by Pico Iyer
My last night in Cambodia I returned to Angkor Wat to see the magical temple for the final time. Above the long avenue of the blind, the limbless, and the deformed, a glorious full moon rose, and a lame man on the ground played a haunting melody on his flute, as darkness fell and the night began to chatter. The temple complex was much smaller than I had expected—it does not open onto a city of other monuments, as I had imagined from the pictures. Yet the experience of being there was infinitely more profound than I had expected, and when I went back to the hotel I knew I would be telling my friends to come to Angkor if they could—so long as they recall that, together with the eighteen thousand apsaras, or attendant angels, that archaeologists have counted in the area, there are probably an equal number of dark spirits.
The next day, as he took us to the airport, our unfailingly sweet and intelligent guide turned around in the front seat and said, “Thank you for coming here. For giving me employment. Tourists are very important for our economy. Also, for conservation of temple.
“Before, we never thought of this,” he said, referring to the protection of Angkor. “If you do not come . . .” With that, his voice trailed off.
In the departure hall, a little bowl had been set up for foreigners to place spare coins or banknotes (worth three cents each), under the sign PLEASE HELP THE POOR VICTIMS.
In the distance, I could almost hear the voices still calling out, “Hello, papa, why you not buy?”
1999
A NEW MILLENNIUM
We dropped out of the heavens and looked around us in the dark: a few stone heads; some men in flowered shirts and shorts, handing out leis inside a small, squat terminal; and outside, in the night, a few parking places marked out for the island’s governor, its judge, some other dignitaries. Otherwise, there was nothing to be seen in the silence and the dark. Easter Island is the loneliest inhabited settlement in the world, thirteen hundred miles from its nearest neighbor (Pitcairn, population sixty-five), and all around you can feel the miles of loneliness and space. Above us, in the dark, three small white crosses, shining on a hill.
There are not many people who get off the plane at Easter Island, and the few who did all scrambled into a minivan, which bumped and jangled over a brown, unpaved road to take us to our resting places. There are only a few motels on Easter Island—and a few houses made to look like motels—and all of them are next to identical: a patch of grass, some somber stone faces, a bungalow or two around the garden. When we arrived at the one we had picked out from afar, a girl with a long rush of black hair and a white flower behind one ear smiled a greeting but said nothing we could understand. An old man led us to our rooms, and opened the doors on suites so new they came without furniture, without clothes hangers, without anything but space and light. It was dark when I got up the next morning, and when I walked into the lobby the man behind the desk was reading the Bible aloud to himself. He waved his finger mightily in the air as he intoned from the Book of Revelations.
Outside, I could see, as the light began to filter in, there was nothing but grass, running down to black volcanic rocks, the sea. Two thatched huts sat in the middle of the emptiness, looking out on empty space. The only sound I heard, the wind, roaring in my ears.
I needed, insanely, to send a message to my bosses in Rockefeller Center in New York, and so I began walking through the emptiness in search of communications. There are very few vehicles on Easter Island, though there is said to be a bus that runs sometimes on Sundays in the summer. Occasionally a taxi churned past, but then it was gone again, and the place was emptiness and roaring winds once more. And so I continued to walk, down a long, straight, silent road—Polynesia set in Scotland, so it seemed—the silence stretching out on every side of me. There is only one town in Rapa Nui (in resource-poor Easter Island the word stands for the place itself, its language, and its people), and until recently none of the island’s three thousand residents was allowed to live outside its narrow limits. There is only one main road in Hanga Roa—the “Navel of the World,” as the town is called—and on this particular morning, the world had yet to arrive. A man with long brown hair flowing down his naked back rode past on a chestnut mare. A girl with a sweet-smelling flower in her hair sauntered past as if on her way to Gauguin. Very soon the town was behind me again and I was alone with black straggly rocks once more, a few stone faces and a tumble of old gravestones, white and black and clay-red, tilted against the sea.
I walked and walked, but could find no hint that a world outside Easter Island existed, so I turned back and walked past the tiny park with its tiny pay phone, the little blue café with Tibetan prayer-flags across its courtyard, the shuttered buildings and little souvenir shops. One of these places, selling T-shirts and stuffed animals, offered “Computadores” on its window, but when I looked in, all I could see was a single aged keyboard being clicked away on by a lonely teenager from California. The point of Easter Island, clearly, was to be out of range of the world at large.
I walked down the quiet main street in the early light and came upon a gateway with a life-sized shark at its top. Inside, in a courtyard, I could just make out a sign in blood-red letters that said: E-MAIL. I followed this sign into a little office and found myself inside a travel agency, liberally appointed with books by Heinrich Böll and pictures of the Alps. At a keyboard wild with upside-down question marks and tildes sat a small round man with tufts of white hair above his ears.
“You are looking for a machine?” he said, looking up.
“In a way.”
His office was open, Herr Schmid explained, from eight till noon each morning, and then again from four till eight each evening. Often, however, it was closed at these times, too. The clock on his wall, I noted unhappily, recorded “Rapa Nui Time.” I was free to use his machine whenever I wanted, he told me, but I should remember that there were only twenty lines on the island connected to the outside world. Four years ago, the island had not even known direct television.
I walked back down the lonely road towards my motel, reassured in some small way that it was still possible to think of reality in a different light. A few years earlier I had taken to traveling around the New Year, in part because that is the time when our hopes are at their brightest cusp, as, poignantly, is our sense that all the resolutions we’re so boldly making will be forgotten by next week. Often, too, I’d taken my mother on trips over the New Year’s holidays, to the places she’d been dreaming of since girlhood (Egypt, Jordan, now Rapa Nui). This year the longing to escape the moment was especially intense because the end of the old millennium, as it was being called, was clangorous with millenarian warnings: talk of computers crashing, and plunging us back into the Dark Ages, and terrorists on their way to LAX. On Easter Island, by comparison, a twenty-first-century luxury was said to be a piece of wood.
I looked around me in the silent morning and tried to see where I had ended up. It’s a disconcerting thing to fly into the remote Chilean possession from California; traveling east as far as Denver, I had somehow landed up in the same time zone as New York. More profoundly, I felt as if I had landed in the distant past. There was a phone beside each bed in the motel, but just to call my mother in the next room involved connecting with an operator who was never there. A fax machine, it was rumored, sat in the office of the manager, but the manager was never there and the office was always closed. The real wealth of Easter Island is said to be the “living faces,” or moai, who, the local people believe, travel across the island in the dark to look over their sleeping forms.
I walked towards the black volcanic rocks, the open sea—the “Y2K” that everyone had been chattering about in California the previous day here soothed into something that sounded like “Why today?”—and thought back to Herr Schmid, with his calendars from the Explorers Club showing the peaks of far-off Switzerland. People wonder sometimes why people like him, or Melville, or Stevenson, choose to take themselves away from the comfort of what they know to a place that does not eve
n have a site of higher education. They ask me why I elect to spend much of my time in a Benedictine hermitage—though no Benedictine—or in a two-room flat in rural Japan where I have no car or bicycle or Internet connection or newspapers. When I speak of “infinite riches in a little room” and the twenty thousand sites on the World Wide Web already devoted to information overload, they look more bewildered still.
It’s not easy to explain that poverty can take many forms, and that a poverty of horizon can seem as paralyzing as the other kinds. I call that man rich, as Henry James famously said, who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination. Hard to explain, too, that time and space open up as soon as you take leave of the simple ways in which you define yourself. Though many of us are lucky enough not to be afflicted with the actual poverty of which Camus was writing, the longing to live somewhere between that reality and the sun remains potent; luxury, for some of us, is measured by the things we can do without.
Before I came to Easter Island, I knew, as everyone does, that its affluence was measured by the enigmatic statues represented on every poster (and even reproduced outside my local health club in Japan). Yet after I began to walk around the languid Polynesian island I began to feel that they were the least of the treasures of this forgotten, ever surprising place. Many of them, in any case, had been destroyed years before in tribal fighting and stood now in artificial rows that had no meaning for the people who took them to be ancestral spirits.
Foreigners arrived from every corner of the world and tried to fill the emptiness with explanations. Heroic oarsmen from the shores of South America, or visitors from outer space, they said; Basque influences, perhaps, or what John Dos Passos, at the end of the 1960s, noting the statues’ cycle of destruction and rehabilitation, called a “warning to college radicals.” For the people who live among them, the power of the statues lies, surely, in the fact that they can’t be easily explained; we are as rich as our sense of what lies beyond our comprehension. In practical terms, such inner riches are important; Easter Island is so poor in actual resources that in the nineteenth century people were reduced to eating one another, and the population of the whole place sank almost to one hundred.
Besides, everything around the statues, all the ways in which what thinks of itself as civilization tries to make itself at home in what it thinks of as the wild, was extraordinary. I went one Sunday to a mass at the local church and found a Virgin who greeted me like a staring-eyed moai. The Savior by her side looked like another tormented tourist. Altar girls walked through the aisles with collection bags while the priest beamed down on us all, rongo-rongo symbols swirling across his white vestments. There had once been an amateur radio operator on the island, Herr Schmid had told me, but he, a priest, had been relocated.
There had once been a woman from Switzerland, too, he said, but then . . . and he said no more.
At the local museum the walls were decorated with decals representing the international credit cards that were accepted, and so I decided to pay for a small purchase with a Visa card. The transaction lasted almost until the new millennium—fortyfive minutes in all—and when it was concluded, triumphantly, the young woman behind the cash register raced out, in her delight, and threw her arms around me, planting a wet kiss on my cheek.
I went back to look in on Herr Schmid and found his office closed, its owner wobbling down the main street on an unsteady bicycle. I returned the next day and found a notice on the window saying that the proprietor was away showing petroglyphs to visitors. I went back the next day and found my sometime host being lectured at by a woman from Norfolk, Illinois. He should acquire more modern computers, she said; as it happened, she was in the business of selling these. “If only,” said Herr Schmid, trying in his way to explain that, though there was an emergency landing strip for the space shuttle here, FedEx and UPS were not so regular in their visits.
The woman, piqued, replied that she was a member of the Rotary Club, and our host’s face picked up with a shy smile. He was, said Herr Schmid, as it happened, the president-elect of the Rapa Nui chapter of the Rotary Club; its members were due to meet this very evening at the Kopakavana restaurant. (“No,” he explained patiently, “not the ‘Copacabana.’ ”) It was just possible that the father of the current Miss Rapa Nui might be present.
The New Year, the new millennium, drew on, and for a few hours the main street got crowded: a TV crew from Santiago had come to broadcast the New Year here around the world. In the blue Tibetan café with quotes from Neruda across the window, a man in a topknot and tattoos appeared, to speak to the eavesdropping cameras about how tribal elders had declined, and were hostage, now, to the talking head. On New Year’s Eve, when I looked in on him, Herr Schmid confessed that he’d come here for three weeks, eight years ago. On a shelf I saw a little picture frame, and a photo of a beautiful island girl and child.
When at last the twenty-first century arrived, the whole population of the island, as it seemed, gathered on the grassy space in front of the sea, a few stone heads before us. The TV crews put on their lights and some girls sashayed back and forth in grass skirts. Then a few fireworks went up into the sky, so scanty they would have been the disgrace of Norfolk, Illinois, and a great mounting roar of wonder spread around me. For three, four minutes, the heavens were a fountain of pink and emerald lights and the whole island seemed to hold its breath. Then we all went back to our quiet rooms and faced the gusty winds and the empty silence of a new millennium. The messages I’d sent from Easter Island all came with the name “Josef Schmid” at the top.
2000
A FOREIGNER AT HOME
“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”
—On the Thames, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
There is a moment, early on in Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, When We Were Orphans, that cuts to the heart of everything that’s odd—to use a favorite Ishiguro word—about this author’s not-quite-English fiction. The typically fussy, agonizingly self-conscious narrator, Christopher Banks, never quite sure of his place in the world around him, steps out of a London lunch to pursue a woman to whom he’s strongly (if always passively) attracted. When he catches up with her on the street, she starts to reminisce about the careless bus rides she took as a girl with her mother, now dead, and asks Banks if he rides the buses, too.
“ ‘I must confess,’ ” he replies, in the over-formal English that is an Ishiguro trademark, “ ‘I tend to walk or get a cab. I’m rather afraid of London buses. I’m convinced if I get on one, it’ll take me somewhere I don’t want to go, and I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to find my way back.’ ”
I can’t think of any one of Ishiguro’s contemporaries in England who would write in quite that tone of voice, let alone have a protagonist (who’s not supposed to be timorous—Banks, after all, is presented to us, without much evidence, as one of the great detectives of his day) confess to such a fear. Yet the response, with all its overlapping anxieties—of dislocation, of losing time, of being swept up in something outside one’s control—suggests something distinctive about the Ishiguro world, and something that can still make his maker seem an outsider in the England where he’s lived for forty years.
There is a practical reason why Banks might feel ill at ease in London—born to an ultra-British family in Shanghai, he’s a relative newcomer in the country of his forebears (and, besides, all his deepest hurts have to do with abandonment). Yet the air of apprehension goes deeper than that. The terror of doing the wrong thing, the elaborate unease attending even the most everyday of activities—take one wrong step and you’ll get lost— and the sense of being always on uncertain ground lie at the heart of Ishiguro’s poignant and often haunted vision. In his previous novel, The Unconsoled, Ishiguro gave us 535 pages about being lost in a foreign place where his narrator couldn’t read the signs.
When We Were Orphans may well be Ishiguro’s richest and most capacious book so far, in part becaus
e it stitches together his almost microscopic examination of self-delusion, as it plays out in lost individuals, with a much larger, often metaphorical look at self-enclosure on a national scale. The story is told in the (slightly priggish) voice, and filtered through the highly fallible eyes and memory, of Banks, a typical Ishiguro protagonist who keeps assuring us how well adjusted and popular he is even as the prose reveals him to be “slightly alarmed” and “somewhat irritated,” irked and “somewhat overwrought.” Living on the fringes of London society in the early 1930s, in—as he takes pains to tell us—a “tasteful” Victorian house with “snug armchairs” and an “oak bookcase,” he longs to have some standing in the world. “My intention,” he declares with a typical (and dangerous) mix of innocence and self-satisfaction, “was to combat evil.”
More to the point, like all Ishiguro’s main characters, he is a foreigner wherever he happens to find himself, homeless even among those snug armchairs: in the Shanghai of his boyhood he is taken to be an Englishman, and in England he is taken to be an odd man out from China. Utterly in the dark, he searches and searches the small print of the world around him for clues as to how to act. (Ishiguro has spoken touchingly of how he, too, arriving in England from Nagasaki at the age of five, learned to “become” an English boy by copying the sounds he heard around him.) And yet, of course, the very deliberation he brings to every transaction ensures that he will never be a part of it. Much as Stevens the butler in Ishiguro’s best-known novel, The Remains of the Day, laboriously practiced his “bantering” to fit in with the class he served, so Banks, before attending a party, “researched over and over how I would—modestly, but with a certain dignity—outline my ambitions.”
