Talofa

                                                    Talofa
                                              by Teia Maman


         I signed off the three-masted schooner "La Luna" in American Samoa. We had limped in to Pago Pago after a terrible beating at sea. A hurricane off Fiji had pushed us all the way over to the Samoas. Parts of these islands had been hit, too, so bad that in some spots even the grass, even the soil itself, had been scalped off the bare bones of lava rock.
         But the bay was deep and sheltered, and Pago Pago received us with open arms. We shipped water, food and cases of American beer, then camped out in a seedy hotel for a few weeks of rest. I took the first week of night anchor watches.
         As all sailors do, we spent plenty of time at the hotel bar. One night, a band set up and played us cover songs of American rock'n'roll hits, as well as Samoan songs. Some native women danced, but not like the wild Tahitian women. Here, they wear ankle-length skirts and knee-length shirts over that. The dances are stylized, controlled and tame. It's a tame place, I thought.
         But underneath that veneer beats the heart of a South Seas people, eager for conflict, deep emotion, vicious gossip, and capable of passionate love.
         The band played their songs and packed up. I stayed in the bar after my fellow crewmembers wandered off to their stable beds ashore. I'd promised the captain to be on watch by midnight, so I was waiting until then to paddle out to the boat in our dinghy, savoring the last minutes of shore life. The guitar player had kept his acoustic guitar and was softly plucking out some Samoan tune, when our eyes brushed, and caused some kind of lightning to strike us dumb. I didn't know where to look, so kept staring at him. Our eyes were locked. Then he smiled, and I was lost.
         We paddled out together to my schooner, and our history began. The bay was glassy now that the storms had passed, a half-moon shone orange on the horizon, the air was steamy and perfumed with flowers and coconuts.
         "Talofa," he said. "I love you."
         Matafia knew English but not perfectly, as he was only visiting from the neighbouring island nation, a set of rugged islands known as Western Samoa. The storm had kept him here in American Samoa.
         "Your name is beautiful, just like your blue eyes and golden hair. Te'a means 'very white' in my language. That is a true sign you belong here with me."
         My skin was pale and dusted with freckles, so different from his. He was over six feet tall, with dark, glossy hair and golden eyes. His skin was smooth like flowing water, and warm. I loved him, it was that simple.
         But simple is not how the world works. As an American, I had no problem remaining in Pago Pago, but he could not. Samoan he was, but of Western Samoa, a separate country. He had no passport, no ID card even; he was illegal already, but I all I cared about was being with him, no matter where or in what circumstances. So when La Luna was ready to set sail, I packed my duffel and went ashore. The skipper wrote in the ship's log, "Deckhand/cook signed off: Fell in love with a native."
         My berth, my job, my life! The schooner would be short-handed, and in the hurricane season, too. And I was the cook. Who would work in the galley? They could just take turns, I thought, and lengthen the watches. La Luna lifted her anchors and slipped away on a fair wind.
         We stayed at my hotel for a few weeks, a stifling, tiny room that smelled of mildew. The staff regarded me with disdain. Samoans do not say much but their eyes express what they think. If I was pitied, an affront to their religious sentiments, I barely noticed. I was ecstatically happy. Matafia was my first love -- I was only 19, and my mind was impressionable. He was 30, old enough to not give a damn, and I saw pride in his eyes when we went out in public. I watched him play music every evening. We ate in restaurants, flimsy shacks for the most part, or in the Victorian-colonial hotel, in the dining room painted and gussied up like a western parlor. The food was strangely American, in a canned kind of way. We walked through the open air market every morning, and he pointed out the names of the turquoise and red fish, the spiny vegetables and furry fruits. Samoans stared at us. A white girl with a Polynesian man – usually it's the other way around, and the change was not approved of. The smattering of white residents and tourists stared too. I clung to him.
         We boarded the ferry to Savai'i, the largest island of Western Samoa. The sea was rough, which I found exhilarating, but Matafia was no sea-farer, and lay moaning on a bench all night. Many other natives were seasick, too, from the instant they stepped aboard until we arrived in the morning. Then all the smiles came back, and we joked about his weak stomach. We wandered around the port town, Salelologa, and found an orange, red and pink-painted bus, blaring Samoan music, that would take us to a far village on the north-west coast.
         The same scratchy cassettes played over and over again, and all the other passengers had disembarked before we stepped down, late at night, in Asau. We walked for over an hour along a road of crushed coral, guided by white-painted stones along its edge that glowed in the light of the moon and stars. No noises save the insects, and the hush of small waves breaking on the lagoon's outer reef.
         Finally, we arrived at a village, a dozen scattered huts of volcanic-rock platforms with walls of lava rock and roofs of woven coconut fronds.
         "Wait here on the beach," Matafia told me. He went into a hut. After a few minutes, he came back with a lantern. He guided me to a cabin of rough wood and coconut fronds built on stilts over the lagoon, his home, where we unrolled a bundle of sleeping mats. Matafia held me in his strong arms, and murmured, "Talofa, talofa, talofa" a hundred and more times. This was the village of his adoptive parents, he said, and they would accept me.
         They all came, the whole village it seemed, to see us next morning.
         "Mama, papa, this girl I love, she stays with me." I could not exchange a word with this old couple, but they were kind and seemed happy to receive a stranger, but also a bit puzzled by it all. The other villagers were glad Matafia had come home, and they made a feast that night, eating fish and pig, taro and po'i, and drinking coconut wine until dawn. I felt like I had come home too.
         At first the villagers were reluctant to let me do any work. Because I was a foreign devil, untrustworthy, incapable of doing the work, or held to be an honoured guest? But soon enough I slipped into their daily life, an easy one compared to the rigors of life at sea.
         The village was built on sand and dirt, but it was spotless. After waking, we women rolled up the coconut frond walls and shook the crawlers out of our mats. We swept the sand from the huts' wood or rock floors and then swept all around them, picking up every leaf and pulling any weeds from the white sand. Then we culled red and yellow hibiscus flowers to spit, brochette-style, on metal sticks, which we stuck in the sand along the coral road to decorate it. After eating fish, rice and fruit, we walked to a stream flowing into the ocean, to wash our hair, skin and clothes and to fill our gourds with water to start cooking.
         Matafia left me every morning at the first pink streak of light in the sky, for the tiny fields and groves he cultivated, or to the reef or into the rainforest with the other men.
         By early afternoon the men returned and we shared out the food we'd prepared and cooked in the imu, a common pit oven. We all ate in our own huts. The afternoons were oven-hot, and no one worked then. We slept, but I was so troubled by the intense, wet heat that I often lay in the tepid lagoon water shaded by our fale, and dreamed of cool water.
         All year long, the calm days unfolded, until the austral winter began. The intense heat and hammam-wet days and nights began to overwhelm me.
         But the river baths were far too cold. I always bathed alone near a waterfall about 500 meters up the hill from the sea. For shampoo, I used the slippery gel-like juice of the red ginger flowers, and cheap, harsh soap from "town." The river water was shocking cold, and the only part of the daily bath I really enjoyed was climbing up into the cascade itself and trying to stand under the pounding water.
         By the time I climbed back down to the village, I was hot again. Mosquitoes came from all up and down the coast to taste the new blood, my blood. Matafia said I should not think about the itching, but I was frantic, and hated the red, near-welts of bites on my ankles, arms and face. I felt the villagers made fun of me for that, and because I got sunburned, and did not even know how to cook taro root. But Matafia soothed my tears, showed me all I needed to know with patience. He scowled at the others when they cackled at my attempts to make cloth, or to scrape the skin of the pig, or weave the very fine reedy grasses for the sleeping mats. But they enjoyed teaching me the dances and I hummed along to their songs, which they sang nearly all their waking hours. I was healthy, young enough to weather the difficulties, and because love filled my soul, I was open to all the beauty of this pristine, isolated coast.
         The north-western shores are sand-edged, and when the sun dips into the sea at evening, light fills the air, and the clouds puff up like giant golden pillows passing just overhead. The village of lava platforms topped with coconut frond-thatched roofs glowed like some Treasure Island dream.
         The sunset colors died swiftly, and all work ended, children slept and couples retired to murmur in the darkness. Our nights together were a long caress. We loved, laughed and talked together until sleep robbed us of each other. I was home, my own true love was beside me.
         One night, heavy winds blew our walls and parts of our roofs away into the sea. The temperature  dropped slightly, but the rains came on then for close to six weeks straight, and my skin became spongy and peeled away in great patches. The villagers treated me with coconut oil massages, but I needed powders, pills, medicine.
         "No, we cannot leave," Matafia warned me. I did not understand why, and he would not speak. When the sun shone again and dried me out, I slowly got better.
         I learned to work the soil, climbing up to the fertile valleys of our taro and banana patches. We grew papaya and oranges and collected star fruit and guava in the forest. My street clothes became tattered, and I turned them into rags, and wore only the pareo. Matafia seemed disappointed by that, as if my exoticism were wearing thin. But my blue eyes and strangely light hair still enticed him.
         One afternoon, I waited long for him to come home for our meal. He did not come, so I walked the lava road with the white-painted rocks, two hours to reach the next village, which was not so clean and pretty as ours.
         "I'm looking for Matafia."
         Some women guided me to a hut near the river where Matafia was playing card games with some young men I had never seen before. When he saw me he became very angry, and yelled that I should go home. I was so shocked and hurt that I just turned away and stumbled off back the way I'd come. After walking about a mile, tears streaming, a dog began to bark, and suddenly I was surrounded by a gang of dogs, friendly perhaps by day in sight of master, but now turned vicious. One attacked and bit me deep in the thigh. I ran then, dragging him. He would not let go of my pareo, and ripped it in half. I outran them though, screaming and kicking them off. My bite wounds were many and deep, but I was able to drag myself home, bleeding and miserable. The women of my village cleaned the wounds with sterile coconut water, binding them with strips of fleshy nono fruit. They wrapped me in a bright blue pareo "for good feeling" and made me eat and drink. I was sick for twelve days, fever and chills. I needed antibiotics, antiseptic, bandages, but Matafia forced me to remain in our cabin, saying I could not leave, and he fed me soup, baked fruits mashed with coconut cream and other delicacies. Eventually, I got well again.
         Matafia always played guitar for me and for the villagers. He was invited to play at a feast in a village several hours walk away and I came with him. A young man paid me a lot of attention, and kept pulling me out to dance with him, until my arm started hurting. But it is rude there to say no. I didn't realize Matafia was getting jealous until he threw down his guitar and pulled me out of the village by my long, blond hair. I was angry, and hit him and twisted my body to wrench away. Maybe I had tried to make him jealous, I thought. He scooped me up and carried me to the road and put me down, but grabbed me into his embrace. I felt him shaking. Looking at his face, I saw tears there, glistening in the moonlight as they ran down his cheeks. "You are too much for me," he said. "I love you too much, and I can't live my own life anymore." But we loved each other, and I was also torn.
         I started to become unsatisfied with the village. The women seemed to always be gossiping, about us, about each other, spitefully. My fale was always sandy, and the sleeping mats hurt my back. The bugs, the cold water, the stifling heat, the fear he would leave again! I wanted "real food" and a "real house," and Matafia seemed to feel he was lacking what I needed. So one day, he told me we would move soon, to his cousin's home near a real town. We left the village, in somehow shameful silence, although all the people came to say good-bye and gave us presents of food that we could not carry, so we left it all with his parents.
         We moved in with his cousins, Vaisa and Salu, albino twins, town-boys in their mid-twenties. They were Samoan princes without a kingdom, their family having lost, with the coming of modern times, the power that went with their titles and lands. Even so, Vaisa and Salu were held in awe, because of their heritage and their strange white skin, their Afro-style yellow hair and transparent blue eyes. They never worked. People came at odd hours with bundles of food wrapped in taro leaf, or gifts of kave, coconut liquor, mats or carvings or fresh fish. But we never knew when or what or even if we would be eating, from day to day. Vaisa and Salu wore t-shirts with their pareos, and they knew English and a lot of TV culture. Women showed up silently in their rooms at night, and we heard riots of laughter and tussling.
         Matafia had to act macho in front of them, and bragged that he could easily "keep" a foreign girl. I liked him less, this Matafia, but I loved him more. How can we help ourselves? We clung together at night, in our room of plasterboard walls, flimsy, with its lumpy mattress on the floor for a bed. I had dreamed of a hot shower or bath, but this little shack had only an outdoor shower of very cold water. But I cooled off that way, several times a day.
         One night, alone again, as the three cousins had left to drink and play cards early in the day, I cut my hand opening a can of corned beef. It bled so much, although I'd wrapped it in rags, that I had to hold it over the bathroom sink. My face was white in the mirror and I felt dizzy. Was it an artery? This required stitches, a doctor, sterilized instruments. But I could not leave, having no way to reach the town, several miles away. I did not know where Matafia or the cousins were. He'd warned me not to leave. I stumbled out of the house onto the white-rock-edged road, and fell down, and couldn't pull myself up. Sometime during the night, a car passed and the driver pulled me in and took me to the hospital, far away back in Salelologa. I woke up the next morning, weak, and anxious for someone to get a message to Matafia. I felt good to be lying in the clean bed though, and the window was open wide onto the port. The ferry was approaching the island, and a west wind was blowing spray high onto its decks.
         If only Matafia would come, but I waited, and the next morning, they told me to pay and leave. I had no money, so promised to send to my family in America, and then I would return to pay the bill. I hitchhiked back to Vaisa and Salu's, where Matafia met me in anger and worry. Only after I showed him my hand did he really understand. But he held his head in his hands and for the second time, cried. "Now they will all know," he said. But he wouldn't explain what that meant. The next few weeks we were very close and intimate, like when I first knew him, and he took care of me. He urged me to pack and come back to the village past Asau. But I was pulling for the port town, where we could get jobs and earn money. I saw that as a future with possibilities.
         One day, a jeep pulled into the yard. A native woman, dressed in Western clothes, carrying a purse and a big, stuffed Nike gym bag got out, and dragged a crying girl out of the back seat. She looked around and saw me, the only white around. She walked straight to me, calling for Matafia, dragging the girl, now screaming, behind her. I asked her what she wanted, but she just looked at me with venom in her eyes and a mouth curled down with scorn and hatred. Matafia came out of the fale, saw her and ran to the little girl. He picked her up and cuddled her. I understood now.
         They shouted at each other in Samoan for a while, then the woman screeched off.
         "I'm sorry," Matafia said. "I already have this wife, she's not a real wife, like church-married, but she was with me before I met you."
         His eyes were so gentle, and he implored me to love the girl like my own daughter. But I was only a girl myself, and I had never known a motherly feeling, and looked at the girl with dislike: the living, breathing evidence that Matafia had loved someone else. I could never love her and was not even inclined to like her, the screaming, crying brat. I showed her to our fale, but she was so scared that the first thing she did was to pee in the corner on our sleeping mats. I blew up and dragged her back out. "Take her back to your wife, right now!"
         He looked sad, not angry with me, and he left on foot, carrying the girl, who was still crying. He did not come home for three days. The neighbours looked at me askance, and gossiped without stopping. Why could she not adopt a beautiful Samoan girl? Why did I not know Matafia had a Samoan wife? I cried in the day in our room, and in the night I wailed, my pain was physical and mental and existential. It was worse every morning, when I woke to find his place on the mattress empty. On the third afternoon he came casually walking in to the house, and first he went to his cousin's room. After an hour he came to me, and held me fiercely to him. He knew already what was coming, but all I knew was that my true love was back. I did not question him as I didn't want to know more. But one day a month later, a group of men wearing black pareos and blue shirts walked into our yard and asked for Matafia. Police. They sat politely in our clearing under the coconut trees and accepted fruit and clear river water. But they told me I had to leave, as I had never received (nor requested) a visa. They said Matafia would have to either return to the other woman or send money every month to support the child. They told us I could stay two weeks more, and they would be back to accompany me to the ferry.
         When they left, Matafia started breathing fast and shallow, then abruptly rushed over to the bushes, fell on his knees and threw up. Next he ran into the lagoon behind the back garden, and swam far out, and stood up onto coral heads and shouted at the reef, throwing his arms about. Finally he came back, wading and pushing aside the water with his head down like a bull. He sat down on the sand, and I sat down next to him and leaned my head onto his shoulder. We stayed there a long time, just watching the lagoon.
         "We will leave, go the far end of the island, alone. No one can find us there," he said.
         The next morning I woke up and Matafia was gone. I ran into the clearing in a panic, but his cousin came just then. "Matafia, he'll come back," he said, gesturing at the road. "He'll take you to the village, he said." I calmed down and thought to gather all that I could, and that was easy, because I had so little now: clean pareos, soap, machete, water gourds, fish hooks and line, mats, and put it all into our baskets.
         Matafia returned mid-day with huge, freshly-plaited baskets full of fruits and vegetables. We took the long noisy bus-ride back out to Asau. We walked to the village slowly, burdened with our heavy baskets, and when I saw the fale over the lagoon, I felt the joy of homecoming. But we were not to stay here.
                After sleeping a few hours, we left on foot again, but this time the villagers were singing a sad song, nearly a dirge and their faces were kind and full of love for us. We walked for close to five hours, along a beach path, and saw only a few fishermen outside the reef. Matafia did not speak. We reached the rocky beaches, where the path went up and down hills, down to coves or around points, until just before sunset, a river barred our path. It flowed down the middle of a steep-walled valley, green and impenetrable, onto a beach of white, glassy sand. We made a camp there. That night, Matafia pulled a thick, soft New Zealand-wool blanket from one of his baskets, a gift for me from his cousins. "How beautiful!" I cried. He smiled and our idyll began.
         For two weeks we lived on this white strip of sand, and we lived for each other. We ate fruits and drank from coconuts in the morning, then bathed in a hot spring just above the cove. That was another surprise, and so welcome. A hot bath had become, for me, the epitome of civilized daily life. We then trekked into the thick rain forest, cutting our way with machetes, to find fruits and vegetables. Matafia had brought cans of meat and milk and cooking oil, and I did all the cooking. When the tide was flowing, we fished in the lagoon on the south side of the point, far out near the barrier reef. With a bare hook on nylon line wound around a coke bottle, in knee-deep warm water, we caught as many milk-fish as we could eat. Rather a bony fish, but I loved hooking them up, and Matafia always rolled his eyes at how excited I got, but he smiled too. We saw sharks and eels, that I shrieked at and Matafia greeted calmly. We caught octopus who fought heroically. At night over the fire, I made jokes about the strange food Samoans eat, but he teased me about how I raved about chocolate, wine or popcorn, foods he distrusted.
         Our camp faced into the wind, so the mosquitoes hardly bothered me. I sent Matafia up to get coconuts two or three times a day, because I loved to watch his lithe muscles working him up the bole of the tree, and the flash of his smile at the top. He lit the fires for me to cook, and for him to sing by, although he'd left his guitar in Asau. The blanket kept me warm at night, but Matafia could never sleep under it; he pushed it away and held me to keep warm. He held me all night every night, and we never talked of time running out. We talked about the stars that Polynesians know stories about. When a rain cloud burst and squalls would cover the skies, we would run for cover in an overhang of the lava rock, still warm and undulating its porous, chalky smell. The heat felt good, the fresh river water cool on my sunburned skin. On the 13th day, we climbed farther up the river than usual, and came to a deep pool, fed by a cascade that slipped down a slab of rock far from vertical. I saw the boulders were carved, in strange tattoos, with men's names and ship's names and dates from long ago. The name La Luna stood out, with the date 1790. The great-grandmother of my old schooner. We slid down the boulders into the pool, where Matafia told me about an old Samoan belief.
         "On the moon, there is a mountain where all dreams come true. And if you sail out to the horizon when the moon is touching it, you can climb onto the moon, and if you can get to the top of that mountain, you will have what you wish. But you can never come back to the same spot on the horizon you started from, and so you have to accept being lost. Your wish comes true, but you lose all you had before."
         The next day, the idyll ended. I woke up and he was gone. He left only the blanket and my few things, so I knew he'd left. I hiked back to his village, which took all day. He was not there, and had not come there, so I slept in our fale, and the next morning waited anxiously for him to arrive. He had to come back to me. How could he leave me like that? Another night passed, and I had no sleep and could not eat. I rocked back and forth on our sleeping mats. The village women came to comfort me, but their caresses were empty.
         On the third morning since he left me, the police walked in to the village. I rushed out, thinking Matafia had hurt himself, or gotten into trouble, or needed me. But they asked me patiently, why did I not come to take the ferry? The fourteen days had passed. They took me by the hands and we walked away, to the beginning of the paved road, where their truck waited. They drove me to the harbour, where the diesel fumes, the cars, the crowds, even a few whites, the smells of food, all seemed strange. All of it swirled over and around me.
         I could not focus, only think frantically: "Where is he? Where is he? Why does he not come?"
         No Matafia. I waited many hours in a shipping office just behind the ferry, until close to departure time. The policemen could not help but feel my desperation, and see how I kept looking all around the market, the sidewalks. They knew I looked for Matafia, and they took pity. They made many phone calls, always speaking Samoan, but I understood the gist and heard the name Matafia. They learned nothing. Finally, they politely told me it was time to go aboard, but I refused. They didn't want a scene; they didn't want to drag me out there. I did not want to humiliate them either. I gave up. But just as I was turning to walk out to the gangway, someone grabbed my hand. Matafia was on the other side of the chain link fence, and he reached for me through the fence.
         "I couldn't stand you leaving and I climbed the mountain. But then I couldn't bear not to see you and say goodbye, too. But we can be together again! Write me, you come back. Send for me, send a plane ticket. I will try to get the visa to leave!"
         He can never leave, we knew this. No money, no passport. She was behind all this. He knew he would go back to her, I did too. It was the only way; his little girl, the powerful dark beautiful Samoan girl who suited him. But as for us, we loved each other then, that minute. We kissed each other, pressing our cheeks into the chain fence. The ship's horn blew, three mighty bellows.
         The police pulled me away, his hands broke from mine, we cried out. I kept looking back, and then they did have to drag me. Matafia cried out. I saw him slip to his knees, his hands gripping the chain link. I was put in a stateroom, and as the policeman pulled the door to, I saw that his cheeks too were wet with tears. He locked the door.
         I still hold these memories, and though many decades have passed, the blanket still warms me through the long, cold night watches.


         
The End