Fieldwork: A Novel (22 page)

Her difficulties in understanding her host family were compounded by Vinai's refusal to spend more than a few minutes at a time in the hut. Apparently, Vinai was of the Dog clan, and some taboo prohibited members of the Dog clan from lingering in the homes of members of the Fish clan. Why? Was it some kind of servant-in-the-master's-house issue? Or some kind of spirit thing? Neither. The only answer she could get was:
It is just our idiotic, incomprehensible bass-ackward fucking custom
.

The central figure in Martiya's life during her first few months in Dan Loi was her host, Farts-a-Lot.
†
He was the first person Martiya saw

in the morning, and the last person she saw at night. Within days of her arrival in the village, Martiya discovered that his nickname was condign: Farts-a-Lot specialized in long, slow, soft, deadly sneakers, the kind her father used to call a "Dutch cigar." When Farts-a-Lot lit one of his Dutch cigars, Martiya wasn't sure if it was her imagination, but the hut seemed to turn a peculiar shade of green, and Farts-a-Lot grinned proudly. Farts-a-Lot was a short, skinny man, wiry and muscular, with light brown skin the color of bark, much occupied with the constant honing of his machete. Sitting nearly naked on the porch of the hut, Farts-a-Lot would pass hours dragging the knife across the whetstone positioned between his rhinoceros-hide feet, occasionally examining the blade with the edge of his thumb, scowling, farting, and sharpening some more. The process of honing a machete, Martiya quickly learned, produces a distinctive
scritch-scritch
sound, which by week two Martiya began to find intensely irritating.
That damn thing must be as sharp as a samurai sword
, Martiya wanted to say.
Knock it off.

But Martiya didn't know how to say anything in Dyalo.

Scritch-scritch-scritch.

Farts-a-Lot, in addition to his chronic gastric distress, was a drinking man, and on a ledge in his portion of the hut he kept a row of bottles of homemade rice whiskey, neatly lined up. In each bottle, there was some repulsive embalmed animal: a snake, a scorpion, a centipede, a few huge termites. These were added to the whiskey, Vinai explained to Martiya, as medicinal supplements, chiefly to increase Farts-a-Lot's potency, which, to judge by certain late-night mutterings around the hut, was faltering. Farts-a-Lot began drinking from his bottles in the morning, and by late afternoon, he was singing loudly the very authentic Dyalo songs that Martiya would have found fascinating in the ethnomusicology lab at Berkeley but here in Dyaloland found just shrill and tuneless. Then Farts-a-Lot would stagger for a while around the hut, belching loudly, before collapsing right on Martiya's mat. Although Martiya could understand not one word of what he said as he lay there, his greasy head on the pillow she had bought just for herself in Chiang Mai, his drift was clear:
You like me, baby. I can tell.

Martiya could not quite believe that, if Farts-a-Lot was the native, why, then, it followed that she had just traveled ten thousand miles to grasp Farts-a-Lot's point of view, to understand Farts-a-Lot's relation to life, to realize
Farts-a-Lot's
vision of
Farts-a-Lot's
world.

The sun rises and sets on a regular schedule, the days organize themselves one somewhat like the next: Martiya had been in a Dyalo village six months, and her days had fallen into a routine.

The Dyalo woke at dawn, and when they first woke up, for a few fleeting moments, Martiya's hutmates were no different from anyone anywhere else, utterly human: Farts-a-Lot yawned and stretched his arms; Lai-Ma, his wife, muttered to herself and stumbled out of the hut to pee. The children were slow to wake up and twitched in their beds; Farts-a-Lot scratched his hungover head; no one made eye contact; everyone lingered over the last of their dreams. Then Martiya had breakfast with her hutmates, a bowl of sour vegetable soup and a shot of rice whiskey, and with all the violent rapidity of tropical sunrise, the sense of strangeness and dislocation set in that would accompany Martiya every minute of every day that she lived in Dan Loi. The taste of the morning soup, more than the strange costumes and songs, and the weird language and the panoply of rites and sacrifices to please mean spirits, more even than the fact that Dyalo teenagers still lay in bed and played with their mothers' breasts—that soup made Martiya feel as if she was living with the people from
National Geographic
. The vile soup was recycled day after day, and spiced with bitter herbs and a creepy brown fungus; it tasted as if everything that was the Dyalo and Dan Loi had been distilled into a concentrated broth; it seemed almost alive, slithering on her tongue like an oyster; it was as intense as eau-de-vie. All morning long, no matter how many times she brushed her teeth, Martiya could taste the forest on her teeth. Sometimes Martiya thought the soup could talk.
Welcome to the Jungle!
it said.

Martiya's first priority was learning the language, and after breakfast, when her mind was at its very freshest, she devoted herself to studying Dyalo. She had figured that being a linguist's daughter she would pick it up quickly, but like everything else in the village, it was more difficult than she had expected. Her chief problem was that she simply couldn't make the sounds that Dyalo required. Dyalo was a tonal language, which meant that the relative pitch of Martiya's voice would, in theory, govern the sense of what she was saying. But there are tonal languages, and then there are tonal languages: difficult Thai has five tones; fiendish Cantonese eight; but Dyalo had
thirteen
. Martiya left consonants unvoiced that should have been voiced—"pall" versus "ball"—and stumbled over vowels that seemed to require some kind of glottal flap that she wasn't sure she possessed. Communicating in Dyalo after only a few months in the village was like being asked to play a fugue on the first day of piano lessons.

Martiya's most patient teachers were the household kids, Farts-a-Lot and Lai-Ma's progeny: the three-year-old boy who liked to eat bugs; the gap-toothed five-year-old girl who threw rocks; the eight-year-old girl with high cheekbones and huge eyes, simply the most beautiful child Martiya had ever seen; the eleven-year-old boy who shot birds in the forest with a slingshot; and the fourteen-year-old girl whom Martiya caught repeatedly going through her bags. She spent her mornings sitting with the kids, pointing at things. The first complete phrase Martiya learned in Dyalo was, "How do you call that in Dyalo?" Over and over and over again, she would point at something and trot out her phrase, and whichever of the children was sitting with her would say something back to Martiya in Dyalo, which Martiya would jot down in her notebook.

"Wei shi shi ma?" she said, pointing at a dog.

"Bao."

"Wei shi shi ma?" she said, pointing at a basket.

"Rai baht nee."

"Wei shi shi ma?" she said, pointing at her teeth.

"Paht."

"Wei shi shi ma?" she said, getting up and walking a few steps.

"Bainai."

"Bao bainai?"

Big smiles. "Bao bainai!"

Yet even this fairly mechanical if laborious business proved a struggle: just learning the word for "rice," the most primal word of the Dyalo lexicon, had required a day. The three children she discussed the matter with gave her three different words, and when she asked Vinai what all the different words meant, he told her, "Rice." Martiya tried to think the problem through. Perhaps, she thought, it was a question of a particular
type
of rice. The production and consumption of rice was, after all, the central drama of Dyalo life. Martiya had read a book about rice in preparation for her voyage, and the world of rice was as variegated to the connoisseur as the world of wine: there was brown rice which hadn't been milled and white rice which had; normal rice, stickier rice, and very sticky rice; rice cultivated in knee-high paddies, in deep ponds, and on the dry slopes of high mountains; long-grain rice, medium-grain rice, and short-grain rice; rice whose seeds once came from Burma, rice whose seeds had been transported by the ancestors from old Dyalo homesteads in China; rice that was naturally resistant to caterpillars, and rice that was a caterpillar's delight. Martiya had expected that the Dyalo would have a number of words for rice. But that wasn't the problem here. The Dyalo did have words to describe all of
those
kinds of rice, but the words the children were using did, in fact, just mean "rice."

Nothing more and nothing less.

Same thing for the Dyalo word for "roof." Three words, one meaning.

And the Dyalo word for "water."

And the Dyalo words for "light," "rock," and "tree."

Gradually,
very
gradually, through numerous such frustrating examples, it dawned on Martiya that there were upwards up of
three
different lexicons all in use in the same Dyalo village, all under the linguistic penumbra of "Dyalo." A similar distinction exists in English when we refer to "pork" and "pigs": two words, one object, depending on the context. But in Dyalo this distinction was far more prevalent than in English: just about
every
noun had three forms. There was the lexicon of ordinary speech, as in "Would you pass the rice, please?"—which, incidentally, is not easy to say in Dyalo, a simple tonal error resulting in an extremely offensive sentiment; and the poetic lexicon, which the Dyalo tended to break into
just
whenever subjects of anthropological interest might arise, such as mythology, religion, history, law, government, or philosophical belief; and the spirit lexicon, reserved exclusively for descriptions of, and conversations with, supernatural beings. Martiya realized with dismay that she would need to learn all three if she was to understand the life of the village.

The problem in Dyalo wasn't just memorizing things or learning to mimic tones. Sometimes the language simply worked in weird ways. One day, Martiya decided to learn the names of colors. It seemed to her a sane, sensible, limited goal for a rainy morning in a very small hut. By chance, Martiya had brought a set of colored pencils with her up to the village, a present from her father, eighty colors lined up in two neat rows, with charcoal and an eraser. The lacquered box had been a source of constant fascination to the children, and she offered them, via Vinai, a bribe: they could play with her pencils if they would teach her the names of the colors. It would be hard to say who in the end was more frustrated. The problem, Martiya quickly learned, was that the Dyalo seemed to have no abstract color terms, words like "red" or "green," which cover a broad range of shades. Rather, the Dyalo color world was painfully precise. Every Dyalo color took its name from an object in the natural world. In Dyalo, the light green pencil was the pencil the color of moss. The dark green pencil was the pencil the color of palm. The red pencil was the pencil the color of betel. There were eighty pencils, and hence eighty distinct Dyalo colors, and amazingly, every Dyalo tribesman seemed in absolute agreement which object in the natural world corresponded to which color. When Martiya pointed to the white pencil and said it was the color of rice, she was immediately corrected: it was cloud. When Martiya protested that the green pencil was not, in fact, the color of moss, and demonstrated this with a piece of moss from a nearby tree, the entire hut burst into giggles.
Of course not! It's the color of moss in dry season!
The names were arbitrary and needed to be learned one by one. Needless to say, Martiya did not learn the Dyalo colors in a morning.

Martiya persevered. She began to get the hang of the tones, and her notebook slowly filled with Dyalo words and phrases, which she wrote in the international phonetic alphabet, using arrows to indicate tonality. This script was itself a source of wonder and fascination to the Dyalo, who had seen the clever lowland Thai write things down and then recall them later with perfect accuracy; but nobody in Dan Loi had ever imagined that the Dyalo language, too, could be handled the same way. Martiya's literacy was regarded as a remarkable skill, and there was considerable debate in the village how it was that Martiya, who could hardly say a word in Dyalo, could nevertheless
write
in the language, the latter of course being considered an infinitely more sophisticated achievement than the former: even the Lahu monkeys, after all, could learn to
speak
Dyalo, albeit always with that unpleasant Lahu accent. When Dyalo from other villages came to visit Dan Loi, Martiya was inevitably trotted out like a show pony to display her strange and impressive facility. It was considered excellent evening entertainment. "Tell my sister what I told you about her husband," Lai-Ma would say at a family gathering; and Martiya, eager to please, would flip through her hard-sided notebook and read back, in Lai-Ma's own words, just what Lai-Ma had said. The Dyalo simply could not get enough of this,
"Koo-koo,"
they said, which was their way of saying,
Brava!
, like opera aficionados applauding a particularly impressive aria.