Euphoria

by Lily King

She wondered why every white asked about cannibalism.

I tasted it, he finally blurted out. And they’re right, it does taste like old pig. It was a joke the Mumbanyo had, that the missionaries had tasted like old pig.

Fen had his back to her but she could see the expression on his face just from the way he was standing with his back arched and his heels slightly lifted. He would be compensating for his wrinkled clothing and his odd profession with a hard masculine glare. He would allow himself a small smile only if he himself had made the joke.

She had known that tribe was a mistake after the first week, but it took her five months to convince Fen to leave.

The tribe is always greener on the other side of the river, she often tried to tell him. But it was impossible not to be envious of other people’s people. Until you laid it all out neatly on the page, your own tribe looked a mess.

She tried not to think about the villages they were passing, the raised houses and the fire pits and the children hunting for snakes in the thatch with spears. All the people she was missing, the tribes she would never know and words she would never hear, the worry that they might right now be passing the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her.

‘It’s Christmas Eve for Christ’s sake. Must you always be working?’ But his voice was teasing now, almost apologetic. We are here, his arm tight around hers said. It is over with the Mumbanyo. He kissed her and this too made the pain flare

I was raised on science as other people are raised on God, or gods, or the crocodile.

Other women had jewelry; Aunt Dottie had beetles in every color and shape, all found in the New Forest, which was ten miles from her house.

But he did not believe ordinary citizens created art. True art was anomalous; it was a rare mutation. It didn’t happen simply because one willed it so. He thought it an utter and exasperating waste of an ordinary man’s time. Science on the other hand, science needed an army of educated men.

She thought anthropology a weak science, a false science, a phantasmagoria of words with no substance or purpose. She was so certain and uncompromising that even short visits were dangerous to my already wobbly convictions.

She didn’t seem to believe my tone of voice or the expression on my face, and apologized again. But I wasn’t put out by what she’d said. Quite the opposite. I was eager, desperate for more. Ideas, suggestions, criticism of my approach. Fen might have had too much of it, but I had had too little.

‘My first report card. I wasn’t sent to school until I was nine, and my teacher’s comment at the end of the first term was: “Elinor has an overenthusiasm for her own ideas and a voluble dearth of enthusiasm for those of others, most especially her teacher’s.”’

‘Do you still amuse your parents?’ It was something I couldn’t imagine being able to do anymore. She laughed. ‘Not in the least.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I wrote a book all about the sex lives of native children.’ ‘That is a bit less seemly than spitting on hats, isn’t it?’

My body feels better. Pitiful that a great amount of my pain disappeared when someone paid a bit of attention to it.

You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.

For so long I’d felt that what I’d been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating and I needed to see her again.

Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense, an ache that seemed to have no name but want. I want. Intransitive. No object. It was the opposite of wanting to die. But it was scarcely more bearable.

Have I ever said anything to anyone that has come back once a day for 8 years?

But the world is deaf. The world—and really I mean the West—has no interest in change or self-improvement and my role it seems to me on a dark day like today is merely to document these oddball cultures in the nick of time, just before Western mining and agriculture annihilate them. And then I fear that this awareness of their impending doom alters my observations, laces all of it with a morose nostalgia.

Always in her mind there had been the belief that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.

Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain you find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is my point exactly.

None of the photographs taken of Nell Stone, the ones you find in textbooks and the two biographies, even the ones taken in the field, ever captured the way she really looked. You cannot see her energy, her quick brimming joy when you came through the door. If I could have any picture of her at all, it would be then, at the moment she saw me that day.

When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?

Helen’s book made us feel we could rip the stars from the sky and write the world anew.

These last pages reminded me of the finale of a fireworks show, many flares sent up at once, exploding one after the other.

I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake.

What would it have altered to have kissed her then, that night? Everything. Nothing. Impossible to know.