Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [29]
“Another shell?” Dirk asked.
“I think so,” I said.
Patricia declined another, but Sylvia, the trooper, was up for another half shell. It was my turn to pay, about two dollars for a half-shell and two full shells—considerably less than the cost of a single beer in one of the bars that lined Father Lini Highway, to say nothing of the cost of a beer in one of the resorts. I could carry only two bowls at a time; returning for mine, I was met by a Ni-Vanuatu man who was, like everyone else, clad in shorts and flip-flops.
“Hello,” he said. “Where you from?”
“I’ve just arrived from America,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. “My name is Sam. I thought you from Australia. Not many people from America come to Vanuatu. Only Peace Corps. Are you Peace Corps?”
I admitted that I was not.
“Tourist? Not many tourists come to the nakamal.”
I explained that I wasn’t a tourist either, and that I was here, in his land, because my wife had a job here and I had followed her. “That’s what I do,” I explained. “I follow my wife around.”
He thought this was very funny. “How many shells you have?”
“This will be my second.”
“Two full shells already?” He emitted a low whistle. “Maybe you will have two-day kava.”
“What’s two-day kava?” I asked.
“That’s when the kava talks to you for two days.”
“Like a hangover?”
“No,” he said. “Not like a hangover. Like a dream that doesn’t end.”
“But in Fiji,” I noted, “people can drink thirty shells a day and still be alert in the morning.”
“But this isn’t Fiji kava. This is Vanuatu kava, from Pentecost Island. It is the best in the world. Very strong.”
I asked him what his home island was.
“I am from Pentecost Island,” he said.
Of course, I thought. Kava grows on every island with a hill in the South Pacific, and in conversations with other islanders, I had yet to meet anyone who didn’t champion the supremacy of their own island’s kava. In a nation a little more than twenty years old, an islander’s primary loyalty was always to his home island. We each took our shell and sought a moment of poetry. The kava did not go down any easier this time. I still found it wretched, but I endured the bitterness because I think it’s important to experience other cultures. And if it would get me stoned too, so much the better.
Soon we all found ourselves seated on a bench, chatting companionably with the nakamal’s other patrons. Or, rather, Sylvia and Patricia were chatting with the nakamal’s latest patrons. Those of us who had had more than a couple of shells had become strangely mute, as if lost in some distant reverie. I was happy to note that I wasn’t the only one who had lost the urge to speak. This wasn’t from any lack of sociability on my part. Indeed, I was beginning to feel as one with all.
Sam was seated next to me on the bench. He turned to me and said apropos of nothing: “America.”
It wasn’t a question, just a word, an image, an idea, and it hovered between us for a long moment, enveloping us. We silently communed about this thing called America. “Yes,” I said finally, after we had exhausted the topic. There was nothing left to say, and we sat there happily, in a shared dream, feeling the slow drift of twinkling stars moving across the sky, until a thought occurred to me, which I shared with Sam.
“Vanuatu,” I said.
Sam inhaled deeply. “Hmmm,” he said. We pondered this for a long age, the nuances of Vanuatu, its essence, its magic. We breathed the scent of the islands, the thick tropical air, the sea, the vegetation, blooming flowers and rotting