Chapter 2

TUSITALA

Turned to the painter, a pink ear blooms, as if the writer can hear an island of conversations – imagining them all speaking at once – and then the world outside the island. Time threading, these voices are ushered in languages he cannot even pretend to understand, fragments of stories asking for a narrative. It is as if his ear has summoned this trade wind of words, drawing them like the call of a conch.

Three miles downhill through roughly hacked forest is the watery receptacle of Apia Harbour. Nine days by steamer ship is Sydney; a month or more via San Francisco is London, a further day ahead by whim of the International Date Line. Quite deliberate is this perch in the Pacific. The writer has no choice but to imagine.

The painter is Italian, as big-boned as the writer is thin. He arrived from Sydney aboard the Lübeck just a few days before and is said to be something of a stylist – the daring harbinger of what they are calling southern neocontinentalism. A preposterous thought. And without even a letter of introduction he is here. Seeing the painter now setting up shop in his smoking room, the writer sees an artistic interloper, but also someone who could be a useful distraction from the days and weeks of writing ahead.

The writer is perched on a carver, a lion-skin rug separating him from the man who has come to begin his portrait. The painter stands on the edge of the rug, unsure whether to advance or retreat.

‘So, what are they saying about me?’ the writer asks, as if testing the painter’s parameters for devotion and discretion. ‘The cigar smokers of the Union Club, the ink slingers at The Times.’

The painter carries his weight with a swimmer’s slow grace. ‘Your letters are explosive, maestro,’ he replies, now advancing across the patch of mangy fur. ‘More explosive than the nitroglycerine the Germans are making from their boats of copra. They say you have been selling rifles to the natives.’

The writer’s eyes have grown huge and hungry, drawing the painter towards his lonely side of the rug. He observes how the painter likes to use his hands when he speaks, blurring the space between them and ushering a tide of Titian-tinged words. These lap at his feet as strangely transformed as driftwood.

‘Without the hurricane and your support of Mata‘afa, Samoa and the Pacific would be Germany’s by now.’

Samoa – a word, an island, fecund and floating. It satisfies the writer to think that he has filled imaginations faraway just by being here. He remembers the upturned German warship that greeted his own arrival three hurricane seasons before. It still lies stranded in the harbour, its masts gently prodding the horizon, landfall for the stray souls of children and frigatebirds.

‘Forget about the Kaiser,’ the painter continues, his hands swimming in semaphore, ‘the Queen and the President – they wish they could give you Samoa and let you do what you like with it.’

Samoa. Just the name summons another warm rush of words:

Fair Isle at Sea – thy lovely name Soft in my ear like music came. That sea I loved, and once or twice I touched at isles of Paradise.

He watches the painter extract his tools of torture from the wooden box: an arsenal of brushes, tubes of oil and a battlesmeared palette. With fingernails flecked with paint, the artist lays them out on the card table for the writer to see. The easel hovers uncertainly over the two of them, not unlike a guillotine.

It is at this point that the painter drops to the rug, his body collapsing around the small sketchbook he holds in his hands.

The writer is conflicted about sitting for the portrait. For longer than he can remember he has concocted his own portrait through the energy of his words: novels, memoirs, children’s stories, all trained on the horizon like the stoic lighthouses of his Scottish father and grandfather. Today he feels exhausted. Yes, another painting could be useful. Something else to live on after his death, which is knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye. He has never felt so outside of his body as he does now, hovering on his carver, afloat in the twilight of the smoking room. He is everywhere but here. A rushing wind, called by the conch, the teller of tales.

His mind briefly alights. Surely to give in to the painter’s wishes, to sit for the portrait, is proof that he is, after all, alive – not a corpse of a man hemorrhaging a body of blood. I am alive, he thinks, edging back so his feet leave the ground, and once again he is floating.

For a moment he imagines he is a child in his highchair about to receive boiled egg and soldiers. His earliest memory. Why then, as the painter takes out his charcoal and begins a preliminary sketch, does his life flash before him as proof, instead, of his coming death?

He tries to think of nothing, calming his mind to a point of stillness, encouraged by the susurrations of the painter’s charcoal.

Beyond the makeshift studio, the blackout curtains are drawn against the morning sun. Out through a chink in the curtains his thoughts dart. Through their heaviness he can hear the call of the crimson-crowned fruit dove – the soft ooh-ooh-ooh ending in a rapid oo-oo. Closing his eyes for a moment he imagines it is the sound of a blood vessel bursting, and then quickly another, until he is spitting blood again in his head.

Bien caillé, the doctor at Hyères had called his spitted blood. Clotted. But that was a decade before, and here in the Pacific, he reminds himself, he is the recipient of what seems to be a miracle of molecular reconstitution: My bones are sweeter to me.

Hiring the Casco was his widowed mother’s wedding gift. It was her idea to anchor him here – away from the world’s prying eyes, harbouring his sensitive soul on this island of trees. A storm on horseback, she would be on the other side of Upolu by now, for the opening of the new London Missionary Society church at Matafele.

Closer to home is his American wife, dressed in her blue native dress patterned with mould, hovering over giant eggplants and cabbages in the kitchen garden. She has always been creative with her hands, his wife. There are the breadfruit trees newly planted, and just recently she has taken to feeding the cows bananas to thicken their milk. The servants like to call her Aolele la‘ikiki, Little Flying Cloud, aloft in her tiny white boots.

Still closer there’s the lazy shuffle of staff – could it be the beautiful Sosimo or Talolo? – their bare boyish feet papering the verandah outside, followed by silence: a pent-up pause released, finally, by a wave of high-pitched laughter, heh-heh-heh. And somewhere behind them is their watchful shadow, the Australian maid Mary, whose waist is even tinier than his, and whose otherwise blank stare is lit by the faintest golden moustache.

He is everywhere but here. A rushing wind, called by the conch, the teller of tales.

‘So what shall I call you, maestro?’ the painter asks, bringing his attention back from the chink in the curtains. It is as if this question is the gravest, most important thing here, something to unlock the coming portrait with.

‘Maestro?’

The writer pauses, tantalised by the thought. Indeed, never had he considered his own name until coming to the island, here where titles are offered like flowers, each collecting and connecting to the next in a lovely necklace of vowels.

‘Tusitala,’ the writer says. ‘Call me Tusitala, the teller of tales.’

The painter brings a paint-speckled finger to his lips, pausing to survey his cargo of canvases, primed back in Sydney.

‘Then I’ll be Tusiata, a sketcher of shadows.’

The writer takes in this shadow catcher, whose continental airs seem as absorbent as his linen trousers already mottled with leaves. ‘So what exactly is it you’re after?’ he asks. ‘A likeness of what?’

‘Let us pretend,’ the painter says. A smile breaks out like a shaft of light in the stillness of the smoking room. ‘Let us pretend that you are Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and that this whisky flask here is filled with a potion that will take us from one state of mind to the next. It is that impression, that likeness, I want to catch with my brush.’

The writer slumps forward, his feet finding the floor. You cannot catch me, he thinks. Instead, he looks up at the etching of his grandfather’s lighthouse hanging to the left of the fireplace. The memory of light sends up a lonely flare in the foggy gloom. The turning intensity of the lighthouse is constant, not darting, something to be summoned through imaginative will. Despite becoming a writer against his father’s wishes, he is still drawn to the light.

From the darkened corner where he sits, the back of the canvas is the brightest thing in the room. He thinks of it as a window or doorway, a threshold for his spirit to cross and perhaps depart from. But the image of his escaping soul barely has time to form before it fades. At which point he signals for the portrait to begin. ‘Tusiata, your victim is ready.’