Mai
Mauatua

For the fullness of one moon and more the glorious ship lay in Matavai Bay, and there the people of Tahiti came to see the white men.

The shores were a constant throng of activity. To be among the white men, that was everyone’s desire; to go on board the ship and see and touch, to get some new toy or tool. Everyone wanted to be bond friend, taio, of a sailor, to go on board. For girls it was easy, night and day they were climbing up and down the sides, and they vied with one another for the most gifts. Necklaces and fans, mirrors and combs, were easy to get. They passed quickly from hand to hand, swopped and exchanged, borrowed and begged. A roll of foreign cloth or a metal blade required more attentive dedication, even tricks. Hiro, the god of thieves, was much in favour. The men, disadvantaged in this exchange, begged their sisters and wives to get for them the things they desired and could not acquire for themselves.

Every day there were new entertainments. People flocked to see the animals the ship had brought. There were all sorts of waddling birds, including one with a long tail that opened like a fan, but the children ran after it for its feathers. There were four-footed animals, some with tusks upon their heads, dropping trails of tiny dung balls everywhere they walked, with voices we had never heard before, seeming to speak the Popa’a language themselves, talkative, noisy animals. Everyone was amazed and astonished – such creatures could not even have been concocted by magicians. Nobody understood what they were for. Tute was purported to have said that you could drink their milk, but nobody could believe this. ‘It surely cannot be fit for people to drink the milk of animals,’ it was declared.

Tute also said that the hair of the frizzy ones could be made into cloth, such as his clothes were made of, but it seemed an unimaginable task.

There was one kind of animal, however, that everybody admired. They were a pair, male and female, and as they stepped from the boat onto the sand, rolling their big eyes and tossing up their heads, I recognised the same animal shown on the medicine container I had offered to the ancestor goddess after my first tattooing. It was the va’a with white sails I had asked for, complete with the sacred animals of the Popa’a! I went to the marae and bowed down before her that day, in recognition of her arrangements. Yet I told no one, not even Hinuia.

They were powerful, those animals, sacred. They had strong necks crested with fine, flowing hair like a woman’s, and a tail the same. They walked on tall, sinewy legs, and they allowed a man to ride on their backs.

When the white men mounted them and commanded them to run by a strap around the animal’s head, then we had a sense of their difference from us, we were awed. They were masters of the creature. They looked down us from up there, running faster than a man, with their feet above the earth. When Mai tried to ride on one, it flung him from its back. We laughed at him because he prided himself so much in his foreign acquisitions, but the horse was not fooled by him. The horse knew Mai was not one of its masters.

‘This is not a good horse,’ he explained. ‘In England I rode many horses, the chiefs and nobles all ride, and the noblewomen are pulled behind the horses in rolling canoes.’

Rolling canoes! We were incredulous. But among the things he had brought from England was a toy in two parts, a horse made of wood which attached to a rolling canoe fashioned in iron. It passed from hand to hand, children attached a cord to it and pulled it along the ground. Soon they were imitating the sound of horses as they ran.

‘Peretane is a very large island,’ Mai told us. ‘They have built paths across the whole land for the canoes to roll on. It would take many days to travel from one end to the other.’

How many tales Mai had to tell. When small children pulled at his curious clothes and women wanted to try them on, he told of the terrible coldness in that country where such thick clothing must be worn night and day, even garments to cover his feet and his hands, made from the skins of the foreign animals. ‘So cold the people make fires inside their houses, and the houses have solid walls built of stones, many rooms inside, and even rooms built on top of rooms, one above the other. Some rooms even below the ground. And so cold is it that they sleep on beds filled with feathers and have thick mats upon their floors made from the hair of animals, dyed in many colours ...’ Many people did not care to believe him of course. They said to one another that houses could not be built of stone, they would be too dark, and rooms could not be built on top of each other, for it would offend all decency for one person to walk above the head of another, and that a fire in a house would cause too much smoke. They took the stories away and passed them from mouth to mouth, and the details became more and more remarkable, until the foreigners were sleeping on the roofs of their houses like chickens, with coloured feathers to keep them from the cold. Soon the children had invented songs about Mai’s amazing adventures, illustrated with mimicry. They tied their feet up in pandanus leaves to imitate his shod step, they raised and lowered banana-leaf hats and kissed one another’s hands.

The girls teased him constantly. ‘Mai, Mai!’ they called, rolling their eyes. ‘Can you do it the Peretane way? Are the Peretane women prettier than us? You should have brought one to Tahiti!’

But Mai was pleased with himself, he shook back his long curls. ‘The gentlewomen were generous to me,’ he assured them, ‘and far too well bred to bring among hoydens like you.’

Instead of a foreign woman he had brought with him two companions from Aotearoa. One was the son of a chief of Aotearoa, and he was a guest in my uncle Tapuetefa’s household. Toa was his servant, and shared the quarters of Tapuetefa’s servants, but he went from place to place as freely as a bird, ignoring boundaries and tapu as if he were himself a chief of Tahiti. He was about the same age as myself, that Toa, and he wished to make love with me. He would wait secretly near our house. He followed me, pressing small gifts on me, once an ornament of bone he had carved himself, feathers of sea birds he had collected during his passage on the ship, and a red one he had got, he said, at the islands of Tonga. At night I heard him blowing on a nose flute he always carried, which whispered to me on my pillow, small songs easily understood.

He spoke like us, yet not. The women and girls made fun of him as they did of Mai, and laughed at his affection for me, but he didn’t care. ‘Toa, Toa, ma’a ta’ata o Aotearoa! Man-eater!’ they teased him, biting on their forearms to show their meaning. But he was not put out by their insults. He began searching his head as if for a louse, and mimed the eating of it. ‘Kaikutu no Tahiti! Louse eaters!’ he responded.

‘Why not?’ he would ask me when I hesitated to go away with him alone among the trees. ‘We are not brother and sister.’

‘It would not be proper. I am waiting for chiefly suitors,’ I replied.

‘I am chief in my own country,’ he would lie. ‘Much land, great forests, deep bays. Come with me and I will show you.’

‘How will we go there?’

‘We go on Tute’s ship, first to Peretane with him.’

This game appealed to me. ‘What will we do there?’ I asked.

‘We will visit all the chiefs of that land and the king will give us gifts to bring back. Horses, weapons, iron tools ...’

‘Will we wear English clothes?’

‘Hats, shoes, coats with buttons, we will be stiff with clothes.’

‘And will you eat any Englishmen?’ I couldn’t resist asking him.

His anger flared up. ‘You too mock the ways of my people! Louse eaters,’ he said. Then he added, ‘It was another tribe who ate the ten Englishmen. Toa eats no man flesh.’

‘Ten!’

‘It was a big meal.’ He laughed and rubbed his belly. ‘Then we will visit all my friends on all the islands we visited on Tute’s ship,’ he went on. He named them all, friends and islands. ‘Everywhere they will welcome us, Toa and Mauatua.’

‘But what if we want to stay in Peretane?’

‘We stay, we go, we are travellers under the wind. Mai says there are hundreds of ships even bigger than Tute’s in Peretane, and many other lands to visit.’

Now we were among the trees, away from watching eyes. Toa put his arms around me, and his hands were no more afraid to roam than he was.

‘Kiss me in the Peretane way,’ I asked him.

‘The Peretane way?’

‘Yes. Mouth to mouth.’

He did not hesitate. We pressed our mouths together, awkwardly, not knowing how it is done. Our lips slithered and tangled, met and unmet. Our tongues darted to taste, and retreated, like two eels in a cave. I closed my eyes and imagined I was kissing a handsome Englishman, but it was no good.

He wiped his lips with his hand. ‘Urgh, like two sea slugs together,’ he said. ‘The Maohi way is better.’ His fingers began to explore again and his eyes darkened with desire. His breath was on my cheek, soon the ure of this man-eating servant boy would be pressing into me, this I knew.

‘I hear my grandmother calling me!’ I cried, and I leapt up and ran away before he could stop me. For the journeys of Toa were not what I was waiting for.

His red feather I took to our marae and slipped it under the stones there, in the sacred place.

Red feathers were among the things in abundance on that ship. Such feathers had always been sacred to our people – they represented the gods. They could usually only be got with great danger from the tails of tropic birds nesting in the cliff faces of Taiarapu, or traded in dangerous voyages to distant islands where red-feathered birds lived in the forests. They were the ornament of the highest chiefs and priests, and necessary in the rituals on the marae. Yet the white men had arrived with bags stuffed full of them, and Mai, too, distributed them generously, until commoners were wearing red feathers in their hair and the priests were clamouring for prohibitions.

Hidden in his English clothes Mai carried another kind of mystery, a handful of small metal discs which rang together sweetly. He would bring them out on his palm. ‘With these, I can have anything there in England,’ he said, boastfully we thought. ‘If I want new clothes I give some of these to a man who makes clothes, and he makes them. If I am hungry, I give some to a man who has food and he will give me that food which I need.’

We did not understand. Did food not grow in Peretane for whosoever was hungry? What were the metal discs for, and who made them, and how did a person get them? It was too much of a mystery for us and Mai could give no better explanation. One by one the discs found their way into the hands of the children, who exchanged them among one another, talking of what they would be able to get with them when they went to Peretane as Mai had. Their illusions were broken when Tatahe asked one of the sailors to give an axe for the disc he had. ‘Pah!’ cried the sailor, ‘you need fifty of those to exchange for this axe.’

Then Tatahe was angry and threw it into the waters of Matavai, but already another child was splashing out to dive for it, so intrigued were the children by those metal tokens.

At the formal feasts, in the company of Tute and his officers, Mai made eloquent speeches. He praised the generosity of his hosts, he eulogised Tute’s navigation, describing the horrible storms, the hazardous shoals, they had experienced. He extolled the wonders of Peretane. The richness of the clothes, the sumptuous houses, the music of singing instruments too many to describe, the styles of dancing, the foods so many and varied that it would be possible to never eat the same meal twice. He told of places where the houses joined one to the other in row upon row as far as the eye could see, with multitudes of people swarming in the thoroughfares and the earth paved with stones for further than a man could walk. Of great bridges crossing rivers as broad as the ocean, and huge temples roofed with stone. So great were the wonders of that land that people began to yawn behind their fans. ‘Truly, it must be a remarkable place,’ they said. ‘How lucky that Mai has been there and can tell us all about it. It is a wonder that he wanted to come back to Tahiti at all when things are so fine there.’

When there were no Popa’a present, when only a few people were around him, Mai’s tone altered. ‘Hear these words,’ he would say, drawing them close.

‘This is what I will tell you. The Popa’a say their god forbids killing. They say human sacrifices would cause their god to be angry, but everywhere in that land I saw strangled men hanging from poles, and women too. They are careless of their god, yet they have all manner of riches in their land, and the noblemen live in splendour, and their god is bountiful to them.’

‘But this you should know, that while the chiefs feast and sport, the common people are hungry. Children die of hunger there in that cold place, and the noblemen permit it, taking no care for the common people.’

This we found strange, for if a chief of Tahiti were to neglect the people’s welfare, he would have no mana, and be no chief at all.

‘Listen to this also. Many are the sicknesses of that country. There is a season of darkness when the sun is weak, the plants withdraw into the earth, and the nights are longer than the days. Then the people are afflicted with sickness, their lungs are consumed by coughing, they take fevers and die, covered in disgusting sores.’

Thus we learnt that what we already knew of foreign sickness was only the beginning, there was more to come.

‘In those paved thoroughfares where the houses are built one joined to the other there is no cleanliness. They pass ordure within walls and then throw it out into the common pathways. But the nose accustoms even to such a stink! The rats there are as big as this and run among the houses at night.’

Now we began to understand why the foreigners wanted to come to Tahiti, and it was like a bad smell to some, and they got up and left. Others wanted to hear more and questions tumbled from their mouths faster than he could answer them. What of their women, were their children born the same way as ours, was their lovemaking the same? What did they do with their dead, in what attitude did they pray to their god, what sacrifices did they make? His answers set them rolling their eyes, shaking their heads, laughing.

‘Their women, ah, the noblewomen feign the ways of young girls and affect not to understand a man’s desires.’ Here he turned his head, lowering his eyes, and put up his hands as if to refuse a proposition. ‘But their moans of pleasure are much louder than their protestations! As for their children, they come the same way as ours, and their dead, they place in wooden boxes and bury near the temples. They pray like so, with their hands together, but they make no sacrifices at all. Rather, they say that their god sacrificed his only son for them.’

‘Sacrificed for them?’ This was novelty. ‘How, why?’

‘The god allowed his son to be born as a man, and then killed, like this.’ He stood with arms outstretched to demonstrate the manner of the son’s death. ‘They pray to the dead son for eternal life beyond this world.’

The listeners were awed at this. In Tahiti the people must make sacrifices to the gods, not the other way around.

‘Ha!’ said one. ‘Then they are fools. What use would it be to pray to a corpse?’

‘You see,’ said Mai. ‘The more I tell you the less you will understand. Such are the ways of the foreigners.’

At last I was left alone with Mai. We squatted near to each other in silence. Torchlight reflected on his broad features, another world glittered far away in his eyes. I waited until he spoke again.

‘You are curious, Mauatua, but hear my words. The ways of that country are narrow and slippery, and whosoever falls is lost. It is a treacherous place. The people look at you, but they do not see you. They are like the rooms in their houses, closed with doors, and what is behind the doors, they do not wish you to see. Aue, it is hard for a Maohi to understand. They are not like us. Different spirits stalk that land.’

‘Were you afraid?’

‘Not afraid, for I am strong, and my atua protects me. My hosts were generous to me, they gave me everything I needed, everything, and I became accustomed to their ways. But they are not like us. I longed for my people. Now I’m back, but I’m not like you any more. I am a stranger on Tahiti. Where will my home be?’

‘Stay here. Has Tu not invited you to join his household? Here will be your home.’

‘Tu is a high chief, surrounded by people with noble blood. What can I be in his household? When all the gifts I brought have been given and all the stories told, then what will I be? A servant among servants.’

Then Mai laughed. ‘Too much sorrow! In England I learned how they make the foreign ’ava, from a fruit that clusters on a vine, and I have plants to grow that vine. The foreign ’ava is good to drink – you will be happy even when you are sad. Hei, it is good!’

But it was not the foreign drink which I was curious about. ‘Tell me about the tattooed leaves,’ I said.

Mai was surprised. ‘What does a young girl want to know of such things?’

‘What are they for, what do they mean? Did you see many, did you learn how to make them?’

‘Hei, in the noblemen’s houses are thousands and thousands of those leaves, bound into bundles covered with animal skin. Rooms full of them!’

‘What are they for?’

‘The Englishmen can look in them and find knowledge. There are stories in them, and memories, but it is hard to understand. They can speak those tattoo marks out loud, or they can hear them silently just by looking at them. Stories of their god and his son can be found in one, which is kept in the temples, and the priests speak their words from it.’

‘It is sacred then.’

‘That one is sacred, others are not. Some contain knowledge, others tell stories, and some have images. Even music can be played from certain marks. Tomorrow, I’ll bring one for you, it will be my gift to you.’

When Mai put it in my hand I felt the awakening of a new desire. The book was smaller than the ones I had seen in the hands of Tute or the other officers of his ship. Its cover of animal skin was soft, like a woman’s. The leaves were so fine and white, they ruffled in the air like finest reva reva peeled from unborn fronds of niau and arranged in the hair of a court dancer.

‘Like this,’ said Mai, and he showed me how they opened one leaf after another, in order to follow the story they could find in the markings. The signs followed each other, thousand upon thousand, laid out in line after line in black patterns on white. And Mai assured me that thousands of such books filled whole rooms in people’s houses in England!

‘Each sign has a sound,’ he explained, ‘and each group of signs is a word, see, a word that can be spoken aloud like any other word, or kept silent.’

‘Show me,’ I insisted, and he put his finger to the paper and tried to draw an English word from the signs there, twisting his tongue and furrowing his brow with the effort.

‘It is hard,’ he said. ‘For English, the mouth must perform tricks. It takes long to learn. These are the words the priests say in their temples, this is their sacred book. Here is the name of the son of their god that was sacrificed, look. That word I know, they showed me.’

Then before me for the first time was the name of that man, Jesus Christ.

‘How do they say it?’ I asked him.

He pulled back his lips in a grimace, then he pursed them, they worked around the invisible word, performing tricks until a sound like a whistling groan escaped between his teeth. He tossed his head in frustration. ‘Too hard!’ he declared. ‘Make it like, Iehu. Iehu Tireti.’ He rolled back on the sand where we sat, he laughed, like sobbing. ‘Hei, it is good! Iehu Tireti!’