But at a second glance, it turned out to be a death notice, which succinctly and starkly informed me that my friend Hannes had passed away a month ago. Nothing more, no explanation. The funeral was of course now long past, but I read the few words printed on the card over and over again, trying to fathom what had happened, but I got nowhere. For the first time, I looked homewards and saw nothing but emptiness; I pictured a funeral parlour, where all the mourners were turned away from one another, I saw the cortège, with everyone looking at the ground, and the tear-streaked faces, and I imagined someone putting on a Charlie Parker record at the graveside. We had our rituals in Europe too, after all, and Hannes was a mischievous character who’d be bound not to observe them.
I could never have guessed it, but now it struck me that I’d been gravitating towards this piece of news right from the outset, down a flight of steps, from the killing of the buffaloes and the attendant rituals, through the viewing of the mummified grandmother, to the dead cyclist by the roadside. Hannes would have approved of the theatricality of the story, not least because of the abundance of cadavers and corpses, the slaughter and the puking, and the stupid phrases in my bilingual dictionary, and because of the simple, slightly sentimental symbolism: a dead man is left lying there, while the others journey on.
I didn’t leave the hotel again that day, because this terrible ‘unforgettable moment’ just dragged on and on and seemed to have no end.
Tonga
Taboo and Fate
Black clouds were said to have billowed up over the Pacific, and the water in the ocean boiled up into a seething white foam; fishing boats and ferries supposedly sought shelter in bays, while people on the shore fell to their knees and prayed. They streamed in their thousands into churches to take confession, and many priests were reported to have claimed that the ‘Day of Judgement’ was at hand. And that was even the case here in the capital Nuku’alofa, apparently, whose name literally means ‘The Abode of Love’!
‘Precisely because of that,’ says the old man who’s telling me what is was like in March 2009, when one of the underwater volcanoes hereabouts – of which there are thirty-six all told – erupted, an event that heated the waters of the Pacific and sent fountains of steaming water shooting up into the air, where they dispersed in a sulphurous-yellow haze.
‘That’s how it is nowadays on the Pacific Ring of Fire,’ he tells me, evidently quite proud of the belt of volcanoes that exerts an elemental hold over the lives of the inhabitants of Tonga.
After all, this kingdom stands only a few centimetres above sea level. Not far from here, in an easterly direction, yawns the 10,882-metre-deep Tonga Trench, a chasm in the ocean floor where every year the Pacific tectonic plate moves by as much as twenty-four centimetres beneath the Australian plate, threatening the island realm with tsunamis. What’s more, it’s also become so prone to hurricanes that it can sometimes take several days for news of the extent of the damage to reach the mainland from the affected islands.
‘So why is Nuku’alofa called “The Abode of Love”?’
‘Hard to say,’ the old man replies, without elaborating further. One hundred and sixty-nine islands and two coral reefs comprise what is officially called the ‘Kingdom of Tonga’, a place which Captain James Cook dubbed the ‘Friendship Islands’ or ‘Friendly Islands’ in 1774. And indeed, that’s exactly what they were, at least until the early nineteenth century. Thereafter, Europeans’ impressions of the place took on a more bitter tone, as by that time the Tongans’ own experience of the new arrivals had also grown more sour and because an almost fifty-year long civil war, which only came to an end in 1852, had spread terror throughout the islands. Two-thirds of the population are said to have been killed at that time, with cannibalism even making an appearance, and still now cultural historians with an interest in the fate of these paradise-like islands ask where this propensity for violence came from, and why this peaceful world is repeatedly disfigured by outbreaks of savage brutality. When he landed here, Captain Cook chose the most beautiful bay, in actual fact a whole system of bays and spits of land, interspersed with patches of bright blue water where dark patches of algal bloom float, drifting out into the intermittently grey and shining blue, dazzling and turbid water of the open ocean. The shores are densely covered with scrubby bushes, but the tip of every spit is home to a palm grove. Even nowadays, this is a landscape that shows virtually no signs of human agency, remaining wild and untamed except for the little spot that has been cleared and tidied up as a memorial to James Cook, and where a tree had had a sleeve put round its trunk bearing the inscription: ‘Here stood formerly the great banyan Malumalu-’o-Fulilangi or Captain Cook’s Tree, under the branches of which the celebrated navigator came ashore.’
We are a quite different breed of traveller. We don’t have to wrest the impressions we glean of the world from situations of danger, nor even very often from mere discomfort, and should we ever by chance find ourselves flirting with danger in our travels, then it’s only as a result of governments having declared an area a no-go zone – like Burma, Murmansk, Kamchatka, Bhutan, or the Forbidden City in the centre of Beijing, say – or because wars have made them inaccessible. The good thing about it is that we can no longer merely judge by appearances. Whereas earlier travellers were able to offer sweeping statements about the life and nature of other countries, all we can do – at best – is capture what they’re like at the moment we visit them, and recount how they appear in our heads, and how they interact with our individual personalities.
On the flight from Sydney to Tonga, I sit in an aisle seat with May, a native of the island, next to me, in a sleeveless top. She’s folded her strong brown hands in her lap and is staring solemnly out of the window. Her face is broad, with a mass of rounded individual features, like her nose, her chin and her cheekbones … and her arms are so smooth that the glare of the evening sun as it sets over the ocean finds its final reflection on her skin, where the grey-blue of the sky mingles with the brown of her complexion to produce a nameless colour.
It’s almost midnight by the time we descend the aircraft gangway and walk through the warm wind of the Polynesian islands towards the airport terminal; we can taste the saltwater tang in the air for the first time. To both sides of the little whitewashed cube that houses the passport and customs desks, queues of bulky people press forward, calling and waving, and others who are still descending the plane yell boisterously and wave back. Our baggage is spewed out of a hole in the wall and stacked up and sorted by a frantic but not very systematic operative, who fends off all attempts by the owners of the bags to get at their luggage. The customs official cuts a cheerless, authoritarian figure, but what can he do? We’re in Tonga now, and sending us back would be no easy matter, and, anyhow, several hundred kilometres of South Pacific until the next bit of mainland is a pretty effective fortification when all’s said and done.
Outside the terminal, a clutch of strangers are hanging around waiting for a communal minibus to take them into town: a bad-tempered French married couple, a homecoming Tongan with no relatives left here, a woman in a wheelchair who cheerfully explains that she wanted to come back to the island of her birth one more time before her death, and an Australian couple, he with the glazed expression of an alcoholic and she with the spherical head of a native Tongan. The French woman coughs and issues orders to no one in particular, while her husband, either because he’s embarrassed or because they are already too much at odds with one another, looks on with the smug demeanour of someone who’s got more important business to attend to than arriving at a Pacific airport in the middle of the night.
Then a friendly, warm rain sets in, and the Haitian minibus driver reduces his speed from forty to thirty kilometres per hour. So we creep through the night until we find ourselves driving through a nocturnal scene by Gauguin. The scene outside is just like one of his paintings, with the palms not in groups or serried ranks but standing isolated and dotted about the landscape as though all
other vegetation – banana trees, sweet potato plants and tomato vines alike – should fall in line with their wilfulness. Groups of men in skirts, some of them staggering, cross the unmade road in front of us.
The riots that took place here in November 2006 – when the democracy movement erupted into violence and shops were set on fire, and both supporters of the movement and opponents could only look on helplessly as the wind spread the fire across the whole of the city centre – left the old heart of the city completely in ruins. Now, the food stalls there are well lit but protected by bars; that’s how these Chinese-owned businesses guard against looting. The vendors wait behind their grilles like workers in a fairground coconut shy. The living rooms of the little houses are mostly lit by neon lamps, while dogs roam around outside. The next shower that arrives is blown horizontally past the windscreen by a sudden gust, and in the hotel lobby, the receptionist announces triumphantly:
‘So – what do you reckon to this weather, then?’
The hotel is a dilapidated old complex of interconnected wings that at some stage were augmented by a half-mildewed main building. In the semi-darkness, I can make out various courtyards, lawns, open loggias constructed out of bamboo; I also notice that the walls are discoloured with fungus. I can hear the sea, and the Vanu Road, along which a couple of cars are slowly approaching, and I can hear two boozers in the nextdoor room crashing about, and their toilet door slamming.
Yet the feeling that now takes a stronger hold of me is one of agoraphobia: being cut off on the far side of an unbridgeable ocean and marooned in the most remote of foreign places suddenly feels deeply oppressive. It’s like I’m cooped up in this vastness, sleep-deprived, yet still harassed by traffic and regularly startled. How can one possibly feel so trapped where everything is so boundless, so free, and so released from the constraints of the mainland, even released from the constraints of my own homeland? If you were to draw a diagonal line from there right across the globe, you’d end up here in Tonga. So, isn’t it a good thing that you don’t encounter the same experiences here, just the reverse side of the same globalized world that’s been given a bit of a folksy twist?
The last time this island realm came to our attention in the media was at the millennium, when European television stations wanted to celebrate the first day of the new millennium in fitting style and Tonga, being situated in the first international time zone, offered to sell them pictures of its sunrise that morning. In point of fact, this honour really should have gone to Kiribati, a nation comprising a few tiny islands, and right through the middle of which the International Dateline ran until 31 December 1994, at which juncture someone decided to shift the line further east. But what lay in store for Europeans beyond this demarcating line that they couldn’t have found somewhere else? So here was a new day, a new year, century, millennium, heralded as it had been since the beginning of time by the breaking dawn, and all you needed to do was go out into the street in Europe twelve hours after sun-up in Tonga to see it live for yourself, breaking over the millennial horizon. However, anyone who found waiting too onerous, or too tardy or sentimental or who somehow didn’t find the experience genuine enough, always had the television, which in turn would not be called ‘television’ if it didn’t have the ability to peer into the far distance to see what the rising sun looked like, the self same sun that had just set over Europe. But in any event, people hereabouts are given to saying: ‘Time begins in Tonga.’
So, because the first sun of the new millennium would be rising over this island kingdom, the rights to capture the event were touted around to the highest bidder, and we came within an ace of enjoying a premiere at the advent of the new millennium: namely, a sunrise with a commercial break.
On my first day in Tonga, I was also keen to see the sunrise, twelve hours before it occurred back home. On the morning I sat waiting for it, the full moon was still visible at 6.30 a.m. Then a bank of cloud rolled across it, extensive enough to completely blot it out. On the opposite side of the sky, the day announced its presence with a grudging hint of brightness – like it was undecided whether to grow light – borne on a cool breeze. At this hour, people were already kneeling down to pray in the neon-lit cubes that are church interiors here, while Chinese shopkeepers were already waiting behind their counters, and cocks were crowing.
But on this particular morning, the sun showed itself only once, as a delicate red cross-hatch effect in a slate-grey bank of cloud, glimmering faintly before vanishing entirely. Then it returned, glowing like a toaster, before it promptly disappeared once and for all. Day broke at a leisurely pace and somewhat lackadaisically. Still irresolute about adopting an unequivocal mood, it wandered aimlessly like a person who has just got up, still heavy with sleep, before finally putting another quintessentially South Pacific weather situation on the agenda: the preamble to tropical rain.
Even so, the minute I set foot outside, I found myself caught up in the sheer verve of the place, the unflappable way its life revolves around a sea frontage that actually isn’t one, but rather port installations visited by a stream of ships covered in great rusting flakes of paint, with other smaller and newer but still battered ships following in their wake. An atmosphere of letting oneself go, of patient waiting and acquiescence pervades the scene, a feeling of exposure and permeability to the onward march of time. Rubbish is strewn everywhere, but how could it be otherwise, given that the wind catches it, whisks it from outdoor dining tables and overflowing skips, from children’s hands and from the quayside. Such an agglomeration of unattractiveness becomes so concentrated that my eyes start to water and I walk ever deeper into the dark wall of cloud that’s looming until rain does actually begin to fall, saturated, warm and incessant, and I take shelter along with three plump, friendly women beneath a plane tree. We get ourselves four coconuts and drink their milk, nodding our approval.
Every morning I walk for twenty minutes to a small Beach Café, as it calls itself, even though there’s no beach anywhere to be seen, only a dingy harbour breakwater where a few halfrusted barges are anchored, while others are in the process of being reconditioned. Every day I do the same thing, not just for the sake of ritual but also because I want to see what else is going on each morning. There’s no better way of getting into the routine of a place than by imposing a routine on yourself while you’re there.
Besides, I like sitting on the tiny, wind-battered veranda made of corrugated iron and drinking coffee and a juice mix of melon and pineapple, and eating buttered toast with orange marmalade. In the general run of things, the landlady is quite severe with me and wishes me ‘Goodbye’ rather than ‘Good morning’, but this morning, when ‘New York, New York’ came on the radio, she started swaying along with her two-hundred-weight bulk, and singing aloud: ‘If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere,’ though there was no one in the world for whom these lines could have been less fitting than her.
Then she approached the table and asked me where I was from, or rather where I was from and how come I’d ended up here sitting at this table. I answered:
‘If I can make it to here, I can make it to anywhere.’
She laughed, put her hand on my shoulder and let it rest there, while translating what I’d just said to her friends behind me in guttural Tongan.
‘Are you alone?’
‘Aren’t we all?’ I replied, thinking that we’d found common ground for friendly banter.
‘No,’ she replied brusquely, and answered the quizzical look I gave her by adding: ‘The Lord is always with us.’
‘Oh sorry, I’d forgotten about Him,’ I responded.
‘You should never do that,’ she chided me.
I promised I wouldn’t.
From the next-door table, a woman in her seventies dressed in bright red and wearing golden earrings looked over and shrugged her shoulders sympathetically.
‘That’s how it is here,’ she said. ‘You must have seen it for yourself: the place is full of churches and there’
s three masses on Sundays, all packed full. People still believe in God here.’
Because she clearly didn’t anymore and wasn’t attempting to convert me, I went over to her table, offered her my hand in greeting and told her my name. Kerry, who had once worked as an anthropologist and had since made a living writing crime novels with her female partner, said ‘pleasure’ and then turned to wave to a local woman who’d just that minute driven up in a large sports car.
‘Dorothy, darling, if it isn’t yourself, back from the islands!’ I went back to my table. From here I had a panoramic view over the neighbourhood: I saw an old woman standing in the receding surf and gathering in fish traps; a flatbed lorry transporting soldiers and blue plastic chairs; an old man lifting up a stone slab covering a drainage manhole and plunging his hand down inside; a massive female truck driver crossing herself behind the wheel; Cassiopeia’s Café, with men coming out of it sporting bouffant hairdos and skirts while women, with their majestic heads, showed their gold teeth when they laughed; a peasant woman carefully putting earthy manioc roots into a basket lined with banana leaves; two people arm in arm, with each of their limbs fully tattooed; a woman in the prime of her life sitting in state on the back of a pickup truck in her wheelchair and gesticulating to a group of her friends, who have gathered round in a large gaggle at her feet, as the truck moves at a sedate pace down the road. And the wind is leaving behind its traces, too, bending the palms, parting the banana bushes, tearing signs from the nails securing them, blowing over bicycles, making coconuts drop from the trees, and catching hold of the large clam shells that have been used as ashtrays on the veranda and sending them skidding across the tarmac below, in a hail of mother-of-pearl splinters.
The Ends of the Earth Page 33