Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [68]
“The chief thinks it’s one of two people,” Kelso added.
“What will happen to the person who caused the rain?” I asked.
“He will be killed,” Kelso said.
Kastom, we were learning, was a powerful force on Tanna. Three hundred men emerged from the forest, led by the chief, who carried a ten-foot-pole wrapped with feathers. On top were the plumes of a hawk. The performers, painted and adorned, danced and sang in unison as the ground trembled beneath them, sweeping everyone away in an ecstatic collective rapture. It was the most extraordinary spectacle I had ever witnessed. I had not thought I could be moved by the dancing in Vanuatu. I had always been befuddled by the kastom interpretation of the afterlife: Live a good life, respect the spirits, tend to your pigs, and once you die you will dance into perpetuity. What, I thought, do an endless hokey pokey? What a woeful heaven, I’d imagined. Watching the nao, however, I was soon transported. It was like the bolero of the forest, a rhythmic dance that gathered ever more force as it went through the stages of a man’s life. Slowly and surely, the three hundred dancers attained an ecstatic crescendo. This was the Man dance, and watching the dancers, I felt something primal stir. The dancers were farmers and warriors, and while I have never been either, there was something about their interpretation that resonated deep within me—We are Men. Hear us Roar—and as we descended the hill to the squeals of pigs being clubbed and drove through the lush hills of Tanna toward the airport, I didn’t think anything could possibly end the bliss I felt, not even a Twin Otter to Vila.
ONE OF THE EXCITING THINGS ABOUT FINDING YOURSELF pregnant on an island far away from anyplace you’ve called home is deciding where, exactly, you’re going to have the child. Of course, it wasn’t me who was pregnant, but I had a strong proprietary interest in the growing swell of Sylvia’s belly. Tick-tock, tick-tock. The day was drawing irrecoverably closer, and we had some decisions to make. Sylvia, who was always keen to have as many third-world experiences as she could, decided that childbirth wasn’t one of them. Her doctor, a Tuvaluan, had told her, frankly, that if she didn’t have to give birth in Vanuatu, then she really shouldn’t. The hospital was a grim, dirty place, and if anything out of the ordinary occurred during delivery—and there is always something out of the ordinary—he wouldn’t answer for the results. Well, hey, we thought, this is our kid we’re talking about. So we consulted the map.
In Vanuatu, most of the Frenchwomen retreated to New Caledonia to have their babies. I had been nursing a strong antipathy toward New Caledonia ever since New Year’s, and I had trouble reconciling myself to the idea of having a wee New Caledonian of our own. The reason he’s colicky, I imagined myself thinking, is due to the fact that he was born in New Caledonia. They’re all whiny over there. The other foreigners generally returned to their own countries, but we quickly nixed this option. It’s funny how long a week can feel when you’re visiting the in-laws. Three months, we thought, would probably end in legal proceedings. For a while, we became amenable to the idea of having the child in Australia, despite worries that our son—we sensed he would be a boy—would grow up to have a predilection for wearing short-shorts well into adulthood. But just as Hawaii, Samoa, and New Zealand were all rejected, so too, ultimately, was Australia. They were pit stops. Sylvia didn’t want to deliver in a pit stop. She wanted a home.
“My nesting instinct has kicked in,” she said, rubbing her swelling belly. “I want”—she thought for a moment—“a rocking chair.”
There was only one thing for it: We would move to Fiji a little early. It had always been the plan, and it was just a question of time until FSP International shifted its office to Suva, the capital of Fiji. What