GENTLEMAN (CONT’D)
I will be here to pick her up at noon.
MARAEA
Yes, sir. Thank you, sir … But I am sure that Mrs Vickers will be quite happy to drive herself to the station.
Rather taken aback that a servant would have the impudence to make any suggestion whatsoever, the gentleman dismisses her with a wave of his hand.
GENTLEMAN
Give your lady the telegram and tell her of Mr Vickers’ instructions.
MARAEA
Yes, sir. I will do that, sir.
The gentleman gets back into the car and drives off down the street.
Only then Maraea races back to the house.
INT. REBECCA’S BEDROOM — MORNING
Rebecca lies on her bed, holding the baby, who is sound asleep in her embrace.
Seated not far away, Paraiti is watching them.
Maraea rushes into the room with the telegram in her hand.
MARAEA
You have to leave! Mr Vickers will be back today and you cannot be here!
Forbidden to come anywhere near the baby, Maraea waits in the doorway.
MARAEA (CONT’D)
You no longer have any business with us.
Rebecca has been observing both women in silence and motions that Paraiti should bring her the telegram.
Paraiti takes the envelope from Maraea and gives it to Rebecca.
Paraiti leans forward, carefully taking the child from her mother’s arms. She snuggles the baby to her chest. The baby whines quietly and Paraiti places a finger in the child’s hungry little mouth.
Rebecca deliberates a moment before opening the envelope. Finally, she reads it, displaying no reaction at all.
REBECCA
(To MARAEA)
Prepare my yellow dress. It is his favorite … And yours too … Not a single wrinkle!
Maraea smiles at her daughter with genuine relief.
Their old ways are restored. Maraea quickly leaves the room to fulfil her mistress’s wishes.
Once they are alone again, Paraiti approaches Rebecca.
PARAITI
You don’t need to stay here. Start your life again … You, with your daughter …!
Rebecca reaches for the baby and Paraiti replaces the child in her arms. Rebecca closes her eyes. She pulls the child to her breast and smiles very softly.
For the first time, Rebecca and her daughter are one.
Paraiti steps back and, after a second, she goes out of the room.
With sad tenderness, Rebecca holds her baby close to her heart and whispers to her.
REBECCA
It’s all right … It’s all right.
INT. KITCHEN — DAY
Maraea is at the table. Next to her lies a cloth nappy and a mountain of silverware, which she cleans and polishes with a rag, lemons and the same white paste she used to bleach Rebecca’s skin.
Preparing to leave the villa for good, Paraiti enters the room and gathers her few possessions.
She looks at the servant one last time.
PARAITI
Inaara ko marama koe kai whea te paihere o tou whakapapa e nehu ana. Whakanuihia; a tona wa ka murua o hara e nga atua.
SUBTITLE:
At least you know where the sacred bond to your lineage is buried. Honour it; maybe one day God will forgive you.
Maraea doesn’t stop what she is doing and nor does she raise her eyes.
MARAEA
All I did was provide a better life for my daughter … Not the life of a pariah, like me. Not good enough for some, and never pure enough for the others … as if I had been a filthy traitor to both sides …
Behind them, Rebecca listens quietly from the kitchen doorway. She has the baby in her arms.
MARAEA (CONT’D)
But at least my daughter has a life. She has a house, she has land …
Still behind the door and unnoticed by the other women, Rebecca looks down at the peaceful little face of her baby.
MARAEA (CONT’D)
That is much more than what I ever had … Much more than what you have, Paraiti.
Paraiti turns away from Maraea, ready to leave, then notices the presence of Rebecca.
Rebecca approaches Paraiti and, breaking an embrace that now feels an integral part of herself, she hands the baby to her.
Paraiti takes the baby in her arms.
PARAITI
Come with us. Don’t stay here.
Rebecca looks at her. Then she draws with her fingers a line over Paraiti’s scar, just as she did the first time they met. Only this time it is a caress filled with gratitude and respect.
Rebecca kisses the baby and turns away to leave.
Maraea dares to look at her daughter, not sure how far she can go, and timidly asks:
MARAEA
Are you going to take your bath Rebecca?
Rebecca stops and turns towards Maraea for the first time since she came down to the kitchen.
REBECCA
Yes, Mother, I will.
Maraea smiles at her, but Rebecca is already gone.
FADE OUT.
FADE IN:
INT. DRESSING ROOM — DAY
Rebecca is wearing a beautiful yellow silk dress. She just sits, staring at nothing.
INT. BATHROOM — DAY
Rebecca enters the bathroom.
INT. KITCHEN — DAY
Maraea is finishing preparing the bleaching paste. She places the bowls on the tray and leaves the kitchen.
INT. CORRIDOR — DAY
With her efficient and parecise walk, Maraea disappears down the end of the corridor, towards the bathroom.
INT. BATHROOM — DAY
Maraea opens the bathroom door to the steamy interior.
In the bathtub lies Rebecca. Her body is under the water, arms at her sides, the silk of her yellow dress stained by the blood that flows from her wrists.
Like Sleeping Beauty, she looks beautiful, silent, peaceful, rested.
LONG FADE TO WHITE.
CREDITS OVER:
EXT. LAKE EIGHT YEARS LATER — MORNING
The same lake where many years before, at the beginning of our story, Paraiti was a child.
LITTLE REBECCA, a pretty girl, about eight years old, with curly ginger-red hair and brown skin, is sitting on the ground. She is fully concentrated, looking at a line of herbs, flowers and leaves of different shapes and sizes, which are placed at her feet.
The child’s hand takes one of the flowers and moves it from one place, and then to another.
After a few seconds, as if coming back from a place far away, little Rebecca reacts, she takes the flowers, plants and herbs from the ground and puts them inside the old kete that belonged to Paraiti.
She stands up and runs.
EXT. CAMP BY THE LAKE — MORNING
Older now, Paraiti is outside her camp.
Oti, older as well and as grey as her master, sits by her side.
Little Rebecca runs towards Paraiti and gives her a good squeeze and kiss on the cheek, then sits by her side.
Paraiti smiles at her. She dips a piece of rustic bread in a bowl filled with honey and places it directly in the girl’s mouth.
The girl savours her sweet breakfast. Paraiti gives a piece of bread to Oti and then gets one for herself.
The old white horse is not too far away, munching on some grass.
EXT. LAKE — DAY
Paraiti and Rebecca walk by the edge of the lake.
Rebecca picks flowers and herbs, and shows them to Paraiti so she can examine them. Then the little girl puts the flowers inside the old kete, which now hangs from her shoulder.
The horse follows. Farther back, a bit slower, is the dog.
Ahead of them is the magnificent range of mountains.
THE END
WRITING THE
NOVELLAS
1. A SICKLY CHILD
I was my mother Julia’s first child. I was premature, a sickly baby with chronic breathing proble
ms. According to her, the Pakeha obstetrician who delivered me didn’t think I would live beyond my first year.
This was in the early 1940s, and on her release from Gisborne maternity hospital my mother consulted her doctor, a kindly man named Dr Bowker, and when my breathing problems continued, took me to other Pakeha doctors without telling him. There was a certain amount of desperation about this: she always used to say to me, ‘I held you in my arms’, as if that explained everything.
My breathing problems continued into my third year. My mother bore a daughter, Kararaina, and then a son, Thomas, who died of a hole in the heart. I think this spurred her to finally turn to her own Maori community of faith healers, including a well-known tohunga, a Ringatu priest known as Hori Gage.
My mother always liked to be formally dressed whenever she went to see important people in the community, so she put on a dark blue suit, stockings, gloves and a hat and drove me to Mangatu, I think it was, where Hori Gage was said to be visiting. However, when she arrived she was told that he had already left to return to his own ancestral lands near Whakatane. She sank to her knees, cradling me in her arms. He had been her final hope.
I know all this because survival narratives are always central to any family, and my mother told them to me to try to instil in me the value of life. Although I was the eldest, compared with my brothers and sisters, I was the sickly runt of the bunch; I still am. And, of course, my mother had already lost Thomas and didn’t want to lose another son. I was prone to all the ills and sicknesses of the world, and the stories of my survival were dispensed with all the cod liver oil, malt and other less mentionable concoctions and therapies with which my mother plagued me with as a boy. My siblings did not think of this as special treatment; I made them look good.
Much later, it was intimated to me by another Maori seer that I would not live beyond the age of thirty, which seemed to affirm the doom and gloom with which my early life was surrounded. Of course I am over double that age now, so every year since I have considered a bonus.
My father’s approach to my sickliness was much more practical, if wrong. He has always been robust, refusing to believe in mollycoddling and instead favouring fresh air, open windows, cold baths and the like; when I grew older and still had various ailments he liked to threaten me with a health camp. I was therefore putty in his hands when he applied his own remedies to get me well, including one that was popular among Maori in those days: dabbing benzine on a cloth and getting me to inhale it. It’s a wonder I didn’t turn into a petrolhead.
So there she was, my mother, on her knees in the mud at Mangatu when she felt a gentle tap on her shoulders. ‘You should take your son to the medicine woman,’ a voice told her.
‘My informant was referring to a lady known as Paraiti,’ my mother told me, ‘or Blightface, because she had a red birthmark over the left half of her cheek running all the way from the hairline to the neck. Like Hori Gage, she was a Ringatu and a follower of the prophet Te Kooti’s spiritual ways.’
My mother therefore took this suggestion on its merits and straight away got up, bundled me into my blankets and drove the short way from Mangatu to Whatatutu, where Paraiti was going about her work. Among the stories of babyhood, this was the one that I could imagine fully: stars wheeling above, my anxious white-faced mother speeding down dusty roads looking for a scarred witch doctor, a crying baby in swaddling clothes — you know the sort of thing.
Where was my father? I don’t know; he never figured in the narrative.
This must have been around 1946, and the work of such women (and men) was illegal and frowned upon; I understood that Paraiti had been jailed a few times and she practised in a clandestine fashion. When my mother finally found her and delivered me to her for inspection, was Paraiti welcoming? No. First she intimidated my mother with her scar, and then scolded her by saying, ‘You should have come straight to me instead of going to Pakeha doctors. Why do you think I will be successful when they haven’t been?’
Paraiti must have been in her late seventies by then. She was a girl during the Land Wars and had lived through the flu epidemic of 1918. She had seen many changes as New Zealand became colonised. Grumpy though she was, she looked at me, said she would treat me and, from what Mum told me, for the next week kept me in a makeshift tent filled with herb-infused steam. Every now and then she trickled manuka honey down my throat.
‘Some days later,’ my mother told me, ‘Paraiti began to karakia, to pray, and, as she did so, she hooked a finger into your throat and pulled out threads of phlegm.’
2. HONOURING PARAITI
It is from this childhood survival story that I wrote White Lies, which was originally published as Medicine Woman in my 2007 collection, Ask the Posts of the House. In fact I had toyed with calling that collection ‘Medicine Woman’, but, at the last moment, chose the other title because it appeared to have more potency and gravitas.
Now comes the film directed by Mexican director Dana Rotberg. It will be the third feature film to be made from my work after Whale Rider in 2002 and Nights in the Gardens of Spain in 2010. (Known as Kawa for its American release in 2011, the latter film won a prestigious National Geographic indigenous award and was released in Germany with subtitles in 2012.) In both the novella of Medicine Woman and film of White Lies the name of Paraiti has been kept for the main character.
And, of course, there is a sequence in the film in which a young boy has manuka honey trickled down his throat so that he can breathe.
I have tried to recreate Paraiti’s late nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth-century world in the first half of the narrative, which follows her travels with horse, mule and dog throughout the wilderness tribal lands of my childhood. Most New Zealanders will know the historical context that I refer to, involving the prophet Te Kooti Arikirangi and his followers — the Ringatu. Surely the settler country feared Te Kooti. During the early days of the Land Wars between the two races, they had wrongly imprisoned him, in 1866, on the Chatham Islands, seven days’ sail from New Zealand. He was incarcerated for two long years, but during his time there the spirit of God visited him and inspired him to create a religion, the Ringatu, and to lead the Maori people out of bondage, just as Moses had done when he defied Pharaoh and led the Israelites out of Egypt. Te Kooti and his fledgling followers escaped from the Chathams by boat, and when they landed back in Aotearoa the Pakeha militia pursued them relentlessly. In retaliation, in November 1868, Te Kooti led an attack on the military garrison at Matawhero. It was an act of war and from then on the prophet and his followers were marked; a ransom was placed on Te Kooti’s head. For ten years he evaded capture, moving swiftly from one kainga to another, always supported by his followers.
White Lies begins during these years. In it I have tried to document the world of the itinerant Maori healer, piecing it together from my own childhood experiences, local Ringatu and other informants and the scarce mentions in historic documents and other sources. My thanks to my dear mentor Maaka Jones — herself a Ringatu tohunga and versed in Maori medicine — and family and local Waituhi informants for oral stories about Paraiti and medicine women of her kind. My father, Te Haa o Ruhia, was the one who told me about traditional Maori massage and how his shoulder was set right simply by massaging the bones together; the account of Paraiti massaging her father with her loving hands at his death also comes from him. Thanks to the authors of the following books: Judith Binney’s Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki (Auckland University Press, 1995); Murdoch Riley and Brian Enting’s indispensable Maori Healing and Herbal Medicines (Viking Sevenseas, 1994); and Roger Neich’s Painted Histories: Early Maori Figurative Painting (Auckland University Press, 1993). Any errors of fact are mine. I am not an expert on the Ringatu or, particularly, on traditional healing and medicine, and I apologise for any inaccuracies. Thanks also to the Manukau Institute of Technology, the Arts Foundation of New Zealand and Creative New Zealand for research and funding assistance during the period I wr
ote the novella printed in this edition.
3. MERLE OBERON WAS A MAORI
However, when I was writing the novella I realised that the fictional Paraiti needed a moral dilemma, something that would challenge her purpose and her thinking: a confrontation with all that she values and believes.
In the second part of her story, therefore, I introduced a character named Rebecca Vickers, a young Pakeha society woman in her twenties, who asks Paraiti for an abortion. But Mrs Vickers and her maidservant, Maraea, in her fifties and a Maori, are not what they seem to be. In particular, Mrs Vickers has a lot at stake: if the baby is born, and if it is of dark complexion, people will realise that she is Maori.
This is where I have interpolated the story of actress Merle Oberon. It provides the heart of darkness for Medicine Woman and White Lies.
I have been fascinated by Merle Oberon ever since reading Merle: A Biography of Merle Oberon by Charles Higham and Roy Moseley (New English Library, 1983). All her life she lived a lie. She told the press that she had been born in Hobart, Tasmania. In 1965, she found herself in Sydney when she accompanied her then husband Bruno Pagliai, one of the richest men in Latin America, on an inaugural Aeronaves de Mexico flight to Australia. Invited to attend a banquet in her honour at Government House in Hobart, she first accepted, then fainted and cancelled; she was in Australia for only seventy-two hours.
Why the deception? Well, Merle Oberon had a lot to hide. She was, after all, one of the most beautiful women of her generation, a famous film actress with a fabulous almond-shaped face and slanting eyes set in a flawlesss white complexion. In a film career that lasted from 1930 to 1973, her electrifying beauty was highlighted in over fifty British, French, American and Mexican films, including playing Anne Boleyn to Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Cathy to Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939), George Sand to Cornel Wilde’s Chopin in A Song to Remember (1945) and the Empress Josephine to Marlon Brando’s Napoleon in Desirée (1954). People thought she had discovered the fountain of youth because as she grew older she seemed to become more beautiful.
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