Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [48]
“I was wondering if you would recognize me,” he said. By this he meant, I was wondering if you’d recognize me with my clothes on. He was the dancer with the plume of feathers. Several of the other dancers had joined me on the benches in the nakamal. An elderly man was grinding the kava roots. Tending the children on the periphery were several of the women dancers.
“I thought you lived in the kastom village.”
“Now we live down here,” he said. His name was Philip.
“So who lives up in the village?”
“The chief and his sons. But we go for our ceremonies.”
Interesting, I thought. Looking around, I suddenly noticed a cascade of ropes among the trees. Attached were sharp, dangling hooks. “What’s that for?” I asked Philip.
“For catching bats.”
“Ah…and why would you catch bats?”
“For eating.”
“I see. And do bats make for good eating?”
“Yes,” Philip said. Better than corned beef, no doubt.
George joined us on the bench. “You can go to Botko tomorrow,” he said.
“It is a very special place,” Philip added.
“Will you be coming, George?”
“No.” He laughed. “It is too far for me. But you will learn many things in Botko.”
“George,” I said. “You had mentioned that there was an old woman on Wala Island who had witnessed her father eating the man.”
“Yes, yes,” George said. “But she died too. Last month.”
Clearly, the previous month on Malekula had not been a good one for those with firsthand knowledge of cannibalism. Or George had been joshing with me all along. Or, and I thought this was most likely, my interest in cannibalism had come across as a little unseemly to the powers that be on Malekula. I couldn’t blame them. It was like meeting a German for the first time and asking them to explain their nation’s curious tradition of killing people in concentration camps.
Philip handed me a shell of kava. I can’t say I recall much of what happened subsequently, except that I felt at one with the Small Nambas of Malekula.
MY GUIDE UP into the highlands was Rose-Marie, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Chief Jamino, the guardian of Botko. How hard could this trek be, I wondered, if my guide is wearing a Harry Potter shirt, a sarong, and flip-flops? Of course, she also had a machete, but I figured everybody on Malekula carried a machete. It was the accessory of choice. Looking back, I can now say that the five hours it took to hike up to Botko were the most excruciatingly difficult five hours I have ever spent on my feet. We left shortly after dawn, following a well-traveled bush trail that meandered inland. I had filled two plastic bottles with rainwater, which I carried in a backpack. Soon I added two coconuts and a melon that were kindly given to us by a man we encountered on the trail. If there is anything more uncomfortable to carry on one’s back than two bouncing coconuts and a melon, I have yet to experience it. As we climbed up the first of what would prove to be a seemingly endless series of steep hills, following a path evident only to Rose-Marie, who hacked our way forward with her machete, I pleaded for a break. “Would you like a coconut?” I asked, speaking in French.
“No, thank you,” she said.
“Rose-Marie, if you don’t drink this coconut, I am going to hurl it off this mountain. I have ill feelings toward these coconuts.”
With a deft tap of the machete, Rose-Marie opened up the nuts. I took a greedy slurp, downing the milk in one go, and moved on to my water bottle, chugging through half a liter. I asked Rose-Marie if she wanted some water. It was particularly hot and humid. Indeed, I was quite amazed by the quantity of sweat seeping through my pores. “Non, merci,” she said. I wondered what the French word for camel was.
Not long after, my mind turned to the French word for goat. Chèvre? I found myself on some particularly taxing slope, clutching onto a tree root, wondering how on earth I was going to scale this muddy face, when suddenly I saw Rose-Marie scamper up the incline without pause, seemingly without exertion, without even a hint of perspiration, as I stood there gasping for breath, oozing puddles