The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “Are you married?” Anne said.

  “No. I upped and left,” I said. “Kind of.”

  “Hawking is interested in the big questions,” Steve said. “I deal with particles. Nuclei. But they contain what human life contains – helium, oxygen –”

  “He told me that on our first date,” Anne said.

  I said, “You do research?”

  “Yes.” And he frowned. His hat was slightly crooked, his shirt hung out. “Mainly the nucleosynthesizing of tantalum-one-eighty.”

  I may have seemed a little slow – at least I had no immediate response to this.

  “It’s the rarest of the stable isotopes,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “We were trying to find out how it was made.” He smiled a scientist’s smile. “We found out how it wasn’t made.”

  “Tantalum-one-eighty?” I said.

  “Yup.”

  Jim said, “Looks like rain, Dick.”

  After we reached the island, Atata, which was about eight miles offshore, we went snorkeling. We had lunch. It rained. We looked in the gift shop. Postcards, T-shirts: Tonga – Paradise in the Pacific.

  “Steve, do you have a necktie I can borrow?” I asked on the way back. “I have to meet the King.”

  “And you need a suit to see the King,” Afu said, the night before my audience. Nor was she much impressed with Steve Kellog’s dark Mormon-style tie. She said Salesi had better ones.

  “I don’t have a suit.”

  The virtue of traveling in the Pacific is that a suit and tie is never necessary. True, a tie is required in some restaurants but you can always be assured that the food in those places (always served by candlelight) is pretentious, saucey, over-priced, and strictly for honeymooners.

  “But you have a lounge jacket.”

  “I don’t have any jacket,” I said. It was often ninety in the shade here.

  “You try Salesi’s jacket,” Afu said.

  Salesi was a short stout man. I am not a short stout man. The shiny ill-fitting jacket made me look like a bum. That odd jacket with the neatly knotted tie made me looked like a mentally defective bum.

  I tried on the tie and jacket for Afu’s inspection. She was dissatisfied but resigned. I was staring at my reflection in a mirror.

  “It is the best we can do,” she said.

  “I look like a Mormon,” I said.

  They had invited me to their house – “farm” was the word they would have used – for dinner. They had said dinner, but I did not see any food. We spent an hour or more drinking Kool-Aid and going through their son’s wedding pictures, all seven albums. It had apparently been a very grand affair – great rolls of finely woven mats, and dead pigs everywhere. I remarked on the pigs.

  “You want to see some pigs?” Salesi said.

  We went outside. The pigs were active. I counted thirtythree porkers, big and small, under one tree. Some of them resembled the wild pigs I had seen on the Hopevale Aboriginal reserve on the Queensland coast – hairy, snouty, narrow-eared creatures.

  “Yes. It is related to the wild pig,” Salesi said.

  “So what you’ve got here, really, is a kind of pig farm.”

  The pigs screeched and snuffled. They butted each other. They trotted from one patch of grass to another. They sucked dirty water out of puddles. They jostled, hoofing it in and out of the shed under the tree.

  “Yes. You can say that. I eat them. I sell them.”

  “Do you kill them yourself?”

  “Yes,” Salesi said sadly. “But I don’t like to. A pig can be your friend.”

  We were joined by Afu.

  “They sleep in that shed?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” Salesi said.

  “That was our first house,” Afu said.

  It was a tiny wooden-plank hovel. They kept it, they said, to remind themselves of the days when they had been struggling. They had married against the wishes of their parents; their early married life had been made difficult by this disapproval.

  “How did you meet?”

  Afu said, “At the palace.”

  Salesi said, “I just sneak in and want to talk to her.”

  This was when Afu had been eighteen, the lady-in-waiting to Queen Salote.

  “The Queen was very cross when I marry Salesi. She did not know he was visiting me. I just say to her, ‘I’m getting marry.’ But she had another man picked out for me, with an education. And she had a girl picked for Salesi, a girl with an education –”

  I got the idea of Queen Salote as a meddler, an arranger, a manipulator – and Afu confirmed this was so. She was after all an absolute monarch. She made a point of teaching Afu simple household chores – how to clean a room properly, how to dust shelves, how to sew, how to make dresses.

  “She didn’t think I would be happy,” Afu said, and she beamed. “I wish she could see us. I wish she could see that we have been so happy.’’

  Afu told me the Coronation story, how Queen Salote had distinguished herself by showing respect for Queen Elizabeth.

  “If someone has an umbrella you stand in the rain, to show respect,” Afu said. “If someone is on a chair, you sit on the floor.” Then she told me a detail that no one else had mentioned. Apparently there had been another foreign dignitary in the carriage – not “her lunch” but another head of state.

  “He was from some country,” Afu said. “He don’t speak English good. He say, ‘Up! Up!’ He getting wet. But Queen Salote say no. He very cross!”

  At last, quite late, we had dinner – chicken and taro and cassava and a delicious bowl of soupy greens, which were taro leaves cooked with coconut milk, a Samoan speciality called palusami. The chicken came from America. Most chicken eaten in the Pacific came from America – from Tyson’s Chicken Farm in Arkansas, to be precise. Even on distant islands in the Marquesas, which are among the most remote islands on earth, they were cheaper than the local birds.

  Afu was still talking about her years with Queen Salote, how she had traveled with her, how she knew her moods (“She pretended to be cross sometimes, so we would be frightened”). In New Zealand, the local people recognized the Queen and waved to her. Afu had panicked. “Wave at the people, Afu!” Queen Salote had said sharply.

  “So I wave,” Afu said and put on a goofy, small-girl face and flapped her hand. “‘Hello! Hello!’”

  Before I left Afu reminisced about how sorry she was that Queen Salote had not known what a happy marriage they had had. But Queen Salote had not been healthy. She had had diabetes. “She could not eat pigs.” Yet she respected their families. Afu’s elderly mother was coughing and spitting in a side-room just off the dining-room, where we were eating. And Salesi’s father, Afu said, had real power.

  “He is a chief. He owns land,” Afu said. “He gives land to people, and then he does nothing. He finds a tree. He goes under it. He sleeps.”

  “People bring him food,” Salesi said. “He does nothing.”

  “Is that good?” I asked.

  “That is what I want,” Salesi said.

  That was what I kept noticing in Tonga, its traditional class system of nobles and commoners, of landlords and peasants. The first Europeans who had ventured into Tonga had remarked on this same stratification, and the way commoners tried hard to please the nobility, and usually failed. The nobility paid little attention. Why should they? Nothing would ever change. Even the Englishman Captain Cook, who knew the niceties and grovelings of the English class system, was astounded by Tongan servility and he remarked on how the commoners stooped to show respect, touching the sole of a chief’s foot as the great man ambled past.

  And soon it would be my turn.

  Early on the morning of my royal audience I walked down to the palace, just to look at the flag. The King’s standard was not flying on the flagpole, which meant he was not in the palace. I began to think that the audience was not going to happen.

  Some Tongan soldiers were drilling with fake guns near t
he palace cannons. This was one of the most rag-tag armies in the Pacific – not more than two hundred men. By comparison, Fiji was a superpower – indeed, in the UN peacekeeping force, posted between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Fijians had proven themselves courageous and resourceful spldiers. It was unimaginable that the Tongan army would be capable of anything even remotely similar.

  I asked the drill sergeant about the King’s flag. He said, “The King only comes to the palace on business. He lives at Fua’amotu, near the airport.”

  By the time I had changed into Salesi’s jacket and Steve’s Mormon tie, and walked back to the palace, the flag had gone up, though it did not fly. The flag drooped heavily on the pole in the windless sticky heat.

  Perspiring, I entered the office of the King’s secretary and saw my name chalked on a board and after my name, Author, former university professor. I was shown to a waiting-room, which was full of red plush chairs and dusty glass cases which contained labeled items and bizarre memorabilia. An old sextant, a rhino beetle encased in plastic, a cane – The Walking Stick of King Taufa’ahau I (1797-1893), five feathers stuck into a crumbly piece of coral, Worn by Queen Salote at the Coronation of Elizabeth II, a silver-plated shovel, a black war club labeled A War Stick, photographs of bewildered-looking royal personages, and a jumbled heap of dirty shards: Pottery pieces found at the hospital site of Havelu-loto, 1969.

  That glass case was unlocked. Discovering this, I was seized with a desire to steal an artifact – anything – in revenge for the things that had been stolen from me in Tonga. As I jiggled the door sideways, fully intending to swipe something, I heard footsteps – heavy heels.

  “Mr Paul?”

  It was an army officer.

  “I am the King’s aide-de-camp. Call me Joe. How do you pronounce your name?”

  I told him.

  “Because I have to announce you,” he explained.

  We walked through the tall grass and the weeds that lay outside the high palace fence and we then squeezed between a pair of gates that were ajar and across through more tall grass, still wet with the morning dew.

  The King’s new Mercedes was parked in the portico out front. Joe led me past it to a ground-floor room on the right – with a buffet and a heavy refectory table, it had the look of having once been a dining-room. It was strewn with gifts – an inscribed crystal punchbowl, a framed key, a toy Thai temple, a silver-plated telescope, a lamp with a label on it, a ceremonial dagger, a samurai sword, and a large framed photograph of Tonga’s many islands, snapped from space, with a long laborious inscription and the signature of Ronald Reagan in ignorant wobbly handwriting.

  A throne-like chair stood at the head of the table. Joe showed me to a chair next to it. I was surprised to see that the throne was the same height as my chair, because I had been told that I would be seated lower than the King, out of respect. I sat and practised crouching to look humble.

  There came a wheezing and a shuffling from the hallway. It was a bit like being in a well-furnished boarding-house – it even looked and smelled like one, with wooden panels, varnished bannisters and stairs, and armchairs with doilies.

  In his black bombazine skirt, thumping along with canes, the King had the distinct appearance of a landlady, the same bossy authority and eccentric dress, his smock-like shirt buttoned to his neck and a great braided mass of cords around his belly. He had an aluminium cane in each fist, and in each breast pocket a pair of glasses, and a gold watch on each wrist – two of everything. But the details of his person were overwhelmed by the King’s size.

  One day in Suva, a settlement he called “the white folks’ town,” Mark Twain reached the conclusion that “in Fiji, as in the Sandwich Islands [Hawaii], native kings and chiefs are of much grander size and build than the commoners.” And he might have added that it was true of Tonga-where it is still the case.

  Whenever Tonga was mentioned, theKing’s weight figured. The guidebooks gave it importance: The current king, Taufa’ahau Tupou IV may be the world’s most powerful (as well as largest!) reigning monarch … Or: The King is known world-wide for his ample girth … (Lonely Planet Guide to Tonga) … Or: The present monarch is a 19 meter, 22-stone (308 pounds) giant … (South Pacific Handbook). Travel books also gave the King’s weight when dealing with Tongan issues, for example, Cruising in the Friendly Isles: The King of Tonga weighs 375 pounds … Foreign newspapers described it: The King – who once weighed in at 210 kilograms (464 pounds) … (South China Morning Post, 31 March 1991).

  His actual weight (and no one seemed to get it right) seemed irrelevant to me. He was vast, he was slow, an enormous shuffling man whose heavy-lidded eyes and whopper jaw gave him the huge frog-like face you sometimes saw on ancient carved Polynesian tikis. A tiki is a statue, but Tiki is also a god – the greatest in Oceania. A suggestion of divinity is attached to the Tongan monarch, as it is to the English one. Tonga was a kingdom of big men, and this man was the biggest of all – you would have known instantly that he was the King. He also had presence. Superficially his bulk made him a bit of a caricature, a sort of island version of Jabba the Hutt from The Empire Strikes Back. But his size also gave him a mythic quality. I had never seen anyone so politically powerful who was at the same time so physically overwhelming.

  Tongans could seem oddly inert creatures, and they smirked a great deal when you asked them questions; but the King possessed a monumental serenity, and he had a watchfulness about him – an intelligence and sensitivity – that I had not seen in any Tongan. Tongan silence was like the stillness of a lizard – a waiting to snatch at an insect. But the King’s silence was not predatory like that. It was like a supreme indifference, as though he was a titanic spectator – impassive, perhaps wise. There was something oriental in his aloofness, in the detachment of his presence, and at times when we were speaking he seemed like a sultan or an emperor, an eastern potentate. Not the effete and inbred monarch of Europe, but a bigger rougher version, the king of cannibals and coconuts, regal in a distinctly physical sense.

  He put his big warm hand in mine and when he said “Sit” I heard it, though the sound was deformed by his jaw or his speech defect – and the word stayed in his mouth.

  “He is known for his long silences,” an Australian expatriate in Nuku’alofa had told me the day before.

  I was close enough to see that each of his wristwatches showed the same time.

  To prove I was bona fide I had brought the King a book I had written. This I now handed him, telling him so. The King picked it up. His hands were big and plump, each one like a baseball mitt. His fingers were thick, his fingertips blunt – too blunt to assist him in separating pages. The book looked helpless in his hands, but neither could the King peruse it. It was too delicate a task for those fat royal fingers.

  I made a short speech, saying how grateful I was that I had been welcomed so warmly in the kingdom.

  Perhaps it was the false suggestion of monotony in his froggy eyes, but he seemed very bored by what I was saying. Minutes had passed and the only word I had heard the King utter so far was, “Sit.”

  “In the 1890s,” I went on, “the Hawaiian King Kalakaua had the idea of uniting the Pacific into a large federation of island nations – a great community of likeminded people. It never happened, of course. But does such an idea interest you, Your Majesty?”

  And I immediately wondered whether I should have said Your Highness instead.

  “I have already started,” he said, “though it is not the whole Pacific. It is Polynesia.”

  I had been right about the speech defect – he had rather a slushy way with s’s and with consonant clusters. He hardly opened his mouth. His words remained echoey in his mouth and some of them stuck to his tongue. It was a growly voice, exactly that of someone protesting as he swallows his mashed potatoes. Perhaps it was a dented palate? Certainly there was little effort in the voice. It was languid and somewhat imprecise – not an accent but a difficulty enunciating – bobbling the words,
and snuffling whole sentences. Each time he spoke I made a desperate effort to translate. Probably the greatest difficulty in his speech was that it had no emotion in it. Emotion was superfluous to royal speech, anyway. He had known the luxury of never having to persuade anyone of anything; he spoke and was obeyed; he was the King.

  “The chairman was a minister from the Cook Islands,” the King said. (“Minister” had been a real mashed potato.) “But this man was voted out in the last election, so I am taking charge.”

  “What is the aim of your Polynesia group? Is it political, Your Highness?”

  “It is not political. How could it be? The Cook Islands is a republic. Hawaii is a state. French Polynesia is a colony. Tonga is a monarchy. There are too many differences. No, it will be concerned with culture and society. With language and the arts.” He took a deep breath. “We will publish a magazine.”

  “And Melanesia is not a part of it, Your Majesty?”

  He was silent. At last, without opening his mouth, he produced the word no and it went on rumbling inside his body.

  “Yet Ontong Java in the Solomons and Futuna in Vanuatu are inhabited by Polynesia people,” I said.

  “We will provide some pages for them in the magazine.” The King now seemed thoroughly bored and I thought for a moment that he was going to send me away.

  I said, “Your Majesty, will you deal with questions such as nuclear testing?”

  “That is a political matter –”

  Not only did he not move his mouth, he did not move his head either, nor his body. He simply sat, huge and immovable, like a great lumpish oracle or the sage in a children’s story, the wise old giant of the cannibal isles.

  “–but nuclear testing in the Pacific is very bad.”

  There came one of his silences. It is a TV interviewing technique to say nothing after a question is answered; then the interviewee often tries to fill the silence by babbling, and often this is confessional stuff. I decided to wait.

  “I have been to Mururoa,” the King said after a while. “I saw the holes in the reef. They drilled down and put the bomb inside, and then filled the hole with cement. They had made so many holes they had very little room left on the reef to dig more. So they had started to dig into the bed of the lagoon, which is of course very dangerous.”