And then finally it was the day I was to meet Tallent. He had sent a telegram to the hall where I was staying at the university, informing me of his arrival time and suggesting that we meet in the lounge area at six p.m.; we would leave the next morning at eight. The flight to the Gilbert Islands would take nine hours, followed by another three-hour-long transfer to U’ivu.
I was nervous before meeting Tallent, uncomfortably so; I was not usually anxious about meeting people, and after all, I had been requested, I was a doctor, I was (I told myself) essential to his operation. Yet this was a false sort of confidence, because as I was aware but unable to admit, it was Tallent who had allowed me to even dream of this adventure, and without him I would be back in Boston, jobless, grounded, scrabbling for a second-rate internship at a third-rate hospital. Shortly before six I got dressed (I had even brought a suit, one of the first things I would later discard) and went down to the lounge, which had cool cement floors and two orange-cushioned bamboo sofas separated by a dirty woven-palm mat.
There was already someone sitting there, bent over a book, and as I walked toward him, he looked up.
There is really no satisfying or new way to describe beauty, and besides, I find it embarrassing to do so. So I will say only that he was beautiful, and that I found myself suddenly shy, unsure even of how to address him — Paul? Tallent? Professor Tallent? (Surely not!) Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another’s appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty. As the months I spent in Tallent’s presence dragged by, I would alternately be tortured by and find solace in his beauty, and would find myself by turns surrendering to it, enjoying my proximity to it, and, less happily, trying to argue against it, as fruitless and pointless an activity as trying to convince yourself that sugar is sour.
“I’m Paul Tallent,” said Tallent, unnecessarily, as I gaped at him. I mumbled a hello. We shook hands. “So you landed all right, I see.” I made a grunting noise. We were standing at the edge of the filthy mat, Tallent an inch or two taller than I. I stared at my shoes. “You’re ready to go, then,” he continued. I nodded. “Well, I’m very happy to have you on this mission,” he said. He had a particular way of talking, I noticed — there were no question marks in his sentences, no exclamation points, and yet his voice was not toneless but rather shaded and rich and somehow substantial, something that conjured a dense forest of variegated trees, all lush and stately and grand. It was a voice that betrayed nothing — not approval, not happiness, not fear or anger — but that might make you crazy with its promise of mysteries. I wanted to hear him speak some more, but I was also afraid to ask him anything, was suddenly unable to say anything at all. “Well,” said Tallent at last, no doubt worried by my monosyllabism, “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
At that moment I realized what I could have said to him—“Would you like to have some dinner?”—but he had already walked away, of course, and I was left standing there on my own.
I was able to study Tallent more closely on our flight.21 The plane was a military vessel, so hugely bulky and bloated in its hangar that landed and Tallent stirred, I was exhausted and exhilarated, abrim with a sweet, private sadness. “Next stop, U’ivu,” said Tallent as we disembarked, and I thought he sounded happy; I was happy too.
From the Gilberts we were flown above U’ivu in a buzzing gnat of a plane, its loudly whisking propellers so vigorous that the trees, stalky clumps of date palms, blew backward as we descended. The plane dipped around a bend, over and along a long, curved stretch of mountain range, and for a second, suspended over the frayed, tender line where the ocean met the land, I looked toward the horizon and found myself unable to determine where the sky ended and the water began: it was all a dazzling, indistinct wash of blue, an audacious blue with no name, so insistent and unvaried I had to close my eyes.
U’ivu, as I have mentioned, is a group of three islands, but only two were officially inhabited. The first was U’ivu, the main island, baguette-shaped, about twenty miles long and half as wide, split lengthwise by a single, unbroken mountain range called Ta’imana. This was where the king lived, as well as the majority of the country’s 35,000-odd occupants. Sixty miles to U’ivu’s east was the second island, Iva’a’aka, the same approximate shape and size but whose entire northern side was made inviolable by a wall of cliffs; even from the sky I could see how the waves slapped against them into fat white plumes, like handfuls of feathers being tossed into the air, and see the haloes of broad-winged birds that circled their sharp lava-rock peaks. But the rest of Iva’a’aka was low green hills, and so it was here that the country did most of its large-scale farming: we flew over acres of neatly stepped fields, the soil freckled with barely distinguishable dots of green and gold.
“Taro,” said Tallent, pointing at one and then, at another, “Sweet potato.”
“How can you tell from here?” I asked him. The fields with their rows of vegetation looked the same to me.
He shrugged. “I can,” he said, and I felt somehow ashamed of myself for having asked.
We passed over some huts, simple structures with what I could tell even from the air were palm-leaf roofs, and an occasional wooden house, but most of Iva’a’aka’s farmers were seasonal, and the island had few full-time residents. Only the plantations’ overseers — for all of these farms were owned by the king, and their produce was given to the government, which then distributed it to the U’ivuan citizens — lived here year-round, Tallent explained; the pickers and growers and gardeners worked on Iva’a’aka only for three-month shifts before returning by boat to their homes and families on the main island. The plane sank in the sky, and as I looked down again, I saw a blur of deep brown streak through one of the fields. “Boars,” said Tallent, and I turned in my seat to look back and stare at them. There they were, the famous U’ivuan boars, and even from a distance one could tell they were monstrously large. There must have been a hundred of them in the pack, and I could see the dirt spraying up around them, an echo of the water breaking against the island’s cliffs.
“And that is Ivu’ivu,” Tallent shouted to me, and I followed where he was pointing. The angle was not ideal — I saw a slant of black mountain, its façade brushed with vegetation — and I crouched in my seat to try to get a closer look at the place where I would be spending the next few months of my life, at the Forbidden Island that would now be our home.
But then the plane turned again and descended once more, and we were above U’ivu. “This is the south side of the island,” Tallent called over the noise of the propellers. “We’ll land here.” And so we did, bumpily, juddering over what I would later see were small hillocks of grass and soil; the runway was no runway at all, just a long stretch of plain earth — that was how few planes landed here.
As we were lifting our bags out of the plane, I saw a short, round figure walking toward us, and when it was about a hundred yards away, it hollered “Paul!” and I realized it was a woman.
“Esme!” Tallent called back, and I was upset and unnerved to see him smile, to see his face fall momentarily into happiness.
The woman came closer and the two all but flung themselves into each other’s arms. Then there was a quick exchange in a language I couldn’t understand but that sounded like pops of gunfire, followed by the two of them laughing, the first time I had heard Tallent laugh.