In Solitary (9 page)

The wind chased the large canoe across the surface of the water leaving transient snail-silver tracks in the waves. Tangiia travelled the paths of his forefathers, using the stars by night and the swells by day, fearfully sniffing the air for ‘the stink of ghosts’ as he passed an island which had become a nightmare via the tongues of parents who demanded their young’s obedience.

Nocturnally he landed to replenish our stores and he skirted the beaches, sometimes to be stared at by aggressive males ready to defend their territories; at other times watched coolly by mothers and young maidens. Once or twice we were tempted by light brown torsos with long black hair, but we resisted, each remembering the dampness of a particular pair of slim young thighs. Better the delight you know than the promise you do not.

At the steering oar hour by hour, for I now took an active part in the sailing, our skins became windburnt and our lips chapped with continual onslaughts from salt
water and sun. The small creases round my eyes cracked at the seams to turn to thin red sores and I played my tongue incessantly around the corners of my mouth, making a masochistic game out of the stinging pain, to relieve the boredom. Occasionally Tangiia took down the sail and stretched his body to remove ache from the muscles, before diving into the sea for real physical exercise. I really hated him for being able to swim while I could not. The water looked as inviting as any pleasure I had known. However, he persuaded me that it was safe to climb overboard while he was in the canoe and hang onto the side, allowing my body to float on the sea. After that I did not dislike him so much for being such an athlete.

There was another reason for his fanatical fitness programme. The fact that Peloa might not be alone had occurred to him and he needed to be fit for battle. Polynesians, like anyone else, would not risk death for their prime pleasures.

The training swims were a mixture of flurry and caution. Flurry because Tangiia was not a good swimmer and tended to thrash the water rather than to stroke it, and caution because we both had a healthy respect for sharks and barracuda. The effect desired was achieved in any case: the young man kept his strength, and felt refreshed and revitalized, and I relieved the soreness of my skin.

Afterwards we lay on the smooth, worn wood of his canoe, and he stroked the place where he and Peloa had united in ecstasy, telling me how they created rainbows of passion in each other’s minds. She would be pleased to see him, he was sure. She had whispered the words of love in his ear.

Tangiia’s home island was Fakaofu, in the Tokelan Islands, more than a thousand kilometres from Peloa’s Raiatea. Winds were only ever light because of the small variation in temperature. It would take a very long time to reach her.

One morning, early, we had one of those terrible electrical storms which frightened Stella so much.

As usual the mushroom towers seemed to be taking the brunt of the discharges. We could see two towers from the boat that day, and they seemed to draw in the web of fire as if it were their breath of life. This was a false impression, I know, for it was basic knowledge that the towers provided
an earth for the static. Still, it was impressive just the same.

‘Look, towers are sending their lines of white fire to one another,’ said Tangiia seriously. I chuckled at his ignorance – this was another human misconception and it was easy to see how it came about. The flash was in the sky for less than a split second and it was impossible to ascertain, visually, whether it came from, or went into, the towers. However, my education from the Soal told me that straight, silent lightning came from the same sources as the kind that is accompanied by thunder, which is often seen as a short jagged crack in the sky. Straight lightning storms, which formed their particular concave, tight-knit webs high above the smaller thunder cloud storms, were silent because they took place so high above the atmosphere. We only saw two meteors burn up in the storm – then it was over.

After the storm I tried to explain about the lightning to Tangiia but he was more interested in my life style before I had come to his island, so I ended up by telling him a few stories about life amongst the Soal. He loved it. We were good companions, he and I, and I began to wonder why the humans stayed apart and alone (except for the occasional foray into another’s territory to sate sexual needs) for we had come together like magnets, reluctant ever to be parted again. Why hadn’t we killed one another, as the Soal taught?

‘Humans,’ Lintar had once informed me, ‘are solitary beasts. They live apart from each other because they react violently to one another’s moods. Put two in a cage together and before the month is out one or both will lie dead on the cage floor.’ I had believed him then, but I did so no longer. Far from being solitary animals we thrived on one another’s companionship. It strengthened us, created confidence and a feeling of security. We could share our fears, and in doing so lessen the effect of those terrors on our minds.

‘Shall we get there soon?’ I asked Tangiia, who was staring soulfully at the moon, which led me to believe we were quite close to our goal.

He moved his hand on the tiller, slightly changing the course of the canoe, and then answered.

‘Not long now. I shall try to reach the beach during
the night. If we arrive too early, we’ll sail around until it is time to find my woman.’

The prow of our Satawal was alive with phosphorus from the water and pieces of silver water slid along the sides of the boat.

‘How do you find your way?’ I asked, more to keep him from mournful reflection than anything else. I was enjoying the peace of a night upon calm waters. A warm night. I dangled my fingers in the water, running them through liquid silver.

‘I feel big wave and watch for
kaveinga
– stars that make a line for me to follow, see, I will show you.’

He pointed to a star on the horizon and I followed it on its slow journey upwards, until it was high in the night – and then, another star was rising to take its place.

‘That’s wonderful,’ I breathed. ‘But I cannot feel the big wave. You must tell me when it next comes so that I can concentrate.’

‘I will tell you,’ he answered. ‘But you must take your hand from water though – there are fish that would eat it. Old word is
mano
– you would say shark.’ He grinned at me as I jerked my hand quickly from the water, suddenly remembering that below our idyllic night, under the wavelets, roamed a multitude of grotesque and dangerous monsters. I had been lulled into offering my arm as bait.

‘How many old words do you remember Tangiia?’ I asked. ‘Very many?’

He thought for a while.

‘Mostly words of the sea,’ he answered finally. ‘The navigator’s words and those of some fish.’

‘Tell me some more.’

He chuckled. ‘Some you would find very funny. Perhaps that is why we remember them. I find them beautiful.’

‘Such as?’

‘There is fish we call
humuhumu-nukunuku-a-puaa
.’

‘I don’t think that’s funny at all,’ I said. The word was like music. It sang the name. ‘I think it is beautiful too. What does it look like?’

‘It looks like this,’ he said, letting go of the tiller, and in the moonlight covering his eyes with his hands and peeking through his fingers looking as though he had patches on
his cheeks. I laughed.

‘And he looks like he is all head, with no body, and when you take him from water, he grunts like this,’ and Tangiia then made the most appalling noises.

I laughed again until my chapped lips hurt me too much to continue.

Over the next few hours Tangiia kept repeating that it was ‘all so beautiful’ and made me feel guilty, because we, Stella and I, had arrived to disrupt his life and possibly take him away from his island to be killed. But then I asked him one evening:

‘Would you think everything was so good if Peloa was not alive?’

‘No. She is what makes it so beautiful,’ he smiled as he spoke. ‘Man was made to have woman by his side, otherwise there are just empty holes in our chests where our hearts should be.’ I grinned with him.

‘Bit of a poet on the sly, aren’t you Tangiia? Well, I still can’t feel that wave of yours. Tell me again when it comes.’

And so it was over the whole journey. Not all of it was pleasant and I was sick many times. I also found the glaring sun a trial, but we stopped many times on small islands to replenish our store of drinking coconuts and food. In all the journey we did not see one Soal craft, and that worried me. However, Tangiia did not seem to notice their absence so I took it that it was normal for this part of the world.

It was a moonlit night when we pulled
the Satawal canoe towards some bushes that were poised with spidery legs at the water’s edge, as if about to step gingerly into the tiny waves.

Slowly and carefully we dragged the craft along the sand and some noise was inevitable as the canoe was heavy, but Tangiia did not wish to leave the craft moored at the water’s edge. It would take him time to launch the canoe but the risk of having his beautiful possession stolen was not worth the extra few minutes it would take to refloat it.

Once he was satisfied it was well hidden with palm leaves I followed him cautiously down the shoreline, keeping close to the foliage and trying to avoid the hermit crabs that covered the sand during the dark hours, for their shells crunched loudly beneath bare feet, and also I had no wish to step on a comb shell, with its rows of sharp spikes. We had not been walking long before we could smell wood smoke. Tangiia put a finger to his lips.

Following our noses, and eventually the light of a fire, we crept up to within three metres of the flames. Seated by the blaze, eating a delicious-smelling piglet’s leg was a lonely matron of some five hundred months. She was fat and ugly, but her face had a pleasant look about it – a moon-round face with food-loving eyes.

My first instinct was to jump up, grab her by the throat and threaten to strangle her if she did not tell us on what part of the island Peloa lived. But I realized that Tangiia had not the heart to attack this well-layered, simple woman and instead I suggested in whispers that he frighten her gently
into giving him the information. He nodded, then cupping his hands to his mouth he moaned softly.

‘Oooah Peloa, who knows where you are my little angel-fish of seas? This is spirit of her lover calling. If you who sit there …’

He had no time to finish for the fat woman was on her feet and streaking away from the firelight screaming at the top of her voice.

‘Keep away, you dirty old man. No more jig-jig with Lipsua. I’ve got to eat sometime. Keep that thing away from me!’

We realized the situation was far from lawful, and that the fat matron was not lonely at all – at least not most of the time – and Tangiia rose and bounded after her, flung his arms around her chest and grabbed her huge bouncing breasts. She struggled, mouthing oaths while he tried to calm her.

‘Off me, you …’ Suddenly she stopped wriggling, realizing that the arms that bound her were not the usual stringy, wrinkled limbs that grappled for her ample melons.

‘Oh, that’s nice. That’s very good,’ she giggled, ceasing all attempts at freeing herself and starting to stroke Tangiia’s thickmuscled left thigh.

‘Stop that,’ he growled. I could see he was beginning to become aroused in spite of her ugliness. It was, after all, a long time since the last mating.

‘You want me?’ she crooned. ‘See I don’t struggle any more. I help you do it, yes?’

‘No. I’m looking for girl. Girl named Peloa. She is young, with long black hair down to here.’ He let her go and she turned, hands on hips to appraise him in the firelight.

‘First we do it. Then you can look for this girl, yes?’ she said hopefully.

Tangiia glared at her, beginning to lose his patience. He unhooked his war club from the cord around his middle and threatened her with it.

‘You must tell me quickly, or I will bust your brains like coconut, you fat old sow.’

‘No need for insults,’ she sniffed, unimpressed by his aggressiveness.

‘I’ve got a man too. If I call
him he’ll come running to smash you to pieces.’ She ran her eyes contemptuously up and down Tangiia’s tall frame.

‘He’s bigger than you,’ she lied feebly.

Tangiia began to get desperate. Hiding in the bushes I thought about paddling her backside with the club but realized that violence would only alienate her. However, it seemed Tangiia had an idea.

‘How would you like man that is really bigger than me?’

The mound of fat quivered.

‘Bigger than you?’ she asked her eyes opening wide.

Tangiia nodded, smiling.

I hoped he was sacrificing Fridjt to this quivering mound of flesh and not me. She would suffocate a man my size with affection.

‘You can come out Cave,’ called Tangiia.

I sheepishly stepped out from the cover of the bushes into the light of the fire.

‘This is not
big
man,’ she said indignantly.

‘Not him,’ answered Tangiia. ‘Another man, on another island.’

She seemed mollified for the moment and began describing a young girl that lived on the far side of the island. Tangiia nodded in excitement, exclaiming, ‘Yes, yes! That’s Peloa. That’s the girl I came for. Take us to her.’

The fat woman led the way along a dark jungle path that had me stumbling along behind the sure-footed natives. Trees and vines are not the best landmarks either and I was anxious in case this woman ran off and left us stranded in the dense foliage. Finally we reached a clearing, in the centre of which was a small hut of palm leaves. Tangiia immediately rushed forward and blundered into the hut calling, ‘Peloa! Peloa!’

I groaned. He was sure to frighten the girl badly that way. The woman and I waited outside and listened.

After a short spell of silence there was a moan: the sound of someone waking from a deep sleep; and then a question.

‘Me, Tangiia. You remember your lover?’ was the soft reply.