Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [44]
“Yu tok-tok engglis?” I asked no one in particular. A half-dozen fingers pointed toward a shy young woman carrying a toddler. Her name was Sally, and she hailed from Paama, a small island to the east of Malekula. Her husband was from the village just up the hill.
“Is this a Small Namba village or a Big Namba village?” I asked her.
“This is a Small Namba village,” Sally said as her little boy and I made googly eyes at each other.
Though twenty-eight languages are spoken on Malekula, most of the island’s inhabitants are roughly divided among Small Nambas and Big Nambas. I found it curious that a people’s identity could be defined by the size of the leaf that men wore wrapped around their penises. And what exactly was the difference? Did the Big Nambas have more to hide, or were the Small Nambas just a little prouder of their members? Historically, the Small Nambas and the Big Nambas were engaged in constant warfare. The hatred seemed rather perplexing to me. “Hey, look,” I imagined a warrior saying. “He’s got a tiny leaf on his dick. Let’s eat him.” Clearly, this needed further investigating, but I sensed that this wasn’t quite the right forum for such a line of inquiry, and instead I asked about the fishing.
“Only small fish,” she said, showing me her catch, a handful of silvery fish, each no more than three inches long.
“Are there any sharks here?” I asked, getting to the crux of the matter.
“Yes. There are sharks.”
“Have there been any attacks recently?”
“Yes. A man was killed off Vao,” she said, pointing in the direction of the island, which lay a little ways to the north of Rose Bay. “And there was another who was killed off Atchin, and another off Wala.” Atchin and Wala were within hailing distance of where we stood. “There was also one whiteman who was bitten off Wala.”
“Really,” I said.
“Yes. He was bitten in the leg, but it wasn’t a shark.”
“What was it?”
“A barracuda.”
Well, that settled it. The ocean was placid and beckoning and alluring. And it was full of monsters. Nothing could induce me to take a swim here. On Tarawa, I had happily swum in an ocean that functioned as a toilet. True, that could kill you too. But it hardly compared to the terror of seeing a fifteen-foot tiger shark barreling toward your naked torso.
“Are there saltwater crocodiles to worry about too?” That would complete the tableau of oceanic terror for me. Crocodiles periodically swam down to Vanuatu from the Solomon Islands.
She laughed. “No, there are no crocodiles.”
“Well, thank goodness for that.”
I gave a thoughtful glance at the ocean, wondering about all that lurked below the surface, when I noticed something odd. The presence of Wala and Atchin and the encircling population of sharks suggested there was a coral reef. And if there was a reef, then there were fish, fish much larger than the meager pickings the women had managed to catch with their hand lines onshore. But there weren’t any canoes or boats of any kind. No one was on the water fishing, which seemed very strange to me. On Malekula people lived off what they caught and grew themselves, and so it seemed peculiar that no one was taking advantage of what I assumed would be a bountiful catch.
“Do the men here go out to catch fish beyond the reef?” I asked.
“Not very often,” Sally said.
“So who does the fishing?”
“We do.”
“And the gardening?”
“The women.”
“And the women take care of the children?”
“Yes,” she laughed.
“So what do the men do here?”
“They tell stories. And drink kava.”
There’s the good life.
“Look,” Sally said, pointing behind me. “Your friend is here.”
My friend? I had a friend on Malekula? Across the stream, my friend, a fleshy Ni-Vanuatu man of about forty with a bald dome that glistened in the sun, waved, encouraging me to cross. What, I thought, my friend doesn’t want to get his shorts wet? I bade goodbye to Sally and marched back through the stream to greet my friend, who was sitting on the sand, resting his legs.
“I am George,” he said curtly. “Do you have a Lonely Planet?”
I did