‘It’s quiet,’ I said, after a while. We were sitting cross-legged, looking down from a height on the Vilakota people, who squatted in the sand with their faces turned up to us. They were smiling, but they said nothing. They were quieter than the palms in the air behind and above.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’d like to spend a week or two here.’ He was watching the headman’s wife come slowly up the stairs, and smiled at her as if they’d known each other a long time, but didn’t speak. He just watched her hands, setting down a sort of carved oval tray in front of us, and pouring something hot and colourless out of a cheap enamel teapot into two tin cups.
‘What is it?’ I said. ‘How did she come by a teapot?’
But he wouldn’t break the silence on my account. He lifted the cup and tasted it, while the woman studied his face. He said to her: ‘Our very great thanks,’ seriously, and she smiled, seriously, and edged away down the steps, with her back bowed and her head lower than ours.
I took the other cup and tasted. ‘It’s hot water,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s a flavour in it.’ And he went on sipping, gazing at the sea.
So I tried again, and did find in it, that time, something a bit sweet, a bit perfumed, maybe flowers or leaves, but faint, and hard to pin down.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘you could have a week or two here by yourself, if you wanted.’
‘Not just yet,’ he said. ‘But I will take a break, at Christmas. I’ll go to Jack Manson.’
‘Who’s that?’ I said. Because he had always seemed to have no friends, and nobody wrote to him: from embarrassment, it could have been.
‘A bloke who came up here when I did,’ he said. ‘He’s at Vuna, not far away. He’s got a wife who was a nurse, and she can cook.’
‘At last you’re talking sense,’ I said.
‘It’s the nagging,’ he said. ‘It’s worn me down.’
All the time he had been watching the jungle on the other shore, and I turned my head to see what he saw. On the lagoon beach, hidden by the soggy undergrowth, someone had lit a fire and the smoke was rising, a little darker than the grey-white sky.
‘What is it,’ I asked him, ‘a signal?’
‘No,’ he said, still sipping at that petal-tea or whatever it was. ‘They’ve got their turtle.’
‘Oh God, no,’ I said. ‘No. I’m going to stop them.’
‘You’re not,’ he said.
‘Well, make them kill it, anyway. You know they’ll be cooking the poor bloody thing alive.’
And they cry, I was thinking, while I took my shirt off. Someone told me that. They cry like babies.
‘Tim,’ he said, ‘you can’t swim that. You’ll be lost off the map, and then what will your hulking great brothers do to me?’
But I was already going down the steps, and muttered back at him: ‘I’ll find out if I can swim it.’
‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘And what about the other turtles?’
‘What other turtles?’ I said.
‘All of them,’ he said. ‘All the turtles in the Pacific.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘up your sweet reason.’ And I walked on, over the sand and up to my knees in the sea.
Then I knew, of course, that he was right. Between the two islands there was something like a canyon, and the tide-rip would have got hold of me and swept me far out, past the reefs of Vaimuna, where the bright white reef-herons were standing like the wreck of a fence. I knew he was right, because I remembered that bit of a rock-islet we’d seen from the Igau, with one little tree on it heavy with sea-birds’ nests, and the sharks jumping out of the water and snapping.
So I stood where I’d stopped, staring at Keroni’s canoe on the other side, which was empty because Keroni was enjoying the barbecue too, and I waited for a shout to let me down easy.
But there wasn’t a shout, only a whisper. Keroni’s wife, squatting at the edge of the water, was breathing: ‘Taubada, taubada,’ and pointing back towards the resthouse, towards him, meaning that I was ordered home.
Slowly I turned to face him, and suddenly it struck me how extraordinary it was, that geometrical arrangement that put him at the centre of the world.
Between me and the resthouse was a semi-circle of people, their brown backs towards me. Behind the resthouse was an equal semi-circle of houses, rain-stained grey-brown. The houses followed the contour of the crescent of grey cliff, which was outlined against the sky with a crescent of forest.
The resthouse stood on stilts at an equal distance from two seas. On the right the water was dark and swelling, on the left flat and green. The open veranda of the resthouse was square, and was covered exactly with matting. At the centre of the matting Misa Kodo sat, cross-legged in white clothes, looking out.
I thought: Yes, that is what a king would look like. Not like Mak. Not like Dipapa, even. But remote like that. Alien like that. Now he looks like he must feel.
III
CARGO
SALIBA
When I came back to Wayouyo that first night I looked down from a high point on the path and saw a glow like a fire far away near the stones. I could not think what the fire might be, because all the bushes were still dripping with the rain, but I did not think it would be anything else but a fire.
My aunt was surprised when I scratched on her house-wall and hissed and called to her. I called: ‘It is I, Saliba,’ and heard her muttering inside: ‘Salib’, Salib’,’ as if she did not believe. But soon she came to the doorway, and I said: ‘Aunt, I have come back to Wayouyo, I will stay here a while, I have quarrelled with Misa Makadoneli.’ So then she made kind noises, and led me into her house, and I lay down and slept where I used to sleep when I was small.
But the night was very unquiet, the rain was rough in the trees, and there were other sounds. Once I heard men’s voices shouting, a long way off, and later men’s feet running on the path. Then my aunt’s husband came in, dripping with wet, and stumbled over my legs in the dark. ‘Avae’?’ he cried out, and my aunt said, with sleep in her voice: ‘It is Salib’, she will stay with us.’ ‘All right,’ he said, and groped his way towards his sleeping-mat and lay down. But he did not sleep for a long time, I heard that. Through all the sounds of the wind and rain I heard him lying there, awake.
CAWDOR
The first sign of activities near the stones was seen by SALIBA when she returned to Wayouyo from Mr MacDonnell’s house in the early hours of October 30th. She reports having seen a ‘fire’, or ‘lights’. This is not confirmed by any other witness, but she happens to have been alone, very late, at one of the few points of the island from which the area of the stones is visible from a distance. Her aunt’s husband, TOBEBA’I, and the VC, BOITOKU, both deny having been there. So do all other Wayouyo males.
On the following day, SALIBA was bringing her aunt’s water-bottles from the cave when she met BENONI on the path. They talked of her presence in the village, which she said was due to a misunderstanding with people in Mr MacDonnell’s house. Then she asked him if he knew the reason for the noises in the night, mentioning that she had heard men running and shouting, and that her aunt had heard a conch being blown. She said that several women had heard these sounds and had been discussing them in the water-cave, and that they were ‘afraid of what the men will do’.
Since his quarrel with DIPAPA, who disinherited him for alleged adultery and never formally re-instated him, BENONI has lived in the Mwamwada hamlet of Wayouyo. When METUSELA arrived in the village, DIPAPA gave him BENONI’s former house in the chief’s hamlet. This action caused something of a sensation in Wayouyo, and led to resentment and suspicion on the part of BENONI and his supporters, directed both at METUSELA (whom many described as ‘a deformity’) and at DIPAPA himself.
From his house in the Mwamwada hamlet it would not have been possible for BENONI to hear the sounds described by SALIBA, since Mwamwada is removed from the chief’s hamlet and from all the main paths. During that day, however, he had n
oticed a change in the attitude of some of the men towards himself. They were, he says, ‘whispering together’ and ‘turning away from me’. He also had the impression that ‘SALIBA was warning me’.
SALIBA says that she had no such intention, that she assumed that BENONI would have been involved in any activity of the men, and was simply curious to see his reaction to her remarks. She was surprised that he seemed ‘very angry’. When she reached her aunt’s house, she noticed that he was walking towards the chief’s hamlet. She called out: ‘Where are you going?’ (a sort of politeness here) and he replied: ‘You will see, I will stop all the noises in the night.’
BENONI
All his women were gone from their houses, to the gardens or to fetch water from the cave. The door of Metusela’s house, that used to be mine, was fastened shut. There was nobody left but the old man, my uncle, like a roll of matting on the shaded platform in front of his house. He lay with his head in the curve of his ebony pillow, held up by the arms of little ebony men, his hands, on the mat, open like spiders, as if they were waiting for something alive to fall from the thatch.
I thought that he was deep asleep, as I might have been myself on a day like that, with the still heat and the white sky, and the smoke of the cooking-fires climbing straight up without a stir. But as I came close his eyelids quivered, and his eyes opened and were staring at me, cloudy and bright.
‘Are you well?’ I said.
For a long time he looked at me, he thought about me, before his face moved. Because he was old, so old that nobody could remember his childhood, his mouth had grown thin, and like rubber. When he spoke, all his skin stretched, and his whole face was different, more smooth.
‘I am sick, a little,’ he said. ‘I am very old.’
‘Sleep, then,’ I said. ‘I will go.’
But I did not mean to go, and he knew it. And at last he said: ‘What is your wish?’
‘My uncle,’ I said, ‘the women are talking.’
‘Truly?’ he said, and he almost laughed, meaning that I was a fool, that the women were always talking.
‘Of sounds in the night,’ I said. ‘Men running and shouting. One heard a conch.’
‘I heard nothing,’ he said. ‘Only the rain.’
‘Myself,’ I said, ‘I heard nothing. But today men are talking about something. I see them muttering together.’
‘E?’ the old man said. ‘Why do you tell me?’
‘Because you know,’ I said. ‘These are some doings of yours.’
My uncle lay still on his mat, his neck in the curve of his head-rest and his eyes never changing, though his mouth twisted a little, moving over his gums. ‘My nephew,’ he said, ‘ku sasop’.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It is you who are lying, O Dipapa.’
‘Will you speak like that?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will speak like that.’
Then it was so quiet that I noticed a pigeon in the bush beyond the village, and I could have forgotten about the old man, almost, wondering what was in the pots that his women had left untended in front of their houses.
‘Good, then,’ he said at last. ‘Now tell me: what are these doings of mine?’
‘I do not understand them. But I think Metusela understands.’
‘Then speak to Metusela,’ he said, ‘not to me. I am an old man. I sleep all day.’
‘And in the night?’ I said.
‘And in the night, too,’ he said, ‘I sleep.’
I looked down into his old face, which was like a lizard’s, and into his old sorcerer’s eyes that would soon be blind.
‘My uncle,’ I said, ‘I have waited a long time. Perhaps I will not wait till the end.’
Then I saw a sort of smile in his eyes, but not in his face, because his lips were sliding around as he sucked his gums and his face was like water, no longer clear.
‘Wait a little,’ he said. ‘A little more.’
‘For what?’ I said.
‘Perhaps for nothing,’ he said. ‘Who can say? In a little, my nephew, perhaps there will be nothing for you.’
You would have thought from his words that he was angry, but his voice was soft, and while he was speaking his eyes closed again. He slipped back into sleep like a dying man, and as I was opening my mouth to answer him his mouth opened too, and a little snore came out of it, like you might hear from some small animal rooting in the bush at night.
CAWDOR
It is my opinion that the VC BOITOKU is the most obviously untrustworthy witness. Unlike anyone else involved in the case, he talks a great deal, I think on the principle of the octopus and the cloud of ink. To pay much attention to him would distort the picture that emerges from the evidence of more reliable witnesses, by whom I mean principally BENONI, SALIBA, and several women from Olumata and Obomatu, though I do not believe that even these have told me more than an inescapable minimum of the truth. BOITOKU’s contribution seems to be aimed at excusing himself and taking the pressure off DIPAPA, who will not speak at all. If he were believed, he would deserve sympathy. He draws a moving picture of himself as a simple country policeman reading the Riot Act to Genghis Khan.
However, there seems no doubt that there was nothing premeditated about the events in the early evening of October 31st. The opportunity may have been seized, but it was not created by BOITOKU or any of his companions. It arose out of a misunderstanding, which is excusable, on the part of the boys of Olumata regarding the intentions of a band of girls from Wayouyo who suddenly descended on them in the heat of a katuyausi or courting expedition.
SALIBA
The girls came into our part of the village twittering like bats and screaming like lories. All their skirts were new, and when they circled round me it was like a whirlwind smelling of bwita flowers and sulumwoya.
‘Salib’,’ they called to me, ‘come with us to Olumata.’ They were dressed to look beautiful for the boys of Olumata, and they felt beautiful and wanted me to see.
‘No,’ I said, ‘not this evening.’ I was standing over the cooking-pot and I knew that the smell of the smoke would be in my hair and on my skin. ‘I am cooking for my aunt,’ I said.
‘O, come, Salib’,’ one girl said. ‘You are not an old woman yet.’
But I said: ‘No, des’, another day.’ And because I was not happy, not like them, they all looked at each other and were tired of me, and ran away laughing over the green ground.
I went and sat on a stone by my aunt’s yam-house, and watched the pot and thought my thoughts, while the light went out of the sky and the palms turned blue and grey.
It was nearly dark when the girls came back. My aunt and her husband and I were beginning to eat, at the door of the house, and my aunt said: ‘What is that crying?’ and we stopped eating to listen, towards the path. We heard the girls calling out, and then their feet running, and then they burst into our part of the village, angry like gulls. ‘The Olumata boys insulted us,’ they shouted. ‘They seized us. They beat us.’ All kinds of things like that they were shouting, and after that they ran on, still screaming, to another part of Wayouyo.
All the boys and young men of our part had heard that, and were standing up or coming out of their houses.
‘It is nothing,’ I said to my aunt’s husband, who had growled. ‘I will tell you how it was. They met the boys on the path and were provoking to them and then ran away. So the boys chased after them and seized them, and the girls slapped the boys, and they all had a fight. It is often like that,’ I told him.
But our boys and young men were shouting that they would go and beat the Olumata boys. And my aunt’s husband went into the house and brought out his shotgun, the iron part, that he uses to hit people over the head.
‘Now there will be war,’ said my aunt with a sigh.
‘E, truly,’ I said. Because already boys from the other part of Wayouyo were running through our part carrying sticks and clubs and torches, and more were gathering on the path to Olumata, with the girls
behind them, yelling that the Olumata boys were bush-pigs and rapists and unnatural.
‘You stay,’ my aunt said to her husband. But he looked away from her angrily, and went off to join the younger men, swinging his heavy gun.
‘I will go too,’ I said. ‘It will make me laugh, this war.’
And so I thought it would and was already laughing at my aunt’s face and her sad noises. So when I saw Benoni hurrying towards the path I jumped up and ran after him, screaming like the other girls. ‘O Benoni!’ I shouted. ‘O Benoni! I have been raped by forty Olumata boys. It was like a dream, Benoni–O!’
BENONI
‘Crazy woman, Salib’,’ I said to her. But she could not make me laugh at her then, with the boys so angry and beginning to march, and the girls swearing and crying out all around them. I left her behind and pushed my way through the men, trying to talk to them, to make them peaceful. ‘It is bad,’ I told them, ‘war between villages.’ But they were excited, and would not listen to me. They began to call ulululu! and to whoop, swinging their sticks and torches. Then some began to run, and soon everyone was running, boys and girls together, and I was caught up in them and had to run too. It was nearly dark then, and in the light of the torches the palm-trunks beside the path sprang out of the shadows of the bush like men or spirits, very pale.
The men of Olumata must have heard us or seen our lights from a long way, or perhaps they were waiting for us, because certainly the girls, whatever had happened there, would have run away threatening them that we would come. Halfway between the villages, where another track goes off towards Rotten Wood, we saw the torches of the Olumata people burning in the grass and against the low fronds of new palms, throwing a green light like fireflies, but growing red as the holders of the torches stood up and moved together and waited in a line across the path.
I was trying to force my way to the head of the Wayouyo men, to hold them back and to speak to the Olumata people before the fighting began. But the bodies were so thick in the path, boys and girls too, that I could not get to the front, and they were shouting very loud and would not hear me. Then some of the men behind me left the path and ran through the bushes and came out ahead of the others, whooping and shouting insults. When they saw that, the men I was among broke into a fast run, and all the voices came together in one scream, and Wayouyo and Olumata met like two seas across a reef.
Visitants Page 17
