he was standing in a pit two meters deep. His parents were astonished when they got up the next morning and found a big hole in the garden and Detlef covered in dirt. But they did not scold him, they even let him keep digging wherever he wanted. He got in the habit of testing the terrain wherever he went, crouching down and touching the ground, or propping himself against a rocky outcrop.

Detlef remembered at nineteen years of age visiting a technical academy where he’d seen a model of Charles Wilson’s Patented Stone-Cutting Machine. He was enthralled. Intimating power, it was a kind of metaphor for getting to the hearts of various things. To him, it was the ideal machine. Henceforth he took every course he could in geology and mechanics. For him, these two fields of knowledge had a single method and the same aim: “comprehend principles, overcome obstacles, bore to the core.”

Detlef made a name for himself by making improvements to the TBM design. He had achieved some stature in the industry. But nothing in his entire career had made a deeper impression on him than the experience he’d had here on this island over twenty years before.

Everyone in that cave of a tunnel heard it. But what was that sound? He had been grasping at an answer all this time, but it eluded him still. Only after meeting Sara did he begin to think that maybe, just maybe he did not have to drill all the way through when there was a sound he did not understand, that some sounds could only exist if they were left alone, undrilled, intact.

And just now when he and Sara had squeezed into that small rock cave, his shoulder touching hers, it was like being in a dream. He felt he could hear, through the wall at the end of this little cave, the sound of the whole mountain.

Not surprisingly, the sound that a living forest or mountain makes is different from the sound of an eviscerated mountain. Detlef reached out and held Sara’s hand, wanting to convey this thought to her.