Chapter 4

KIDNAPPED

The portrait in question, the reason for his travels, is sixtyone centimetres by thirty-five, and rendered in oil on canvas. Despite the Scottish writer’s icy stare the palette is hightoned, almost feverish. Nerli: the artist’s signature with its calligraphic flourish is rendered in Chinese red.

The subject is seated. His arms and legs have been cropped, emphasising his torso and face – but most of all his eyes. The looseness of the writer’s pyjama shirt contrasts with the tautness of his gaze, the atmosphere at once simple and severe, Samoan and Scottish.

Lewis has both seen the portrait and not seen it at all. While he has yet to journey to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh to inspect the work in situ, as an art historian he knows the painting intimately in the way that a luggage inspector might know the bags which pass across his X-ray screen. He communes freely with each crack in the canvas, each daub of paint and brushstroke.

With little effort he could reel off the details of its painting. Place and date of execution: the Scottish writer’s house in Apia, late 1892. Number of sittings: ten, or if you believe the painter’s widow, twenty-seven. And the various characters just out of frame: the writer’s mother, his American wife and her grown-up son and daughter, all sheltering in an unfinished house in the unquiet jungle. Beyond the forest, he knows, the rebel chief Mata‘afa is encamped, concocting a war of whispers against the Germans and their chosen king, Malietoa.

Gliding at thirty-one thousand feet above the Pacific, Lewis’s mind races. On the small TV screen in front of him, the computer rendering of the island pulses emerald green. Upolu is perfectly shaped like a leaf turned on its side. Thrown eastward is its inverted twin, Tutuila. Figures of flight time and air speed flitter between Japanese and English.

He brings the tray table down and opens his book to the reproduction of Nerli’s portrait, releasing the eyes of the Scottish writer to stare out at the cabin.

Lewis frowns, tugging at his moustache and running a finger along his unsmiling bottom lip, worried by what he cannot see. He is constantly aware that the sitter is returning the artist’s gaze, that this is a painting about the necessity of maintaining eye contact; the face is nothing without being looked at. The stare is unvarnished: Lewis feels as though his soul is being poked with the pointy end of a paintbrush. They are roughly the same age, just closer to forty than fifty, and perhaps more fearful of life than of death. But still they look; they can’t look away.

The writer’s wife wasn’t shy to deliver her disapproval of the portrait: ‘If the painter had only been willing to paint just Louis and not the author of Jekyll and Hyde, we might have something that looked more like him.’ Through the whooshing of the Boeing engines, Lewis can hear the resoluteness of her Indiana accent, its bossy bravado.

He hopes through his research trip to Apia to answer her in some small scholarly way. The conference paper under preparation carries the working title ‘Kidnapped: Painting a portrait of Vailima’, and ten days in rainy season should give him ample time to collect an island of voices, to hear notes of dissonance and disquiet.

Such is the idea anyway, though at times his mission seems as shadowy and unresolved as that of the Italian painter Tusiata. So much seems left to happenstance, in the hands of unknown cataloguers and museum keepers. With the rest of the plane suspended in sleep, Lewis angles the reading light down on the book’s portrait pages so that there is nothing else in the cabin but those bright orbs moving about. Even in reproduction the flash of crimson in the corner of the Scottish writer’s eye is visible. Lewis wonders what he saw.

He finds both sanctuary and subterfuge in history. As the cabin lights dim around him, Lewis looks out through the Scottish writer’s eyes. He sees the Italian painter before him, a man with loose continental airs and a mouth turned pink with pleasure, and the blackout curtains beyond, making this big-boned body the only real thing in the room.

Returning from inspecting her breadfruit trees, the American wife would find the writer strangely stilled, as damp as the painted canvas, with perspiration trickling down his stork-like neck: I am not sure who suffered more the artist or the sitter.

Lewis understands the unwritten rules of portraiture. He knows the seductions of its mirror-like surface, the terrors of concealment and truth. He also recognises the feeling that has overtaken him in the sleeping cabin, a swiftness of sensation that brings everything to tingling close-up, like the sudden sharp illumination of a sheet of microfiche. At halo height above him the reading light shines preternaturally bright, breathing the portrait to life and coaxing a stream of words from the Scottish writer’s mouth.

Lewis knows this gliding giddiness all too well; for nearly two-thirds of his life, it’s been a silent warning call. And fumbling in his cabin bag, he presses out a small rectangular pill from its bed of silver foil and downs it with a cup of water. The pill is cerulean blue, the colour of a painted sky.

Lewis isn’t afraid of flying. At sixteen, in his second-last year of high school, his parents and twin brother died along with the rest of the passengers and crew when their sightseeing plane flew into a mountain during a white-out in Antarctica. His Aunt Agatha was visiting Sydney at the time, and Lewis had emerged from the toilet, wallpapered purple paisley, to be told the bad news.

Aunt Agatha described the horizonless dazzle of snow and cloud as if the white-out had somehow anaesthetised his parents and brother, rendering them as oblivious to pain as this indifferent world of snow. He remembers looking at his aunt and forgetting to wash his hands.

Later, when he moved back to Dunedin with her to study art history, he felt comforted to be closer to where his parents and brother had perished. The clear-cut pronouncements of Aunt Agatha, as if they had been carved from the city’s bluestone foundations, also helped assuage his grief, allowing him to find solace in his studies. The crash was a simple thing, it seemed to him – he thought of the plane pressing into the mountain, like the time his brother Garry plunged a lead pencil into his plump white calf.

Lewis began an honour’s thesis on the nineteenth-century landscapes of the sublime, recognising the organising hand of God in a snow scene or a glacier. He wasn’t religious, but the cathedral canvases of Von Guérard or Buvelot stirred in him an almost hallucinatory sense of awe – unfettered by the heavy carved frames on Dunedin’s red salon walls.

But such awe was almost beyond description and difficult to translate, so he struggled to articulate it. During his candidature a royal commission into the air disaster released its findings, unearthing ‘an orchestrated litany of lies’ about flight paths fudged and blemishes covered over by the airline. Snow scenes could be complicated things, he now realised. Lewis was persuaded by his supervisor to change tack. The Dunedin gallery was showing an exhibition of paintings about the South Pacific. He liked the sketchiness, the unfinished business of this painter Nerli who, a few years after his voyage to Apia, had disappeared altogether from the world.

When a departmental position became available at the university in Sydney, not long after the death of his aunt, the time seemed right to move back across the Tasman. Helped by his inheritance, he bought an art deco apartment on Botany Bay. He liked its rounded red-brick balcony, the way it appeared almost hermetically sealed. But most of all he liked the name welded in metal above the front door, one which existed in his mind as its own watery mystery: Oceania.

There was something calming in the chop-chop-chop of the bay’s seemingly shallow waters. And it was reassuring to see, above the whitecaps, the constant comings and goings of planes – so many every hour of the day, so many bodies in transit that would never be embedded in a frozen mountain like lead from a pencil thrust into his schoolboy calf.

The cabin lights come on with a merciless blink. At once Lewis feels comically constrained, knees knocking against the seat in front of him, a blanket strangling his neck. Miraculously he manages to stow his book in the seat pocket, making way for the sudden arrival of the breakfast tray and its cubist arrangement of little plastic containers.

Peeling off the foil, he notices a slow tremble in his fingers, the chemicals at work in his bloodstream. Suddenly, he is hungry. A shallow grave of scrambled egg is revealed, the steam briefly masking his face. He fumbles with the plastic knife and fork which are ridiculously dwarfed in his hands. He can’t help but notice the tattooed arm at his side, rhythmically brushing his own, feeling its heat and heft. With the movement of muscle and a film of moisture, the tattoo seems newly inked, the interlocking design moving like snakeskin around the man’s hairless arm.

Lewis lifts the window shutter to reveal the pitch-darkness of the Pacific outside. In the reflection he can just make out his tattooed companion beside him. Lewis can’t remember him from the beginning of the flight – perhaps, like much of the plane, he had boarded in Auckland.

From his very first flight across the Tasman, Lewis’s natural instinct has been to hold his tongue in the company of strangers – in any case, his original chaperone, the taciturn Aunt Agatha, considered too much energy was wasted on unwanted words. But there is something irrepressible about his companion, this man freely forking egg into his mouth.

‘Are you going home?’ Lewis finally has the courage to ask.

‘Bro, you’re not wrong.’ Carried in the man’s voice is a surety and warmth, something generated with time and long distance. Lewis recalls how each human cell contains two metres of DNA, and he’s thinking this when his companion points to the map on the TV screen with his fork.

‘I’m born in Aotearoa but this is my homeland. I want to see how my other family is going.’

The man’s plastic fork hovers in the air, as if to emphasise the point. ‘You are Samoan by your values and by your behaviour, not by where you were born.’

Lewis realises they are no longer talking about a piece of geography, a map point in the Pacific, but something embodied by this smiling man who calls him bro.

He soon learns that his companion is Troy from Savai‘i; that after Christmas he will travel by light plane to a hip-hop festival in Pago Pago, American Samoa. Together they study the map on the tiny screen in front of them.

‘The only difference for me is that when they speak English they’ve got an American twang.’

Troy’s hand still hovers over the screen, as if he has just this minute tossed these two stray islands, Upolu and Tutuila, in a game of knuckles.

‘Do you think they’ll ever be united?’ Lewis asks.

‘No, never,’ says Troy. Once again there is that surety and warmth in his voice.

‘We’re cool being two. We’ve had the missionaries, the Krauts, the Kiwis and the Yanks telling us what to do. Think of us as two islands connected not separated by water.’

Troy then brings his arm down next to Lewis, spilling into his space.

‘The Pacific is the body we share.’