The Navidad Incident

by Natsuki Ikezawa

  The invocations are just beginning. The Yoi’i Yuuka mimes the act of sailing the barge across the high seas with the other Yuuka in their white robes and huge leaf crowns striding alongside, front to back, dancing like waves, while the virgins form a ring around them, spreading their arms and swaying to suggest a great ocean. The musicians accompany them with rhythms that, not surprisingly, emulate gently rolling waves. On board the barge he can just make out a sacred plaited palm-leaf box placed before the divine visitant, who sits covered head-to-toe in palm fronds. That role belongs, if Matías remembers correctly, to the third highest Melchor Elder. A lone man among women, his face is entirely hidden; only his arms and legs are visible. He neither moves nor utters a word. Not even when they move on to the next ceremonial site will he lift an oar. Transported together with the palm-leaf box, he is a ritual object whose immobility demands great self-control.

  The boat ritual proceeds at a calm, even tempo. The vast sea has been invoked. Without the power of the sea, without the forces of current and wind and wave, the boat and its revered passenger—god or ancestor—go nowhere. These forces must deliver the barge safely to land where the Yuuka welcome it as human inhabitants—or no, perhaps as divinities now themselves?

  The sacred barge arrives, the spirits alight and dispense blessings to the virgins, who then dance their joy at length and are answered in kind by the Yuuka, who also dance. The musicians stand, playing. The priestesses recite incantations blessing the ground of the square and, by extension, all of the earth. Then they chant a verse, praying that the boat and its holy of holies fare safely to the next ceremonial site, followed by a long, plaintive song of farewell and vows to meet again—if only two hours hence.

  Matías watches all this from his precarious perch. How many hours has he been propped up against the lamppost? He has no idea. It’s as if a transparent curtain had descended from heaven to earth, draping everyone and everything in a wholly different time. It hardly matters anymore which of the eight Yuuka is Améliana—or whether she’s really here at all—Matías sees her, performing with chaste devotion.

  The sad, slow song of departure drones on, finally fading into aftertones as the Yuuka and virgins all kneel in place. The more anxious pilgrims quickly break position and start off for the next rendezvous. After a prescribed interval, the Yuuka, virgins, and musicians all rise and also head toward the next ceremonial site via another, more secret path that does not cross any secular road. Their route may take them under bridges or through caves; some claim they must even traverse the treetops—no one knows for sure, though village kids are probably hiding and watching where they go. (Other kids, Matías recalls, never let him, the orphan boy who didn’t know his own father, stand lookout.)

  He climbs down from the pickup truck and wades into the crowd. Only now does he notice how tired he is—tired and hungry. The sky is now dark, and torches have been lashed to palm trees here and there. Looking up, he sees a brilliant, nearly full moon overhead. There’s not a hint of cloud. He doesn’t know where he’s going, he just walks along with everyone else. Come to think of it, he missed lunch and dinner, but festival pilgrims are free to help themselves to the food set out on boards at each house. Some villagers even divine their fortunes good or bad for the next eight years from the popularity of their offerings: the faster the tidbits disappear, the better the family’s prospects. The boards at the first few houses, however, are bare; earlier pilgrims must have eaten everything. Got to keep going, thinks Matías, we’re bound to find something eventually.

  “Hey you, where you from?” comes a voice, apparently intended as a greeting.

  “You talking to me?” he asks back. It’s been ages since anyone addressed him so casually.

  “Yeah, you.”

  The speaker turns out to be an older man—or no, could they be about the same age? At one time he must have been taller, but now the man’s back is so bent that he’s forced to talk up even to Matías.

  “I’m from here, from Zaran originally, but now I live in Baltasár City.”

  “And you come back for the festival?”

  “Uh-huh,” says Matías, adding, “Sure am hungry, though.”

  “Well, there’s plenty around to eat,” says the old man. “Try the super up ahead.”

  “The super’s handing out food?”

  “Yep. During Yuuka Yuumai, most stores got tables out front giving out free eats. Don’t you know nothing?”

  “I wasn’t around last time. It’s my first festival in years.”

  “Started the time before last, musta been. Nice custom.”

  The two of them walk along toward a halo of bright lights. It’s a big storefront thronged with people. Others are standing just out of the light, all eagerly snacking on something.

  “See, what’d I tell you? Guili Supermarket’s doing a giveaway,” says the old man as he picks up his pace. He must be hungry too. Matías follows after him to join a spontaneous queue. It feels strange to be lining up at his own supermarket. He had no idea the Melchor store provided free food to festival-goers. Presumably it was all written up somewhere in the accounts sent to him as owner-operator; no doubt he also could have requested a full report on the scheme, but his presidential duties don’t spare him that kind of time. The food chain’s been flipped on its head. From highest in the hierarchy, he’s down at the bottom begging for handouts. Festivals are funny, he thinks, trying to restrain his hunger.

  The festival freebies turn out to be an evolved version of instant ramen—cup noodles. Lined up in front of the supermarket are several large tables piled with boxes of the stuff. Young clerks in uniform blue T-shirts stand by with utility knives to cut open the foil seals on the styrofoam cups, pour in hot water from a succession of large kettles that others relay from inside, and finally hand one hot product and a plastic fork to each taker.

  “Step right up! Takes three minutes,” spiels a young assistant manager. “Just count to two hundred, nice and slow, while you wait. Or if you can’t do the numbers, just watch how your neighbor does it. Gotta give it time, though, or it won’t taste so good. Finish one, you can come get another. Eat as many as you like of these lip-smacking cup noodles, the Yuuka’s snack food of choice. It’s just Guili Super’s little gift to all you hungry folks.”

  Standing on a step stool, the man is a born huckster, ready and able to use any opportunity for publicity. Why sure, the festive atmosphere adds pleasant associations to the taste, tonight’s free samples and free spirits helping to trap tomorrow’s cash customers. One after another famished pilgrim passes up the traditional boiled taro and bananas set out by ordinary houses, or fried fingerlings lovingly prepared by poorer families, and reaches instead for the Japanese treat directly imported courtesy of M. Guili’s capital advantage. Maybe it’s a sign of the times? But now, for the first time, the man who rode his instant ramen breakthrough to the top of a new economic model is seeing that whole construct from the bottom up.

  The old man gets his cup and fork and moves off, after which a plump girl in regulation blue quickly presses the identical items on Matías. Immediately, the queue ratchets up behind him, so he too moves to the side of the road. He slowly counts to two hundred, then carefully peels back the seal and savors the soy-scented steam before forking up some noodles. While they cool slightly, Matías watches the assistant manager working the crowd. He looks familiar; they must have been introduced at some company function. Good thing he didn’t see his boss—the President of the Republic himself—standing right in front of him.

  Matías, mouth full of ramen, meditates on his present anonymity: to be nobody in a crowd out in front of Guili’s Supermarket is quite different from being an anonymous participant in the festival. To enjoy the blessings that the sacred barge and Yuuka share out is a privilege, but to get hooked on cup noodles merely makes a consumer keep coming back to spend his last handful of change.
Even so, this little man in his aloha shirt, shorts, and sunglasses standing by the road eating noodles picks up enough pocket money from those consumers to run his political machine.

  Can’t a country operate any other way in this day and age? Are the capital interests that would exploit the Yuuka Yuumai so insatiable? Matías had imagined he was here for the age-old appeal of the festival (Améliana’s spiritual pull adding an extra tug), but no, he sighs, the scheme of things inevitably involves his own secular connections.

  Or no again, the real reason he sighed and hesitated to dig in was that the cup noodles were still too hot to swallow all at once. And honestly, to make things worse, the first slurp was so good—the pasta perfectly firm, each bite-sized ingredient releasing a new burst of flavor in a broth rich with pork fat and vegetable extracts and MSG to tease the taste buds—he can hardly wait for the temperature to come down a few notches so he doesn’t burn his tongue. Hell, he may be president and supermarket tycoon and pilgrim all rolled into one, but there’s nothing like a good ramen. Pure oral pleasures are the best.

  Matías empties his cup down to the last drop of broth and decides to go queue up again, when he spies the same old man, flimsy styrofoam cup in hand, glancing over at him and grinning. For one brief second, Matías flinches—has he been found out?

  At the third ceremonial site, Matías doesn’t go all the way forward but stays deep in the crowd, letting the energy of the rituals carry to him through the waves of humanity. As the charged atmosphere buzzes late into the night, he can feel himself replenished—by the moonlight beaming down from high in the sky, by the strains of festival music floating nearer and farther, by the unseen motions of the Yuuka, by the mystic powers radiating from the boat at the center of it all. Everyone here feels much the same thing.

  By the time the moon sinks in the sea to the west, just as the first intimations of dawn filter in, though the hills block direct view of the eastern sky growing light, the ceremony comes to a close. Not once this time did he see the Yuuka. The crowd starts to break up, carrying Matías along with it. Luckily the fourth location is not far away. As Matías stumbles along, he remembers he hasn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. Of course he’s been getting by on extremely little sleep of late, but he is over sixty-four after all. All eight ceremonies would be pushing his luck, but he feels confident that he can manage one more.

  Yet somehow he can’t get into the spirit of things at the fourth site, as if the festival magic had lost its effect. He’s able to go fairly far forward and claim a place on the beach close enough to see the barge and Yuuka in the distance over the shoulders of other seated pilgrims. People are standing not far behind, but around him everyone stays low and sways on their haunches, all rapt expressions and ecstatic cries. Why can’t he get into the mood? No longer one of the faithful flotsam, he’s back to being the president just as surely as when he’s at the Presidential Villa; a politician soberly observing this superstitious premodern spectacle, this waste of energy that brings everyday affairs to a halt.

  Or maybe the festival spirit has given up on him. It’s as if someone or something has now denied him entry here. Why this jaded, apathetic feeling? In a celebration of selfless belonging, why is he himself again? After all the secrecy involved in shedding his official identity, why has he suddenly reverted to keeping a watchful eye on civil disruption?

  Clouds of suspicion boil up inside him, choking his mind with apprehension. It’s as if the Yuuka had ritually laid the entire blame for people’s misfortunes at his feet. He’s an outsider, he doesn’t belong here. Worse than that, what if people notice he doesn’t belong? In their aroused state, they might turn on him and tear him to pieces. The fear becomes palpable. He’s a crow among doves, he can’t stay here.

  At the high point of the ceremony, while the virgins are doing a dance of praise before the Yuuka, Matías turns away and wades out through the crowd without anyone stopping him. It must be around seven thirty in the morning. The outskirts of the village are deserted save for gangs of early-rising kids who clamor to get a view, unlikely though it is that they’ll be able see past all the adults who fill the festival precincts.

  He walks along, heading nowhere in particular. What’s wrong with him? Is it just exhaustion catching up unannounced? Better take a breather, go lie down somewhere and take a nap, but he’s not really sleepy. He keeps walking, then remembers that one of his own houses is somewhere in the vicinity. Not an old family home—he’s lost track of his mother’s relations for the most part—it’s a property he bought before he became president, as an incidental investment when M. Guili Trading was beginning to show a profit. He’s stayed there, what, three times all told, a decade ago. Always wanted to rent it out, but there’s no market on Melchor, so he just kept it for when and if, employing an old pensioner from the Guili Supermarket in Zaran to look after the place from time to time. Now if he can only jog his memory, where does the man hide the key? Oh, he’ll probably find it once he gets there. He’ll be able to rest up, maybe catch a little shut-eye.

  He finds the house and the key in no time. Inside, the air is still. Everything looks neat and tidy; the old caretaker has been doing his job. There’s a bedroom in back, shuttered and secluded, but the sofa in the main room will do just fine. He’s dead tired; he doesn’t need nightmares, no shadowy anxieties coming back to seize him. No panic, no dread, just let him recuperate enough to go see the next ceremony. People will let him rejoin the festival, won’t they? Thoughts spiral, but his body demands its due until his head gives in. But more than that, it’s the otherness of this island, the aura of Améliana and the Yuuka that grant him sleep. He stretches out on the sofa and, very much like his nightly blackouts at the Presidential Villa, promptly slides down a steep incline into unconsciousness.

  He wakes in the dark, then slowly recognizes his whereabouts: he’s on the sofa in his house on Melchor. What time did he come here and fall asleep? It must have been morning. He can’t have slept that long, but that’s the full moon right outside the window. Last night the moon had almost completely waxed, and the Yuuka Yuumai begins on the eve of the full moon. Has he slept through one whole day on this wobbly sofa? How many years has it been since he slept so much? How is it possible?

  The fifth ceremony will of course be over by now, probably also the sixth. Even if he hurries, he’ll be so far back he won’t see a thing at the seventh. No, it would make more sense to go on ahead to Sarisaran and just wait. Those earlier fears seem to have mysteriously vanished. Purified by sleep, he somehow knows he’ll be accepted among the festival-going faithful. The fifth through seventh ceremonial sites are all the way over on the other side of the island, but the sacred barge circles back for the last observance at Sarisaran, an easy hike from here.

  Matías starts walking and almost immediately feels hungry. He can make a short detour over to the supermarket for another cup noodle handout, but he’d rather eat something more substantial. The house up ahead has set out a washbasin full of deep-fried taro dumplings dusted with sugar—the absolute best treat around when he was a kid. There’s also a large pitcher of water and cups. No one is about and no one seems to be home either, so he helps himself to a skewer of dumplings and a nice big cup of water. Can’t beat simple fare—this is the real thing. So what the hell did he eat not twenty-four hours ago at his own store? What was that mass-produced crap he imported by the crate-load from factories half a world away to make his fortune? What does that make him? His wealth, even his presidential career are built on a bubble that a single stick of dumplings can burst.

  He tries not to think about it and hurries off toward Sarisaran, passing several pilgrims dozing by the roadside on the way. Fifteen minutes later, he reaches the sanctum and finds a good hundred people there ahead of him, already positioned in silence on the sand waiting for the arrival of the Yuuka and the boat. Matías wanders in among them and locates a free patch of ground. Nothing i
s happening yet, but mysteriously—at least to him—he blends right in unnoticed.

  Suddenly he’s completely hemmed in by people. He must have dozed off again—altogether extraordinary after these past few years without normal sleep—but now a stir ripples through the crowd. Every eye is on the young oarsmen carrying the barge up to the final earthen dais, around which sit the eight priestesses and festival band.

  The music begins. The Yuuka rise and slowly start their boat-landing dance, with special hand and foot movements, the orientation of the barge and dancers’ bearing all subtly distinguishing Sarisaran as the holiest site in the cycle. Even the time spent on each movement here differs from the other seven places. Matías strains to follow every nuance and gesture, not feeling estranged in the least, but as if Sarisaran held him in a welcoming embrace. The feeling intensifies: a rapport he shares with every person here—newly initiated youth and toothless crone, man and woman, rich and poor, sick and well—each imagining himself the sole focus of the ritual. All the Yuuka seem to be Améliana, performing body and soul just for him. Through them the gods have been joyously welcomed from far across the waves, offered song and dance, entreated for eight more years of happiness, praised for things large and small, anger of mountain and wrath of sea assuaged, motions of the sun and all other heavenly bodies assured, in order that the reef teem with fish and fields with taro, that foreigners dripping with money be sucked toward the islands, that healthy children continue to be born and grow up to share in all this bounty. Each and every pilgrim believes it to be so—and for the moment, Matías counts himself among them.