The Tongans have their Stonehenge, too, an alpha-sign made of volcanic rock. You go through this archway and come to a tall stone slab, in the shadow of which one of the ancient kings of Tonga, who was two and a half metres tall, is said to have leant, as shown by the impression left by his body in the stone, and then you can walk on further into a dense, dark wood full of spiders’ webs and unfamiliar flowers, and further on towards the sea, which you can only hear from here but not see. Leah took a few apprehensive steps down this path, but quickly turned back.
‘It’s haunted,’ she said.
‘That’s your relatives,’ Douglas whispered.
And doesn’t she have every reason to be afraid? In cases like hers, there have been plenty of stories of corporal punishments, mutilations and imprisonment. The violation of taboos has to be avenged, otherwise it wouldn’t be called taboo.
We make our way back. Our gaze grows numb as we watch the receding waves. On the gravel path to her hotel, Leah turns around one last time, like she wants to say something. Then she seems to think better of it.
As evening falls a couple of hours later, four well-built women descend the path just outside my room, notice me standing at the window and give me a wave. I wave back. One of them beckons to me, inviting me to join them. I shake my head, at which she squats down and mimics a riding motion. In former times, the women here offered themselves to strangers for a few rusty nails, and sailors praised their tirelessness. Even the degeneration of charm into vulgarity that I’ve just witnessed is actually quite genial in its own way.
In 1803, a merchant called John Turnbull landed on the island of ’Eua. The natives had little to offer except foodstuffs and a few tools, but in exchange for these few odds and ends demanded valuable items like scissors and axes. When the English sailors refused, the natives had three women – who were clearly war captives and the prettiest they could muster – brought to the vessel, and offered to sell their services to the crew. But in his log, Turnbull calls them ‘stocky, masculine and with hard features’, and none of the sailors wanted anything to do with them, which baffled the natives, who had gone to some lengths to bring them to the British.
At this stage, Europeans were primarily interested in trading with China. Yet they had few commodities that were of interest to the Chinese, with the exception of furs and whale fat, which together with all manner of whale by-products found a ready market in China. And so the Europeans extended their whalehunting areas to cover Polynesia, which in turn led to bitter trade wars with indigenous whale hunters, conflicts which were marked by skulduggery and extreme violence that poisoned relations between natives and foreigners. If one also takes into account the fact that an unprecedented wave of Christian missionary activity reached the Pacific region at the same time, it is easy to imagine the Polynesians’ confusion. Who was the quintessential Westerner, they must have asked themselves: the unscrupulous whaler and exploiter, or the missionary fisher of men, who proclaimed brotherly love and shared humanity?
And that wasn’t all. Precisely the fact that Captain Cook characterized the inhabitants of Tonga as peaceable, friendly and helpful and spoke of the abundance of natural produce available there, and because it was generally known that missionaries were well established on the island, led whale hunters to beat a path to Tonga in particular, so exacerbating the conflicts between peoples.
In addition, Europeans spread infectious disease to the islands of Polynesia, and once slave traders had also found their way to the region, the arrival of the white man once again proved disastrous for the indigenous civilization. But despite that, or maybe precisely because of it, Tonga is the only state within Oceania never to be colonized by a European power.
‘Indeed,’ Georg Forster exclaimed while accompanying James Cook on his second voyage to the South Pacific, ‘if the learning and erudition of individual men have to be bought at the cost of the happiness of entire nations, then it would have been better for both the discoverers and the discovered if the South Seas had remained forever a closed book to unruly Europeans!’
Sometimes, the idyll looks down upon a car park. This is the case looking out from the Beach Café: every morning the manioc sellers lay out their earthy roots on cloths on the quayside, knock holes in coconuts, display bundles of vanilla pods and pour kava powder into bottles. And every morning the fishermen wait for sloops to take them out. The arrangement of the stalls is always the same, the cars stop in the same places, and the same hands shake one another in greeting. Tourists flock here for the market’s immediacy, in search of sights worth seeing and opportunities to take snaps; by contrast, travellers come here looking for the permanent and the everlasting. You have to have spent a long time in a particular place, visiting the same haunts over and over again in order to discern its true spirit.
Kerry, the anthropologist and crime writer, is already ensconced at her little table outside the café by the time I arrive today; she’s dressed in red and dripping with gold jewellery again, and is also sporting a pink ribbon for Breast Cancer Awareness on her lapel. With the beady-eyed alertness that can equally well characterize both ladies and wild beasts, she’s keeping a close watch on the car park, the quayside and visitors to the café, and immediately waves me over when she sees me.
‘Sit down, keep me company, I’m writing a postcard. Tell me, who were those two people you were with yesterday? Friends? I’ve never seen them round here before.’
I tell her about Stephen and Leah, their conspiracy theories, their resentments, and their fear of her family.
‘The woman’s a local, you can tell that straight away. Simple people. People like that used to be called “dirt-eaters” on Tonga. Don’t be shocked.’
She picks the raisins out of her muesli and lines them up, one by one, on the saucer under the bowl.
‘So, she’s come here with her boyfriend, pregnant I’m guessing? I thought so. Oh dear, that could get tricky. Yeah, the dirteaters can be brutal if you violate their traditions.’
A sports car draws up right in front of us. An Indian beauty of forty or more slips out, wrapped in a formal green and black sari, and with lithe movement floats up the steps to the café.
‘Dorothy, meet my new best friend … what’s your name again? Roger.’
The two friends immediately lapse into a private argot. I catch snippets concerning an appointment, money, some former advice and a warning.
Dorothy announces ‘I must go inside, I’ve got to wait there at a window table.’
The moment she’s disappeared, Kerry’s head comes right up close to mine, so close I can smell her face powder.
‘Some really shady business goes on in this café. Did you see Dorothy? She’s as poor as a church mouse, but she’s dressed in her glad rags and has hired that car; she’s meeting a man here who wants money off her for brokering a leasehold. In the café, I ask you! I’ve warned her already. And in cash, too, can you imagine?’
She throws herself back in her seat like someone who can look back on a gratifying tradition of smart-aleckry, but what she says is true: because foreigners aren’t permitted to buy land here, just lease it for fifty years, at which point it either reverts to the owner or the leasehold is extended, some dodgy dealings have evolved between Westerners wanting to get away from it all and native landowners.
It clearly bothers Kerry that from her seat outside on the terrace here she hasn’t got sight of the second entrance, which Dorothy’s would-be business partner might use to enter the café.
‘Excuse me, dear, I’d better go inside and give Dorothy some moral support. She can be such an airhead.’
When Douglas drives up a moment later, he hasn’t got a ticket for the Princess Ashika, but in its place he has a suggestion.
‘I’ve been thinking and wanted to ask you, now that we know one another a bit better, why don’t you come with me to ’Eua, my home island? We’re burying my great aunt there at the weekend. That way, you’ll get to see the real Tonga and witness a genuine funeral c
eremony with my own family. You’d be very welcome to join us.’
The two islands now known as ’Eua and Tongatapu were named Middelburgh and Amsterdam by the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman. ’Eua was the second island of the kingdom that James Cook landed on, a small, nowadays largely neglected island largely untouched by tourism, where people are left to their own devices and on which reason has so far failed to impose order.
Douglas recounts some of the other advantages of life on ’Eua:
‘On ’Eua we always say: Just keep calm. It’s not nearly as hectic as on Nuku’alofa …’
‘… and the top speed for cars is fifteen kilometres per hour, and hefty people waddle comfortably along the pavements, and I’ve never seen anyone there make a sudden movement. That’s just the way it is: the farther away you get from the centre of things, the slower the pace of life.’
Two days later, the little aircraft begins its descent to the island of ’Eua. The pilot puts his plane down on the grass next to the runway, because it’s safer than landing on the rutted tarmac. The paths running off into the palm groves between the huts are a bright cinnabar-red colour. Sometimes, the women here rub a bit of this soil into their washing water and use it to dye their hair.
We can tell we’re approaching Douglas’ parents’ house from the purple sashes that have been draped around the whitewashed wooden sheds in the compound, as a sign of mourning for his grandfather’s sister.
‘She was eighty plus, I think,’ Douglas says.
He doesn’t really categorize people by their age. The oldest of the mourners is Douglas’ mother, who has a fine-featured face etched by austerity and is wearing a shawl decorated with a blue and yellow flower pattern. A Hammond organ is tootling away in the background on the radio. All the sheds surrounding the meadow have been cleared and laid out with mats with the designs of peacocks, coffee jugs or rhombuses woven into them.
The women are sitting in a circle preparing for the interment. Even the professional mourners are draped in bast-fibre mats, which make them look like scarecrows or Christmas figures from the Krkonosze Mountains in the Czech Republic. Douglas’ mother puts tapioca served on pandanus leaves in front of me, and next to it a little pile of finely chopped beef, including the fat, gristle and bones.
‘Now say your prayers and eat.’
I fold my hands and lower my eyes. The meat has a doughy taste, and there’s country music playing on the radio now. My gaze is drawn through a back door, to the open fireplace behind the house, surrounded by a pile of coconut shells and more upholstered chairs in a circle. From this afternoon on, no more radio music will be allowed. Instead, there will be communal singing of spirituals, the whole night through until ten o’clock the next morning. That’s how long the deceased great aunt’s family members will have to keep the fire outside going, while others tell all the good stories from her life. Indeed, a young girl with a very deep voice has just begun to do so.
I go out and sit in the open. From the steps of a shed for housing guests, I can see the black and brindled pigs. A boy is grating coconut flesh coarsely, skinny dogs with scarred faces are panting in the grass, there’s the bleat of women’s voices and an old woman comes singing through the finely drizzling rain; she stops, noisily snorts up her mucus and lingers a while under the flat green canopy of the mango trees.
An hour later Douglas has mobilized his lethargic cousin Winter, along with the family car. From the glove compartment wafts the aroma of vanilla pods, green ones and black and brown flecked ones. The little tree air freshener on the rear view mirror can’t compete.
Underway, Douglas’s commentary is all on the one topic:
‘Look at all these coconuts. See how rich the soil here is! We’ve got any amount of mangoes, so many we’re even feeding them to the pigs. We only need money for electricity and fresh water and for the kids’ schoolbooks, everything else literally grows on trees. Look how much kava we’ve got; I’ve never seen this much kava on Nuku’alofa.’
Here and there a few plots have been cut into the sparse jungle of coconut palms, mango trees, weeds and other undergrowth and planted densely with vanilla and kava bushes – land for cultivation chopped out of the bush, and which nature, from all sides, is constantly trying to reclaim, with rampant undergrowth and encroaching branches everywhere.
Presently we find ourselves climbing a cliff high above the sea. A good five metres from the edge, Douglas stops dead and keeps tugging at my shoulder to pull me back. Far below us, birds wheel out from the cliff-face, and spume froths between the black volcanic boulders.
‘I get dizzy easily,’ Douglas explains. ‘Even when I’m sitting in the sea and put a diving mask on and look at the bottom, it makes me giddy.’
Suddenly, this colossal man seems quite delicate. We carry on along the cliffs. The cliff tops are rounded and grassy, while inland the land sweeps away in loose folds, like careless drapery. Here, on the most beautiful spot on the island, high above the sea where one only has the wind for company, there once lived a German friend of the old, plump king of Tonga. This mysterious German built his house in complete solitude, cut off from everyone, and set about raising pigs.
But after a few years it emerged that the man had six passports and twice as many aliases. Also, a U-boat which he was in radio contact with was once rumoured to have surfaced in the bay. When these stories began to seep into the public domain, the authorities picked up his scent and he was forced to flee. The king, greatly perturbed, took swift action and summarily had the mysterious German’s house razed to the ground. It was as if, by doing so, he was wanting to expunge his memory of the man too. Under the house, a vast hole came to light, presumably a dungeon of some sort. But for whom? Soon after, the fugitive was shot in the back on a neighbouring island. No one ever found out who he really was.
We drive back to his mother’s house, where the mourning party has by now dispersed. They’re all waiting for the arrival of the coffin, which is supposed to come on the ship first thing that morning. Douglas sets off to do some condolence visits.
In a village that’s been very much left to itself, I find myself likewise left to my own devices, amid free-running hens, free-running pigs and free-running strangers. Here, too, there are scarcely any fences. Throughout the island, everything lies strewn about like on some opulent lawn, with pigs and huts and columns of smoke and stories and songs. Today we’ve had all kinds of weather, none of it very long-lasting. The clouds are scudding by.
If you were to ask me what my ideal footpath is, it would be one of the paths here: light or reddish-brown earth, without any demarcation, and palms dotted about irregularly and piglets crossing it now and then. You hear the wind, the shouts of children, an axe, a cockerel, and in the fields to either side stand the mango trees with their broad-leaved canopies. The huts are surrounded by flowerbeds that are home to the most exotic plants, and butterflies of an unimagined size and colour flutter round the banana bushes. The voices of the old women crack in the wind like flags. You hear our own footsteps, you stop and it is perfectly still and complete.
We take the family car to the harbour and park by the bollards. Men lurch up like they’re staggering under their own weight. A large group of black-clad, mat-bedecked people, solemnly bowing to each other and respectfully greeting one another, gathers at the quayside.
When the ship docks, Leah and Stephen are the last people to disembark, before the coffin is unloaded. They sidle up, pale and earnest, to a group of locals who make not the slightest move towards them, but who immediately close ranks around the couple, so that I lose sight of them. In a great throng, they walk off down the dirt track, and I ask myself how they’re planning to square their own conspiracy theories with the great system of taboos.
The ornate coffin is the last thing to come off the ferry. Where the ship’s ramp meets the quayside, they’re all standing there in black, and in the grotesque bulk of their bast and mat cloaks, which they sometimes roll up laboriously. Douglas
especially, who’s wearing a mat that looks dirty and frayed and keeps on popping open, seems to have changed character entirely. He appears comical, and when the women start fiddling with his mat cowl, he gawps at them like a village idiot. But at one point both of his hands, with all nine fingers, are pressed up against a gate on the breakwater. His niece looks at him, I look at him, and then she and I look straight at one another. A taboo wouldn’t be a taboo if he were simply to tell us what had happened at that juncture.
The coffin is loaded onto a decorated truck and immediately covered with mats. The women sit up alongside it as it sets off on its final journey in a slow-moving convoy with a police escort. It will come to a halt finally on the lawn in the middle of a great feast, where the guests will contribute their good memories of the deceased and the bereaved will contribute the food. Throughout the whole night, until sunrise, they must stay by the fireplace, since it is the family’s duty to keep all the funeral guests supplied with nourishment on a running basis.
Finally, at dawn, when the visitors’ stories have dried up and the spirits have all departed, the fire may also be extinguished. Justice has been done to the deceased. It was a lovely send-off, a worthy feast, and now the departed may rest in peace.
Next morning, when I walk into my familiar Beach Café in Nuku’alofa, Kerry is already sitting there. She’s busy picking out bits of spaghetti with her fork from a fish stew, and waves me over.
‘You’ve heard the news, I suppose? It was bound to happen sometime. I warned about it time and again …’
‘Warned about what?’
‘The Princess Ashika sank on the overnight sailing to Ha’afeva. It’s been less than a month since she came into service. They’ve only picked up fifty-four people alive, eighty-seven are still missing, but the toll’s rising by the hour. Trouble is, who on earth here had a regular ticket, who was a registered passenger?’
‘How did it happen?’
‘The police are acting very professionally, they’re not jumping to any premature conclusions or issuing statements. But I hear the ship wasn’t even properly seaworthy. Anyone who had a berth below deck will have drowned. They haven’t even been able to salvage the bodies. But the men standing at the railings and the smokers are probably the only ones who’ve survived. Did you really hear nothing about it?’
The Ends of the Earth Page 35