Mautu taught the older students, and in the days before Barker intruded into his life his lessons were severe, unimaginative and therefore boring — but pity the inattentive student. (Even his children feared him during classes because to prove his impartiality, he treated them more harshly.) His capacity for teaching was enormous — sometimes his classes lasted all afternoon and his students staggered home mentally battered to families who were annoyed with their pastor for keeping their children away from their afternoon chores. But none questioned him.
Those students, who were also members of his household, continued their lessons in Bible reading after evening lotu and serving the meal, with Mautu laboriously correcting their errors. But when exhausted or angry he never shouted at any student. A cold lowering of his voice, a pronounced frown, a sharp clicking of his tongue was enough to frighten the culprit into obedience.
Lalaga was the more imaginative and dynamic teacher. Small, quick and of strong nerves, she worked from the first light until late at night, with the hems of her starched dresses whispering around her ankles. The students enjoyed her classes, and whenever they were bored she told them stories from the Bible.
As a student at Vaiuta she had modelled her behaviour on Miss Beth (Misi Peta) their papalagi missionary teacher. A frail middle-aged Englishwoman, with skin the hazy, milky colour of smoke, Misi Peta had timetabled every waking minute of her students’ lives, and each activity was a lesson in godliness, frugality, cleanliness, punctuality and good Christian living.
They woke at 5.30 am to the jangling of a hand-bell, which Misi Peta told them had been bequeathed to her by her beloved mentor, Misi Isapela. After lotu, which usually ended with a prayer by Misi Peta admonishing students who’d committed misdemeanours, they went out to the grounds to pick up the fallen leaves and other rubbish. Then it was cold showers at 7 am and a breakfast of orange-leaf tea and home-baked bread or fa’alifu. The students were rostered to cook and serve meals, and their first lesson began at 8am.
Misi Peta taught the whole group, aided by two graduates. Apart from the three Rs and Bible knowledge they learned sewing, embroidering, cooking, weaving and first aid. Misi Peta was always nearby with her precise instructions and meticulous demonstrations, her untiring inspiration. Endless work was a supreme virtue — armour against the temptations that arose out of indolence. Samoans, she emphasised, had to learn that. You were far more than a Samoan girl from the village, you were a Christian aspiring to love God and His Holy Son, Jesus; a Christian who would one day serve God more devotedly through your pastor husband. You were a child of the Light that the courageous John Williams, whom she’d known personally, had brought to Samoa.
Though they were in awe of her, there was that permanent wall of aloofness between Misi Peta and her students — a fear of skin touching skin, of their glimpsing who she really was, of what she referred to as ‘our savage and evil instincts gaining control’. There was a proper time and place for everything, and a correct Christian woman’s way of doing those things. Moderation should govern one’s appetites so whenever their laughter or singing or dancing became immoderate in her measure Misi Peta promptly corrected them. Bible class on Sundays was devoted to students rising and, in moderate, matter-of-fact, respectful language, confessing the ‘sins’ they’d committed that week. Misi Peta forgave them, always.
With her senior students, Misi Peta often talked of love, passion, ‘the weaknesses of the flesh’ and self-control. Love and affection between a man and a woman were not to be displayed publicly; ladies were to be ladies even in their sleep; the flesh was weak and had to be policed constantly; and a good Christian wife was to obey and serve her husband unquestioningly, bear him many children as was her duty to God, and devote her life to performing good deeds and serving her community and God. Though she described Solomon as a king who’d given way to the temptations of the flesh, she loved reciting his psalms to them, her face flushed red, her trembling upper lip beaded with sweat, her voice hoarse with emotion.
In Samoa many people were still pagan, their eyes clouded over with the Darkness, and it was the duty of every Vaiuta graduate to save those pagans for God and His Church, she exhorted them. Lalaga was to recall that she never once saw Misi Peta in anything less than black shoes and starched dresses that covered her from neck to ankle. On Saturdays when the whole school in their sailor suits marched in double file to Mulinu’u, where they fished the reef and mudflats for seafood, Misi Peta never entered the water. She sat in the shade, fanning herself and reading poetry. Her love of poetry was perhaps the one thing that Misi Peta could be accused of being immoderate about. She tried to conceal it but she recited poems during her lessons, after lotu, during church services, used them to correct their behaviour with, and she made them memorise many of her favourites. Lalaga could still recite some of them. For instance:
Let me sleep in the loving arms of our Lord,
Let His light shine upon my sinful soul,
Let Him bring the gentle rain of His love
To quench my spiritual thirst …
It was rumoured that Misi Peta also wrote her own poems in the black notebooks she kept locked in her study. But for most of the time it was as if she’d been born Misi Peta: ageless, always in control of everything, untouched by the immoderate tropical sun.
And Lalaga worshipped her.
At first when Mautu went into Barker’s orbit he still took his classes regularly. Noticeably, however, his lessons became stories about faraway places, and as he continued to orbit with Barker, a subject such as arithmetic became inhabited by exotic creatures, heroes and adventurers performing incredible tricks of combining, plussing, minusing, and sailing in magical ships to fabulous lands. For instance, there was a hero called One-Plus which could stretch its body to fit any shape, distance or size, and which could, with its plus factor, add to itself any other creature. In one adventure, One-Plus used its plus factor to add all the Pacific Ocean to itself and was thus able to reach the kingdom of All-Plus, inhabited by creatures called Ever-Happy Positives. The mirror image of All-Plus was the kingdom of Ever-Unhappy Negatives, ruled by King Minus who, with his touch, could make things disappear.
Eyes aflame, Mautu laughed, joked and gesticulated wildly as he told his tales. Soon his stories merged into one golden stream that wove its compelling, healing, dazzling way through the enraptured imaginations of his students. Within six months Lalaga was losing students to her ever-storytelling husband.
However, as he spent more and more time with his books and Barker, he began to neglect his classes. So Lalaga, in the spirit of Misi Peta and aided by her older students, who were training for entry into Vaiuta, assumed the responsibility of teaching all the students. She revelled in her work; it was her duty to bring the virtues of Vaiuta and Misi Peta to Satoa. Soon she was also taking classes in cooking, first aid, hygiene and sanitation for her students’ mothers and other women. The more she worked, the happier she was.
When Mautu started neglecting their household as well, Lalaga took charge of that, and within a brisk time the lives of their children and the other members of their household ticked to her punctual timetable. Soon their home, church, school and the surrounding area were always trim, tidy and clean like her starched dresses, and, through her classes with the women, her cleanliness spread through the village.
It was a cold evening, the fale blinds were drawn, blocking out the wind that was sweeping in from the sea, everyone had bathed earlier than usual and the mosquito nets were up. The lamp in the centre of the fale flickered and cast a swimming light over everything. Mautu called his children into the side of the fale where he slept with Lalaga. He drew the curtain to separate them from the rest of the household, lit a lamp and, after looking at each child, declared, ‘Up till now I’ve given you the new knowledge in a very disorderly fashion, and in Samoan. An important part of the treasure is the language in which it is coming to me: English. Tonight I am going to start teaching you that language.’
‘Yes, yes!’ Peleiupu said. The others agreed eagerly.
The wind hummed and clattered around the fale as if it wanted to enter and participate in the lesson. Opening the English Bible, Mautu said, ‘“In the Beginning …” Repeat!’
“‘In the Beginning”’, chorused his children, led by Peleiupu.
‘“…was the Word…”’
‘“…was the Word…”’
‘“…and the Word …”’
‘“…and the Word …”’
“‘…was with God…”’
‘“…was with God…”’
‘Once again!’ he instructed them.
As their lesson continued and their tongues struggled to fit the new language it was as if the whole fale and the light were being named by another system of shaping and inventing. The wind slowed down, wrapped itself around the fale, held its breath and listened. Ruta and Naomi fell asleep and Peleiupu and Arona carried them to their mosquito nets.
Three nights later Lalaga joined the lesson around the lamp. ‘The village will notice you are favouring your children,’ she told him. He didn’t seem to hear her. He opened the Bible and started the lesson.
She didn’t mention it to him again. Worried about the transformation he was undergoing and the effect it was having on their children, she participated from then on in the English lessons. She noticed that Peleiupu was swallowing up the new language avidly, easily, at a pace she herself had to struggle to keep up with. And when the other children fell asleep where they sat and Mautu started drowsing off, Peleiupu was stridently awake and wanting more. More.
Lalaga believed Mautu was on the most important journey of his life (and, consequently, theirs): a journey into regions she was frightened to contemplate, away from the realities she cherished because they tied her securely to the earth’s pulse. But because he wasn’t aware he was taking their children with him, she feared for their safety and wished Barker (and his difficult language) had not entered their lives.
When Mautu stopped teaching his afternoon classes altogether, Lalaga used that time to try and influence their children away from Mautu’s journey. She was harder on them, gave them more difficult schoolwork, punished them often, insisted at home that they do most of the chores and no one was to help them. They deferred to her, and did everything perfectly, without complaining. Especially Peleiupu, who did most of the work and rallied her brother and sisters whenever they threatened to rebel against their mother. It was as though Peleiupu had decided (on behalf of the others) that Lalaga’s taxing lessons and demands were the price they had to pay for the wonderful education their father was giving them.
Lalaga harboured fears she was afraid to admit to herself but which made her observe, vigilantly, every change in her children. The first fear concerned the history of abnormalities in her aiga.
Earlier that century a cousin, so it was whispered, had been born with six toes on his right foot and a large black patch of pig’s fur on the nape of his neck: a result, so everyone said, of his father’s adulterous ways. He spurned his father, and eventually in his adulthood went mad and rushed through their village ripping with his nails at the fur on his neck and crying, ‘I’m a pig! I’m a pig!’
Before him, a female ancestor in her fifth year had sprouted a large hump on her back — the result, so rumour had it, of her father’s insatiable appetite for cooked human flesh. In her fiftieth year, after a granddaughter was born with a similar hump, she stabbed sticks into her father’s grave and into the holes poured boiling water, cursing, ‘You cannibal! Take that, you cannibal!’
Another ali’i ancestor and head of their aiga was disgraced by his eldest son’s cowardice in battle so he cursed him, invoking a ferocious aiga aitu to inhabit his son’s centre and remind him that he’d sired a coward. The aitu, who also felt disgraced, went further and burst open the son’s insides, revealing to all that the youth was without a liver, the organ where courage resided.
Most frightening of all to Lalaga, because it was recent and concerned people she loved profoundly, was the fate of her two brothers, who had been groomed by her parents and the papalagi missionaries for the ministry.
Just before graduating, the eldest, Mose, had been found wandering through the missionary settlement, boasting loudly about the size of his manhood, and cursing God for denying him indiscriminate use of it. Their distressed parents took him home where at least once a month, despite their vigilance, he broke out of their fale and paraded his erectness through the shocked village. He hanged himself a year later, on Christmas Eve, after their father had chastised him for tearing out the first page of Ecclesiastes and eating it.
Ionatana, Lalaga’s second brother, had lasted one year at the theological college, returned home and told their enraged father he didn’t want to be a pastor. Their father refused to talk to him for week after week after week. Eventually Ionatana disappeared from their village, and Lalaga hadn’t seen him since. She’d heard he was living in Apia and working for a German trading company.
She missed her brothers deeply. She’d loved them intensely, so when they’d both denied God and their duty to serve Him, she suspected she was tainted by the same madness. Not only was she afraid of the curse — the strain of insanity that seemed inherent in her aiga — reappearing in her children, she was also frightened of what they may have inherited from Mautu and his aiga.
Four months before Lalaga had graduated from Vaiuta her parents had visited Misi Peta and spent a long time talking in her office. Eventually Misi Peta had sent for Lalaga. She was drenched with sweat before she reached the office.
As she entered the room, head bowed, she caught the sound of a fly — an almost inaudible buzzing like a small finger twirling gently in her left ear. She was to remember that throughout her life every time she entered a place in which she didn’t feel secure. She sat down beside Talaola, her mother, by the door, clasped her hands in her lap and gazed down at them.
‘Lalaga,’ Misi Peta started in her slow deliberate Samoan, ‘now you are in your twenties, your parents, with God’s guidance, have reached an important decision concerning your future and your life.’ Lalaga continued staring at her hands. ‘You have spent nearly three years with us, learning the ways of God as laid down in His Holy Book. You have been a very obedient and diligent student, a credit to your people and aiga. Now your life as a student and girl must give way to your life as a woman, and a woman of God who, in His wisdom, has chosen you to spread His Word, His message, throughout this country, which in large measure is still pagan.’ She paused, and Lalaga could feel those intensely blue eyes focused on her. ‘Lalaga, your parents have chosen a servant of God — he will finish his training at Salua at the end of this year — to be your husband. I want to congratulate your parents for coming to that wise decision …’
As Misi Peta went on, Lalaga grew more bewildered. Becoming a woman, an adult and a wife and mother, and all at once, was too sudden, too overwhelming a transformation for a girl — yes, she was still a girl. And the responsibility of being a pastor’s wife and spreading God’s Word made it even more harassingly unbelievable. She had always accepted that her husband would be chosen by her parents but she couldn’t believe that choice was being made now.
‘We know, Lalaga, that you will make an excellent missionary. All you need to remember is that our Heavenly Father will always be with you. Be a good, loving wife to your husband and God and the people you are going to serve. Live by the Christian ways and rules of conduct of your school.’ Misi Peta got up. ‘I will leave you now to talk to your parents.’ As she passed Lalaga she patted her head. Lalaga would always cherish that first and last touch of Misi Peta’s blessing.
Lalaga’s compact physique, the quickness of her movements and gestures and the melodious way she spoke reflected her father, Malaetasi, a small but tenacious matai, the first in their aiga to become literate, who had spent a large part of his adult life trying unsuccessfully to get one of his sons to be a pastor. In bitter desperation he had accepted the second option: his youngest daughter (and his favourite) was to be a pastor’s wife. From him, Lalaga had inherited a quiet, relentless tenacity, realism and practicality. You never gave up on, or into, anything.
Her mother, Talaola, on the other hand, was illiterate, accepted most things and people for what they were, and was loved for her talent as a storyteller and her capacity to forgive others. From her, Lalaga derived an indomitable solidity, and the will to forage for what was enduring and good. Although at times Lalaga was ashamed of her mother’s illiteracy, lack of sophistication, and what Misi Peta called ‘superstitious and uncivilised ways’, she loved her more than anyone else.
‘He is a good person, a student at Salua,’ Malaetasi said. Lalaga looked at her mother, who nodded. ‘I have talked with his teachers, especially Misi Simaila, the papalagi missionary, about him. They agree he is an excellent pastor. He is from a good Christian aiga, too. Lotu Ta’iti, like us. His father is one of the ali’i of Fagaloto. Excellent lineage.’ He paused, waiting for Lalaga to reply. She didn’t; she was trying to accept the unreality of the future being mapped out for her.
‘It will be an honour for our two aiga to be united through your marriage. And a greater honour for my daughter to continue serving God in the work as a pastor’s wife.’
Lalaga looked at Talaola, who rarely said anything when her husband was present. Talaola coughed and said, ‘Your father, who has cared for and loved you all your life, is correct in his decision. As you know, I am an ignorant person, so I am very proud to have an educated daughter, one chosen by our Heavenly Father to do His work. And even prouder that my daughter is marrying an educated man.’
Rising slowly to his feet, Malaetasi said, ‘When we leave here the tulafale of our aiga and I will visit his aiga and arrange everything.’ He left the room quickly.
‘There is nothing to be afraid of,’ Talaola said, placing her hand over Lalaga’s. Lalaga nodded once. Her mother’s smell reminded her of dew-wet earth drying in the morning sun. ‘We are all very proud of you,’ Talaola whispered. Lalaga found herself gazing into her reflection in the tears in her mother’s eyes.
As soon as she entered her dormitory Sinaula, her best friend, and the rest of her graduating class hemmed her in, wanting to know what had happened. From past experience she knew she had to tell them immediately or they’d continue embarrassing her. So she did.
‘What’s his name?’ Sinaula asked. ‘Yes!’ the others chorused. She told them.
‘How do you feel about marrying someone you’ve not even met?’ someone asked. Lalaga shrugged her shoulders.
‘We have no choice in the matter!’ Sinaula reminded them. ‘We are not papalagi, who are free to marry who they want and for love.’
‘No, we’re not papalagi,’ Lalaga emphasised. ‘But I’m sure my parents and Misi Peta have chosen a man I will respect.’
‘Yes, a good servant of God!’ Sinaula stopped the others’ embarrassing curiosity. ‘And Lalaga is lucky she’s getting married. We’re still waiting for our choices to be made for us.’ The others nodded. ‘Anyway, if you don’t know who you’re marrying, you may be in for pleasant surprises!’ she added. Some of the others laughed.
‘You may also be in for unpleasant surprises!’ a pessimist offered. Lalaga glanced at Sinaula.
‘As a pastor Lalaga’s husband will have to behave,’ Sinaula declared. The pessimist had to agree. Sinaula had a way of ultimately getting her way with the other students.
The others dispersed soon after. Sinaula sat holding Lalaga’s arm. ‘I’m sure it’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘Most of the Vaiuta women have married pastors who were chosen for them. That’s how my parents married — and they’re still together, despite the fact that my mother bosses him around.’
During the day the others kidded her about the kind of man Mautu was going to be, and she tried not to get annoyed. Sometimes she dreaded how and what Mautu was going to be and had to consult Sinaula, who consoled her with alluring pictures of an ideal marriage, ideal ‘touching of bodies’, ideal children.
It was during arithmetic class that Sinaula came in and said something to their teacher. ‘Misi Peta wants to see you in her office,’ their teacher called to Lalaga. She knew, and her heart threatened to clog her throat. She rose unsteadily to her feet and, head bowed, headed for the door. Sinaula brushed her shoulder gently as she hurried past.
Her feet were leading her. She kept swallowing back. No one in the corridor, streaks of sunlight striped the floor ahead. She watched her feet treading on the light, disturbing the almost invisible particles of dust that rose slowly into the air.
She stopped in the open doorway. ‘Come in,’ Misi Peta called. Lalaga’s right foot was the first to step over the threshold.
She refused to look at anyone, focusing her attention on the area directly in front of her feet.
‘Sit down over there,’ a male papalagi voice invited her. She caught his hand pointing at the chair near the door. She sat down. Ahead at the corner of her vision was the outline of Misi Simaila, sitting in the cane chair behind Misi Peta’s desk. Misi Simaila was a regular visitor to Vaiuta. In the right-hand corner, facing the missionaries, was a young man, immense and in a white shirt and ie lavalava. Her heart was like a live bird trapped at the back of her mouth. For the rest of their meeting most of her attention would be on him.
‘Thank you for coming,’ Misi Simaila said in Samoan. His accent was less pronounced than Misi Peta’s. Lalaga forced her vision to inch up. Misi Simaila appeared to have no flesh on his skeleton. ‘Let us pray,’ he declared. Bluish veins, a network of them, were visible through his jade-white skin, and his green eyes were embedded deeply in their sockets. Lalaga knew from his previous visits that, despite his austere appearance, he was kind and gentle — the first papalagi she hadn’t been afraid of. Misi Simaila’s prayer was short and uttered precisely. He finished, pursed his thin lips and said in Samoan, ‘It is good that we are meeting here today…’ From there Lalaga would hear only bits of Misi Simaila’s conversation; her attention was now on Mautu, on the huge sweep of his shoulders and head, the square bulky forehead, the downcast eyes. ‘…We know, Mautu and Lalaga,’ she heard Misi Simaila saying, ‘that you will be happy together and that your children will be exceptional children of the Light …’
Misi Peta spoke as soon as Misi Simaila had finished. Lalaga heard little of what she said either. A cool sweat was growing, comforting her unease. ‘… Now we want you to meet Mautu,’ Misi Peta declared. Immediately Lalaga’s sweat turned cold. She was on her trembling legs and being dragged by her precocious feet towards Mautu, who was standing and trying not to look at her. Her feet took her into his shadow and his coconut-oil scent.
She couldn’t look up at his face. All she saw was his large feet with uncut nails under which black dirt was embedded, feet with the small toes flaring outwards, with healed sore scars and bulging veins, feet that seemed anchored to the floor with a force that couldn’t be severed. Tentatively she extended her right hand, and for an instant her hand was drowned in his smothering grip. She pulled it out quickly and almost ran back to her seat.
‘Congratulations!’ Misi Simaila said, smiling.
Back in Malaelua she soon discovered she had no say in her marriage arrangements. She wanted Sinaula to be her bridesmaid. Her father and the elders agreed but they also decided there were to be five others representing the important branches of their aiga. Behind the scenes her aunts, the most vocal and bullying being Gutu, her father’s oldest sister, and the other women argued about who those were to be, almost resulting in a physical fight between Gutu and two of her younger sisters. Malaetasi again had to rule. Next, those same aunts and their husbands argued over who was to provide her wedding dress, so her father ruled that she was to have three. After another long debate about the wedding cake, during which his sisters again quarrelled — they each wanted to provide the cake — Malaetasi again had to rule that Talaola’s aiga was to do it. His sisters wept bitterly. When they calmed down, which didn’t take long, they insisted that the cake be at least ten tiers high, befitting the status of the Malaetasi and their aiga. Lalaga watched her poor mother fuming but knew she wouldn’t say anything publicly.
The guest list offered another opportunity for squabbling. It was unanimous that the list would include Misi Peta, Misi Simaila, Lalaga’s and Mautu’s other teachers and their wives, their pastor and the other Lotu Ta’iti pastors and their wives from the neighbouring villages, the wedding party’s parents and their friends, and Mautu’s aiga. But problems arose when Malaetasi ruled to invite only the matai, deacons and their wives of Malaelua, and the main matai of their aiga throughout Samoa. He was reminded, especially by the vocal Gutu, of others and more others. ‘What’s going to happen when other relatives and friends hear they haven’t been invited?’ she argued. ‘What are people going to say about our aiga — that we’re mean and poor nobodies!’ Until in a suppressed rage Malaetasi declared, ‘Invite the lot!’ and stormed out of the fale, muttering that he was going out to try to find enough food to feed ‘the hungry multitudes.’ The list would continue expanding until anyone who wanted to come could come. You couldn’t turn anyone away, anyway — it was mean to do so, and the Aiga Malaetasi was the most generous aiga in Samoa. God would provide, Gutu kept chorusing.
Fed up with the endless work and the squabbling, Lalaga simply wanted her wedding to be over with. ‘Why do we have to go through all this?’ she asked her mother.
‘Because it’s important to your aiga, because you’re marrying a Man of God,’ she replied.
‘But you didn’t get married in church at first,’ Lalaga reminded her.
A long pause. ‘No, but your father and I are not educated — and we were young, we still followed pagan ways. Later when your father wanted to be a deacon we got married in church.’
Sinaula and her mother arrived three days before the wedding, and Sinaula took control of Lalaga and the tasks she had to perform. For instance, after the young men cut coconut fronds and timber from the bush, she and the other women helped them build long shelters on the malae for the wedding feast. Sinaula organised the women and they decorated the church, tidied the church grounds and the whole Malaetasi compound; they gathered flowers and made ula for the wedding party and main guests. Lalaga envied Sinaula for the way men, while appearing to be distancing themselves, were all attracted to her. ‘They’re all crazy about you!’ she whispered to her friend.
A week before Christmas, 1879, the wedding took place. It was a day without the threat of rain — an auspicious day for her wedding, her mother had whispered to her before they left their fale for the church. In the bright light at the end of the long aisle that divided the packed congregation stood Misi Simaila and their pastor. Misi Simaila glowed in his white suit and looked as if he were going to disintegrate at any moment. To steady her trembling, Lalaga gazed only at Misi Simaila, focused on his vibrant smile, his transparent, infectious happiness, and clung to her father’s arm as they walked up the mat-covered aisle, feeling as if she were wading through thick liquid heat that smelled richly of frangipani.
At the end of the aisle to her left stood Sinaula and her bridesmaids; to her right, Mautu and his groomsmen. Lalaga and her father stopped between the two groups. Misi Simaila stepped forward. Her father handed her to Mautu, who held her hand carefully, gingerly.
‘We are gathered here this beautiful morning …’ Misi Simaila began in Samoan.
Lalaga concentrated on Misi Simaila’s facial expressions, voice and gestures but didn’t hear much of what he was saying. She knew the wedding service by heart, having learnt it at Vaiuta. Once when she gazed up at the light behind Misi Simaila she wished it would absorb her unto itself and she’d be free. Drops of sweat trickling down her back returned her to the present and she glanced up at Misi Simaila to find him gesturing to her and Mautu to step forward. She refused to look at Mautu as his trembling fingers sheathed the ring around her finger. She refused to look up at him when he lifted her veil, hesitated, pushed his face at hers and pecked her on the cheek.
The wedding dress clung wetly to her as they walked back down the aisle. This time she looked around and smiled at everyone: Misi Peta and her mother grinning and weeping; her father trying to look stern, unmoved; Aunt Gutu smiling and calling, ‘Be happy, Lalaga!’; the friends she’d known all her life — some crying openly, some waving, some avoiding looking at her as if they didn’t want to say goodbye.
For a moment the light blinded her when they emerged from the church into the crowd, which clapped and called out their congratulations. Waves of children lapped around her and the wedding party. She bent down and kissed many of the children.
The wedding dress was a heavy wet skin that squished around her when they crossed the malae to the main fale. There, Mautu and the bridesmaids and groomsmen were served fresh green coconuts and cake, while Lalaga, helped by Sinaula and directed by the over-efficient Gutu, changed into her second wedding dress, behind the curtain that had been strung across the fale. ‘How is it?’ Sinaula whispered.
‘I’m going to survive,’ she replied, and when Sinaula looked questioningly at her, smiled and repeated, ‘Yes, I’m going to survive.’
When they emerged from behind the curtain Lalaga looked directly at Mautu for the first time. He smiled but looked away. One of the bridesmaids handed her a coconut, she raised it to her lips and drank long and deep, paused, took a deep breath and took another long drink, yet another and another until the nut was empty, and her whole breath and body were saturated with a defiant coolness. She sat down in the chair beside Mautu, pressed her knee against his and, almost as if she were doing it accidentally, placed her hand on his arm, which lay on his thigh. He didn’t move a muscle, or indicate that he knew she was touching him. So she pressed harder, and continued gazing at his profile. Eventually he turned and looked across at her. When she smiled, he smiled back but again looked away.
As with everything else, Gutu had taken charge of the wedding feast. She told everyone weddings were a papalagi institution and their aiga would show their ignorance if they didn’t do everything properly, correctly, according to the papalagi way. So immediately in front of the fale, in the shelter for the wedding party, a long table (made up of two tables borrowed from the pastor) had been set with chairs (borrowed from around the village), white tablecloths and knives and forks and expensive dinner plates and glasses (the first to be seen in Satoa), with the largest ten-tiered wedding cake ever seen in Satoa dominating everything. Women trained by Gutu as waitresses over a severe three days were fanning the flies away from the food at the main table. Eyes as sharp as newly honed knives, but with a wide smile fixed on her round face, Gutu moved about welcoming the guests and supervising the ushers, who were seating them on the mats beside the long rows of food in the other shelters. No chairs or expensive cutlery or crockery for them — just plain fingers, palm-leaf containers and foodmats.
In the neighbouring fale and circling the malae in the shade were those who’d come with the guests — hundreds of them. The hungry air was thick with the smell of umu-cooked pork, chicken, fish, palusami, faiai, taro, ota, faiai fe’e, povi masima, pisupo and other dishes. Throughout the previous night nearly all the aiga in Malaelua had made umu for the feast. ‘Are you hungry?’ Lalaga asked Mautu.
Nodding, he said, ‘Yes, and you?’
‘Yes, I’m hungry too.’ She felt his hand descending on hers and clasping it. She looked away from him.
Once she and Mautu were seated at the main table, she again felt she was being watched by everyone and tried to focus only on Mautu, who kept smiling at her. Their pastor said grace, blessing the wedding feast and their marriage, and then everyone started eating.
For their wedding night her aiga had prepared the small fale by the sea: a new mosquito net, a soft bed of mats, new pillows and sleeping sheets, a lamp, lowered blinds whispering almost inaudibly as the inquisitive sea breeze poked its wispy fingers through them. For a long moment before she said goodbye to Sinaula, who had accompanied her to the fale, she stood on the paepae gazing out at the sea. The breeze was saturated with the smell of decaying coral. As the darkness broke out of the heart of the horizon and spread like soft mud across the sky, the evening chorus of cicadas started.
‘Thank you for everything,’ she said. Sinaula put an arm around her shoulders.
‘It was a beautiful wedding,’ said Sinaula.
‘Yes, but I’m glad it’s over,’ she replied. A flying-fox broke out of the heads of the mango trees by the fale and started flying along the shore. ‘We’ll always be sisters, won’t we?’ she heard herself saying. She turned and held on to Sinaula.
‘If you ever need me, I’ll come, Lalaga,’ Sinaula whispered. ‘I’m fortunate to have you as a friend — my best friend.’ She paused. ‘You’re lucky: Mautu is a good man. You know that now, don’t you?’
The darkness and the chorus of cicadas deepened. Sinaula hurried into the fale and lit the lamp. ‘By the time you get up tomorrow, my mother and I will have left,’ she said, her face glowing in the light of the lamp. ‘Don’t forget: if you ever need me, just send a message.’ Before Lalaga could embrace her, Sinaula kissed her on the cheek and rushed away, up towards the main fale where the women were stringing up the mosquito nets.
In the lamplight the net shone like a large spider’s web, and as the breeze nudged it, it danced almost imperceptibly. Lalaga hesitated for a while, sat down beside the net, and through a gap in the blinds watched the darkness fill the space outside. When the mosquitoes started stinging her, she lifted the side of the net, rolled onto the bed of mats and, lying on her stomach, embraced a pillow. The pillow smelled faintly of starch and coconut oil. Suddenly the cicadas’ chorus was gone, and all around her in the darkness the huge sea stirred and listened.
Huufft! Someone’s sharp breath blew out the lamp and she was awake, but didn’t move, sensing that Mautu was lying beside her. He smelled of sweat and coconut oil. Immediately she found herself trying to suppress her frantic breathing.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered. ‘It was a very successful day.’
‘Yes,’ she replied. A long pause. Though he was a few feet away his breath on her left shoulder felt like the touch of hot skin.
‘Your parents and aiga have been very generous to me.’ Another pause, with a single mosquito drilling at it. ‘You’l … you’ll have to help me say the things I want to say to you.’
‘I need help too,’ she admitted.
‘You must be very tired,’ he said finally.
‘Yes,’ she lied at once.
‘Sleep then.’
They lay awake, listening and waiting for each other. They could hear the tide rising and lapping against the paepae of the fale, and at the edge of their hearing the surf pounded on the reef. When she realised her blouse was soaked with sweat she tugged it off her skin at places and let the air cool her skin. When his elbow brushed against her shoulder she jumped away from the spark.
‘There is … there is something I want to confess,’ he said. ‘My flesh has been weak, sinful, since I was fifteen. I am ashamed of my sinful appetite. In me still thrives the pagan whom good missionaries like Misi Simaila are trying to drive away from our country.’ There was a painful pitch in his voice. ‘Even now I am trying so hard not to desire you, not to stain your purity.’
‘I am your wife now,’ she heard herself inviting him, discovering she wasn’t afraid of his smoky odour, which now filled the net and enveloped her. She wanted to lose herself totally in it and was surprised and afraid that she was ignoring Misi Peta’s cautions. She sensed him moving towards her. She reached out and felt her hands moving slowly over the heat of his chest. However, as his arms came around her, she found her invitation turning into defence, a struggle to push him away. Yes, yes, yes, she murmured in her head, yet her knees pushed at him. His weight and strength, the whole wet heat and smell of him, she wanted to absorb, become part of, yet she struggled — for Misi Peta and her whole public upbringing.
‘It’s a sin, a sin,’ he repeated, his body a slippery insistent embrace. But he moved to counter her resistance, her scratching and pushing and knees and panting cries. ‘It’s wrong!’ he moaned. She pushed away and allowed him to pull her blouse up and over her head. Then the heat of his chest was crushing her taut nipples and breasts and it was exquisite, the enveloping cold-hot fire of it. ‘It’s wrong!’ he moaned, as he buried his face in her neck and his lips and wetness were a fire around every bit of her. Her knees stopped pushing and, as she stuffed the corner of her lavalava into her mouth to stifle her cries, she wound her arms around him. When his fingers danced down her stomach and between her legs and over her wetness, as if he were breathing on her, she cried Aahah … ah … ah!
He pushed her right hand down his belly. She let him, and for an instant the thick round heat of his penis repelled her, but when he pressed her fingers around it, and he murmured, ‘Yes, it’s good,’ she clutched it. ‘Uhh, uhh!’ he cried as he pushed it up and down within her grip.
She loved the free-flowing wetness and heat of it, and she pushed against his fingers as he fondled and caressed her. Then she felt his whole body tensing — a wave, a cry surging up from his hips into the hard thickness of him, which jerked and jerked in her grip and he cried through his closed mouth as the warm liquid shot onto her belly. ‘Forgive me, forgive me!’ he murmured.
Suspended inexplicably at the height of the wave, she was puzzled and felt guilty when he rolled off her and wrapped his ie lavalava around his waist.
At dawn when she woke he was gone. She heard him in the kitchen fale and knew he was preparing the morning meal. She raised the nearest row of blinds — it was still quite chilly and dark, though the horizon line of light was expanding — and jumped down onto the beach, wrapped her ie lavalava around her shoulders, squatted and urinated. She was surprised that she was experiencing no guilt or shame, and even more surprised that she was shamelessly savouring every memory of it.
The dark warm water wove around her feet, then her legs and thighs as she waded into it. She washed the stains off her ie lavalava and then raising it to belly height, squeezed the water out of it. The water cascaded in a rope-like stream and splattered into the surface of the sea. Lalaga closed her eyes, turned her face towards the sky and sucked in large gulps of the cold air, as if she wanted to inhale everything, the whole world of smells and tastes and feelings and desire and Mautu — yes, especially Mautu.
Mautu spent the whole day in the plantation with some of the young men of her aiga, and she helped the children and women dismantle the shelters and clean up the fale and grounds.
That evening, as soon as they were alone in their fale, after the lotu and the meal and their bathing in the communal pool, during which he avoided looking at her, she blew out the lamp and got into the net. ‘Are you tired from working?’ she asked when he lay down beside her.
‘No, just aching a bit.’
‘Let me massage your back.’ She was surprised by her boldness.
There was a hesitant pause, then he said, ‘Yes, go ahead.’
She was shaking and could hardly hold the bottle of oil as she pulled out the coconut husk cork, poured some oil into her left hand, rubbed her hands together, and then started rubbing the oil into his shoulders. The whole slippery heat and feel of his body and the knowledge that he was also wanting her forced her to stop periodically and suck in air through her mouth. ‘It’s good, very good!’ he kept murmuring. That made her feel bolder, so she pressed and squeezed harder as she moved methodically down his back.
‘It was wrong, what I did last night,’ he said out of the darkness.
‘No it wasn’t, we are man and wife now.’ When her hands reached the top of his ie lavalava he pushed it down. The scent of the oil filled her nostrils. ‘That’s good,’ he moaned as her hands moved over his buttocks, as she slid and slipped and kneaded.
‘No!’ was her automatic cry when his left hand gripped her knee. She stopped massaging. His fingers started caressing the inside of her thigh, lightly, moving upwards. She leaned forward over him, her hands pressing firmly and sliding down the backs of his thighs, more urgently as his fingers played.
When his insistent hand clasped her between her legs, and his fingers opened her wetness gently, she shivered and held on to his thighs to stop herself from falling. ‘I’ve never told you how beautiful you are,’ he said. ‘I am very lucky you are my wife, Lalaga.’ He was on his knees now and holding her against his body. ‘Don’t be afraid: as you say, we are husband and wife now.’ He tightened his embrace and stilled her shaking body, nuzzling her neck with his mouth and nose. ‘Here, lie back.’ He lifted her easily and laid her on the mats. ‘I’ll massage you, get rid of your fears.’
He was so wrong, she would think afterwards — it wasn’t fear, it was uncontrollable desire, lust, love, call it what you like. She helped him take off her blouse and ie lavalava. When his hands started exploring her again, they were covered with oil and she felt as if her whole outer and inner selves were being caressed by his hands. Then all of her was centred on her wetness, over which his oiled fingers were now moving with an exquisite rhythm. She stuffed the corner of her sleeping sheet into her mouth. ‘It may hurt,’ he whispered as he parted her legs, and she raised her knees. His thick hardness pressed against her thigh for a moment, slippery with oil, and hot. She waited for the pain she’d been told would come. Waited. At first when he surged against her there was a tightness and resistance, but she held on and, wrapping her arms around his hips and buttocks, pushed him in hard, into a widening, an expanding, an opening up of all of herself to all of him. No pain. But she wanted him to slow down as he again, like the night before, moved urgently, rapidly. ‘I’m sorry, sorry,’ he kept gasping into her neck as he tensed to breaking and then ejaculated into her.
She lay beside him for a long time, gazing into the darkness. Nothing was as she’d been raised to believe. She was supposed to be ashamed of the desires of the flesh; she wasn’t. She was a pastor’s wife and not meant to show any sexual feelings, even towards her husband — yet she’d unashamedly shown Mautu her desire and brazenly encouraged him. And despite her reminding herself that women weren’t meant to experience and enjoy orgasms — yes, she could even say it — she now wanted that more than anything else with Mautu. When she heard him snoring lightly, she found she was annoyed with him for having hurried.
The next night it rained steadily. The heavy muffled sound of it made her feel as if they were caught totally within their desire for each other, and when Mautu lay beside her, she rolled him over to his stomach and started massaging him again. This time she lingered over every stroke, every circling of her hands pressing into his body, all the kneading and plucking of her fingers. She didn’t even wait for him to push down his ie lavalava; she stripped it right off, trickled oil out of the bottle onto his buttocks, and massaged — long lingering caresses. A thin, endless humming issued from his clenched mouth. When his hand started exploring her thigh, she held it palm upwards and dripped oil into it. Soon every stroke of his oiled hand against her thigh took the air out of her lungs. She parted her legs more and more as his hand moved up, and she dipped her hands down into the groove between his buttocks, dipped and caressed.
‘Is that all right?’ he asked as his fingers moved into her wetness.
‘Yes, yes!’ she moaned. He rolled onto his back, and his fingers were inside her. With his other hand he took hers and wrapped it around his erectness. It was fat and pulsating as she twisted and swivelled her hand around it, learning how to make it enjoy her playing.
‘Is that good?’ he asked as his fingers moved in and out of her.
‘Yes, yes, yes!’ she cried, moving her hips rhythmically against his fingers.
When he rolled her onto her back she held onto his penis and guided it into herself in one long, smooth movement. ‘Don’t! Don’t!’ She held on to his hips, stopping him from moving. He knew and moved slowly, gently, and she responded, and then as she moved faster, her breath broke out of her mouth in ragged gasps. Up and up and up she mounted and then in one long cry exploded into the darkness and the drumming of the protecting rain.
‘Is it wrong for me to enjoy it too, and to enjoy it so much?’ she asked hesitantly, later. When he didn’t reply, she sensed he was going to deny her, but he didn’t.
‘No, I don’t mind,’ he said, pressing his face against her shoulder. ‘I like it, I like you enjoying it.’
‘You mean, it adds to your enjoyment — my wanton abandonment to passion?’ She asked. He laughed softly against her breast, licking the nipple once. ‘You don’t behave like a good pastor, do you?’ she joked.
‘I’m wicked like you!’ he laughed. ‘But God will forgive us because we love each other truthfully …’ He stopped abruptly.
‘So you love me, do you?’ she asked. He nodded against her breast.
‘But you’ve not known me very long.’
‘I know what is in my heart,’ he said. ‘I have great love for you, Lalaga.’
For the next two weeks, while they had the fale to themselves and before they shifted to Mautu’s aiga, they abandoned themselves to their enormous passion every time they were alone. Twice they even risked it during the daytime, in the fale. Three times on the excuse of getting crops they went into the plantation and, hidden in the trees, continued exploring the limits of their desire. At first they were both surprised by their boldness and shamelessness, but as they experienced no guilt they became more daring.
In public they were the model pastor and wife: self-control and moderation. It was to be that way all their lives.
Mautu divulged little about his aiga to Lalaga, but from the five visits she’d made and from what others said, she feared for her children.
In the pre-Christian religion, the holders of the Tuifolau title and Mautu’s direct ancestors were the taulaaitu of the Atua Fatutapu, revered throughout the country. With the fervent consent of their converts, the missionaries banished the atua. Mautu’s uncle, Tuifolau Lei’a, the atua’s taulaaitu at the time, committed suicide by simply vanishing into the mountains. At the height of his priesthood Tuifolau Lei’a was loved and respected for his gift of curing most ma’i aitu and healing any malady using fofo techniques and herbal cures, but was feared for his powers of casting spells. Most effective was his ability of making victims sleep themselves to death. It was also believed he could make himself invisible, steal any person’s soul, and change into any creature.
Though the people claimed publicly they no longer believed in the superstitions of ‘the Days Before the Light’, they believed Fatutapu was now an aitu, an evil demon and ally of Satan, and that the Aiga Tuifolau were still Fatutapu’s guardians, with Mautu’s sister, Lefatu, the atua’s taulaaitu. Mautu neither denied nor confirmed this but Lalaga knew that whenever someone was afflicted with ma’i aitu the victim was taken (secretly) to Lefatu who, everyone believed, possessed what the missionaries branded as ‘the powers of Darkness’.
Because of all this Lalaga avoided visiting Mautu’s aiga.
Lalaga attributed what Mautu kept cursing, after each ‘meeting of their flesh’ (her description), as his ‘sinful weakness’ to his aiga’s aitu and to his father, who’d had numerous wives, Mautu’s mother being the last and only one he’d married in church. In the district he was known affectionately (but not to his face) as ‘Tuifolau-ma-le-Gaau’, Tuifolau-with-the-Intestine. The reference was shamefully obvious and unchristian, Lalaga thought. Over twenty-five known children were proof of the fecundity of his intestine and the fertile source of the endless tales his people told about him everywhere they went. (Only God and his closest friends knew how many other children existed.) Rumour had it that he died at eighty-eight of a heart attack while he was trying, once again, to tame his unruly intestine. Lalaga preferred to believe her Christian brethren’s claim that he’d been struck down by the Almighty for his ‘sins of the flesh’.
Peleiupu was now a gangly thirteen-year-old: taller than her friends, with a high pronounced forehead that was to become the most distinctive feature of her descendants, eyes as fiercely dark as cold-water springs, and fine wavy hair (Mautu refused to have it cut), which rippled behind her when she ran — and she ran almost everywhere.
She’d been born two months late but it had been an easy birth, and when the midwife was cutting the umbilical cord they’d noticed, with astonishment, a knowing smile on her face and those intense eyes examining them. The midwife predicted an exceptional intelligence, which was soon evident, and people expected her to become a precocious child. She didn’t. She exercised mature control over her behaviour. Though many people were uncomfortable when she was around, feeling her observing them and uncovering to the quick of their darkness their innermost secrets and, most disconcerting of all, anticipating their thoughts and actions, no one feared her, for she exuded an aura of understanding trust — their secrets were safe with her. They came to admire her tremendously and, when chastising their children, held her up as the ideal they should emulate. Affectionately they referred to her as ‘the pastor’s walking-stick’ because she accompanied Mautu everywhere.
A year younger than Peleiupu, Arona was already a miniature version of his father’s former build: thickset, with a square head, long muscular arms and large hands, and showing signs of developing phenomenal physical strength. He’d been conceived during the ninth devastating whooping cough epidemic since the papalagi had introduced it, which had again killed many Satoan children. So when he was born his parents were relieved that he had no physical deformities. From the day he started walking he revealed a slow, deliberate manner, and seemed indifferent to everyone but his parents and sisters.
As his strength blossomed, his appetite for everything became a ravishing hunger that frightened Lalaga in particular because she thought he had inherited it from her and Mautu. She feared that his ‘appetite’ would be even more demanding than theirs.
Ruta and Naomi were separated by a year but Lalaga treated them as twins. They both learned to talk early and were soon taking everywhere their endless chatter and laughter and quarrels, which ended quickly with tearful bouts of reconciliation. They became well known in Satoa for this, and adults encouraged them, good-naturedly, to show that they were especially gifted with language.
Noting every change in her children, Lalaga’s concern for their safety deepened. They seemed driven by forces inherited from her and Mautu and their aiga — forces that would either turn them into exceptional people or consume them, perhaps even turning them into allies of Satan. None were going to pursue moderation. So she worked hard to protect them from themselves, but the more she did so, the more they moved into their father’s orbit.
Mautu came to spend much time teaching his children but he remained unaware of what was happening to them because to him childhood was an uninteresting period, unworthy of his attention. Not that he didn’t love them: they were special people with whom he wanted to share his new knowledge. Books and English were the keys to opening up their imaginations to the miraculous secrets and powers of God’s magnificent universe. There were multiple dimensions to reality, to God, and the papalagi possessed many of the ways of seeing those dimensions. His children were to discover that understanding with him. As Mautu pursued his speculations and took their children with him, Lalaga wove a protective web around them all. The children went adventuring with Mautu and eventually outgrew the other Satoan children. An unbreakable bond of alofa and respect grew between them, and their devotion to their parents intensified and became one of the strengths of their lives.