by Paul Theroux
“I will jump!”
“Don’t look at him – look at me!”
Into the falls, down the sluice, diving backwards, fooling and loving it. They were fourteen and sixteen, but seemed much younger.
So this was what it was all about. You came here and frisked with brown boys, and slept with their sisters, and gave money to their parents, and lived and died. You slept and ate and laughed.
Savaii was a maddening place from the paddling point of view – either surf crashing on rocks and nowhere to launch from, or else a lagoon so shallow that my paddle blade struck bottom with each stroke. The Samoans were not boat people themselves – only the oldest ones could remember ever crossing from island to island paddling in a canoe or sailing an outrigger. This skill of using small craft, by which I tended to judge Pacific islands, had just about vanished in Samoa.
The Taga blow-holes were not far from the mysterious stone mound of Pulemelei. The blow-holes, locally know as pupu, were volcanic fissures in the cliffs of black lava that made this part of the coast of Savaii so dangerous. The swell crashing into the cliffs traveled through the sea-caves and the hollows and shot into the vertical holes, producing a geyser or waterspout that made a plume of water eighty feet in the air.
We stood by one of the dozen or so blow-holes and chucked coconuts into the hole just as the swell hit the cliff, and within a few seconds the coconut was shot into the air like a cannonball. The kids did the same with palm fronds and watched them flung upward, twisting and turning in the spray.
The whole place was deserted. It was one of the great natural phenomena of the Pacific. We stood under sunny skies and big puffy clouds, by the lovely sea, the boys fooling, the coconuts shooting skyward, and I thought, My God, this is stupid.
But it was a feeble protest. By then a lazy sort of boredom had taken possession of my soul, the Oceanic malaise. I never saw anyone reading anything more demanding than a comic book. I never heard any youth express an interest in science or art. No one even talked politics. It was all idleness, and whenever I asked someone a question, no matter how simple, no matter how well the person spoke English, there was always a long pause before I got a reply, and I found these Pacific pauses maddening.
And there was giggling but no humor – no wit. It was just foolery. The palangis were no better. Warren got up a picnic with an American named John, who had started his own farm in the Mid-West, and with Friedrich, who told me, “I am studying the smell of roast beef.” He meant just that: he roasted a chunk of beef every day in his laboratory in Munich and then distilled its essence and tried breaking the flavor down into its chemical components. “This has many applications,” he explained. In our party there were also the usual contingent of Samoan youths, clambering and laughing.
We were sitting under the palms at Asuisui, and when Warren passed out the sandwiches, I said, “I can’t eat Spam. Hey, that reminds me. Ever read Descartes – René Descartes?”
Silence from John, silence from Friedrich, silence from Warren, giggles from the Samoans.
“As in ’Don’t put Descartes before the horse’?”
In the ensuing silence, Warren cleared his throat. “I’ve read him,” he said, “but it was years ago, and I don’t have a retentive memory.”
“I was just going to make a joke.”
They stared at me.
“Descartes – didn’t he say, ‘I’m pink, therefore I’m Spam’?”
A look of apprehension settled over them, and only Manu broke the silence.
“What you tink?”
“What do I think about what?”
“Da wedda.”
So we discussed the wind and clouds.
Later in his car Manu said, “I got a wife.”
We were driving towards Lalomalava. His car was a jalopy which contained an expensive cassette-player, and reggae music was blaring from his stereo speakers, mounted with some stuffed toys on the back shelf.
“Any kids?”
“I got a kid in here,” he said, and banged the glove compartment. He was having trouble opening it, until he thumped it very hard. “Kid – in here – somewhere.”
Finally he took out a crinkled photograph of a fat brown baby wrapped in a clean blue blanket. The picture had not been snapped in Samoa.
“My son,” Manu said proudly.
“What’s his name?”
“I dunno.”
“Where was this picture taken?”
“Auckland.”
“You want to go to Auckland?”
“No,” Manu said, and tossed the picture back into the glove compartment and hammered it shut with his fist.
What exactly was the story here?
I traveled to the northwest of Savaii, to Asau Bay, to paddle, and there I met Fat Frank, who had recently arrived from California and was scouting the island. He was an alcoholic, and he had taken up residence at a motel at Vaisala. Apart from Fat Frank there was only one other guest at the place, a Finn from a freighter in Apia, who complained bitterly about Frank. His habit was to rise at eleven, drink a bottle of Vailima Beer for breakfast, follow it with a half-bottle of tequila and then paw Samoan waitresses until he passed out. He was a chain-smoker and his huge pendulous belly hung over his belt. He sat hunched over, breathing hard. I met him in the late afternoon, after his second snooze, when he was wheezing and on whiskey.
He grumbled about his feet swelling up. He hated the heat. He said he didn’t sleep well. He was one of those fat people who when they are horizontal begin to breathe irregularly and snore in a choking, strangling manner all night, Aaarrrghh!
“I’ll be here six weeks or so,” he said.
“That seems a long time for such a small island.”
“Thing is, I’m thinking of relocating.”
“Moving here to Samoa?”
“Yeah. Changing my whole life-style. Why wait until you retire? Why not do it now?”
He was only in his thirties, but had a certain swollen look that made him seem much older, like a fat elderly baby.
“Ever been here before?”
“No, but I think I could fit in. The people here are very friendly – very warm. Not like Pago. That’s a dump. I was supposed to stay there a week and I stayed one night. But these people take you into their family.”
“I think they expect something in return. I mean, wouldn’t you have obligations?”
“We could work something out. I’ll look around. Look for a house. Look for a village. Then find the chief and talk it over.”
He was looking for a life and he made finding it seem simple. A Somerset Maugham character, people say, but in the flesh Somerset Mangham characters could be such slobs and bores.
“And I might do some business.”
He had a very furtive way of lighting a cigarette, palming it, turning his lighter on it, sucking it hard, then spitting the smoke out. He was from Mile City, somewhere north of San Francisco.
“Want to know the trouble with business here? You can’t make any money in a country where the people have no money.”
Delivered of this wisdom he took a long pull on his bottle of hooch.
“But I figure a dive shop might make it. The Japs will come here eventually.”
“Why would they come here? They want golf. Beaches. Luxury. Mickey Mouse logo shops. They like to shop. God, you can’t even swim here. I’m just managing because I have my own sea kayak.”
“I can make out.”
“You might be a teeny bit bored.”
“Go back” – he wasn’t listening to me, he had a slow wheezing way of talking, and this sentence had begun long before – “get my toys. Motorcycle. Hi-fi. Diving equipment. Scuba gear.”
Heavy people are often divers. Was it the sense of weightlessness that attracted them – the experience of being light and buoyant, as they chubbily made their way among the coral and the flitting fish?
“What do you do?” he asked me, wiping his mouth.
“I do a litt
le writing.”
“That’s why you got all the questions!”
He looked around and laughed. He was laughing at the blazing sun, the palms, the wrecked beach – the worst of the hurricane had come here. His laughter showed in the rolls of flesh on his gut.
‘I knew I was going to meet a writer here. As soon as I saw this fucked-up place I said to myself, ‘I’m going to meet a writer.’ And a painter. Where’s the painter? There must be a painter here.”
So he was thinking of leaving the vastness of northern California, and the friendliness of this small American town, and settle here in a jumbled family, taking up residence in a fale in a Samoan village, with all its Christians. I said this to him in so many words.
“It’s a trade-off, isn’t it?”
He wanted a new life. He wanted the pleasure of retirement now – not when he was arthritic and unhealthy. That in itself was sensible: at this rate he wouldn’t last – fat and tanked up and chain-smoking.
“I got the answer. People will buy anything from someone they like.”
“Meaning you?”
“Yeah. Like me. A real character,” he said. He rested the bottle on his belly. “An interesting guy.”
And then I understood, and I saw him in America, on his Harley-Davidson. He was one of those terrifyingly fat fellows in a Nazi crash helmet that are seen roaring down the highway, sitting behind the immensity of his belly, that shoot out in front of sober motorists who say, “Look at him, Doris. Hogging the road!”
“Don’t make him mad,” Doris says. “Please don’t honk the horn.”
And you don’t.
Fat Frank was looking for an indulgent family, and it was possible that he would find one in Samoa, where you could develop a relationship with a family that had strong ties. I was not worried about Frank taking advantage of them; in the end, they would take him for all he was worth. But it was a paradoxical society. Outside the family there seemed to be no driving force, no loyalties; and the interdependency that was limited strictly to the family made it seem less like a society than like a simple organism, a certain type of jellyfish, perhaps, the hydrozoan that was a little colony of tentacles, some for stinging, some for eating, that sways and bloops along the surface of the sea.
Whenever I attempted to do something in Samoa – buy a ticket, rent a car, obtain information – the Samoan I asked looked a bit surprised and seemed totally unprepared to help. In their own lives, Samoans managed to scrape along with a little farming and a lot of remittances. It was the most cohesive society that I saw in the Pacific, but the least individualistic – perhaps the most traditional in Polynesia. But apart from the immediate needs of the family, nothing was achieved – where were the doctors, the dentists, pilots, engineers, architects and skilled people? Many Samoan teachers fled to better-paying jobs elsewhere, and their positions were filled by Peace Corps volunteers. Even the grubbiest road supervisors and heavy-machinery operators, driving bulldozers and augering holes for power lines – were from New Zealand and Australia.
Or was I taking the whole business too seriously? Perhaps it was all a comedy. But if you weren’t in the mood for that sort of low hilarity it was the wrong place to visit.
“I tone like Tonga,” a Samoan said to me.
“Why not?”
“Because it is too much sandy.”
“Too sandy?”
“Yes. And dey tone like Samoan people.”
“What a pity.”
“Because a Samoan kai cut off da head of a Tonga kai.”
“Is that all?”
“And cut off his leek.”
“I see. The Samoan guy cut off his head and his leg.”
An ancient quarrel shrouded in myth? No. It happened in Auckland, he explained, just a few months ago.
Some of these wild cannibal-looking youths were very sweet. The surliest-seeming ones, obstinate one minute, could be unexpectedly helpful the next. The policemen were ineffectual but in their white helmets and epaulets they were at least picturesque. Was it because I was in Samoan backwaters? But in Samoa it was all backwaters. And at those moments when I was most exasperated I would look up and see the oddest thing – a man holding a pig in his lap, or a man standing up to his neck in the lagoon, smoking a cigarette – and I would laugh the witless Samoan laugh and think: Take this seriously and you’re dead.
17
American Samoa: The Littered Lagoon
No one in the Pacific has a good word for American Samoa. This alone predisposed me to liking these islands and finding them habitable and bounteous, the sort of carefree archipelago I might want to fling myself into and be happy as an Oceanic clam.
The place was generally hated, but what was the problem? Six little islands and one biggish one, Tutuila; a total population of 37,000 people – American Samoa had only half the population of the town where I was born, Medford, Massachusetts, which I had always thought of as unbearably small. And every year the United States government handed over roughly seventy-five million dollars to American Samoans. You couldn’t get much more carefree and bounteous than that, though politically Samoa is perhaps a kleptocracy.
On the face of it, there was no reason why these islands should not be paradise – indeed, they are, in their own potbellied way: the islanders are very happy. Life in American Samoa is one long yankee boondoggle, and the people are so hoggishly contented that they cannot stand the idea of ever forming an independent political entity with their brothers and sisters in Western Samoa, just across the water, because that reunion might diminish the money supply. The average per capita income in Western Samoa was $580 a year; in American Samoa it was almost ten times that. But it was all funny money in any case – intravenous, drip-feed cash, as they said in Australia – most of it foreign aid. New Zealand had gone on financing its former territory of Western Samoa, and America still stumped up money for its indigent islands which, politically, had the same status as Puerto Rico.
So much for all the guff about the sacred concept of familyhood in the two Samoas. “Corrupted” is the perfect word, though an American Samoan can revert from being a fat guy in a Bart Simpson T-shirt, with a can of Coke Classic in his hand, watching the Super Bowl; and, at a moment’s notice, turn into a big dark fire-breathing islander, confounding you with obscure incantations and unfathomable customs. When Samoans have their backs to the wall they put on a lava-lava and pretend to be islanders. The rest of the time – it seemed to me – they were fat jolly people, with free money, having a wonderful time.
The last sight I had had of real life in Western Samoa was that of some women at dawn on the coast of southern Savaii, washing their clothes and themselves at the edge of the Falealila River – the soap suds vivid as surf against the black rocks. Virtually the first thing I saw in American Samoa were four enormously fat women sitting in Danny’s Laundromat in Pago Pago, watching their clothes being tossed in washers and yakking about the high cost of living. They were an extraordinary size, guzzling Cokes and glowing with perspiration, and sitting with their chubby knees apart, Samoan style.
Houses in Western Samoa are true fales, shaped as though modeled on the humpy helmet of Hernando DeSoto, and enhanced with mats and blinds and thatch; in American Samoa the so-called fales are little boxy bungalows, prefabs made in California – flat roof, single walls – plopped on a slab. Poverty in Western Samoa has forced people to build in a traditional way, because it is cheaper. And the fales there are better suited to the climate than the cinderblock bungalows of Tutuila, which are unendurable without a rusty, howling air-conditioner propped in a window. Even the churches are less impressive in American Samoa, because of their dreary modernity.
But in both Samoas dead ancestors are buried in the front garden, or next to the house, in a colorful sarcophagus. Samoans had all sorts of explanations for this burying of the dead beside the hibiscus hedge on the lawn – grief, affection, tradition, ancestor worship, the vulgar love of a good in-ground necropolis, a wish to be near A
untie Ida, and so forth. But the true answer seemed obvious to me. On an island where land tenure was always subject to lengthy deliberation, wasn’t it a way of taking possession of the land? You could evict anyone from a house, but how did you go about ridding the place of a dozen dead relatives, sealed in coffins deep in the ground?
Kind of a crazy place, Verne in Tonga had told me. But I’m kind of crazy, so I liked it there.
The ferry from Apia to Pago Pago had been full (“We sell three hundred and twenty-one tickets, because we have three hundred and twenty-one life jackets,” the man in the office explained) so I took the short airplane ride.
“You are overweight,” the 350-pound Samoan at the check-in desk said.
It was nothing personal – it was my boat and my gear, but the chunky airline employee said that it was too much trouble to collect the additional charge, and so he waved me through.
Pretty was not the word for Tutuila – it looked fabulous, with green steep-sided mountains that had black peaks – dark splintery antique volcanoes – precipitous valleys plunging down to sea-cliffs and rocky headlands. It was a high vertical island, with a wide lagoon and many fine bays and the deeply indented harbor of Pago Pago – a lovely place, more vertiginous and dramatic, steamier, much lusher than its sister islands to the west. Not pretty at all, but hot, langorous, ravishing, dangerously attractive, like the person you pass on the sidewalk – what is it about these lucky people? – who makes you feel flustered and breathless and forgetful. You could fall in love at first sight with Tutuila.
But on second glance, a moment later, looking closer, you recover and decide not to throw your life away. Pago Harbor is muddy – it doesn’t get properly flushed by the tides – and it reeks of the tuna canneries on the eastern side, Starkist and Van Camp. The rubbish on the beaches, flung everywhere and seldom collected, is worse than anywhere else in the Pacific and would make any sort of beach activity in Samoa depressing – but the lagoon is too shallow for swimming, the coral is broken and dead, there is a sensational litter of old soft-drink cans underwater; so there is not much beach activity.