The Fruit Hunters Page 13

  When I contact Durette at his home in Arizona, he says that he’s been hiding out to a certain degree (citing an unflattering article in Playboy). Nonetheless, he is open to discussing his lifestyle. “The time seems to be right,” he says in an e-mail, “for me to get out there and to make my presence known.” He explains his belief that protein is overrated, and that there’s another sort of unmeasurable life force that fruits bestow. Fruitarians speak of a sense that fruits allow them to tap into some sort of spiritual energy. According to Samuel Riche, a twenty-nine-year-old fruitarian from California, being a fruitarian allows him to attain a state of direct communion with God: “It’s almost like living in a realm just outside my physical body—in a lighter plane.”

  Durette echoes this sentiment, saying that what he eats is a means of getting closer to Paradise. “The Bible makes it clear that we were intended to live in the Garden of Eden and eat fruit year-round,” he writes. “We’ve got to get back to the garden.”

  THE BIBLE NEVER stipulates that Eve and Adam ate an apple. In fact, the fruit growing on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is never specified. Apples only started being used to represent the fruit in the fifth century A.D. In Italy, oranges were believed to be the fruits of the tree of knowledge. In 1750, grapefruit was the “forbidden fruit.” Linda Pastan writes that it was a pear. Ethnobotanists have proposed the iboga, a West African teardrop-shaped fruit that cures opiate addiction. Others have conjectured that it was a pomegranate, grape, lemon, durian, peach, cherry, coffee berry, pawpaw or even a magic mushroom (a mushroom is, botanically, the fruiting body of a fungus). Enoch, who managed to return to the Garden of Eden (and was subsequently turned into the fiery angel Metatron), reported that the fruit was, in actuality, a date—or, depending on the translation, a species of tamarind.

  Perhaps it was a fig. “Truly if I were to say that any fruit had come down from Paradise, I would say it of the fig,” declared the prophet Mohammad. The mosaics of San Marco in Venice from the thirteenth century depict figs as well. Even specific varieties were candidates in Midrashic texts: some rabbis said it was a bart sheba fig, but another rabbi disagreed, saying it must’ve been the bart ali varietal. Either way, they definitely covered themselves with a fig leaf. Or maybe it was a banana leaf. In eastern Asia, the banana was believed to be the source of Good and Evil. Confusing matters, medieval Europeans called the banana the “fig of Paradise,” the “fig of Eve” and the “apple of Paradise.” There is still a Ping-Pong–ball-sized variety of banana called the pitogo that looks more like a plump fig than a banana.

  Certain sources claim the tree of knowledge contained five hundred thousand varieties of fruit. According to Kabbalistic exegisis, the seven fruits of the Land of Israel—wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and date honey—were all taken together in the duo’s transgression. In the third century A.D., a gaggle of plenipotent rabbis held a symposium to settle the matter once and for all. As the commentary Genesis Rabbah makes clear, in the Jewish tradition, the sin had nothing to do with carnality. One rabbi wonders where Adam might have been while the snake was chatting up Eve. Another rabbi answers: “He had earlier had sexual relations and now he was sleeping it off.” The committee concluded that the name of the fruit wasn’t specified lest the symbolism of the image be diluted by its connection to something of this world.

  As its convoluted name implies, the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil is a metaphor meant to encourage contemplation. It hints at a distinction between the material world and another level of experience beyond duality. The mystical unity of opposites is impossible to grasp with our conscious mind. Fruits were employed, perhaps because they themselves are the coming together of male and female flowers, of sugars and acids, of dying flesh and unborn seeds.

  Biblically, the eating of fruits occurs right before humanity is expelled from Edenic bliss into a physical world of good and evil, of unconditional opposites. Twelve more fruits are found on the final page of the Book of Revelation, all growing on the Tree of Life that grows on both sides of and in the street of a river. These fruits are in season every month of the year. Beyond these fruits, God speaks, saying, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” He is all opposites, unified.

  Fruits are symbols that guide us across a threshold into a new reality. Cacao fruit was the “pathway to the gods” in Mesoamerica. In Norse mythology, the Goddess Frigga brought children to paradise bundled in floating strawberries. The hero of Paradise Regained is presented with fruits on the doorstep of the kingdom of heaven. This return to the field of creation is called redemption. Examples abound, from the wild fruits outside Eldorado in Voltaire’s Candide to the apples shimmering like huge soap bubbles in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Bell, which tells of a young boy’s religious awakening. The Gnostics believed the Eden allegory to be, as Elaine Pagels says, “an account of what takes place within a person who is engaged in the process of spiritual self-discovery.”

  The metaphor is evergreen. In 1982, author William T. Vollmann crossed over the border into Afghanistan with mujahadeens. “I will never forget the morning we came to an apricot tree one hill away from a Soviet base. The tree was bowed beneath the weight of its golden fruit. In the sand by the tree was a human jaw.” I asked him what it was that affected him about the image. “It was really fertile and normal and gruesome at the same time,” Vollmann replied, still overwhelmed by the recollection. It was life and death, or life in death.

  Whether it’s Aeneas tossing a fruit sop to the three-headed guard dog of Hades or Dante finding a barren fruit tree that bursts to life in between purgatory and heaven, fruits inhabit a liminal boundary zone where they whisper of salvation.

  AS A FLOWER DIES, a fruit grows out of it. That brown-gray lint at the bottom of every apple is a desiccated calyx containing traces of a moldy, dead flower. Although fruits ripen and then fall off a branch, they come back the following year on that exact same branch. After a fruit rots and decomposes, the seeds live on. Nature is a feedback loop, from putrefaction to perfection and back again.

  Humankind only learned that seeds grow into plants around ten thousand years ago. The miracle of vegetative growth seemed to shed light into the mystery of our own lives. Seeds go in the soil—like dead people. Perhaps that meant that something equally magical might happen to our own bodies—and souls—after death.

  Anthropologist James George Frazer documented anecdotage of tribes around the world who believed their deceased ancestors hovered in fruit trees. The Golden Bough mentioned how the Akamba of East Africa believed that “at death the human spirit quits the bodily frame and takes up its abode in a wild fig tree (mumbo).” Other hunter-gatherers regarded certain trees as reincarnated fathers. Solomon Islanders told of transmigrating into fruits: “A man of great influence, dying not long before, had forbidden the eating of bananas after his death, saying that he would be in the banana. The older natives still mention his name and say, ‘We cannot eat so and so.’”

  As I was completing this book, my father told me that he’d been writing his will and pondering his burial. His final wish, he said, is for his ashes to be scattered over his vineyard in Hungary. He then joked that perhaps he’d come back as an indigenous grape varietal: “Oh, this Badacsonyi szürkebaràt has quite a distinctive taste—Dad’s aftershave.”

  This idea has long fascinated writers and poets. Gabriel García Már quez once wrote about a woman fearful of eating the oranges in her tree lest it contain remnants of her dead husband. The hero of the ancient epic Welsh poem Câd Goddeu evolved from fruits: “Of fruit of fruits of fruit God made me.” The Nobel Prize–winning Norwegian author Knut Hamsun once contemplated whether, in a past life, he had been “the kernel in some fruit sent by a Persian trader.”

  Folk tales all over Europe told of humans descending from fruit trees. In Hesse, a lime tree “provided children for the whole region.” In Abruzzi, it was grapes. The Antaifasy of Madagascar believed
their common ancestor was the banana. An Indo-Chinese myth describes how the founding mother gave birth to a pumpkin whose seeds became human children. The Sri Lankan myth Pattinihella refers to a woman being born in a mango. The Phrygian god Attis was born after his virgin mother wedged a pomegranate between her breasts.

  Even stranger than fiction, scientists like Pythagoras and Newton didn’t eat certain foods due to their belief in metempsychosis. Pythagoras, like the Chaldeans under whom he studied, thought that souls ended up in fava beans. My college philosophy textbook contained the fragmentary Pythagorean tenet “abstain from beans,” not explaining that it might have something to do with eating your forebears. (Heraclitus referenced this in his own aphorism on human fallibility: “Pythagoras may well have been the deepest in his learning of all men. And still he claimed to recollect details of former lives, being in one a cucumber.”)

  Works of Jewish mysticism, such as the Zohar, characterize human souls as fruits that grow on the Holy One’s tree. These soul fruits separate into pairs on their way to Earth. As a result, humans are born with half a soul, a soul that can only be complete by meeting a lover whose soul is the fruit’s corresponding other half: a soulfruitmate.

  After one visionary experience whilst gazing at a fruit tree, Isaac Luria, founder of Lurianic Kabbalah, told his followers that, “If you had been able to see them, you would have been shocked to see the crowds of spirits in the trees.” Other denominations of esoteric Judaism believe that souls, after death, can literally become ensnared in fruit-bearing trees. If someone comes along and makes blessings over the fruit before eating it, the soul is liberated and it enters Paradise. However, if no blessings are made, the soul will be stuck until the end of days. While peeling an orange or slicing into an apple, I find myself uttering gentle words for any disembodied specters.

  The tradition of saying grace has been linked to freeing transmigrating souls from their temporal fruit prisons. Buddhist and Jain ascetics eat only fruits that have been cut with a knife or poked by a fingernail because of the spirits believed to reside within. Fijians used to ask coconuts for permission to open them, saying, “May I eat you, my chief?”

  AFTER BIDDING FAREWELL to Shunyam Nirav, I catch a flight to Indonesia. Fruits play an important role in the sacred life of Bali, a predominantly Hindu island in an otherwise mainly Islamic archipelago. Shrines abound, plants are dwelling places for supernatural forces and the landscape sparkles with divine potential.

  The Balinese live equally in two worlds: sekala, the seen physical world; and niskala, the invisible spirit world. Fruits, in Balinese ritual, inhabit a zone that is somewhere between the two. Fruit offerings are used to propitiate spirits during ceremonies such as circumcision, marriage, cremation and tooth-filing (a custom believed to eliminate animalistic lusts and desires). Fruits invariably appear at daily contributions to various deities or alongside gamelan musicians playing ancient melodies at rites of passage.

  Hinduism was the first major religion to explore the concept of reincarnation using fruits. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad explains that, after death, smoky human souls waft up to the moon the way a berry detaches from its stem. Once they reach the moon, the souls are eaten by the gods. These souls are reborn when they fall back to Earth in rain and enter plants that bear fruits that are eaten by men that then become semen.

  Made “Rico” Raka, the son of a village priest, is guiding me around the island. Some surfer friends of mine have suggested I hire him as a guide, and although he usually spends his time shuttling Australian bodyboarders to secluded beaches, his intimate knowledge of the role of fruits in Balinese culture makes him the ideal companion. Because of his religious upbringing, Rico is familiar with temples where little purple fruits with curative properties grow in profusion near shrines crowned with empty thrones. At roadside fruit stalls, Rico explains how various fruits are consecrated to Ganeesha. Bringing me into a coconut grove, he demonstrates how the shell’s three eyes represent Shiva. Just as Westerners break champagne bottles on boat hulls, coconuts are broken to appease the gods at the launch of a ship or at the start of important new endeavors.

  We drive out to the country in his van (“Rico’s Fun Wagon”), where he takes me into a forest full of ripe jouat fruits and snake-fruit trees covered with needles. It’s easy to see how they got their name: their scaly brown peel looks like what’s left over after a molting snake sheds its skin. At the market in Ubud, we descend into a smoky netherworld of mangosteens, Technicolor pancakes and gelatinous mounds quivering in the half-light. The tiny corridors of Denpassar’s Peken Badung central market are crowded with women carrying baskets on their heads. Rico sorts through black-jelly nuts, explaining how to eat forest fruits like the kaliasem, kepundung or sawokecik. When he remembers a special tree near his childhood home, we drive off in search of it. Pulling to a halt an hour later, we come upon the tree, full of extraordinary pink-fleshed kinbarans. Opening up their green shells, Rico and I jump for joy.

  At the end of our last day together, as we savor some chikus growing in a nearby alley, Rico turns to me and says, “Your name is like a symbol. Think about it: Adam hunting for forbidden fruit!”

  While pondering the ins and outs of duality, I go for a walk along the beach as the sun is setting. A priest with a high crown and a golden raiment is conducting a seaside ceremony. A dozen followers chant hymns.

  After the sun has dissolved into the roiling ocean, I turn off the beach toward the main drag. Walking through a nondescript beachfront hotel, I arrive at another road I don’t recognize. Spotting a little passageway across the street, I follow it, as it winds around through some tree trunks.

  A half hour later, lost, I reach a rural area where cars can no longer be heard. I’m on a dusty path, ensconced in a crepuscular silence. Roosters strut about. Looking to orient myself before night falls, I notice the word MELON spray-painted on a barn wall. Some unripe mangoes dangle on a branch just out of reach.

  Walking on, I follow a footpath through a rice field. There’s a cow flicking its tail in the grass. I wonder if it’s sacred. The path brings me to a babbling stream. Venturing over the rickety bridge, I open a wooden gate and enter what appears to be a cemetery or burial ground of some sort.

  By now, the moon’s out. Shivering, I realize it’s become quite dark. The land is desolate. Coconut husks lie rotting in the sand. Heaps of ash suggest recent cremations. A bird of prey circles above. The bushes look like dragons, their heads reared in a silent scream, their talons clawing the air.

  It grows colder. And then, two fearsome idols rise out of the dark, their long tongues hanging out, their eyes rolling in their heads. They’re holding babies. It’s a paradoxical vision of birth in death. I recognize their black-and-white checkered robes, the Balinisian symbol of good and evil. Baskets of fruit lie at their feet. Just then, two security guards shout at me from the other side of the cemetery, and I rush into the glare of their flashlights.

  7

  The Lady Fruit

  And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman.

  —Genesis, 2:23

  MY LAST DAY in Southeast Asia is spent touring a Rayong fruit garden filled with Edward Scissorhands–like topiaries. Am, my lanky, twentysomething guide from the Tourism Authority of Thailand, is telling me how she used to filch a sour berry called the takob from neighbors’ trees. “Stealing fruit so much good,” she says, grinning.

  We pause under the shade of a rambutan tree, next to a hedge shaped like a monkey eating a banana. Drawing a circle around her belly button, hips and upper thighs, Am asks me if I’m familiar with the “lady fruit.” I shake my head and laugh nervously, wondering if this is some kind of innuendo. She pats her backside and looks at me questioningly. I freeze. She keys something into a portable translation device. “In English,” she says, “it’s called ‘the fruit from which women originate.’”

  My blushing subsides as she continues. “People thought it wa
s only a legend from the Rāmāyana, but now we know the fruit actually exists.” She learned about it from a Buddhist monk who spent many years abroad living as an ascetic hermit. While wandering through a forest in India, the monk bumped into a Hindu pilgrim. “In the jungle,” Am explains, “there are places where people with similar beliefs can meet.” To commemorate their auspicious convergence, the pilgrim presented the Buddhist monk with a gift: a hardened fruit shell with all the features of a woman’s pelvic region, both front and back. Upon his return to Thailand, the monk brandished it as evidence that womankind had indeed evolved from a fruit.

  Sensing my doubt, Am suggests that we visit the monastery in a rustic northern Thai village so that I can see it for myself. Unfortunately, my flight leaves the following morning and the monk is a twenty-three-hour train ride away in an area so flooded that people have been sleeping on their roofs for weeks.

  BACK IN MONTREAL, I start searching for evidence that corroborates Am’s apocryphal story, but literature on the “lady fruit” is scant. According to one seventeenth-century account, a nut fitting the description was believed to grow on an island that could only be found by those not seeking it. Melanesian creation myths explain how the first four men created the first four women by throwing some coconut-like fruits at the ground. I’m convinced that Am’s fruit doesn’t even exist until I come across a book about magic in India. It mentions that holy sadhus in Borgampad carry ritualistic water vessels, called kamandals, made from a fruit resembling female butt-cheeks. This fruit, worshipped by a cult, grows only in the Seychelles, where it is called the coco-de-mer.

  Armed with a name, I immediately uncover some online images. Not only is the lady fruit real, but it is easily the sexiest fruit in the plant kingdom. Its risqué shell is a life-sized simulacrum of the female reproductive region, including hips, an exposed midriff, two thighs and a pudendal cleft—complete with a tuft of alarmingly lifelike hair on the mons pubis. From the back, it bears a striking resemblance to a woman’s derriere. Visitors to the Seychelles call it the pubic fruit, the lewd fruit or the butt nut. Blushing articles in travel sections refer to it as “indecent.” “This … this is so dirty!” gasps a friend when I show her a picture.