Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  ‘You have a boyfriend in Lufilufi?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She smiled, not at all minding the question.

  ‘You marry soon?’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, no.’ She preferred to go to New Zealand, find work there and send money home.

  ‘Why not work here?’ Perhaps teaching English. Her English was quite good enough.

  ‘Oh….’

  Opposite us, the frigate-sized outcrop of Treasure Island waved its topknot of palms. Terns sideslipped in the breeze on wings that flashed like fragments of white porcelain.

  ‘I like to see New Zealand,’ said Emma. ‘Then I can send money to my father. For his plantation.

  *

  Tolu, the head of my new family, came home just before sunset and was astonished to see me. He was of medium height, stocky, with a fair paunch and a navel like the boss on a bronze breastplate. He carried a bush knife in his large and calloused hands; he had been working in his gardens, he said. The bones of his face showed that it had once been square, but a strong jaw had now become heavy and round. For about two inches above the waist of his lava-lava his skin seemed to be covered with terrible bruises, but on a closer look I saw that the ‘bruises’ were an elaborate tattoo encircling his body like a corset. He was pleased at my interest and drew up the hem of his lava-lava to show me how the tattoo extended round his thighs and down to his knees. The complicated dark blue patterns were densely, and no doubt painfully, pricked into his skin.

  Tolu was proud of his tattoo: it conveyed noble status. ‘Matei,’ he explained, pointing to himself: ‘Chief.’ The South Pacific Handbook had told me that Samoan society is based on its ten thousand chiefs, the guardians of the fa’a Samoa, the Samoan way of life, who elect the forty-five-member National Assembly of Chiefs in Apia. Chiefs control local affairs through the islands’ village councils. Tattooing was part of fa’a Samoa but unfortunately it was dying out, Tolu said. I asked Fili why he was not tattooed, offering to pay for one for him, but he made a face and shook his head.

  ‘Fili scared,’ said Emma to tease him. ‘Hurt too much.’

  It was not easy to explain to them exactly what I was up to, but with the help of my Samoan dictionary and Emma I managed at last to convey what had brought me here and how soon I had to leave, indicating sea by holding a forearm and hand parallel to the ground and undulating it. In return I learnt that Tolu, though not rich (the little house told me that), owned land down the long, steep hillside out of sight of his original village by the sea. He and Fili worked a plantation of three thousand taro plants, yams, papayas, sugar, bananas and a good many coconut palms. They had cows, too, and chickens, a dog and the one chestnut horse, which was the family’s sole means of transport. Nobody in Western Samoa starved: nearly all Samoans owned a ‘plantation’ of some size, even if some owned it indirectly through their membership of an extended family. But they had to work it. You could not let plantations go.

  We sat cross-legged on woven mats, leaning against the pillars supporting the lozenge-shaped roof of sugar leaves and palm fronds. The walls consisted of adjustable panels made from woven coconut leaves, that were hoisted up and down like homespun Venetian blinds. The panels were rolled up when it was fine, so everyone and everything in the house was visible to passers-by. Not that there was much to see: a few large trunks; a plain wooden dresser full of cups, teapots and metal dishes; a deep wooden chest stuffed with schoolbooks, the family Bible, assorted clothes. Newly washed lava-lavas hung over poles in the ceiling. Meals were cooked under a separate roof behind the main house. Most dishes, I noticed, were wrapped in leaves and baked on hot stones.

  After dark, when dinner was ready, Manino, with Emma and two smaller daughters, Ruta and Ala, brought in bowls of baked fish and taro spread with coconut cream and laid them on banana leaf ‘plates’. Tolu murmured a prayer in Samoan, while Fili and Amosa made faces at me – I took this to mean we were now all friends together – and then we dug into the food with our fingers. The taro – a fibrous root vegetable about the size of a pineapple and the Samoan equivalent of bread – was cut into round slices as chewable as a rich fruitcake but with a dull, neutral taste; it was better dipped into coconut cream and sucked like a lollipop. Tolu sucked each fishbone, too, loudly and with great care, before spitting it into his hand. Any food that spilled onto the mat-covered floor was cleaned up by two furtive cats that cleverly dodged slaps from Fili and ignored Isaia’s whispers of ‘Pussi, pussi.’

  A humid heat lingered long after the sun had gone down in a blaze behind the forest and the last fruit bats had flapped heavily home. Flying insects were the problem. Throughout the meal they did their best to disrupt us. Smack! Smack! The family slapped arms, legs and bare torsos as swarms of indefatigable mosquitoes sniped at us like highly trained hit-and-run guerrillas. Struggling with fishbones, I could see these ‘winged blood-drops’ placidly grazing on my vulnerable arms and feet and feel needlelike bites on my neck and forehead. They crawled boldly into one’s ears. It was difficult to eat and just as hard to relax later; the teasing, remorseless whine continued long after the dishes had been cleared away and even after the side walls of the house had been lowered for the night. Fili covered my feet with a spare lava-lava and Isaia squatted down by me and began flapping a leaf-shaped woven fan round my ears, but I wondered how I was going to sleep. Stevenson hardly mentions the mosquitoes at Vailima, yet they must have been a nightmare for a writer with no insecticide and little or no window netting. Had he forgotten this little bit of hell in paradise? With the moon, a cool breeze came like a blessing and Tolu yawned, evidently a signal for Fili and Amosa to drag up mattresses and pillows. ‘You sleep here,’ Fili said, patting a mattress by his own. This was luxury. I had expected to sleep on the bare mat. More than that, there were to be some anti-mosquito measures: Amosa unfurled three huge nets over the mattresses and soon, at long last, the infernal whining died away and I saw some possibility of sleep. I heard the muffled shifting of springs: Isaia had begged to be allowed to guard the car and had curled up in the back seat. Then Amosa went home, murmuring ‘Tofa.’

  ‘’Fa, Amosa.’

  When Tolu lowered the flame in the pressure lamp, the mosquito nets seemed to swell in the dark and fill the little house like three white phantoms. In the silence, like a hundred sewing machines, the cicada chorus began in the undergrowth outside. The chestnut horse, tethered to a banana tree, blew now and again and stamped a hoof. A dog barked on the hillside.

  ‘Gavin stay one week,’ Emma called in the darkness.

  ‘Gavin stay one year,’ Fili said.

  ‘Gavin stay,’ Tolu gruffly told his family, cutting the talking short.

  I watched moonlight seeping through the wall blinds and listened to the night. The breeze rapped the bamboos; a nightjar chuckled behind the house.

  ‘I stay,’ I said, giving in to the Samoan night. To them all.

  Twenty-one

  The early morning was as cool and fresh as if Samoa had been created that very sunrise. Dew gleamed on each banana leaf, on every blade of grass, on every hibiscus blossom and gardenia. The smoke of Manino’s fire hung motionless round her kitchen like a blue horizontal screen, giving out the smell of roasting cocoa beans. I had roused Isaia from the car by tickling his feet, and he held a bowl of water as I cleaned my teeth hear a clump of sugarcane. Fili hacked firewood and soon Amosa strolled up, his nose deep in the petals of a gardenia.

  ‘Talofa, Gavin.’

  ‘Talofa, Amosa.’

  With Fili and Amosa, I pushed through thick bush to a deep, stony cleft where water ran so cold that the first plunge took my breath away. The two Samoans, apparently unaffected, splashed and laughed, warmed by a halo of sun. Stevenson had written of such scenes. In his time, not so very long ago, war drums had sounded on this very hillside, and warriors had raced home through these trees from battles, waving the heads of their enemies and crying excitedly to their chiefs, ‘I have taken a man!’ It was easy to imagine those days of se
vered heads in this hidden, untouched place where the great trees, scores of years old, trailed feathery creepers like hairy arms. Amosa and Fili conversed in high-pitched cries like bird calls, and their singing was falsetto, too. On our way back to Tolu and with the house in sight, I was suddenly alone – they had taken off like a brace of excited snipe, racing through a field of waist-high taro plants, zigzagging through the upturned, heart-shaped leaves which swayed out of their path like an army of green, flat-faced extra-terrestrial beings taken by surprise. Amosa, with his gardenia in his hand, his yellow lava-lava, his brown limbs and his streaming hair, might easily have been some wood demon spirit of the place celebrating another fine day.

  Samoan superstition peoples the island with spirits. Belief in ghosts runs in the blood, and where a people speak of ghosts the phantoms tend to respond. Known in Samoa as aitus, they dwell in every tree and stream, as jinns live in the hills and groves of Arabia. According to local tradition Apia is a sort of spirits’ transit camp, a seaside springboard from which they launch themselves into Pulotu, the Other World. Stevenson wrote that he had an aitu for a neighbour at Vailima – ‘It is a lady, Aitu fafine: she lives in the mountainside; her presence is heralded by the sound of a gust of wind, a sound very common in the high woods; when she catches you, I do not know what happens; but in practice she is avoided, so I suppose she does more than pass the time of day.’

  Little Isaia shared Amosa’s puckish quality. He frisked about in as sprightly a way as any child I have ever met.

  I tapped his nose very gently with my finger. ‘You … are … an … aitu!’

  ‘Aitu!’ – delighted, Isaia ran hysterically around Tolu’s banana patch, scattering the chickens.

  ‘Aitu!’ Emma screamed.

  I saw Manino laughing behind her cooking pots, and Tolu, too, called, ‘Isaia is aitu.’

  Across the commotion, Amosa smiled his wood demon’s smile at me over his gardenia and closed one slanting, green eye in what might have been a conspiratorial wink.

  *

  Whack! A huge, middle-aged matai in a black and yellow lava-lava swung his three-sided bat at the ball hurled directly at his stomach and smacked it over the copra trees towards the sea. Gathering up their lava-lavas, three fielders rushed headlong to retrieve it from a tangle of morning glories. The most headlong of them, I saw, was Tolu.

  His village was playing cricket against a neighbouring village.

  Whack! The next ball soared inland and for a long time a number of boys feverishly searched the undergrowth. Ten minutes went by … fifteen. No one showed impatience. You could tell from the crowds of onlookers that kirikiti’s importance to Samoans easily transcended long hold-ups like this. The hold-ups, I soon saw, were frequent because Samoan cricket is a more straightforward game than its British model. You cannot be out leg before wicket because no one wears pads and so fancy play becomes physically dangerous. No one can be bothered to block a ball, and because batsmen are warriors at play, blocking is not very highly considered. Manhood demands a virile swing of the bat – of the warclub, really – and Samoans usually hit the ball. Nine times out of ten it flies high over the short jungle boundaries – it is made of light rubber – and the long search begins. To be out, you must be caught or bowled.

  There are frequent casualties. Tolu had explained that the suppurating sore I had noticed on his leg was a cricket injury. Chasing a ball from pitch to beach he had stumbled into coral, a dangerous thing to be cut by because it leaves poisoned gashes. But worse wounds than that can be sustained in Samoan cricket. Teams of twenty or twenty-five hot-blooded players have been known to turn village rivalry into real war, and now and again when that happens a bad sportsman, or umpire, is sometimes chased and clubbed to death.

  On this occasion propriety reigned. Sportsmanlike handclaps rose from groups of figures smoking in the shade of breadfruit trees, and spectators perched like bright birds halfway up the trunks of coconut palms cheered and called encouragement to the batsmen who one after the other strode fiercely to the wicket, clutching their bats like semi-naked warriors advancing to lop off a few heads.

  Amosa and Fili were not playing at warriors or sportsmen. They sat in long grass singing in falsetto to a small guitar. ‘We go,’ said Fili when it was quite dark.

  Soon clouds hid the rising moon and spits of rain splashed the windscreen. The headlights wavered along the long, steep forest track, illuminating boys carrying baskets of coconuts, women holding umbrellas over small children, half naked men on dripping horses. The wet, bare calves, shoulders, chests made shining patterns of brown and gold. After a while there were no more human beings and then suddenly the lane opened out. The grey tower of a church and thatched houses loomed as unreal as an exotic film set. There were figures on the roadside, shaking fists, waving. Young men were shouting, running frantically from the deep shadow of trees and bushes. They looked demented. Had there been a terrible accident?

  I began to slow down. The last thing I expected was that Fili and Amosa would go berserk. But I felt Fili pummelling my shoulders from the back seat, and heard Amosa beside me yelling – ‘Go, go, go! Stop no! Stop – no!’

  Figures gibbered and gesticulated.

  ‘Go to home!’ Fili shouted. ‘Bad, bad!’

  Battered and half deafened, I accelerated recklessly, wrenching the car away from what looked like a mob of madmen throwing themselves at our headlights. I shall never know how I did not run down at least two of them. Was it a hold-up? Wild, indecipherable words were lost in the night. I remember close-up, split-second images of open, twisted mouths, flying hair, furious eyes at the window. Worse – dark, solid objects flew across my vision towards the by now swiftly moving car.

  ‘Fili – what …?’ I swerved to miss the trunk of a perfume tree.

  ‘Go, go!’ Fili was breathless with passion.

  After a minute I slowed down. ‘Now then,’ I said, and now it was explained.

  ‘Very bad boys and girls. Come from New Zealand. Too much beer, too much –’ Fili mimed a man smoking and his finger drew circles round his temple. Drugs.

  ‘Kkhhhh! Kkkhhhh!’ Amosa’s exclamation conveyed the strongest disgust. It was an odd, harsh sound, half gargle, half growl, like a file against a knot of wood.

  So that was it. We had run into a coven of boozy and very violent Samoan layabouts – typical, according to Fili and Amosa, of most young emigrants to New Zealand. There they had acquired a taste for liquor, drugs and fighting. Girls as well as boys. Lost souls. A serious menace to an innocent, church-going population. As a Methodist, Fili said sententiously, he thoroughly disapproved of alcohol. It made Samoans behave like animals. Those solid flying objects had been bottles. For drunken fun, they would have damaged the car, and beaten us up. Kkkhhh!

  ‘What about the police?’

  Fili said, impatiently, ‘Police only in Apia.’

  ‘Girls very bad,’ Amosa said. ‘Drink beer then make –’ Gestures told me what they did.

  ‘With you, Amosa?’

  ‘No, no! Me-tho-dist!’ he cried righteously.

  Fili interrupted. ‘Amosa like fu-fu with girl.’

  ‘Fu-fu?’

  More vivid gestures assailed my eyes in the rear view mirror. Fu-fu evidently meant what used to be known as heavy petting.

  ‘Fili like moetotolo,’ Amosa said in one-upmanlike tones.

  ‘Moeto –?’ I dodged a troop of piglets that charged across the track behind a sow big enough to have overturned the car. But the panic was over. Fili and Amosa soon settled down again and we drove home to the sound of falsetto Samoan singing. The mosquitoes were as bad as ever, but Manino had cooked green pigeons and spotted crabs for dinner.

  *

  The Methodist minister, a Samoan in his mid-thirties who had spent some years in Australia, was Tolu’s friend and neighbour. His bungalow and church stood by the track a few hundred yards away.

  ‘Moetotolo – so you’ve heard of that.’ The minister seemed amused.
‘“Night-creeping”, in other words. Very common in Samoa.’

  His wife gave a polite little laugh over her teacups.

  The aim of moetotolo was for a young man to steal a girl’s virginity as she slept in her parents’ house. I had seen how a Samoan family slept side by side, sharing mats and mosquito nets, and I found it difficult to imagine how on earth Amosa, say, could deflower poor Emma and against her will without raising the household within half a minute. What contortions would do the trick? Surely it was impossible. And the boy would be courting serious physical harm – if the girl’s father and brothers woke up, they might beat him to death.

  ‘Of course,’ the minister said, seriously, ‘it is a manual deflowering. Not a … full-scale ….’

  ‘And the object?’ I asked. ‘Just the thrill?’

  Tolu said, the minister translating, ‘The only motive is to force the girl to marry him. From shame…. You see, if the boy steals her virginity,’ the minister went on, ‘he shames her deeply. Shame is a strong element in a girl’s make-up, so he will threaten to tell the village unless she agrees to marry him.’

  The minister’s handsome wife lay now on her stomach on a mat on the floor, her arms and chin resting on a bolster. She said, ‘It happened near here only the other day.’

  The minister said, ‘Yes. This boy comes creeping in the night to the girl sleeping among her family. He makes moetotolo. But he is clumsy. The girl jumps up and shouts to her father. The father wakes up and this boy is all tangled up in the mosquito net. The boy runs too late. The father catches him and beats him very badly. Then the father complains to the matais’ village council and they fine the father of the boy – pigs, a hundred taros, some fine woven mats: a heavy fine in these parts.’

  The minister’s Bible lay on a chair and, to see what Samoan looked like, I turned to the first words of all: ‘Na faia e le Atua ma le lalolagi i le amataga …’ (‘In the beginning God created the world …’). The Gospels here were according to Mataio, Mareko, Luka and Ioane. Amosa, I discovered, was Samoan for Moses.