Tau’ arearea
Mauatua

In their years of tau’ arearea, young people were permitted all pleasures. The gods delighted in their experiments and adventures. Nothing was forbidden between them. A mother would be proud for her daughter to attract many boys and have many lovers, for it showed how desirable she was, a compliment to the mother and her ancestresses. Accomplished in the skills of lovemaking, her attractions would become famous and powerful men would seek her out. These were the fond hopes of mothers.

Teraura was such a girl. Tane could not resist her flashing eyes, her sharp-edged smile, which lured them like a pearl-shell hook spinning on a line.

She and I had declared ourselves name sisters, friends for life. After Grandmother’s death she came to live in our household, and spread her sleeping mat next to mine. Many nights she returned late, some nights not at all.

For me, there were no meetings along the torch lit shore, no nights in secluded groves. It was not boys which claimed my hours of darkness, but something else, fierce and persistent, that came looking for me, night after night.

It began with the scratching and fluttering in the breast, began quietly, like the pecking of a chick within the egg. But quickly increasing and spreading, feather and bone soon scrabbling at the ribs, twitching in the limbs. Bird, rat, bat, spirit inhabiting, pecking, clamouring, breathing. Breathing. Louder and louder, rattling like stones, breathing my name, clutching, reaching, pulling. Mauatua, Mauatua!

Rolling on my mat as I woke, I flung them off like spiders. They leapt out into the guttering candlenut light that burned all night, they fizzled and expired in the shivering flames, but they left the smell of death in my nostrils, smoking in my lungs.

I would look across at Teraura, lying on her back with her arms flung up. She smelt of pleasure, of coconut oil and sweat, and she smiled in her sleep. For comfort I would creep closer to her, inhaling her perfumed heat, and imagine the pleasantness of her dreams. Her ancestors did not harass her, they let her sleep in peace. Sometimes she woke and reached out to me with a sigh like a baby that has fallen asleep at the breast.

At the marae Hinuia kept vigil, receiving the visiting mourners who still arrived. The place filled me with dread. Pursued by it at night, I kept away from death by day. But each morning the priestess called me there. ‘What are your dreams, e hine?’

‘They pursue me with their heated breath, it’s always the same.’

‘Your ancestors are looking to guide and assist you. You must forget the white men e hine, forget, forget, forget. Listen to the spirits, let them manifest, or they will become angry and try to harm you.’

I grew impatient under her endless prayers.

When Tetua’s body was taken down and placed in the burial chamber, Hinuia made me look one final time at Grandmother’s tattooed hands. ‘That is how you will recognise her in the afterworld,’ she reminded me. The flies were buzzing eagerly and I dared not cover my nose with a cloth.

I looked instead at my own hands. That is how I will recognise myself. By those same patterns incised into my skin.

‘These shall be your keepsake,’ she said, and she took up a split bamboo and began tweezing out the corpse’s fingernails.

‘Not me, Hinuia,’ I begged her. ‘Let Maoiti have the gift of her mother’s nails.’

‘First, you will clean them in the ocean,’ she instructed. ‘Then shape them with a coral rasp, then polish them with monoi, then bore them with a shark’s tooth, then attach them to a cord plaited from your grandmother’s hair.’

‘We wear necklaces of coloured beads now,’ I protested. ‘I’m too young to wear death mementoes.’

Hinuia reached out and snapped the thread of my necklace with a movement so swift I scarcely felt it, showering beads across the mat. I glimpsed them running away into the cracks of the flagstones.

‘The white man’s cord is weak,’ she said. ‘Don’t be fooled by their playthings. This is the ihu of your grandmother we speak of, this is the mana she found you fitting to receive. Now is the time to cleanse these foreign influences from you, to look for your guide, to follow the wisdom of your ancestors. You must be absolutely pure, you must bear no stain, no hara, offend no spirits or deities.’

How could I tell our priestess that my guide had directed me to copy the white man’s sacred signs, placed a feather in my hands.

The metal blades had nearly all found their way into the hands of men since they were first traded for. The men treasured them, some had learned to shave the hairs from their faces with them, like Popa’a men. They consecrated them to their own gods, wearing them strung on their hips in pandanus sheaths.

It was well known that foreign medicine was necessary to treat any wound made by those foreign blades. And likewise, a foreign blade would be necessary to cut the quill of the foreign bird and turn it to such outlandish purpose.

A sharpened shell, used to scrape aute bark for cloth making, or to split and cut pandanus leaves for weaving, was not sharp enough. Nor was a sliver of bamboo, though it could quickly slit the belly of a pig for the oven. A shark’s tooth, cunningly fitted to a handle so as to tear open human skin, was unsuitable. A stone, ground to an edge for hewing timber, too clumsy.

Along the shore fishermen and net menders were gathered.

‘What do you want a metal blade for? asked one of them.

‘To cut the shaft of a feather.’

‘Why do you want to cut that feather?’

‘For making patterns on barkcloth.’

‘A woman’s purpose. This is a fisherman’s knife, it would be unlucky to turn it to women’s work.’

‘But it is a foreign knife, and our gods have no jurisdiction over it.’

‘It makes no difference, a man does not let a woman use his tools.’

This set the younger men glancing and giggling like girls.

‘A white man would let me.’

‘E, a white man would let you, but can a white man spear fish as we do?’

The laughter mounted.

‘The white men speared all the prettiest fish on Tahiti!’ claimed Teraura, who never missed a chance to flirt.

The men hooted with delight at this reply. ‘Take these,’ said one of them, throwing a string of coloured lagoon fish at her. ‘When can I come fishing at your house?’

Teraura broke into a dance, flinging the fish around her hips. Other girls were arriving, attracted by the laughter.

It was Teraura who borrowed a knife from one of her lovers, perhaps without him knowing it. The feather was cut easily then. Together we prepared the dye from burnt tu’tui nuts, scraping the soot to mix with water in a coconut shell.

The book itself was where I had hidden it, still tightly wrapped. Teraura sighed with admiration as the layers of cloth disclosed it. She turned it around in her hands, caressing its soft skin, marvelling at the smooth edges which fanned out into a thousand white whispering leaves. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘It is the sacred knowledge of the white men, all told by signs.’

‘Aue! What will you do with it?’

‘Watch and you will see.’

At first the dye spilt from the eye of the quill in black droplets and spoiled the white cloth. It was necessary to shake them out first, and seek the grip which would apply just the right amount of pressure. Then it was easy. But the marks in the book were so tiny, so many, and I did not understand how they could have been made so small except with the tip of the tiniest feather. My first attempts were clumsy and disfigured. I began by tapping dots, the way the tattooist works, before I realised that it was possible to form the shapes with a single line. By the end of the afternoon I had copied the first word many times, each time more completely than the last. The mystery of it stared from the rough barkcloth. They were like a mask that hides a sacred face, those seven signs. GENESIS.

After Teraura had come to live in our household, our bleeding soon began happening at the same time. We stayed three days each time at the women’s house, among all the other women whose moon cycle was the same, and we did not work, or touch food in this time, but drank only water, and bathed in running water, and stayed away from all others. Children and men did not seek us there; we kept to a separate part of the shore and had a bathing pool of our own where our blood could be washed away safely. Tuna, the eel, was guardian of that pool, and grew fat there in return for protecting us from evil spirits, for Tuna loved the woman, Hina, so much that he gave his life for her.

Yet the white men had left bitter traces of their passing. Rashes of spots and blisters that broke out on women’s breasts and bellies and shoulders, sores in the most intimate parts. At the women’s house these signs were discussed and examined, medicinal treatments trialed and recommended. Some women were grieving the loss of babies born half formed; others, in fear, had gone to the tahua mori to massage out a white man’s child, or to the tahua ra’au, to mix a secret remedy. There was weeping and whispering.

‘What have we done that the gods punish us with these sorrows?’ it was asked.

‘Evil spirits of the white men,’ it was murmured.

‘They leave their sicknesses with us, they leave their children to die in our wombs. Death is in their embrace.’

Teraura and I pressed tightly together as we heard the stories murmured there.

‘The gardener was a kind man,’ said Teraura. He carried no bad spirits with him.’

‘Tute, also, is good.’

‘Next time I will go with them,’ she said.

There were other girls who were interested in the talk. Mareva and Faahotu were cousins, the daughters of manahune sisters. Mareva’s mother had been a servant in my grandmother’s household. They were strong-legged and broad-shouldered, and both had spent time on Tute’s ship, and learnt some of the Peretane language. They liked to retell the stories of those times, about nights squeezed into the swinging nets the sailors slept in, with the white men snoring all about while the girls lay joking and talking in the swaying belly of the ship. They acted out the tricks that had been played on the men, incorporating white men’s snores, white men’s angry voices, the sounds of their pleasure. We burst with laughter at these tales. Some of the older women were disapproving, but our eyes strayed constantly to the distant horizon, where the white sails would reappear.

Vahineatua, like Teraura, came from a ra’atira family. The work of her hands was always fine. From her grandmother she was learning how to bleach and scrape purau bark to make fine skirts and mats, and how to treat the pia stalk to get the soft white ribbons used to decorate dance costumes. She had a soft voice and a quiet laugh and she would draw near to me and Teraura in the women’s house. Her family had kept her close to home all her childhood, but now she was a woman, free to follow her own inclinations. Like me, she was pirimomona, a virgin, and had heard only stories of white men’s love.

By night, circled in her glowing orb, glorious Hina sat straight-backed among the stars with beater raised, pounding an endless sheet of white barkcloth. It was for Ta’aroa, god of the ocean, that Hina herself had given her life, in that distant time when the gods dwelt on earth. She was working tirelessly at the beating board, making a cloak for him. All night and all day her mallet pounded, but Ta’aroa wanted to sleep. He sent a servant to ask her to cease, but she only laughed and said cloth beating was soothing to sleep to. He sent his servant again to command her to stop, and still she refused. ‘Tell him to block his ears,’ she replied.

Ta’aroa was furious, and he sent the servant one last time to stop her. He pleaded with her, but she said, ‘You will have to kill me if you want me to stop.’

The servant, afraid of his master, snatched Hina’s mallet and hit her on the head with it. Now at last, the beating stopped, and Ta’aroa could sleep in peace. Then Hina’s spirit left the world, it flew up into the sky. It occupied the moon, and she sits there beneath a heavenly tree, with her mallet ever raised to her work, and appoints herself the guardian of women’s occupations.

This is the stubborn and fearless Hina who cannot be extinguished by command of even mighty Ta’aroa, but takes to the realm of stars and resides in an orb of light, like an unborn babe in its water sac.

Again and again she dies and is reborn in an endless reflection and echo of te ao marama, the world of light inhabited by humans. It was Hina we praised and Hina we prayed to, the Hina of ages, Hina the goddess, Hina the protectress, Hina the maiden, Hina the old one. We are her daughters, her servants; she commands our wombs and showers the night with her subtle radiance. Even the ocean must obey her.

To Hina the girls prayed for a cure to the foreign afflictions, weeping and singing the old songs, sung by the grandmothers and their grandmothers, retelling the stories of Hina’s goodness. Hina, do not desert us.

While others said that only a foreign medicine could cure the foreign disease.

The symbols began to flow easily from my feather tip. Hooked sticks and coiled lines, circles and crosses, dots and loops. I kept the patterned sheets rolled up among my mats, not daring to let Hinuia see how I passed my time. She thought that I went with the other girls to dance and swim in the afternoons. Often I did. In Matavai Bay the coral head of Hiro’s reef was always raised above the water, inviting us to swim out to it. The small waves scrambled around it, tangling and crossing as they met each other. As we played and dived there, the gods looked down favourably upon us from the peaks of Orohena, from the slopes of food springing forth. We were their favourite daughters – they would grant us fertility, grace and strength. We admired one another’s breasts and bellies, and our tattoos, nearly all complete, which gave us secret patterns such as the birds and fishes wear.

Sometimes we dived to the seabed to look for things left behind by Tute’s ship, which had lain at anchor near the Toa Hiro. There were still nails to be found, and the metal discs. Teraura, who was a good diver, found a metal fork lodged in a crack of coral. ‘My sister must have dropped this in her haste,’ she declared. ‘When she sees me eat so nicely with it she’ll want it back.’

‘Did she drop this also?’ asked Mareva, tossing her a bottle.

‘Aue, the white man’s crazy water, and the stopper is still in it.’

They gathered around quickly, holding the bottle up to the light and pushing at the bung.

‘There was a special tool for pulling out the stopper,’ Faahotu remembered.

‘We’ll have to push it in with a stick.’

Teraura carried it ashore, but she could not hide it from the boys who were playing on the sand. ‘What have you found?’

‘Only a bottle.’

‘Is it empty? Let us see.’

‘It is ours, we found it.’

‘It’s full! My brother has the tool to get the stopper out.’

‘Tell your brother to bring it to me then.’

‘Let me take it to him.’

‘Go now and get him to bring it to me.’

‘He is gone up into the valley, cock fighting.’

‘Then tell him tomorrow.’

She kept hold of the bottle and later we hid it in a crab’s hole under a purau tree. Next day it had gone already, and the boys were crazy.

‘You stole our bottle,’ Teraura accused them.

‘No, it was the thieving land crab that must have taken it,’ came the reply, and they laughed, and invited us to dance with them.

In the years of tau’ arearea young people were permitted all pleasures. Nothing was forbidden between us. But it was a different hand which guided me, the unseen which crowded at the borders of the known world, beckoning me.