Just a distant plume of smoke outside is enough to tell him that the Germans are closing in on Mata‘afa’s camp. It is commonly known that Mata‘afa is destined for island exile in the graveyard of the Pacific, and that it will be Malietoa’s doing. What is not known, Sosimo thinks, is that deep down Malietoa wishes it was him, as exile is worse than death.
An upstairs window slams. When the wind rushes up from the harbour like this, Sosimo swears he can still hear Aolele’s strange singing sculpture, now strangled by vine and tuitui weed in the kitchen garden.
After the Italian painter’s vanishing, this was the portrait they had been left with. That and – just as camouflaged – the genie of desire that the Italian had let loose from his box of paints.
He still remembers the widow’s strange request made by the fireplace in the writer’s study upstairs. Said with her eyes pressed shut, so he could trace the purplish lines on the backs of her lids.
‘Please comfort him, for I fear his wife no longer can.’
So Sosimo had hatched a plan. He had observed how each afternoon Tusitala would walk to the local swimming hole to practise his flageolet, and it was here Sosimo waited one day, perched on rock and dappled in sun. His hair, freshly scented, spilled over his oiled shoulders, and in place of his usual kilt he wrapped a lavalava.
The first note of Tusitala’s flageolet was his cue, at which point Sosimo revealed himself with a voice of sustained sweetness. Spilling across the water came the soprano sadness of Lucia’s song.
Tusitala quickly stopped playing and looked up. His face had paled as if he had just that moment glimpsed the aitu fafine, and immediately turned on his heels to run. His twiglike legs were surprisingly swift, but Sosimo was alert to the forest and, an adept weaver of shadows, soon caught up with his master. They found themselves trapped by the edge of a stream, one of Vailima’s five rivers, and three small steps across stones offered an escape back to the house.
Sosimo was close to his master now, so close that he could see the red flower in his hair reflected back in Tusitala’s unblinking eyes.
‘My child,’ he said softly, searching out something in Sosimo’s unfinished tattoo. And then, in three quick steps, he was gone.
Sosimo reached over to pick up the flageolet his fleeing master had dropped into the stream, and in that instant he saw another figure appear mirrored in the surface. It was the Italian painter stepping in from the trees.
They would say nothing, the white-flannelled stranger and what he supposed to be the aitu fafine, red-haired in the sun and now singing to him from across the stream. It would live on in the portrait, in a fleck of red in the writer’s painted eye. But most intimately in the little sketch Sosimo would be given on the painter’s departure – quickly framed to distil their secret forever under glass.
His face is the opposite to this now, closed to the world, and strangely becalmed. So Sosimo thinks as he surveys his master’s body this final time.
He notices a finger has sprung up, perhaps in a last act of defiance. It is stubbornly resilient, this last gesture of his master, but in pressing it back down again Sosimo also lays to rest a memory he will carry for the rest of his life.
They say it was a cerebral haemorrhage, a massive stroke, that killed his master, but that does not quite sit with the pacific sweetness that has passed over his face.
And so Sosimo thinks of it as a red teuila flower that bloomed within his body, bursting through his brain.
Chapter 36
REQUIEM
He’s still focused on the ground when he swiftly surfaces through trees. A chloroform calmness envelops him, an immense scrim of green through which the red bursts like a capillary. It’s the darting underbelly of a small bird, Lewis quickly realises, as it rises through the vespertine air.
The crackle of something underfoot brings him back down to earth – the dried-out husks of breadfruit leaves. They appear like tortoises in the darkening light. Beyond the leaves he notices that the lawn is perfectly manicured, and wonders how you could bring a mower all the way up here to the top.
Then with a sudden gust of wind, the leaves scatter and he hears the sound of singing so low it could be crying:
Music, but a lonely song …
The flash of vermillion catches his eye again, but this time it isn’t a bird. They are the red letters floating within a bag of duty-free – CHIVAS REGAL – dangling there in the breeze.
From behind the trees he watches her, waiting for the right moment to reveal himself. Not now. With her face turned away from him, he can look down the length of her body, watching the song play itself down her torso along with the last of the light. Every now and then her toes tremble and rearrange themselves, as if the song is held there for a moment before being released to the air.
He doesn’t dare move. Just to draw this moment out, drawing it out to the distant point where music becomes silence and the light fades and the sky deepens and departs.
Even when the singing stops he can hear the song of her breathing. The sound draws him in until it’s all that he hears on this last island of light.
It’s in the final moments that he can see most clearly. In a blink it will be gone.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am in agreement with Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote that ‘every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude dropped for them in every corner.’
I would also like to thank: Steve Waterson who, with serendipity, sent me on assignment to Samoa in 2005; the Australia Council for the Arts who assisted subsequent research trips to Apia and Pago Pago; Alosina Ropati and the open-hearted fa‘afafine community who welcomed me back; James S. Winegar and the staff of the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum at Vailima; Sia Figiel and Dan Taulapapa McMullin as important early readers of the manuscript; Varuna, The Writers’ House for a fellowship to further develop the novel; John Murphy in steering me back to the treasures of the Mitchell Library Reading Room; Leo Tanoi for his generous cultural insights and offerings; Brian Castro and Peter Hill for their kind words; and Barry Scott and Penelope Goodes for their belief and skill in finally bringing the book to fruition.
Tusitala’s life and writings were seminal to the creation of this work of fiction, as were the shadowy brushstrokes of Girolamo Pieri Nerli, and Roger Neill’s Robert Louis Stevenson and Count Nerli in Samoa: The Story of a Portrait (1997) and Michael Dunn’s Nerli: An Italian Painter in the South Pacific (2005) were particularly invaluable resources.
Final acknowledgements go to the wonderful and often thankless custodians of both these slingers of ink – the patient and attentive staff of the Pacific Room at the Nelson Memorial Public Library in Apia, and the Special Collections area of Sydney’s Mitchell Library Reading Room.
Michael Fitzgerald lives on a lush gully in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. He first journeyed to Samoa in 2005 as arts editor for the South Pacific edition of Time, and has since worked as a magazine editor for Art & Australia, Photofile and now Art Monthly Australasia. His writing has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Financial Review and Harper’s Bazaar. The Pacific Room is his first novel.
The Pacific Room Page 16