The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “You will have to pay that old man,” one boy said. “He is our chief.”

  He was sitting on a log under a tree, listening to an early model transistor radio the size of a Kleenex box. It was bruised and dirty and patched with tape, but a buzzy voice was murmuring in the speaker.

  The old man’s name was Marcel Devo – this was another Catholic village: St Theresa’s Church was on the bluff just above it – and he said he thought he was seventy-seven. He did not speak Pidgin or English, only Savosavo.

  “Ask him if he remembers the war,” I said to one of the boys.

  “I was already married when the war started,” he said, and the boy translated.

  “What do you remember?”

  “Everything,” he said, in a croaky voice. “I helped carry the American food and equipment. I worked hard. You see this road?” He gestured to a rutted path that sloped from the beach. “The Americans built it. It was the only road we had in Savo.”

  “Did you see fighting during the war?”

  “There was fighting everywhere.” And he raised his red eyes to me. “Smoke and fire. And loud noises. Ships all over the water.”

  Putting his radio down he nearly dropped it. He was very feeble, but I had reminded him of the nightmarish years of the war.

  “It was terrible” – the boy was still translating – “Some bodies washed ashore and others were eaten by sharks. We were frightened. We did not know what to do.”

  “What were you listening to on your radio?”

  “The news,” he said. “The war will start in Iraq and it will come here. Either the Iraq people will come first and then the Americans will drive them away, or else the Americans will come and the Iraq people will fight them here.”

  “Tell him I don’t think that will happen,” I said.

  When he heard this he muttered to the boy, who said, “You are wrong.”

  Normally the chief was paid five Solomon dollars by anyone who wanted to use Kaonggele’s path to hike up to the volcano, but the old man said I did not have to pay.

  “I saw you paddling your canoe here, so you can go for nothing.”

  Eight of the boys came with me – they had nothing else to do, they said. It took an hour up to the rim of the crater where I looked down and saw the gray steam blowing out of the cracks down below. That to me was a less impressive spectacle than the hot springs here and there on the upward path – little boiling pools, where people gathered to cook their food. I hung around one group which was simultaneously steaming cassava and sweet potatoes and ears of corn – the vegetables were thickly wrapped in leaves. A man offered me an ear of corn, which I ate, and looking for a place to fling the cob after I had finished I stepped into a puddle of sulfurous water and scalded my foot.

  Cooking on free hot water on the slopes of a volcano! These people had everything! Birds flew in and gave them hundreds of huge eggs a day, and all they had to do was carry them up the hill and boil them. They had nuts and oranges and lemons and breadfruit and papaya – the trees required no care at all. Their pigs looked after themselves, so did their chickens.

  It seemed an almost unimaginably pleasant life.

  “Do you have missionaries here?”

  “No. But a priest comes once a month for mass.”

  They showed me the church. It was wooden, and rather roughly put together, and big and musty and empty.

  “What about mosquitoes?”

  “They don’t trouble us.”

  But they troubled me. The only aspect of this island I did not like was its pestilential insects – fleas and midges and mosquitoes, and most of all its skinny biting flies that never left me alone, in spite of my insect repellent.

  I gave the boys some chocolate cookies and made a point of saving three or four for the chief, Marcel Devo. In return they climbed the coconut palms and hacked open some nuts. I drank a whole one and filled my water bottle with the sweet water from the others.

  A few days later I paddled back to Kaonggele, but instead of a somnolent village I found boys and men engaged in furious activity on the beach, setting out piles of yams and bananas on palm leaves. One boy, whom I recognized from my previous visit, was hacking a dead pig to pieces with a bloody machete.

  “What is this all about?” I asked.

  “For peace,” the boy said and smiled knowingly.

  “Do you mean there was trouble here?”

  “There is peace now,” a furtive man said.

  “This man Phillip make trouble,” the boy with a machete said.

  Phillip, the furtive fellow, was skinny, about thirty years old. He had a pinched and rather anxious face, and did not look at all like a troublemaker. He squirmed and said, “Sha-sha-sha,” trying to shut the boy up.

  “That is Phillip’s pig,” another boy said teasingly, and laughed.

  “There was fighting,” the first boy said.

  “Did you fight?”

  “No. Ask Phillip.”

  Phillip was sorely embarrassed. He said in a low voice, “I made the trouble with that other village. I made a fight. So I do this to stop the trouble.”

  This feast was a zokule, a peacemaking meal. Phillip had quarreled with a man from a neighbouring village, and caused bad feeling. To bring peace he had offered his pig and the others had provided vegetables. When the food was all set out the offended village would walk down the beach and eat it and in that way, having shared this food and especially Phillip’s pig, would be placated.

  That day and other days, when I encountered men or boys in canoes – not outriggers, but the slender dugouts they used for fishing and playing – they challenged me to races, and I beat them. Their canoes were sleek enough but their paddles were single-bladed and rather heavy and hard to handle. I had a carbon-fiber double-bladed paddle – the usual for kayaking. When I loaned it to any of them, and I used that person’s paddle, I always lost. So I encouraged them to use my paddle and tried to convince them to carve long double-bladed paddles for themselves, using this design.

  They usually said they would try. They were certainly open to suggestions. Araban’s schoolgirl sister Agnes, who was a plump and mature fourteen, had a large fresh set of scars on her cheek – a circle radiating wiggly lines.

  “Dis da sun,” she explained.

  Yes, a radiant sun, carved into her cheek.

  “Is that a custom here on Savo?”

  “No. On Malaita. It is not our custom. I asked the Malaita people to do it to me. They came here to dance. One month ago.”

  “Did it hurt?” I asked.

  “Yes. Very much. They did it with a fork and a knife. Afterwards they put salt water on it.”

  I thought, How strange. Because another group of people in the Solomons had a tradition of scarring their faces, this Savo schoolgirl had offered hers, and had her cheek painfully knifed open with an obnoxious disfigurement she would carry on her face for the rest of her life.

  “You like it?” she asked.

  I told her what she wanted to hear.

  The nights were so starry they lit the island even before the moon had risen. The children played and sang until midnight. I thought they were bratty, but one day they brought me a chair and I felt ashamed of myself. I could actually sit comfortably under a palm tree, writing or reading, while they swatted flies. I usually waited until the shore was empty of people and I went nambis, feeling like an utter fool, so exposed. You squatted at the tidemark, facing inland.

  Except for the insects, and the occasional snake, life for me on Savo was idyllic. But I soon realized that I was caught between the feuding of two brothers – Araban, the fat former politician, who spoke English well if a bit pompously; and Mapopoza, the skinny illiterate who did little except stuff his mouth with betel and lime. Both men were capable of being jolly. But of course, Mapo, who had no pretensions, who had never left the village, had the most power.

  Ataban, however, controlled the egg fields – actually owned a quarter mile of beach where the eg
gs were laid. It was strange that these wild birds were in a sense privately controlled. This was an almost inexhaustible source of wealth, and it was obvious that he was rather resented for it – but what could anyone do? He charged the diggers five eggs a day in order to go on digging for more eggs. On successive days I met Araban in the egg fields, and what I had thought to be easily-won food turned out to be hot, dirty, tiring work.

  So as not to risk breaking the eggs, the men began digging with a small flat piece of wood, but after they had dug about eighteen inches they lay on their bellies and used their bare hands. The volcanic sand was heavy and the men labored in the full sun, sometimes digging to three or four feet before they came upon the egg. It amazed me to think of the bird digging that deep, laying the egg and then pushing all the sand back in with its scratching feet. All morning, in the egg fields of Savo, there was the curious spectacle of men stuck in holes, chucking sand out, and all you saw were their sweaty kicking legs smeared with sand grams.

  A young man named Walter told me he was saving up his eggs. He had eighty-five at the moment. He wanted to take a hundred eggs to market in Honiara. It would cost him twenty-four Solomon dollars for the round trip on the motor-boat, and a few dollars to hire a table at the market. His profit for fourteen days of laborious egg-digging would be less than thirty American dollars.

  Peter from the village of Alialia presented a strange sight. He had been to London in the 1970s on a parliamentary delegation. He had met the British foreign secretary and the Queen, and had worn a borrowed suit, and here he was lying on his belly in his Foster’s Beer T-shirt, sand in his springy hair, his arms filthy, his face gleaming with sweat, scrabbling in the sand with his bare hands, searching for a megapode egg.

  The egg fields were sort of a men’s club – women were not allowed to dig or even to set foot in the place. The diggers joshed each other and gassed with me, while Ataban sat plumply in the shade of a tree, accepting his tribute of five eggs from each man – he collected between twenty and a hundred eggs a day in his cloth bag. When he had three hundred or so – a week’s accumulation – he sent his son to Honiara to sell them at the market.

  “Everyone wants them,” Ataban said.

  One day I said, “Do you have the same number of megapode birds as years ago?”

  “No. We have less.”

  It was predictable enough. “So why don’t you give the eggs a chance to hatch? That way you’d end up with more birds and more eggs.”

  “The young people would never accept it, although that was done in olden times, when the bird was worshiped with sacrifices.”

  That day he showed me the grave of the man who was the last person to carry out sacrifices. The man, Kigata, had died in 1965. The usual sacrifice was the burning of a pig to ashes in a tabu-grove on the cliff behind the village. But Ataban explained a sort of Manichaean idea that the bird was also associated with a certain snake, its “devil” or spirit.

  On the way back to the village, I said, “What month do you harvest the yams?”

  “Usually in June.”

  “You have plenty of food that month. Why not forbid the digging of eggs then? Set June aside for hatching. A few weeks later you’d have megapodes hatching all over the place, and you’d have more eggs.”

  “That is a very wise observation,” Ataban said. It was hard to tell whether he was satirizing me.

  “I will put that idea to the council,” he said. “We will make it a bylaw.”

  It was in the egg fields, in the breather between eggs, that they became very chatty. They asked about the price of oil in other countries, about the power of the Soviet Union and Japan, about the greenhouse effect (this question raised by a very old man who said, “A man in Honiara told me –”), the cost of living elsewhere, and how much you would have to pay for a house in various countries. Invariably the talk in the egg fields turned to the stand-off in the Gulf, and after Ataban demanded my assurance that in the event of a war the Americans would win (“No problem,” I said. “But men will die”), he began teasing me.

  “Put away your guns!” he said. “Put away bombs and planes and bullets. Fight with your hands. We Melanesians can beat you – with our hands!”

  “Rabis. Bullseet,” I said, and the others tittered. “That is all nambaten. You wouldn’t have a chance. We are bigpela, strongpela.”

  “No! We are Melanesian!” Ataban said. “we are warriors, and we have magic.”

  “Ya, ya,” the men said, and began jeering at me.

  “Where was your Melanesian magic in 1942?” I asked.

  “Oh, dear,” Ataban said in a squeaky voice. “We no have no magic at that time. We just ran into the bush and let the Americans fight the Japanese. Ha-ha.”

  After that particular discussion a twenty-year-old named Edward sidled up to me and said, “But Rambo is very strong. He can fight without guns.”

  Rambo is one of the folk-heroes of the Solomons – indeed, his fame pervades Oceania. Anyone hastily condemning this credulity as simple savagery must recall the utterance of the American President Ronald Reagan in which he mentioned how he had seen a Rambo movie at the White House, and how the witless brute in this worthless movie had inspired him.

  Over dinner at his hut one night (megapode eggs, the Spam they called “Ma Ling,” and kumara, sweet potatoes), Mapo asked me, “Mi laik lukim Rambo video tumas. Yu lukim Commando? Nambawan man long Commando.”

  “Yu lukim video long pies Balola?”

  “Ya. Mi kros. Dispela generator bagarap.”

  The one generator on the island had no use except as a source of energy to show videos here.

  Pidgin was in fact rarely spoken on Savo, except to outsiders. The island language, called Savosavo, was said by linguists to be Papuan – not Melanesian at all. Ataban denied this, but there were many Polynesian-sounding words in the language. For example, the Savosavo word for “island” was molumolu, undoubtedly a cognate with Polynesian forms (motu in Tahiti, moku in Hawaiian, and so forth).

  “Where did Savo people originally come from?” I asked Ataban.

  Before he could answer, Peter the egg-digger said, “Asia.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ataban said. “We believe that we were always here. That we came from a bird or a snake. The bird – maybe it was a frigate bird – laid an egg, and a woman came out. That is what I think.”

  “What about the people on other islands? What about those people who live on Ontong Java?”

  They were Polynesians on this small atoll in the north of the Solomon group.

  “Maybe they sailed there,” Ataban said. “But we came from birds and sharks and snakes.”

  And, he explained, after death they turned back into sharks. It was a belief on Savo that sharks were the ghosts of dead people. For this reason sharks were often spoken to and given food.

  There was no fear of sharks in the Solomons, but then there was no fear of sharks anywhere I went in the Pacific. This was not so strange. It is a statistical fact that only twenty-five people a year are killed by sharks. Many more people are killed by pigs.

  Most of the time, paddling around Savo, I wore earphones and listened to my Walkman, the same tape – because I only had one at the time – which was of Puccini and Verdi arias sung by Kiri Te Kanawa: Vissi d’arte from Tasca, O mio babbino caro from Gianni Schicchi, Un bel di, vedremo from Butterfly, Fors’é lui from La Traviata, and others. It is almost impossible to describe the peculiar poignancy of being close to a small, lovely island, passing under the high cliffs surmounted by slender palms, the strange lumpy hills and calderas created by the vulcanism of the fairly recent past (the explorer Mendaña saw Savo in eruption in 1568), the surf whitening the rocky beaches, and the children with sunburned hair running from the bamboo huts and playing in the waves, all of them – the people, their huts, their canoes, their little gardens, the women gaping up at me from their washing – dwarfed by the active volcano just behind them, as I listened to the rich soprano voice singing Q
uel’ amor with piercing sweetness as I paddled on.

  Or, more appropriately, Se come voi, the aria of the pretty flowers – because the flowers were visible from where I paddled. If I were as pretty as they, then I could always stay close to my love, and would say “Don’t forget me” –

  Se come voi piccina io fossi,

  O vaghi fior, sempre sempre

  Vicina potrei stare al mio amor …

  Under the pink and purple sky of early evening, paddling in a sea the color of rose-water, while the cockatoos flashed from tree to tree and the frigate birds soared, I felt lucky. I had found this island by chance, and it seemed to me that if the people were not interfered with by tourists or bureaucrats, the island would remain intact and the people would be able to manage well on their own. It daunted me to think of the permanence of that strange simple life, but it must have been a fruitful life or else the people would not have been so generous and unsuspicious.

  When I perceived this place as sad, as I sometimes did, listening to those arias and watching this green island revolve past my boat, I realized that the sadness was mine. I had brought it here. It was part of my mood in the day. It affected my dreams, which were of gray chaotic London and steep stairs leading to thick locked doors – no doors here, no locks, no stairs even – and dreams of delay and missed appointments, almost meeting my wife and then bamboozled by a sudden orgy of naked people on a street corner or a bolted back door, and arriving and whimpering Too Late, and waking up in a sweat, hearing the sloshing surf and remembering I was in Savo, in the Solomon Islands, alone in a tent on the beach.

  I paddled because it was a way of being alone. I paddled because I liked listening to music. I paddled because the water was too filthy for swimming in. I also paddled to give the day a shape, because I usually wrote my notes in the morning, exerted myself in the afternoon – only eight or ten miles, but in that equatorial heat the sun shone from a cloudless sky. I paddled because it was often the only way of getting from one place to another.

  If Mapo was not with me at sunset, Ataban (who hated him) stopped by for a chat. One day he asked whether I thought it was odd that he should regard his brother as an enemy. I said I found it much more understandable that he should dislike or pity his brother than feel that way towards a vague acquaintance.