Chapter 24

SMILE!

Lewis peers in through the glass to see an old man sitting reading the newspaper at a large communal table, a walking stick resting between his legs. Lewis pauses, wondering if this is a space he can enter, then pushes through the swing doors. At once the air-conditioned coolness lifts his eyes to the cantilevered ceiling above. In the middle is a windowed wedge of raining sky.

It feels sacred, this space, he thinks, like a small Italian chapel – as if a coin slot will somehow illuminate the scene and reveal what needs to be seen.

Keeping vigil atop a bookshelf in the centre of the room are two small wooden sculptures – one a maiden, the other a warrior – and on the column above them a sign: SMILE! It takes more muscles to frown than to smile!

The room has the shelf space of a small school library. There is a sense of knowledge contained. As Lewis slowly circles the books, his hands fidget over the embossing of spines, packed so tightly he imagines if one book is pulled out, the whole room will collapse in on itself, an island of quietly lapping words.

A page of newspaper slowly turns. The old man seems to be reading every item on every page, imbibing them unhurriedly, word by word, as if by taking these stories in he is uncluttering the world. With imperceptible slowness he turns another page and gently smooths it down. Just behind his head are the three or four shelves devoted to the study of Tusitala.

Lewis can’t bring himself to disturb the old man’s painstaking task. Instead, he gives in to it and relaxes. On display nearby is a shelf of Pacific fiction. Gently his eyes brush their spines, their titles washing up like strange driftwood in his mind. At random he picks one up, his finger slipping into its loosened spine; the book falls open:

Not yet – not even yet – has Samoa lost her charm. In the early eighties, before the world had found her out, she was all charm, all gold …

He thinks how this island has offered itself up like so many pages of a book, to be written over and erased and sometimes torn. He wonders what more will fall open for him.

It’s only once the old man slowly rises from the table, placing his newspaper back on the rack, and the swing doors settle once more into stillness that Lewis approaches the shelves and gets down to his task.