Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  The Mongoni cut all excess flesh from their bodies—chunks from their calves and buttocks, lumps from their cheeks and arms. Scars are prized. A merely thin person is far less attractive than one rendered thin through the carving of flesh, the skin itself scraped so that the face is cadaverous.

  To display their wounds and their lacerated bodies, the Mongoni wear hardly any clothes, just a wraparound. No power is derived from this ordeal, only the notion of beauty. The chief of the Mongoni I remember as monstrous, his wife carved almost to bits, and it was common also for these people to hack off their fingers and toes.

  The Cat Totems of Moto Tiri

  At one time, all over Oceania, dogs were raised to be eaten, and still are in many places. Dogs are also found in the meat markets of Southeast Asia and throughout China. Instances of cat-eating are rarer, chiefly occurring in Alotau, in Milne Bay in New Guinea, and in some outlying islands in the Philippines.

  But in Moto Tiri cats are universally eaten, and every part of the cat is used—its meat forming a significant source of the islanders' protein, its fur used as decoration, its bones fashioned into needles and hair fasteners, its teeth into jewelry. The cats are wild. They feed on the island's dwindling bird population.

  Butchered cats are displayed in Moto Tiri markets—the legs, the haunches, the back meat; some are sold dressed or stuffed. They are coated with sauce, they are smoked, and some are salted. Cats are the essential ingredient in stews; they are fried, poached, and baked; they are served en croûte with taro crust.

  I mentioned to a man in Moto Tiri that cats are house pets in much of the world. He laughed at such a novel concept, and in the course of our conversation I learned that pigs are the house pets of Moto Tiri. They always have names, and are petted and made a fuss of. They are never eaten. On chilly nights, pigs are often taken to bed by the natives and embraced for warmth, a practice that has given rise to the affectionate name for a pig on the island, being called "a Moto Tiri wife."

  The Living Stones of Hanga Atoll

  Local legend has it that the stones had swum to Hanga Atoll on their own from the distant land of Honua, which means "stone." The Honua granite matches the stones, which are not found anywhere on Hanga.

  The stones are the size of humans, but of course much heavier, being solid rock, and many have been carved into the rudimentary shapes of humans.

  Each person on Hanga is responsible for one stone: the stone bears the name of that person. When the person dies, the stone passes to the eldest child in the family, and the name of the person changes to that of the stone. If there is no child, the stone goes to the nearest living relative.

  Some people have no stones, many have one, and a number of people have many. Incidentally, one of the meanings of the Hanga word for stone is the same as that of the word "stone" as it is used in Deuteronomy, meaning testicles.

  Stones are wealth in Hanga, but the predicament of the "owner" (ownership is reversed—in effect, it is the stone that owns the person) is to keep the stone moving, clockwise around the atoll. Someone with many stones must spend a great deal of time moving them, often most of the day, every day, preoccupying the person with a granitic ordeal.

  A stone maybe "killed" by moving it to a cliff on the south side of the island, but if a stone is disposed of, a family member must go with it. That is a sad occasion, yet it is the stone that is mourned and remembered, not the person.

  The First Night Colors of the Mulvatti

  "First Night" indicates the time when a Mulvatti man and woman consummate their marriage. It is not the wedding night or anything like it. Months and sometimes years go by before the Mulvatti couple make love, though no one I met was sufficiently able to explain to me why such a long period of time passed between the marriage ceremony and the act of love. There is no specific expression for sexual congress, only an ambiguous Mulvatti word meaning "it is happening."

  Perhaps it is shame, perhaps it is their low sexual drive or their instinctive prudishness. Whatever the reason, the Mulvatti have one of the lowest birth rates in the world, a minus figure.

  Mulva is a lozenge of land the size of Delaware, tucked into the southeastern border of Yakutsk. The typical Mulvatti home is a tent of felt. Animals share the single room, peat and dung are burned in the fire, and the people worship wolves, believing they themselves are descended from a wolf. Mulvatti women are so lupine in aspect that this bizarre belief seems eerily accurate.

  The "First Night Colors" refer to those vegetable dyes that are painted on the private parts of the Mulvatti man and woman on the night they enjoy sexual congress for the first time. They present themselves wearing aprons, and when these are removed and their painted parts displayed, they lie down.

  Innocence is greatly valued among the Mulvatti. If either party expresses surprise at the lurid colors—the purple penis, the green vulva—it is taken to be an unmistakable sign of previous sexual experience and vicious behavior, and such an outcry can be used in a subsequent annulment of the marriage.

  The Elephant Protocols of the Shan States

  In upper Burma the Shans, a hill people, live adjacent to the Marins, who are traditionally the mahouts, or keepers, of the Shan elephants. But the Marins have degenerated into an isolated folk without animals or income, living precariously as subsistence farmers. Still, they revere the elephants, and they retain a memory of having cared for these majestic creatures. They hold that the creator of the earth was an elephant, and that the earth itself is the interior of an elephant's body—that we all live within an elephant, the First Elephant, and that the curved dome of the sky is the elephant's body cavity.

  In the Marin belief system, humans are nothing but an insignificant aspect of the elephant. This reverence is ritualized every four years when the Marin raid the haunts of elephants and steal their great muffins of dung, removing the excrement to their village, where it is baked into wheels of bread known as "protocols." These are consumed on a certain day, specified by the Marin priests. There is no word for dung in Marin. A clod of elephant dung is universally known as a record of a transaction, or a "protocol."

  I have little clue to the significance of any of this. As if deliberately to confuse me further, a Marin woman told me that the elephant is a symbol of unity, prosperity, and fertility. "The elephant head is male," she said (meaning it resembled a penis), "and the elephant hindquarters are female" (meaning it resembled a pudendum). She was amused when I told her frankly that I did not see this at all, and that in my culture an elephant was an animal that had a long memory.

  The Feasting Donkeys of Quevalo

  In a time of great antiquity in Quevalo, in eastern Ecuador, a group of people, lost and starving, heard the braying of a donkey and were rescued. The feasting ceremony, conducted every four years, commemorates that deliverance.

  All the donkeys of Quevalo are rounded up, herded into the village, and ritually bathed. They are washed and brushed, carefully groomed, their tails and manes braided, their hooves painted. Each is brought to a hut and fed cakes and tidbits prepared especially for the occasion. Money, in the form of notes of high denominations, is sometimes baked into the cakes the animals are urged to devour. During this period the donkeys are continually fed all sorts of delicacies, they live in the hut, and their members are stroked by the Quevalo women until they are huge and tumescent. Although I asked repeatedly, I was not privileged to acquire more detail, although from the giggles I suspected that a great deal was withheld from me. An old woman told me bluntly that ejaculation occurred; however, I never learned how it was accomplished.

  Paradoxically, the fine food seldom agrees with the donkeys. It is so much richer than the normal diet of grass that the donkeys swell with gas, they break wind, they cramp, they bellow with discomfort. Yet the attentions are unceasing: each donkey is fed and stroked until it is so stuffed and nauseated and excited that it finally vomits copiously, and the entire family feeds on the vomit.

  In the event that the donkey do
es not vomit, the family pokes a stick into its gullet, causing the creature to regurgitate, and the product is gratefully eaten—as it happened to the lost family of Quevalo, long ago.

  The Memory Priest of the Creech

  One person alone, always a man, serves as the memory for all the dates and names and events of the Creech, the hill-dwelling aboriginals of south-central Sumatra. (The word is also written Crik, Krich, Kreetch, and so on.) This person possesses an entire history of the people and may spend as much as a week, day and night, reciting the various genealogies.

  This Memory Priest reminds the Creech of who they are and what they have done. He is their entertainment and their historian, their memory and mind and imagination. He keeps the Creech amused and informed. The Creech have no chief or headman, so the Memory Priest serves as the sole authority.

  The Memory Priest is awarded his title at birth. An infant is chosen, and as soon as he is able to communicate, he is given to understand that he is the repository of all the Creech lore. History begins with him. His is not an easy career. He must memorize great lists of family names and be able to recite all the events that took place from the moment of his birth.

  The Creech are an outwardly placid people, occasionally displaying fits of violence. Biting themselves in order to show remorse is not unknown, and clawing their own faces is commonplace. They are also untruthful and unreliable, prone to thieving, gossiping, gambling, and sudden spasms of the most aggressive behavior.

  What the Memory Priest knows, the immensity of his storehouse of facts, is nothing compared to the one fact that he does not know, a secret that is withheld from him in the conspiratorial silence of the entire population: that after thirty years have passed, and he is old by Creech standards (possibly toothless, likely wrinkled and shrunken), a meeting is convened, he recites the Creech history, and at the conclusion of this he is put to death, then roasted and eaten by every member of the Creech, in a ritual known as the ceremony of purification.

  The next male child born to a Creech woman is designated Memory Priest, and elevated; history begins once again. Nothing that has taken place before his birth has any reality, all quarrels are settled, all debts nullified.

  So the Memory Priest, now an infant, soon a man, learns his role, believing that history begins with him, and never aware that at a specified moment his life will end. Yet it is the death of the Memory Priest that the Creech live for and whisper about, the wiping out of all debts, all crimes, all shame and failure, and so they eagerly anticipate the amnesia his death will bring. Throughout his life, though he is unaware of it—less a supreme authority than a convenient receptacle into which the ill-assorted details of the Creech are tossed—he is secretly mocked for not knowing that it will all end in oblivion, at the time of his certain death.

  The Ornaments of the Wahooli

  The Wahooli people of the Rumi River, in northwestern New Guinea, made first contact with outsiders only in 1973. After that they vanished, moved deeper into the forest—which was odd and perhaps inconvenient for them, since they were a fishing community and there were far fewer fish in the area they fled to. But they had their reasons.

  I heard about them from an Australian gold seeker on the Rumi. He said that he had thought of writing their story, but that he did not think he would be believed. He also felt—so he said—that the proper way for the story to circulate was as the Wahooli themselves might pass it on. That is, verbally.

  The Wahooli do not write. Which is not remarkable—the world is full of people who have not found any need for written language. But the Wahooli are unusual in having no pictures or symbols, absolutely no decoration of any kind. In fact, all ornamentation is derided as suspect and wicked, and anyone found in possession of any decoration is punished severely. The Wahooli believe that all designs are meant to cast spells. Only the devil—in Wahooli cosmology an elaborately costumed demon—would approve of such things.

  The Wahooli go about naked. They feel no shame. Clothes are pomp, feathers a vice, even a skirt of dead leaves is vain. In every encounter, the Wahooli make a practice of peering very closely at each other's bodies; and their ritual greeting is a snorting or a sniffing, for even the scents of flowers or perfumes are a despised form of ornamentation.

  Weapons and tools among the Wahooli are generic, the simplest spears and daggers, the most straightforward nets and fishing tackle. Much of their fishing is accomplished by damming various reaches of rivers and streams, creating pounds in which fish are easily caught by hand.

  The Wahooli sleep in trees, on roofless sleeping platforms, in family groups, one to each shelf. Although the Wahooli have names, they use them with great reluctance. They have no words for please or thank you, no equivalent of good morning or farewell. No colors are recognized, and for all intents the Wahooli world is achromic. Their language is almost without adjectives, although "useful" and "harmful" are two of their chief categories; "edible" and "inedible" form another. The word for stranger is "inedible," while enemy is "edible."

  The Wahooli are noted for their silences. They eat what they kill. Nothing is kept overnight, nor is anything stored. They do not use feathers or shells. They are a people without texture or design.

  They have no leadership at all and hardly any social organization. Women are equal to men, and though the infant mortality rate is enormous, even children have specified rights in the Wahooli code. But then so do animals and birds and even fish, all of whom the Wahooli communicate with, often holding lengthy conversations.

  All this I learned on my first visit. On my second visit I found that the Wahooli had utterly disappeared, perhaps having fled deeper into the interior.

  The Rat Rooms of Rondok

  The Rondok people of the Aru Sea inhabit the almost inaccessible heights on one island and have resisted any attempt to become integrated with neighboring Indonesia. Indeed, to save face—because the island has repelled all invaders and has remained unconquered—the Indonesians leave Rondok off their maps. Melville wrote of Rokovoko, Queequeg's island, "It is not down on any map—true places never are." As is the case with many peoples who have remained steadfast in their beliefs, the Rondok are fierce and well governed, and neither missionaries nor soldiers have made any lasting impression on them.

  It is said that no outsider has survived a single night on the island. Anyone who has not departed the island by sundown vanishes in the darkness, is "swallowed"—literally, so I was assured in the short time I spent there, only a matter of hours, having gone ashore in the tender of a passing yacht on which I was a passenger. I wanted to see a fish hog, a sea mammal that inhabits the island's inner reef.

  From a Rondok fisherman who had wandered to the edge of the lagoon I learned two facts. The first was the one I have just mentioned, the disappearance of anyone who remains on the island overnight (there were many instances, owing to the obscurity of the island). The second was the manner in which the Rondok conduct elections to their highest office. Anyone may be a candidate, any number of volunteers are invited. In the initial caucus, various tests of strength are given, and they involve both mental and physical ability—running, jumping, feats of memory, repeating poems and songs, floating in the lagoon with arms and legs tied ("drownproofing"), throwing heavy objects. Rondok women are not excluded.

  The volunteer cannot withdraw, but must persevere in the tests until he or she either is eliminated or attains the level of Candidate. This may take months. When there are about a dozen Candidates remaining, they are individually locked into cylindrical pits called Rat Rooms, like shallow manholes, sealed with heavy covers or lids.

  Each Candidate shares his or her small underground space with thirty or forty furious squealing rats. There is no light in the Rat Room, there is no bed, and because of the low ceiling the Candidate cannot stand and would not want to sit. There is water, but it is in a basin, at floor level, in what is known as the Tank, available to the rats and the Candidate alike.

  Some Candidates, already
exhausted by the selection process, and undone by the sheer misery of the situation, sometimes fall to the floor and are gnawed to death. These Candidates are mourned. Another category comprises those who, starved and imprisoned, eat the rats. On their release they are put to death. The successful Candidate is the one who emerges unscathed, who has neither been bitten nor has eaten any of the rats, and who has found a degree of harmony in the Rat Room. This person is made head of the people, given the title of Rat Chief, and when he or she dies the tedious selection process begins again.

  Gilstrap, the Homesick Explorer

  THE TAMARIND TREES hummed with the evidence of baboons, Gilstrap had noticed, because the noisy creatures loved squatting in the branches, cracking a tamarind seed, and a smile, with each bite of their doggy teeth.

  You could not camp within fifty feet of a tamarind. But Gilstrap was not dismayed. "There it is!" he said with cheery fatalism, and tugged his mustache. He was on a quest.

  The Two-Toed Tumbo people were the object of this quest, yet as an explorer he knew that such a journey was a continuous series of startling confrontations of which the baboons chewing in the limbs of the tamarind were just one. This was the Zimbaba, the lower river.

  It was not Mudford, the home he had left too long ago even to remember the names of its trees, nor any of the people there, except the ones who had tormented him as a youngster, and the woman who waited for him in vain. Her name was Elveera Howie. Mudford was the past, and like all such distant memories it was unreal and a little absurd, a sort of toy town he had abandoned when he was Freddie Gilstrap from Webster Street.

  Gilstrap the explorer had a taste for hardships but could not abide nuisances, which was why he had fled Mudford and why he had stayed away. Elveera was just an encumbrance, because she would not leave the hideous town.