Easter Island

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  He put his eye to the ocular, adjusted the focus. “There we are. You try.”

  Greer strained onto her toes and pressed her eye to the brass eyepiece. Three swollen circles appeared before her.

  “What do you see?”

  “Circles,” she said.

  “What else?”

  “Puffy circles, big puffy circles with thick edges, like they were drawn with a Magic Marker.”

  “But what do yousee , Lily Pad?” His voice was edgy; there was a right answer. “What are you looking at?”

  “Life?” she asked.

  “Ah, Lily Pad.” She felt his hand, firm and proud, settle on her back. “You and me.”

  Just as she began to feel the happiness of her achievement, the bulb above them sputtered, and Greer heard a drip from the corner. She looked over and saw a leak in the ceiling. She felt her throat tighten. The place she had waited so long to make use of had vanished, the threshold she had waited to cross now held nothing but disorder.

  Now, years later, she understood the danger of letting grief enter your sanctuary.

  Greer opened the crate that held her distiller—tap water contained pollen and had to be purified—and carefully assembled the pieces. She unpacked her centrifuge and set it on one of the tables, then lifted the lid, checked the eight empty buckets arranged in a circle, and made sure nothing had been broken in transit. She removed her plant press, wiped down all the pieces, and set it nearby.

  The final crate, which held her microscope, proved harder to open. She gave the lever a gentle kick downward, but this sent the lever clanging to the floor. Greer then wedged the tool deeper and stomped hard. The wood splintered open, the lever dislodged, cartwheeling into her shin.

  “Oh, bloody shit!” she shouted, hopping on her unharmed leg. A sharp pain shot through her, and for a moment she felt tears, but as she swung around she saw a young man in the doorway. It was the man from the airplane—the cake man.

  He raised his index finger. “We have a medicine kit.” He disappeared, his footsteps fading along the hallway, and Greer composed herself. When he returned with a wad of gauze in one fist and a glass bottle in the other, she had mustered a decent show of stoicism.

  “I’m all right.”

  “It is important to disinfect. To avoid tetanus.”

  Greer was still hunched over, her hand pressed firmly to her shin, but the initial wave of pain was subsiding. She tried to straighten herself. “It’s fine. Really.”

  “Do you meanoh-bloody-shit fine?”

  “In theory.”

  He crouched beside her. “Well, yes. Of course it is fine,” he said. “Only, it should be clean as well, no?”

  He opened the bottle, doused the gauze, and handed it to her. The sharp smell of rubbing alcohol tickled her nose.

  “It’s fine,” she said, dabbing at the cut. A thread of blood had risen in the crevasse of the wound. “Really.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Fine. Hmmnn. My English is not so good. Forgive me, but I don’t think I know this word.” A smile pinched the corners of his mouth. “I must look for understanding in the language of the body. The blood, the body bent over, the face tightened with pain. I think perhaps that this wordfine must mean the same as awful.”

  “No,” sighed Greer. “It means really awful. Aching awful.”

  “English is a fascinating language. There is much you can teach me.” He stood. “Once, and this was many many years ago, I fell in a broken hang glider, just after I had taken off from a peak to the north of Santiago. I landed on my leg. A clean break. The danger, of course, was not the bone but the mountain dust. The doctor said I was very fortunate I had cleaned my wounds quickly.” He gestured once again to the bottle of rubbing alcohol.

  “Vicente Portales?”

  “Would that be fine for you?”

  “The most fine kind of embarrassment.” She lifted the gauze from her leg and saw that the bleeding had stopped.

  “See? Almost like new,” he said. “Well, at least I have seen here tonight that you are, in fact, very busy settling in. Of course, you do not have to come to dinner. I wanted only to say hello to our new guest, who I now know is Doctor Greer Farraday. I am indeed Vicente Portales. A cryptographer. And I welcome you to Rapa Nui and to our colleagues—Doctor Sven Urstedt and Doctor Randolph Burke-Jones, who would also like to meet you. And I will offer you this small piece of advice: If a person would like to avoid the whole world, it is an excellent choice to come to Rapa Nui. There is perhaps no better place. But if a person would like to avoid people on Rapa Nui, that person will have very little success, because, you see, it is a very, very small island.” At this, he crouched down, removed from his pocket an elaborate Swiss army knife, flicked up a thick blade, and in four quick movements eased the lid off her final crate. “To help you settle in a little faster,” he said, returning the knife to his pocket. “Iorana,Greer.”

  She listened as his footsteps faded leisurely down the hall.

  “Thanks,” she called, though she did not think he could hear her. Only the echo of her own voice returned.

  The next morning, Greer awoke at dawn, put a fresh Band-Aid on her wound, and prepared a day pack: sample bags, cutters, field notebook, camera, a change of clothes. She lathered sunblock on her arms and neck, then walked through the just-waking streets of Hanga Roa to find Mahina’s cousin Chico, whom she’d been told could rent her a horse. It seemed news of her plan had spread quickly—the short man with an unruly gray mustache stood in the middle of the street, holding the reins of a brown and somewhat emaciated horse, waving as she approached. After arranging a price, he gave her a boost on and handed her a worn map of the island with severalmoai drawn in.

  “Bestmoai here.” He pointed to a spot on the island’s western side. “Ahu Tahai. Fifteen minute. No more. And here”—his finger tapped a stretch of sand on the northern coast—“is good for swim. Anakena. Maybe two, three hours.”

  She thanked him, and gave a slight kick to the beast’s flank. It had been years since she’d been on a horse, not since she went riding as a child, and she liked the roll of her torso over the animal’s back, the light trapezing of her feet. Often she had ridden alone across fields, watching her parents’ house fade to a white speck in the distance, to collect minnows and newts from the creek. Her father had raised her from infancy on a diet of science. He filled her with stories of natural wonders: century plants that grew for decades, waiting to finally flower and fruit for one brief moment; an Asian orchid that could bloom for nine months. But her favorite was the story of the small heart-shaped seeds that fell from tropical vines, washed by rains into the sea. Millions of sea hearts were riding the world’s oceans at any given time, drifting for months, years, eventually washing ashore on the beaches of distant lands to begin a new life. Sea hearts were such good travelers, her father said, that sailors stuffed them in their pockets for luck.

  While her friends gathered after school to trade Ginny dolls and baseball cards, Greer went exploring in the woods, upturning rocks and rotten logs to see what miniature worlds lay beneath, hovering for hours above mildewy civilizations of spiders, slugs, and millipedes. Or she went riding across the fields, collecting wildflowers, sometimes dismounting and following a bee as it pranced from flower to flower, trying to see if she could discern a pattern in its preferences. She had long ago grown accustomed to solitude, to a quiet alliance with nature.

  Greer continued slowly along the road out of the town, the ocean on her left a forget-me-not blue. Soon, cluttered rows of white crosses sprouted from the grass. Her map marked this as the local cemetery—started after the missionaries arrived and began preaching Christian burial. Before that, burials had been in the caves, or under theahu , the long stone platforms on which themoai originally stood.

  The path was lined with ferns, which Greer suspected had been on Rapa Nui a long time. Fern spores were among the lightest in the plant kingdom, no heavier than the average grain of pollen, and could
be carried by wind for hundreds of miles. Ferns had been among the first flora to regenerate on Krakatoa; three years after the eruption on the Indonesian island, they made up over half of the island’s plants, far above their usual fifteen percent. Greer liked to think of ferns as the floral Polynesians—itinerant, adventurous, adaptable—settling every landfall across entire oceans.

  In the distance ahead, several giant stone figures lay fallen in the grass—moai—the statues that had etched Easter Island into the world’s consciousness. According to Chico’s map, this was Tahai, the group ofmoai closest to the village. Much more depressing, she thought, than impressive. Long noses pressed to the ground, backs bared to the sun. They looked like debris. Greer tried to imagine them standing, the way Roggeveen had seen them in 1722: a row of towering human forms. But that majesty was long gone. Greer didn’t dismount; themoai weren’t her purpose for being there.

  She cut inland to look at the old leper colony, where the land was supposedly the most fertile on the island, and had been used by the lepers to grow fruits and vegetables; the produce had been difficult to sell at first, but people eventually overcame their fear. After a few minutes, Greer found herself before the scattering of abandoned huts in which almost twenty lepers had lived at one time. The last leper had died a few years earlier. Since then, the huts had been left to the violence of wind and rain. She circled the settlement until she found what looked to be a field for cultivation, dismounted, and took a soil sample. She then headed back toward the shore.

  Dozens more toppledmoai littered the coast below. From a distance, some simply looked like rocks. Through her binoculars, though, the slope of the shoulders and the indentation of the eyes fixed to the ground became clear. The twenty-foot statues of volcanic tuff had all been carved with identical features—they looked like slender giants with huge rectangular heads. They were neither lifelike nor ornate, but the size of them and the sheer number were impressive. She could see why they had captured the imaginations of Roggeveen, González, Cook, and La Pérouse. This was more than art, this was industry. Carving hundreds of stone giants, then positioning them along the island’s coast—impossible to imagine.

  The sun, now high in the sky, beat steadily on Greer’s arms and legs, and she put on her sunglasses. For another hour she urged her horse along the rock-clogged path, stopping once at a cluster of low shrubs speckled with red berries. GenusLycium, she guessed. This was the only wild plant among the grasses, and she clipped a branch and eased it into a sample bag. Dozens of horses and sheep grazed on the slopes. She passed two cattle ranches, where she had to lead her horse inland to bypass the fences, and saw several partridges jumping in the grass.

  By noon she had reached Anakena, a crescent of white sand hosting several picnics. The American couple from the day before were sunbathing on a plaid blanket, a small radio propped between them. Farther down, several women in bikinis tossed a beach ball. A cluster of palm trees shaded the edges of the beach—these, she’d read, had been planted just a few years before—and three elderly women had propped themselves beneath one of the thick, scalloped trunks, fanning themselves with pamphlets. They were reveling in this minute patch of shade, the first Greer had seen all morning. It astounded her, really, how completely the island bared itself to the sun. Almost as if shadows, too, had become extinct. The island’s sole oasis was this slim beach with its canopy of palm fronds. This was where Hotu Matua, the island’s first settler, had landed his canoe, and where the famous lost British expedition had made its camp. Greer had planned to have lunch here, in a bit of shade, but now changed her mind. Too many tourists. She wasn’t here to take photographs, to say to friends back home:I went to Easter Island . She was here, in some significant way, to understand.

  She rode away from the beach, following the steep rise of the coast. For another hour she stuck to the shoreline, then veered off the trail into a tangle of grass and rocks. The horse stepped slowly. A strong, salty wind rose from the water, battering her face. This, and the sound of the waves below, briefly muted the thump of the horse’s hooves. Seabirds swooped overhead in eerie silence. But soon the wind subsided and she heard a hollowwhoosh. On the rocks below, a spout of water shot straight into the sky: a blowhole. According to her map, this was almost halfway back to Hanga Roa—a good place to stop for lunch. A worn track led down toward the water, so she dismounted and tethered her horse to the broken head of amoai .

  Fastening the straps of her backpack, she eased herself down the cliff, carefully placing each foot on the loose rocks. Finally on flat ground, she had just shrugged her pack off, when she heard the faint sound of footsteps against the rough basalt. She looked around the cliff’s face to see an old man in loose brown chinos and a beige sweater climbing the rocks toward the path, his footholds fast and light, noticeably more confident than her own. An islander. His hair was thick and gray, his eyebrows unruly. Nervously glancing at Greer, he passed out of sight. Just then a breeze carried the smell of food: roasted meat, the sweet smell of yams. On the rocks about twenty yards from her, she spotted a plate covered with a metal lid, a halo of steam curling from its edges. It was odd, this abandoned meal, but then again, the island seemed governed by its own rules and rituals.

  Greer sat and pulled out the lunch Mahina had packed—two bananas, a cheese sandwich, and a warm bottle of cola. In the distance, a small jetty stretched into the water, frayed ropes hanging from its rocks. Beneath her, the sea splashed the cliff and she listened, with surprising contentment, to the rhythm of the waves. Greer had always liked the ocean, and in Marblehead those past few months, when the confusion of mourning Thomas seemed overwhelming, it was the ocean that had calmed her. But here, above this endless sea, in this place so far away, she felt more than calmness: She felt the first small hint of joy returning. She’d made it to Easter Island, and she was doing her first solo field research. Greer pulled out her notebook and began to write:

  Day 1:Initial survey of current vegetation of northwest coast of island: extensive Gramineae and ferns, without apparent shrubbery or ground cover. One sample (A1) of possible Lycium taken two miles beyond village of Hanga Roa. (Are berries edible to humans? What are the other possible faunal predators of fruit? Means of dispersal?)

  Soil eroded and dry. Approximately two dozen coconut palms grow at Anakena beach on the island’s northern coast, but beyond that there is no—

  The blowhole released another whistle, a spray of seawater fell over her, and when Greer looked up, above the steaming plate stood a ghostly figure. An old woman, pale and slender, barefoot, in a soiled smock. The wind stirred her long white hair. Her legs bent gingerly as she lifted the plate. Then she turned to Greer.

  “Iorana!” Greer shouted. “Windy.Viento! Fuerte! ” You never knew what difference a friendly word might make. “The view,” Greer said, her arms sweeping out to the ocean, “. . .el mar, hermoso .”

  The old woman scanned the horizon.

  “Hermoso!” Greer repeated.

  “Vai kava nehe nehe,”the woman said, her voice low and brittle, almost lost in the rumble of the water. She turned toward the cliff and disappeared.

  Sliding forward, Greer saw a small crack in the face of the rock, a sliver of an opening. Of course, a cave. The whole island was perforated with relics of its volcanic past: lava tubes left by the magma that flowed thousands of years earlier. Beneath the yellow grass, beneath the basalt, these caves formed a subterranean world of elaborate passageways hidden from view, littered with the skeletons of ancient islanders. According to oral history, the caves had served as shelters and hideouts during turbulent times; in them, families had slept and cooked and waited, and, when needed, had buried their dead. The early Christians, too, thought Greer, understood the benefit of underground networks, digging burial chambers beneath ancient Rome, then, during times of religious persecution, taking refuge belowground, beside the dead. Strange how mausoleums often became sanctuaries.

  Many of the island’s caves were still though
t undiscovered. The one before her, though, seemed to serve as the old woman’s home. How many more, she wondered, were still inhabited?

  Greer quickly finished her lunch—it was getting late—and resumed writing her morning’s observations. She detailed the path she’d taken, the weather, the number of horses she’d seen. She had promised herself to take extensive notes, to document each step of her research as though she were, in fact, responsible for turning the notes over to the nonexistent society that funded her research. But now, at the bottom of the page, Greer added a small note inappropriate for an official log, the kind of note at which Thomas would have shaken his head.

  An old woman who lives in one of the caves fetched a plate of hot food that had been left outside by an elderly man. She seems some sort of hermit. Interesting. She is pale, with white hair. One of the oho-tea race.

  Vai kava nehe nehe—translate.

  Smiling Greer closed her notebook, packed up the remains of her lunch, and made her way back toward the village as the sun fell in the sky.

  After returning her horse, Greer walked through the streets of Hanga Roa toward theresidencial. It was eightP .M., and the few shops along AvenidaPolicarpo Toro had closed. On the corner, a small restaurant seemed to be coming to life. A man in a brown button-down shirt carried chairs and tables to the dusty street, shook checkered cotton cloths across the tabletops, clinked down salt and pepper shakers. A few tourists had already been seated, extricating themselves from their visors and camera straps, piling guidebooks on the tables. Snatches of Spanish and German and English mingled in the street. This was the only life in sight. As she turned onto Te Pito O Te Henua Street, she spotted Vicente Portales walking with a newspaper tucked in the crook of his arm. Greer noticed the precision of his posture. He wasn’t tall, but the way he held his shoulders made him seem so. He waved and approached her with an easy confidence.