The Signature of All Things
sorry patch of garden, but not much to be done about it; Ambrose had built his house upon the burning sand, so it was futile even to try. There was nothing to be done about the lizards, either, who scampered across the rafters all night. If anything, they helped to abate mosquitoes, so Alma tried not to mind them. She knew they meant her no harm, though she did wish they would not crawl over her while she slept. She was happy they were not snakes. Tahiti, mercifully, was not snake country.
It was, however, crab country, but Alma soon taught herself not to be bothered by the crabs of all sizes that scuttled around her feet on the beach. They, too, meant her no harm. As soon as they glimpsed her with their waving, stalked eyes, they skimmed off in the other direction in a quick, clicking panic. She took to walking barefoot as soon as she recognized how much safer it was. Tahiti was too hot, too wet, too sandy, and too slippery for shoes. Fortunately, the environs welcomed bare feet; the island did not have even a single thorned plant, and most of the paths were smooth rock or sand.
Alma learned the shape and character of the beach, and the general habits of the tide. She was not a swimmer, but she encouraged herself to wade into the slow, dark water of Matavai Bay a bit deeper every week. She was grateful for the reef, which kept the bay fairly calm.
She learned to bathe in the river in the mornings with the other settlement women, all of whom were as thickset and strong as Alma herself. They were fiends for personal cleanliness, the Tahitians, washing their hair andbodies every day with the foaming sap of the ginger plants along the banks. Alma, who was not accustomed to bathing every day, soon wondered why she had not been doing this her entire life. She learned to ignore the groups of little boys who stood around the river, laughing at the women in their nakedness. There was no point in trying to hide from them; there was no hour of the day or night when the children would not find you.
The Tahitian women did not object to the children’s laughter. They seemed far more worried about Alma’s wiry, coarse, faded hair, which they fussed over with both sadness and concern. They all had such beautiful hair, which fell in black, billowing sweeps down their backs, and they felt simply terrible for Alma that she did not share this spectacular feature. She felt simply terrible about it herself. One of the first things Alma learned how to convey in Tahitian was an apology for her hair. She wondered if there was any place she could go in the world, ever, where her hair would not be considered a tragedy. She suspected not.
Alma picked up as much Tahitian as she was able, from anybody who would speak to her. She found the people to be warm and helpful, and they encouraged her efforts as a kind of play. She started with the words for the commonest items around Matavai Bay: the trees, the lizards, the fish, the sky, and the sweet little doves called uuairo (a word that sounded exactly like their soft, bubbling cry). She moved on to grammar as quickly as she was able. The inhabitants of the mission settlement spoke English at varying levels of proficiency—some were quite fluent, some simply inventive—but Alma, always the linguist, was determined to keep her interactions in Tahitian whenever possible.
But Tahitian, she found, was not a simple language. It sounded to her ears more like birdsong than speech, and she was not musical enough to master it. Alma determined that Tahitian was not even a reliable language. It did not have the sturdy injunctions of Latin or Greek. The people of Matavai Bay were especially kittenish and rascally with words, changing them by the day. Sometimes they mixed in bits of English or French, inventing imaginative new words. The Tahitians loved abstruse puns that Alma could never have comprehended unless her grandparents’ grandparents had been born here. Moreover, the people at Matavai Bay spoke differently from the people in Papeete, a mere seven miles away, and those people spoke differently from the people in Taravao or Teahupo. You could not trust a sentenceto mean the same thing on one side of the island as across it, or to mean the same thing today as it meant yesterday.
Alma studied the people around her carefully, trying to learn the disposition of this curious place. Sister Manu was the most important, for she not only tended the pigs, but policed the entire settlement. She was a
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