The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  21 Of all the characters who have populated the last half century of anthropology, Paul Joseph Tallent (1916–?) is arguably both the most fascinating and the most unknowable. Thought to have been born to a mother of Sioux extraction, he was raised from a toddler at the St. Joseph’s Orphanage for Boys in the town of Cloud Prairie, just outside of Pierre, South Dakota (the town’s territory, if not its name, is now a suburb of the capital). St. Joseph’s was a Catholic orphanage with a disproportionately large number of Indian boys; it was known for training its charges in various vocations, including plumbing and carpentry. Tallent, however, attracted the attention of one of his teachers, a Brother Peter (his lay name was Michael Tallent, and it is from him that Tallent undoubtedly took his surname, as all of the boys at St. Joseph’s were automatically given the name of Joseph), who mentored him and secured him a scholarship to a Catholic boys’ boarding school in Pierre, St. Francis’s. Tallent excelled at St. Francis’s and went on to win admittance to first Dartmouth (A.B., 1937) and then the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1941 (like Norton, Tallent was granted an exemption from service, although it’s unknown on what grounds). He was indeed, as Norton notes, very handsome, a fact that contributed to the aura of heroic romance that later came to surround him.

  Tallent was immediately considered something of a prodigy in his field, first at Chicago, where he stayed to lecture for three years after receiving his doctorate, and then at Stanford, which would become his permanent academic home. While

  it seemed as unlikely as a dodo ever to fly. Tallent and I and our luggage shared room with crates and crates of supplies, but no other passengers; the engines were so loud that conversation was—I was relieved to discover—impossible, and so after smiling vaguely in my direction and writing in a notebook for an hour or so, he closed his eyes and napped.

  I had never given much thought to my own appearance—my body was, until that point, a vehicle of utility, and not something I had ever even considered possible or in my ability to change or shape or perfect. But looking at Tallent—his hair and skin and eyes the same dark-gold, brandyish hue, his many teeth remarkably white and crowded, which gave his smiles a lupine affect—I was made unavoidably aware of my own flaws: my bunchy knees, my floury skin, my floaty puff of hair. It seemed both improbable and ludicrous then that Tallent and I should be of the same species, and cruel that he should be a mirror of human perfection against which I could only catalogue my deficiencies. I spent the rest of the flight staring at him, willing him to open his eyes and yet dreading it too, disgusted by the ache I felt and yet enjoying it too. When the plane at last at Chicago he found a mentor in the renowned anthropologist Leo DuPlessix, who was at the time studying the reproductive rituals of the Hawawa people, a small tribe that lived in the jungles of Papua New Guinea; he was no doubt responsible for Tallent’s intellectual leanings and fields of interest. It is thought that DuPlessix, who died in 1943, assisted Tallent in his first trip to U’ivu later that year, but this is not documented in DuPlessix’s papers so cannot be definitively stated.

  Chief among the many frustrations Tallent’s later biographers and scholars would encounter was their subject’s lack of journals or papers of his own. Indeed, most scholars find it difficult to believe that Tallent, who was so scrupulous about documenting every detail while in the field, should not have left behind a personal diary, or at the very least correspondence. This absence, along with his work and his still mysterious disappearance (which Norton will discuss later), has naturally only heightened the intrigue that surrounds Tallent, and several historians have been at work for many years now trying to compile definitive biographies of his life. (Norton, who is among the people who worked with him the most closely and at the most significant period of his scholarship, is often approached by them for interviews and insights.) In my opinion, however, it seems a job more suited for a novelist than for a historian: among the unknowns of Tallent’s life are his sexual predilections, his parentage, the specifics of his childhood, his romantic life (if any), and, of course, the manner of his death. He has become fertile ground for conspiracy theorists of all make, and is even revered as something of a mystic among certain fringe elements of the liberal arts community.

  22 This was actually untrue. While Duff, who was at the time a lecturer in the Anthropology Department at Stanford (her specialty was Micronesian village life), had accompanied Tallent on his previous two trips to the island, she had never been known among her colleagues as a linguist, and her understanding of the language was considered by later U’ivuan scholars to be rudimentary at best. However, she was certainly not quick to correct any misunderstandings regarding her fluency.

  23 All three of the guides were boar hunters on U’ivu, where the hogs mostly keep to the forests on the Ta’imana range; they would have had great expertise not only scaling steep inclines but negotiating rough jungle terrain.

  24 Later Norton would speculate that Tallent might have been referring to a series of experiments that were conducted at St. Joseph’s around 1910 by a phrenologist named Murrow Upton, whose theories about skull size and proportion were considered quite fashionable at the turn of the century. Upton was particularly fond of saying that the Indians had been biologically ordained to lose their lands to the Europeans, which he was convinced could be proved by measuring their skulls, which he posited were both smaller and lighter than those of various European ethnicities.

  25 The opa’ivu’eke remains the only turtle in recorded history that can live in both fresh water and saltwater for sustained periods of time.

  26 Literally, “My spear, my self.”

  27 This concept of la—which Norton here translates as “meaningless,” though others have interpreted it as something closer to the Zen Buddhist concept of mu, or “nothingness”—is arguably the most important governing principle in traditional U’ivuan philosophy (not to be confused with their mythology, or their religion, which is largely animistic).

  In The Land of La (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987), the theologian David Hohlt even argues that although Buddhism never reached U’ivuan shores, the core values of the belief system are “closer to early Buddhism than the way the religion is currently interpreted and adhered to throughout Asia today.” In fact, Hohlt writes, we can see the U’ivuan philosophy as a sort of ur-Buddhism, an argument for the theory that the belief system—and, by extension, history’s other major religions—was an inevitability, that its tenets are something man was destined to create for himself.

  I myself have a la story, one I have always remembered from when I visited U’ivu, in 1972. It was very hot, and I was disoriented and groggy from the humidity, the bugs, the stenches. As I walked through the town’s circle of poor, flimsy huts, I came upon a group of three little Ivu’ivuan girls, all half naked, holding hands and moving slowly in a circle, chanting. They had the sort of high, pretty voices only very small children have—sweet even in their tunelessness—and I watched them move round and round, singing their song.

  Later, however, when I told Norton of what I had witnessed, he said he knew exactly what the girls had been chanting. A nursery rhyme, I guessed. But it wasn’t; it was the first verses an U’ivuan child learns, a chant sung at both births and deaths:

  What is life? La.

  What is death? La.

  What is the sun, the water, the sky, the forest? La.

  What is my house, my pig, my beads, my friends? La.

  But what is life without my spear? O, la. La. La.

  28 Among the many things that were unique to the U’ivuans was their way of measuring time. The U’ivuan o’ana, or year, is divided into four periods of one hundred days each. First comes the ‘uaka, or wet season, when it rains literally every day, sometimes for hours at a stretch. Then comes the lili’uaka, or “small rain” season, when the air is still damp but the rainfall less frequent and the temperature warmer. The next season, lili’aka, or “small sun,” is the most pleasant: there is
rain in the morning, but it burns off quickly and the rest of the day is sunny and fairly arid, or as arid as a tropical climate can be. Last comes u’aka, the hottest season, when rain arrives only in unexpected, stingy splatters and even the trees seem to wilt under the relentless sun. (Although Norton does not specify, his journeys in Ivu’ivu probably began around the end of lili’uaka.)

  Aside from these four seasons, the U’ivuans were remarkable for not measuring any increment of time: they had no sense of hours, minutes, weeks, or months; even their numeric system only went up to one thousand. A day began when the sun rose (or, in the case of ‘uaka, when the sky lightened) and ended when the sun set (or the night descended). People’s birthdays were marked by which day during the season they were born, so, for example, someone born on the seventeenth day of the small sun season would say that they had marked a year on lili’uaka oholole, or “small sun seventeen.” This means that because of their four-hundred-day year, a sixty-year-old U’ivuan would actually be 65.7 by the Western calendar. But Norton has used the U’ivuan calendar throughout this narrative to avoid confusion, as the majority of U’ivuan scholars have in subsequent studies and writings.

  The past three decades have seen an erosion of many of the most compelling and distinct U’ivuan traditions, the result of a growing interest in the country—for which Norton always found himself to blame—and a great influx of Christian and Mormon missionaries, who were able, through their twentieth-century efforts, to gain a toehold that their nineteenth-century predecessors were not. Today the majority of U’ivuans adhere to the Western calendar and are fully conversant with (though do not necessarily abide by; U’ivuans are notoriously tardy) the civilized world’s definition of time.

  29 Of course, this is no longer true. Like everyone else on the planet, the U’ivuans have gotten taller, fatter, and longer-lived, themselves participants in that modern paradox in which we find ourselves becoming simultaneously healthier and less healthy. Today the average U’ivuan man lives to be sixty-three (women typically live a year or two longer), and although dysentery has been more or less eradicated with the introduction of plumbing, the primary cause of death for both men and women is currently heart disease—something once virtually unheard-of in the islands but now, given their new, tinned-food-heavy diet and love of alcohol, depressingly common.

  30 The U’ivuans and Ivu’ivuans spoke the same tongue, but Ivu’ivuans are now considered by linguists to speak “pure U’ivuan,” the original version of the language, unsullied and unchanged by, say, Western influences. A good example of this can be found in the word for hut: in Ivu’ivu, a hut was known as a male’e, but in U’ivu it had become simply a malé, apparently changed after a protracted and heavily concerted effort by a pedant of a late nineteenth-century missionary named Daniel Makepeace, who decided he would rid the language of its distracting glottal stops and what he characterized as its “extraneous syllables.” In the Ivu’ivuans’ language was a record not only of a people without encounters with the rest of the world but of a people completely ignorant of technology, jobs, and even, largely, time. There were no words for doctor, for example (a village midwife and a village herb man administered to the pregnant and sick), or light (as in electric light), or of any country other than their own. Indeed, as isolated as U’ivu often seemed to visitors, its inhabitants at least had some idea of the peoples and innovations and cultures that existed outside their own, even if they showed remarkably little interest in encountering them in person.

  31 A lithopedion, or stone baby, is a condition in which the fetus dies in utero and, being too large to be reabsorbed by the body (as the death usually occurs after the first trimester), instead calcifies to spare its host from infection. A woman can live perfectly normally for decades, even for her entire life, while carrying a stone baby; indeed, she can even bear other children. The phenomenon is, as Norton notes, extremely uncommon, a particularly ghoulish medical curiosity, and these days all but unheard of in the civilized world.

  32 Girls were usually married at age fourteen, so if Ivaiva and Va’ana’s story was true, that would make them around 133 in 1950.

  33 A close relation of the coconut, no’akas are a round gourdlike fruit that grows on vines (like watermelons) and are about the size of a large honeydew melon. On U’ivu they’re more commonly referred to as uka moa, or “hog food,” for the resemblance the stiff black hair that covers their surface bears to a hog’s bristles.

  PART IV: THE NINTH HUT

  I.

  I have called it and would call it the village, but it wasn’t a village really, just a large dirt-floored clearing with two-dozen-odd shaggy dried-palm huts ringing its perimeter, which appeared as abruptly as a mirage.

  We had come across a particularly impassable-looking scrim of trees, and the guides grunted as they shouldered their way through them, the dreamers shuffling after them in their stumbling, disorganized way. Esme and Tallent and I followed, and although we began in the forest as we pushed our way through a clutch of manamas, we emerged at the edge of the village.

  The first thing I saw were the bodies. They were everywhere: women lying flat on their backs, their children’s heads thrust up into the furrows of their armpits; men, their legs spread wide apart, their mouths open; a passel of hogs, their forelegs tucked beneath them like a cat’s, their bristles black and shiny as porcupine’s quills. In the middle of the clearing a small fire snapped and spat to itself. Suspended over the fire was an unidentifiable skinned animal, smaller than the hogs and black where the flames had lapped it, its eyes still intact and staring wretchedly at us.

  It was the scene of a massacre, a mass death, and it was only when I looked again, more carefully, that I saw that the women’s chests were moving, and that the men’s thumbs were dreamily stroking the spears they clutched even in their sleep, and that with each exhalation, the quiffs of stiff hair on the hogs’ noses trembled and shifted.

  Fa’a was the first of us to speak, and although I didn’t understand what he said, I did understand that his tone was unsurprised.34 Behind us clustered the dreamers, all of them uncharacteristically silent, and for a minute or so we all, as a group, simply stood and watched the village at sleep.

  But then, and for no particular reason, Eve let out one of her echoing, pistoning shouts, and the sleepers burst into movement like a bundle of tinder catching fire, the men seeming to go from horizontal to vertical in one swift shift, the women adding their voices to Eve’s in fear, the hogs grunting and running to the men’s sides, their eyes small and mean and oily. Only the animal skewered above the fire remained where it was, the flames spitting to themselves. Later I would remember it as a repeat of the day the dreamers had encroached upon us, stepping out of the forest in a gang, and would think how this time we were the intruders, inserting ourselves rudely into a play in which we had no written part.

  Later still I would remember this scene and the panic that had ensued when one day—many years after—I was watching one of my children watching television. On the screen was a cartoon: there was a hunter, a potatoey squirt of a man with a speech impediment, who bustled into a village populated by similarly tuberous people, although these people were black, and the only things distinguishable from the black of their bodies were their lips, fat and red and as ridged as an unsplit cacao pod, and the startled bright whites of their eyes. The hunter chased the black creatures, who ran about in frantic wobbling circles, waving their spears and shouting at nothing, while the hunter pranced around, the group of them making a crazy ballet.

  And that was us then as well. The villagers ran and screamed, and we ran after and around and above them, probably screaming ourselves—anyone looking at us would have imagined we were playing a children’s game. You can well imagine by this point how many hours it took Fa’a (poor Fa’a!) to reestablish something resembling order, for the men to cautiously lower their spears, for their snarling hogs to sink back to the earth, docile but alert. It took many, many hours, an
d by the end of it all—the women sitting on one side of the clearing, their children surrounding them, and all of them blinking at us like toads; the dreamers, guarded by Uva and Tu, at the edge of the clearing, somehow managing to drift off to sleep; most of the men sitting on the other side, their hogs beside them; and I, along with Tallent, Esme, and Fa’a, in the center of the village, where the creature35 continued to roast above the fire, its whole backside so burned now that its skin continually ashed off in little confetti that drifted through the air like flocks of moths—I was exhausted.

  Across from us sat three of the villagers, all men, all robust in appearance, their hair dark and exuberant, their arms and legs stripey with tendon and muscle. For a moment the two groups stared at each other a bit shyly, as if one of our group was to be betrothed to one of the other and we were here to make introductions and discuss terms. The men held their spears upright in their right hands and, as I had seen Fa’a do, opened and closed their fingers around them in a gesture that seemed more rhythmic than nervous, so that at some points, when they were all fanning their fingers at the same moment, it appeared choreographed, and I half fancied they might break into song.

  It was the man in the center who first spoke, and even were it not for this fact, nor that he sat in the center, I would have assumed he was the superior of the other two: he was slightly taller, even sitting down, and sat with his shoulders pulled back at an almost unnatural angle, and his hog was bigger than his friends’, its coat marvelously shiny, as if it had recently been rubbed with oil.