by Paul Theroux
“Two years ago,” Lyndon said, “there were two small children in the village who were thought to be evil. They were causing bad things to happen. That’s what people said.”
The breeze ruffled the thatch on the pavilion roof, and I could hear the low breathing of the villagers.
“So what happened to the children?”
“They were killed.”
“How?”
“Poisoned.”
“By whom?”
“A bwaga’u. Someone in our village.”
“Do you know who?”
No one replied. There was darkness and silence. Someone m our village. A sorcerer. But it was a very small village.
7
Aground in the Troubled Trobriands
“We cannot take the short cut. I saw some naked girls this morning on that road,” Simon said, smiling – but there was a tremble of anxiety on his purplish lips.
This was my second visit to the Trobes – I had just been dropped at the airstrip by the Moresby plane and Simon, barefoot and toothless, had met me at the airstrip in his rusty pick-up truck. Simon disproved Malinowski’s observation, “They give at first approach not so much the impression of wild savages as of smug and self-satisfied bourgeois.”
The surprise to me was that Simon was smiling at all. At the road-side a little earlier an elderly Indian priest wearing a straw hat and shorts had asked him for a ride. Simon said, “You Catholic mission?” and when the priest nodded, Simon said, “No, no, no!” and gunned the engine. The mission was next to his village. “They are bad people,” he explained to me. “They are troubling my village.”
My collapsible kayak was in the back with all my camping gear, and a large bundle of presents – the T-shirts, the lantern, the spear points and fish-hooks, and all the rest of the stuff the people from Kaisiga had asked me to bring.
“I saw the girls doing the mwaki-mwaki,” and he giggled at the thought of it. He had dusty hair and a brown scarred face. “Wearing short skirts.” That meant the brief, bristly grass skirts. “They lifted their skirts up. They show their arse and private parts.”
“What will happen if we go there?”
“They will rape us.”
“How can they rape us if we just lie there? It’s physically impossible.”
“They will” – and now he smiled his red-toothed beteljuice smile – “sit on our faces.”
“Does that frighten you?”
“Very much.”
“They wouldn’t attack a dim-dim like me.”
“Yes. One was attacked some years ago. And Dennis” – Dennis was the local Member of Parliament, but a dimdim – “they chased Dennis last year.”
“The Yam Festival isn’t supposed to start until next week,” I said.
“It started today,” Simon said. “This is the first day of yam harvest.”
Perfect, I thought.
The Trobrianders who hung around the lodge, or who worked there – it was never clear who was who – greeted me in a friendly way and helped me carry my gear. “This is your boat, Mr Paul!” In places where the passage of time is unimportant, where there are no deadlines, where there is little sense of urgency – Pacific islands, the landlocked countries of Africa, the clearings in the South American jungle – people seem to have excellent memories. And they seldom remark on how long it has been since your last visit. You are welcomed, not effusively but warmly. You are fed. It is as though you had never left.
“Anything new?” I asked them.
“No,” they said.
The food at the lodge was much worse than before. I sat down to the first course, which was a dish holding one orange segment, a small withered carrot, some brown discs of banana and a cold gray cut-open hot dog.
“The cook is on strike,” Gertrude said. She was skinny and wizened, though she was no more than thirty-five. In a place where the average life-expectancy was forty-something – because of malaria, TB and bacterial infections – Gertrude was regarded as (and looked) rather old.
I asked her to bring me fish, yams and sweet potato, and if they didn’t have it in the kitchen, I said, why not get it at the village next door? She brought it, and then sat with me while I ate, and we talked about the yam harvest. Just that morning some girls had accosted a man as they were leaving the gardens with some yams. The yams were special, magical; the carrying was always done by women, and in this matrilineal society the women had power.
“They took him on the ground,” Gertrude said. “They scratched him on his arms.”
“Girls or women?”
“Just the girls. Not the women. The girls are young. They can do as they like. They are public property. But even some women wear short skirts at this time of year. Their husbands cannot do anything about it.”
“Do you wear a short skirt sometimes?”
“If I want to!” she said, and laughed hard. “What do they do in America?”
“Men and women chase each other all year, not just at harvest time. But it’s not so much fun. Also they pay the women sometimes.”
“They pay here, in some villages. Five kina. Or twokina, if the man doesn’t have a job.”
I loved that.
“They call it the ‘Two Kina Bush.’ You pay the money and do it in the trees.”
The wind had blown all night and it was still blowing hard in the morning, which would make for rough paddling conditions. It was cooler than on my previous visit, with scattered clouds. But I wanted to set off, so I carried my gear to the shore and – as men and boys wandered over to watch (“Waga,” they muttered) – started assembling my boat. Nine of the men carried bunches of betel nuts. They were from the island of Munawata, which lay a few miles to the west of Kaileuna. They sat and watched and spat blood-red betel juice, and they laughed each time they saw me stumble or heard me curse, as I put the boat together.
Two Chinese men joined them. They said they were from Malaysia and I guessed they were here in the Trobriands to buy some heche-de-mer, the sea-slugs the Chinese regard as a delicacy and call sea-cucumbers. Local divers found the best of these creatures in deep water, and got about fifteen cents apiece from island traders, who processed them. The fat squishy sausages were smoke-dried and turned into hard little clicks, then bagged into forty-pound sacks and exported – with carvings, sea-slugs were one of the few Trobriand exports. (Trochus shells for buttons and pretty butterflies – sold to lepidopterists – were others.) Selling sea-slugs was the only thing to do with them. Most Trobrianders laughed at the thought of anyone eating them, though when there was not much food available some people ate them.
Mr Lim and Mr Choo watched me loading my boat.
“You are going out in that little boat alone?” Mr Lim asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s adventurous,” he said.
“If you say so.”
“But you don’t look adventurous,” he said. “You look like a professor.”
“Thank you, Mr Lim.”
Mr Choo said, “I am adventurous.”
“Good for you,” I said.
“But I wouldn’t go alone. It is dangerous to go alone.”
Mr Lim was scowling at the group of men from Munawata.
“But the Aborigines seem friendly,” he said.
Andrew, a dark sturdy fisherman who worked at the lodge, was talking to the men. When they spoke to him, he laughed, and said, “They told me, ‘Tell the dim-dim to be careful.’”
“Why do they say that?”
“Because the water is very rough around Kaileuna,” Andrew said. “That’s why they are here. They are waiting for the weather to improve.”
It might have given me pause, but I knew their canoes well enough now. They were well built but did not have much freeboard and in a heavy sea they shipped water. They could go anywhere, even in fairly poor sea conditions, but there was often a lot of bailing to be done, with their wooden scoops. My boat could go anywhere, in almost any weather: that was the great virtue o
f a kayak.
But I had never paddled this boat so heavily laden. Besides my food and my gear, I had bundles of presents, and some of the presents – the fifty T-shirts and the fishing tackle, for example – I had crammed into a big canvas sack about the size of a mail-bag and tied to the stern deck of my boat, where it sat like a carcass.
The weight thrust the boat into the water and all this wetted surface gave it stability. But it was harder to paddle and, beyond the clay-colored channel and the weedy shallows and the crocodile nostrils poking up at Boli Point, where the open water began there was a strong wind blowing and four-foot breaking waves.
And the high lump of cargo lashed to the boat caught the wind and I was turned like a weathervane. I seriously wondered whether I should go back, or camp on this western side of Kiriwina Island and wait for better weather. As I pondered this – Kaileuna Island lay in the distance – the wind was still spinning my boat sideways, and waves were breaking across the bow deck, and I realized that in my indecision I had been blown quite far from shore.
So I kept at it. If you are stuck in chop and wind, kayakers say, just stay upright and paddle through it. I had the entire day ahead of me, there was no hurry, all I had to do now was plow on to Kaileuna. The breaking waves were the worst of it, and every now and then I was drenched – being slapped in the face by a cold frothy wave inspired a nervous dread in me, the feeling (as the water ran down my neck) that there was worse to come.
I headed for the nearest part of Kaileuna, which was a point of land, so that I could shelter and have a drink before pushing on along the coast to Kaisiga. It took me three hours to reach this rocky nose, but before I had time to celebrate my little achievement with a swig of water, two boys appeared on the beach, carrying spears – straight shafts with home-made rusty points.
“We will not hurt you,” one said. He was wearing a pair of goggles that gave him the popeyed appearance of a villain.
But that in itself was a kind of warning. I took out my own spear – a long fiberglass one with a wicked-looking trident on the business end.
“Want to see my spear?”
They admired it, looking suitably respectful. “Where are you going?”
I said, “To Kaisiga.”
“We do not like those people,” said the boy with the goggles. “We are from Giwa.”
I said, “Are the girls in Giwa raping the men this week?”
“On the mainland the girls rape men. Not here.” “Mainland” meant Kiriwina. This larger island was always called “the mainland.” And the real mainland they called New Guinea.
“Come to Giwa,” they said, as I paddled away. “We will show you our village.”
It was another hour or so to Kaisiga and, in a stretch of water where there were normally lots of fishing canoes, little dugouts and larger outriggers, there were no boats at all, only a sea of rough water. And there were no people on the beach, only the sweeping wind and the thrashing of thatch and the loose panels of the woven huts.
I was spotted – first by some children, then by some men sheltering behind a hut – and they helped me ashore, Micah, and Josiah, and Lyndon, who called himself Leendon.
Josiah said, “You came from the station?” – meaning Losuia – “In this wind? Eh! Eh!”
I could see that they were pleased. They themselves had planned to go fishing today, but instead stayed ashore because of the stormy weather. They were flattered that I had come all this way in the wind and the waves to see them – and, more than that, risked getting wet in order to bring them T-shirts and fishing tackle.
John was at the garden, but Esther was at her hut. She was sitting crosslegged, suckling her infant.
“This is Anne,” she said. “As I told you. We named her after your wife.”
“It’s a nice name,” I said.
It was simply impossible for me to explain to her, or anyone on these happy islands, the derangement in my life.
I gave Esther the pressure lamp I had brought her from Moresby, and then I unloaded my boat. As I was setting up my tent, the wind rose, gusting madly and lashing the coconut palms. Meanwhile, about ten children were kicking a football nearby – every so often the ball would bash into my tent. I waved the kids away, but they just laughed at me – they were fearless. And when the rain started they kept kicking the ball and screeching, as they ran and splashed.
The frenzied kids, and the rain and wind, exhausted me. I went into my tent and made notes about my morning paddle in the high wind, while sipping the sherry that I hid from these prohibitionists. Every so often the children booted the ball into the side of my tent, but they laughed when I told them to play somewhere else. Finally I dozed off.
The gong woke me. I heard the kids hurrying in the pattering rain, and then,
Weespa a frayer in da morning
Weespa a frayer at noon …
The sweetness of their voices was undeniable, but in it was a note of mockery. They no longer sounded innocent to me. These prayer rituals were no more than momentary pauses in their relentless teasing, and indeed seemed to make their teasing worse.
Pastor John had come back from the gardens in order to conduct this evening service. I met him amid the blowing trees a little later and told him that I had brought the things they had asked for – the watch, the lantern, the T-shirts, the fishing tackle.
A number of villagers gathered in the wind and drizzle to watch me unpack the bundle of T-shirts which I had collected from friends to bring here. I let them choose the ones they wanted, and they immediately put them on – Boston Celtics, Hard Rock Cafe, Me and My Girl, Punahou School, Great Wall Hotel Beijing, Dream Girls, Braves, and so forth. They took them without ceremony. Though there was gratitude in the way they accepted them it was wordless thanks, yet it was so muted and perfunctory it seemed to verge on disappointment.
I gave Leendon some fish-hooks. He smiled at me. “But where is the line? What good are hooks without line?”
Zechariah thanked me for the spear point. He said, “Now I need a spear rubber” – meaning the tube of surgical rubber they fastened to the shaft of the spear to give it propulsion.
“You can borrow Micah’s,” I said. I had given Micah a length of rubber.
But Zechariah had seen that I had several more – ones I had planned to use for trading in other villages. “I want my own rubber,” he said.
“Did you get me extra batteries for my watch?” John asked.
“This shirt does not fit me,” Derrick said, exchanging aBraves T-shirt for one that said A Day in the Life ofCanada.
In a society that operated on a principle of continuous gift-giving, what I had done was merely to perform a ritual, fulfilling an obligation, which was why they felt free to nag me. And when I showed myself completely indifferent to their nagging, they changed the subject.
“There is a feast at Sinaketa tomorrow,” Leendon said. “I am sailing there. You could come with us.”
“What if the weather is bad?”
“I am a good sailor,” Leendon said, and laughed. “I am big-pela, strong-pela. Ha!”
“I might paddle in my boat,” I said.
The wind blew so hard that night it lifted the fly of my tent and soaked the mosquito net. And the pelting of raindrops and the sound of the wind in the trees woke me and made me anxious. Hearing the waves loudly hitting the beach I poked my head out of the tent, but in the blackness I saw nothing. So I switched on my flashlight and disturbed a dusky crab twice the size of my hand clawing at my tent flap.
I made green tea with my little stove, and had this for breakfast with Esther’s rice, and pumpkin tops boiled in coconut milk. The wind was still blowing hard and I could see that the whole lagoon was frothy with chop and breaking waves. Was this a day for sailing or paddling anywhere?
Leendon said, “We are going. Come with us.”
This man had once told me: We sail out, and if it gets dark, we find an island and stay there for the night. There are islands everywhere i
n this sea, and there is always an empty island at night. So I trusted him.
The whole village turned out to launch Leendon’s out-rigger canoe into the surf. I carried my binoculars and my compass. There were nine of us on board, including just one woman who crouched at the bow. I sat on the gunwale of the canoe and the seven men were occupied as crew members, two adjusting lines and trimming the rigging, two using the steering paddles jammed between braces, one on the main sheet, one standing at the bow and yelling about the heading, and Leendon alternately grunting orders and bailing the canoe. It would have been hard to sail this twenty-foot canoe with fewer than seven men. We began to ship water as soon as we left shore and, when we burst over the reef, sea water streamed in. Most of it came through the uncaulked seam in the longitudinal planks that had been added to give the vessel greater height and volume. No one seemed worried by this, least of all Leendon, who bailed with an old wooden scoop they called a yatura.
We had a lateen sail made of thick blue plastic sheeting and we sailed with the wind striking us on our outrigger side, which lifted the platform towards the body of the boat and almost submerged the seam of the plank on the opposite, down-tilted side. We could not sail very close to the wind, and at the beginning everything seemed very chaotic to me; but after a while I saw that each person on board had a specific role to play and in this rough sea was very attentive to his task.
The canoe was slow to respond to any trimming, even slower to turn, and was sluggish in the waves. We were all soon soaked to the skin as soon as we were past the reef.
“Leendon, does this canoe have a name?”
He said the name, Toiyokwai. “It means, ‘Too Big-Headed.’ You say, ‘Do this,’ ‘Do that’ but the person don’t listen. They got their own way. You can’t tell them a thing.”
Pompous, Arrogant, Over-Confident. “I know the type.”
“But why are we heading out to sea?”
“It is better in this wind.”
We looked back at the disappearing islands, where another canoe was struggling against a lighter wind.
“We’re going to beat him,’’ I said.