by Paul Theroux
That was a familiar refrain. In Polynesia I rarely met anyone who did not claim to get horribly seasick on a boat, no matter how short the trip. Even on the brief inter-island ferry rides this race of ancient mariners puked their guts out.
Again I was surprised by the Tongans as physical specimens. The girls and women were the most attractive I had seen so far – not just winsome and willing, as Melanesians had been, bare-breasted, with their shrieking laughter and their splayed feet, nudging you in the guts after each wisecrack or snatching with tough hard hands. These Tongans were elegant – it was something in their posture, in their features, many actually looked noble – a prince here, a princess there. Something in their very langor (a nice word for laziness, after all) was sensual. Of course, many were fat and jolly, the big soft women, the chunky web-footed men, each fat Tongan packed with Pacific Brand corned beef, with salt, fat, natural juices and nitrites.
Men and women, old and young, walked slowly and very erect. Each person wore a mat tied around his or her waist, and some of these mats were no larger than a cummerbund, though some were enormous flaking carpets, crunched and wound clumsily around a person’s mid-section, making them look even fatter, and some of the mats twisted and dragged and frayed against the ground.
None the less, in these days of preparation in Nuku’alofa, I could not remember having seen a people so bereft of enterprise, so slow of speech, so casual in manner, so indifferent to a schedule, so unable or unwilling to anticipate. Being inattentive, they were physically clumsy and had little manual dexterity. They dropped things, they forgot things, they broke promises. They drove slowly – who else in the world did that?
Salesi had a friend, Alipate. He had done Alipate a favor – something connected with land. By way of returning this favor to Salesi, Alipate looked after me for a while. Alipate was a wily bird, and rather unwilling. Sometimes after we agreed to meet, because I needed a ride – which he had offered – he didn’t turn up. The concept of face-saving was nearly as important in Tonga as it was in China. I could not mention that he had let me down. I had to pretend to be grateful to him, and Salesi, for a favor neither of them had done me. In fact reneging on the promise had complicated things for me – I had had to get a taxi, not an easy matter in a place where phones seldom worked. I visited the sacred flying foxes of Kolovai – feathery casuarina trees draped with great shitting fruit bats – without Alipate’s promised ride.
“We are going to be late,” I said one day to Alipate.
We were on our way to the airline office. Since the boat wasn’t going this week to Vava’u I would have to fly.
“Yes, but they will be late,” Alipate said.
This was (aka tonga, the Tongan way.
Desperate to involve myself, I took an interest in Tongan graves. These were not the ancient pyramids and terraces and stately mounds that I saw elsewhere in the Pacific, but rather small earth mounds ringed with beer bottles shoved into the dirt. Granny’s grave, Mom’s grave, little Taviti’s grave. Some were in fenced-off plots, under large cloth canopies, with embroidered tapestries flapping in the wind – Jesus, the Last Supper, crosses; and underneath them, rows of Foster’s Beer cans, arranged symmetrically; or red banners and bunting; or tinsel – Christmas decorations were popular on Tongan graves, and Christmas was a long way off. They were everywhere, by the roadside, in cemeteries filled with big flapping banners and the funereal beer bottles, and in the yards of little huts, the grave being an adjunct to the house. Some were strung with tassels, or plastic flowers, or bunches of yellow ribbon; some had bottles as well as beer cans on the periphery; some had wind-chimes. Chinese funerals sometimes looked like this, but in a few days the ribbons were gone and the banners removed. In the case of Tonga the graves were everlastingly decorated.
Here and there was a tiny bungalow on a lawn, with windows, a little dwelling that you might mistake for a dog house. But no, it was a mausoleum – there was a grave inside.
While I was out visiting graves, someone stole my pajama bottoms. I had moved to a different hotel in the meantime but it seemed you were robbed wherever you went. (And isn’t hotel-room theft the worst? The thief sees you leave the room and he has all the time in the world to take what he wants.) I was fond of the pajama bottoms. The great thing about camping on islands was that you could wear your pajama bottoms all day.
I went to three tailor shops in Nuku’alofa and asked whether they could make me some more pajama bottoms. The women in these shops sat idly, propped against their sewing-machines, not working.
“We are too busy,” was the excuse at one shop. At another: “We are making school uniforms.” At the third: “Come back in a month.”
But I persevered and found a willing woman and her assistant, a boy who in the Tongan way had been raised as a girl – because there were no girls in the family, and a girl was needed. He was known as a faka leiti (“like a lady”) and he was helpful – responsive, competent. He conferred with his boss, who did not speak English. Yes, he said, they could make two pairs of pajama bottoms in a few days, for twenty dollars.
I decided to suspend judgment on Tonga – I would not generalize from what I saw in Nuku’alofa, and I wrote in 372 my diary: Tonga is itself. It had no investors, no immigrants, no history of occupation by foreigners. It had no desire to see strangers. Long-termers were actively discouraged. They did not even issue tourist visas to Fijian Indians (Fiji was only an hour away by jumbo jet) for fear they would stay and contaminate this Christian kingdom with Islam. I wondered whether there was another group of islands in the Pacific that was so much itself – one people, one language, one set of customs, one way.
Or was it changing? Viliami Ongosia, who lived in a lopsided hut outside Nuku’alofa, had once been a Methodist. But recently he had switched his allegiance to the Assembly of God. I asked him why. He said, “Because it has more spirit.”
“Methodists drink and Methodists don’t do what they say” – hypocrites, he implied, without using the word. These happy-clappy religions were gaining ground, and even the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries had a following in Vanuatu, on the island of Efate. They sold video cassettes of Swaggart himself, the old whore-hopper preaching his head off, and of course they solicited funds.
Viliami, like Salesi, became so seasick that although his mother was from Vava’u and most of his relatives lived there, he never went to the islands – the boat was out of the question, and he couldn’t afford the plane fare. He had sailed there once. He said, “I was so seasick I thought I was going to die. I could not hold my head up straight. It was terrible.”
I liked hearing stories of Polynesian seasickness. It was like discovering people you had always regarded as cannibals to be vegetarians. In fact, the Tongans had once been nearly as cannibalistic as the Fijians, but unlike the Fijians, who gloried in their cannibal past, the Tongans made nothing of it and seemed to resent any mention of it.
One year, seeking work, Viliami had gone to Fiji. He found no work, though he had gotten on well with the Fijians.
“But the Fijians are Melanesians and you are a noble Polynesian,” I said.
He smiled; he knew I was being sarcastic. He said, “I like them. They are good people.”
“What about the Indians there?”
“I never talk to them. They just look at me, and I look at them. They know how to save money.”
“How?”
“They carry their lunch to work. Just some curry. Never go to restaurants, never spend money.”
“Tongans go to restaurants all the time, of course,” I said, watching him closely. “Nuku’alofa is full of wonderful restaurants and delicious food.”
He shrugged. “But we don’t carry our food in a bag.” And he explained, “We too lazy to cook at home. We don’t care about saving money. But the Indians, they don’t eat meat – no pig, no cow, no horse.”
Vegetarianism was a way of saving money: it was not only a Tongan point of view. I had heard Fijians say as much. V
egetables were cheap. The expense in any of these island households was the meat supply. In a word, it was the high price of corned beef, imported from New Zealand. But if money was plentiful what these Tongans wanted was to get their teeth into a roast pig.
“And the Indians don’t eat dogs,” I said.
“Yes. No dog.”
“And no fruit bats.”
“Yes. No fruit bat.” He smiled. “You like fruit bat?”
“Never ate one, Viliami.”
“Taste good.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “In a soup?”
“No. Umu.” The underground oven had a similar name all over the Pacific.
“What about dogs? You stew them or umu them?”
“Always umu. I like to eat dogs but I don’t like to look at it when they are cutting it. I don’t want to see it. But it is all right in the oven. And I like to eat the dog meat.”
We were at the seafront, on a beach, watching some young girls swimming. A group of boys were also watching. This being Tonga the girls swam and thrashed into the water with all their clothes on. It was unheard of – because it was sinful – for any girl to wear a bathing-suit. And because wet clothes could be so revealing, the girls wore several layers – two shirts, two soggy skirts, trousers. They shrieked, mimicking suicide, and rolled off the pier, then thrashed and climbed back onto the pier, streaming with water, wearing every article of clothing known to man, and grinning with great big booby faces. It was a wonder they didn’t drown.
After a while, Viliami, who had a strong Tongan accent, uttered an incomprehensible sentence.
“Tocks putt not gets.”
Perhaps this was Tongan? No, what he meant was, Dogs but not cats.
“But does anyone in Tonga eat cats?”
“Plenty people in the bush eating cats. Not in Nuku’alofa, they don’t eat,” implying the enormous sophistication of not indulging in cat stew, “but in the bush, they do eat them and they say, ‘We eat gets!’”
The Tongans talked about food a great deal of the time. I was sheltering in a doorway one night during a drenching rain on my way back to my hotel (where, because of the terrible service, I swore I would never eat). In this same doorway was a Tongan named Koli, a man of about thirty.
After a while he said, “Boll, you like Tonga girls?”
“Yes,” I said. “Do you like American girls?”
He thought a moment, and then said, “No, I don’t like.”
The rain fell. The road was flooded. You could not walk – the pot-holes brimmed, the monsoon drain was clogged. The rain had brought darkness to Nuku’alofa.
“Boll.”
“Yes?”
“You like Tonga food?”
“Do you mean dogs and cats and horses and fruit bats?”
“Everyting.”
“I have not eaten much of that food.”
“Boll. You come to my house. You eat Tonga food. My wife cook it.”
“Maybe sometime,” I said, and thought: Perhaps I have them wrong. Perhaps they are friendly and warm and hospitable. But I had never found them nasty – that wasn’t the issue; I had found them unpredictable.
A Tongan Sunday was even deader than a Fijian Sunday. It began at midnight Saturday, when everything shut until Monday morning. At 5am on Sunday the church bells rang, and soon after a dirge-like harmonizing was heard from every Methodist chapel and every Free Wesleyan church. At 10pm that same night the voices were still raised in song, in praise of the Lord. And once during the day. Tongans went to church three times on Sunday, and they roundly condemned anyone who failed to. If you wanted to go snorkeling or swimming you had to make arrangements to do it on an offshore island.
The Sabbath, an official government handout stated, from midnight Saturday until midnight Sunday, is a day of rest in Tonga. The law says it shall be kept holy and no person shall practise his trade or profession, or conduct any commercial undertaking on the Sabbath. Any agreement made or document witnessed on the Sabbath shall be counted null and void of no legal effect. Please do not date your cheques on a Sunday …
No planes land or take off on a Tongan Sunday. No one is allowed to play games or to swim – Tongans are fined or given three months in jail for violating this law.
“Would it be appropriate for me to jog today?” an American asked – rather delicately I felt – at the hotel.
The answer was no: it was sacrilegious. If anyone was observed enjoying themselves on a Sunday there was hell to pay. Yet I never saw any evidence, in Tonga or else-where, that the sabbath exertion of three church services, three sermons, umpteen hymns and all those prayers made them better people the rest of the week. They were usually late, unapologetic, envious, abrupt, lazy, mocking, quarrel-some, and peculiarly sadistic to their children. On small islands where there were two different churches, the church members fought.
They claimed to observe the proprieties. It was for example unthinkable (and illegal) in Tonga to be without a shirt in a public place, and their crunchy waist-mats were always neatly tied, and they constantly alluded to their loyalties towards faka tonga, the Tongan way. And yet they spat, they swore, they shouted, they razzed outsiders, they threw my change at me in shops, they seemed to consider it an indignity to carry anything for me, and certainly not my heavy bags.
“They often let air out of my tires,” the captain of a sailboat told me. A New Zealander who had been in Nuku’alofa for a short time, this man’s present means of livelihood was ferrying people back and forth to the outer islands on Sunday. On these islands you could swim undisturbed. But the penalty for this was that he frequently came back to his van and found the tiires flat. Who did it?
“Church people,” he said.
They were the Tongan equivalent of the mutawwaain, the religious police of fanatic Arabia, who throw paint on unveiled women, and who once pushed my brother Peter into a mosque to pray because infidel horoscopes (“the evil work of credulous infidels”) appeared in the pages of the newspaper he worked for in Riyadh.
Still waiting for the day of my audience with the King, I went on one of these Sunday day-trips with Big Jim, skinny Dick and their wives. They were from San Clemente, California. Bob was retired from the auto parts business. We talked about the drought in southern California. I said that it was odd that the government did not supply water to every household. Jim said, “That’s socialism!”
Why was it that Republicans traveled all over the world, shouting their views, and that it was so seldom that one found oneself listening to a fellow American deploring, say, capital punishment?
Dick was more reasonable. We talked about the Gulf War and skeet shooting.
As for their wives, “They love shelling. They’re happy as long as they’re shelling,” Jim said.
Shelling was what a lot of people did on luxury vacations.
Jim, I discovered, simply liked to be blunt, if not down-right crude. He was fairly stupid and rather prided himself on his vulgarity. Later, he walked by me while I was eating alone, and slapped me on the back, jostling the plate on my lap, and said, “How do you like that mess?”
The only other people on this Sunday jaunt were Steve and Anne. We were talking about Japanese honeymooners in Hawaii, where they had just been, and Anne said, “Just like us.”
They wore identical baseball hats that said Oregon, though they themselves were from Burbank, California. “They were a gift from a friend,” Steve explained. They were a small-sized couple and seemed ill-at-ease – still getting acquainted with each other. Anne was the talker, Steve a self-confessed introvert. They had met at a community choir – they were both singers – on 30 October 1989. By Christmas, Steve had marriage in mind. Anne took a bit longer to decide. It was more or less settled by March of the following year that they would marry. A year of seeing each other, as the expression goes, and they were married two weeks ago – two weddings, one small Saturday nuptial at a Russian Orthodox church (Anne: “I converted. I used to be a Methodist”) and a
big one, a hundred and fifty-odd people, on Sunday at Steve’s Episcopal church. Their community choir had sung at the service. Then early the next morning to Honolulu, two nights at the New Otani Hotel near Waikiki and – possibly a mistake, Steve felt – a luau, or Hawaiian party, at Germaine’s.
“It was an hour and a half bus ride,” he explained in his gentle way. He had a high voice and was a small, sweet-tempered man. “The bus ride was more or less dominated by the other people.”
“Who were they?”
“An Australian rugby team,” he said, “and they were drunk.”
“Good God,” I said. And then, as he smiled, perhaps recalling the ordeal of listening to the rugby team’s singing, I said, “What line of work are you in, Steve?’’
He cleared his throat and adjusted his slightly-too-large baseball hat and said, “I’m a nuclear astrophysicist.”
It said as much on his business card: Stephen E. Kellog – Nuclear Astrophysicist, a Pasadena address, a Caltech address (his lab) and a little quotation from Walt Whitman that ran, I believe that a blade of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars …
“Is that a kind of motto for you?”
“Yes.”
I said,
“To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
“William Blake. That kind of thing?”
“I believe that, too.”
“I speak French,” Anne said. “In France I was taken to be a French person. That’s how good my French was. I’ve got a good ear, I guess.”
Jim from San Clemente said, “I have trouble with English!”
This was the truth. He said fillum for film, for example. He said nucular for nuclear.
“What sort of nuclear astrophysics do you do?” I asked Steve. “Stephen Hawking generalizations about the nature of the universe? And by the way, did you hear that Hawking’s wife has just left him? Amazing. The guy’s a genius, slowly wasting away in a wheelchair, and she ups and leaves.”