The Shark God (16 page)

Eli grew up hearing the old folks whisper about
kastom
and about the power and secrets the church had banned. As a young man he was struck by the idea that his family was following someone else's religion. He had had enough of it. “I had looked at the world, and I knew there wasn't only one true religion. I knew about the Buddhists, the Muslims, the Hindus. The world had al
ways been full-up with religion. I decided that my
kastom
was the religion of my country, and I wanted to start living by it again. Don't tell me my
kastom
is darkness!”

The more excited Eli grew, the more he fell into speaking Bislama. It was hard to keep up, especially after my second shell of kava. I caught this much: Eli had planted
kastom
herbs and built himself a house amid the ruins of the old mission schoolyard. He had started a culture club and invited the elders to come and share their knowledge. He had stopped attending Sunday services. The church elders declared him a heathen and a backslider.

The kava was strong. The night was dark. I was sitting on a high wooden bench when Eli lifted a plastic cup of kava in the air. Cali gestured for me to get down, squat on the floor. “
Taem kastom chief i drink, yu mas stap daon nomo
,” he whispered. Eli gulped his drink, stepped outside, spat into the wind, and barked an elaborate incantation. It was an exaggeration of the
tamavha
rituals I had seen on Tanna. It felt like an imitation, an approximation of what had once been sacred.

“What about magic?” I asked Eli. “I suppose that has been lost for years.”

Sabina let out an annoyed sigh. I had forgotten she was with us. This definitely wasn't Tanna, or no woman of any color would have been permitted near a kava session.

“It has not been lost,” said Eli. “Some old fellows hid their magic stones from Esuva Din, and now we are learning how to use them again.”

“What about you? Can you do it, Eli?”

“Sabina knows I can. I have proved it. One time, Catriona, the last researcher, made me
cross tumas
. She spent two weeks interviewing me, making demands, asking me to
walkabaot
with her here and there. Then, to show me her appreciation, she gave me a box of matches. A box of matches! I said no worries. I did not complain. But when she went to the airport at Sola, I sent my boy
to give her a message. I told him to tell Catriona that she had better find somewhere to stay in Sola because she would be stuck there for two weeks. Then I made it rain.
Hem nao!
I made it rain so hard that the airstrip flooded and the big water swelled. Didn't I, Sabina?”

“Well, it did happen to rain, and Catriona happened to be stuck, but…”

“Look,” I interrupted. “On every island, people tell me they can use
kastom
magic, but nobody ever proves it. I'm tired of magic
toktok
. I want magic action.”

“
Disfala
rain magic takes time. The rainmaker has to make sacrifices. No sex. No talking. He has to fast for three, four days.”

“Fine. I'll stay five days, until Wednesday.”

“Is that a challenge?” said Sabina.

“You bet it is.”

“You careful,” Eli said with a mischievous smile. “If we bring rain, you won't be able to cross the big water.”

“Well then, hold off on the rain until Wednesday afternoon.”

There was more said that evening, but I had taken a third cup. Shortly after my last spit, I lost Eli's voice in a congealed soup of mumbled thoughts, shards of flickering lamplight, and distant dog howls. I remember the silver-blue glare of Sabina's headlamp, shooting across the yard. Swirling nausea. A fight with a mosquito net. A damp mattress. Rain seeping through the rafters.

The next morning, I was back in the village, sitting in Sabina's kitchen, when a few members of Eli's culture club arrived. Sabina stepped back and tended to her cooking fire. One man had the hungry eyes of a creeper. He sat down and told me that the club was working to start up the
suqe
again. It would be difficult, he said, giving up all those pigs, spending all those months in meditative seclusion.

“If the
suqe
is so hard, why bother reviving it?” I asked.

“For power!” he said. “Our grandfathers, they went to the
salagoro
and prayed, and they would
walkabaot
down into the ground, deep, deep, until they reached a place under the bottom of the ocean. There they met the sea snake, and he gave them secret knowledge so they could become wealthy.” There was more. Something about eating a
tabu
fire in order to kill some distant and unsuspecting person. His ideas were a muddled fusion of
suqe
,
tamate
, and
The Lord of the Rings.

“So when will you start killing pigs again?”

“This will take a few years. We have to convince enough men to join us. Right now, most Christian men are afraid of this kind of
kastom
. They call it devil worship. So we have secret meetings each week to gather the old knowledge and rebuild
kastom
.”

“How many have joined you?”

“Um, hum, six, I think.” His voice trailed off. He scratched his beard and stared over my shoulder. I followed his gaze across the room. Sabina was bending over her fire, revealing the peach-smooth skin at the small of her back.

Vetuboso sat on a forested plateau above Vureas Bay. That afternoon, Sabina led me down a footpath to the sea. The mountains were girdled with low cloud. The breeze was warm and sticky. Waves curled along a black sand beach. Sabina swam fully clothed—it was
tabu
for a woman's thighs to be seen in public.

My conversation with Eli's culture gang had made Sabina grumpy. “You know, I have never heard those stories,” she said. “The
salagoro
, the
suqe
, the snake spirits—the men won't tell me about any of that stuff.”

Once, said Sabina, an informant had told her a
tabu
story, a particularly erotic one involving the god of taro and his tree-sized penis. When Eli got wind of the informant's indiscretion, he was furious. He said it was not a story to be shared with women or outsiders. He became even more angry after Sabina defended the old man and told her he would have nothing more to do with her. It took weeks for Eli to warm up.

“But why would Eli block you? You are here to help him save the
kastom
.”

Sabina wiped the seawater from her eyes and swam closer. “You have to understand that women here are seen as a threat to male power. I don't mean politically; men honestly believe that women can drain their energy. That's why, when men practice their dances, they steer clear of women. When the men go fishing, women are banned from walking on the beach. Some fish will simply refuse to be caught when women are around. Men even abstain from having sex with their wives for fear of losing this kind of energy.”

Sabina had come to Vetuboso to write about people's sense of self. Who do you think you are? she asked them. Why are you that way? All she had gotten were superficial answers. “
Mi no savve
,” people would tell her.
I can't say. I don't know. It's just our way
. The more time she spent in the village, the more an invisible grid of
kastom
rules and relationships closed in around her. The moment Sabina arrived in Vetuboso, she had become Eli's adoptive daughter and a member of Eli's wife's tribe. Her maternal cousins—of which, according to the mathematics of extrapolated kinship, she now had dozens and dozens—became like brothers and sisters. Half the village's unmarried men had suddenly become potential marriage partners.

The system landed her in a minefield of manners in a landscape filled with uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, friends, and enemies by default, all people who were bound by
kastom
to speak to her in specific ways or not to speak to her at all. Sabina was forbidden to utter the name of her “sister-in-law,” Cali's wife. She couldn't even use words that sounded like that name. Sabina couldn't tease or joke with Eli or any of her maternal uncles. She had scribbled diagrams to remind herself whom she could talk to.

This, she said, was the real story of Vetuboso. The rules were everything. If a man took the wrong person—for example, an un
married woman—to his garden, the gossip would start immediately. Then the elders would levy a fine. Or worse: they would send a party to trample all the man's garden, and perhaps those of his family as well. But it was the gossip that hurt the most. Trust me, Sabina said with the gravity of one who knew from experience: you do not want to break the rules in Vureas Bay. She had given up trying to extract
kastom
secrets—the
suqe
and
salagoro
mysteries would have to survive without her help—and she had focused her research on the intricate web of rules she had to follow. The rules, she told me, were everything here. You write what you know.

I learned this in Vureas Bay: the rules were catching up to Sabina, tightening around her, suffocating her. I liked Sabina. We agreed on things, on the subjectivity of morality, for example, a concept that was a world away from the kinship codes of Vetuboso. Sabina had a secret of her own, I knew that much. She had made one mistake, she had broken one rule. The backsliders let it slip between belts of kava. The creepers whispered it at night, when they circled like sharks in the shadows of her garden. We know who you are, they hissed. We know you are not as strong as you pretend. You have opened your door once. Now open it again.

Sabina would not reveal her secret in her doctoral thesis on kinship rules, and I have promised not to reveal it here. I suppose we are attempting to make the story of Vureas Bay our own by erasing the details that do not suit us, just as the missionaries did with the myth of Patteson's death and the conversion of Nukapu. Now I know that Sabina's secret has been passed from fire to fire and village to village across Vanua Lava. It has climbed on the mail plane and bounced down to Vila. It has flown around the world. It has entered e-mails. It has arrived like a scandalous guest at university cocktail parties where cold-handed academics snigger and debate the rules of engagement but cannot begin to imagine the lonely nights, the knocked-on doors, the jealousies, the dimmed lanterns, of Vanua Lava.

The secret's mobility and tenacity have proved to me that writers are not the only arbiters of history. And Vureas Bay proved that
kastom
secrets are much heavier, much harder to unearth than gossip. It's the things that matter most that people are slowest to reveal. Eli Field taught me that lesson, in a roundabout way.

Eli was hard to catch, which seemed to be a trend among people I had challenged to prove their magic. He spent his days away from the compound. Cali explained that he was doing Very Important Things Related to Culture. I caught him after dark on my fourth night. He wouldn't talk until I had downed a cup of kava with him.

“Sabina came here to help you, but you and your friends won't share
kastom
stories with her,” I said.

Eli scratched his belly and smirked. “She can always ask the women for their stories.”

“But women don't know about men's
kastom
, do they? They don't know about the
suqe
or the
salagoro
. How is Sabina supposed to make a full report?”

Eli threw back another cup of kava, went to the door, and spat into the night. He lowered his voice and spoke solemnly in English. “Let me tell you what makes a Ni-Vanuatu different than a white man. You people share out all of your knowledge, but you don't like to share your money. Your thinking is backward. Here in Vanuatu, we are not too rich, but if you want our food, we will cook for you. If you want our money, we will give it to you. We are generous with these things. But knowledge, that is our power, and there are some things only men should know. If you take the secrets that belong to us men, if you write them down or show them to women, you take our power away. And then we would have nothing. Sabina was cross first time I explained this to her. She cried for weeks. But this is our
kastom,
and she must accept it.”

“But the men have told me all kinds of secrets, and I am writing them down,” I said.

“Mmm, but we will never tell you the most important things.”

“But you said you'd prove to me that your
kastom
, your magic, still has power. Didn't you promise to bring a big rainstorm on Wednesday?”

“Hmm, well,
yumi garem wanfala
problem. It has rained so much this year, our mangoes are rotting on the trees. It would be irresponsible for me to make rain right now.”

The truth was that it had been drizzling constantly since I arrived in Vetuboso. A rainstorm wouldn't have been much of a miracle anyway.

“Okay then, how about sun?” I suggested. “Let's have some sun for Wednesday.”

Eli shifted uncomfortably on his bench. His voice lost its authoritative tone. “
I gat wan narafala
problem.”

“What? What now?”

“I have been trying to help you. I have. But the men who keep the
kastom
stones are scared. Today, I went to see the man
blong
shark stone, to see if he could bring you a shark in the bay. He refused. I told him that you would write a
bigfala
story about him…”

“To prove that your
kastom
lives,” I said.

“But he was afraid
tumas
. He said if he played with the stone, the
tasiu
would kill him.”

Eli lowered his voice. The
tasiu
, he said, was a powerful man of God. He lived with his apprentices on a hill near Vureas Bay. He had a magic walking stick. Wherever Eli had tried to promote
kastom
, the
tasiu
had smashed it. Even as we spoke, the
tasiu
was hunting down
kastom
stones, exorcising their spirits, wiping away their power. The
tasiu
confronted the owners of those stones: he told them they must wrap their hands around his magic walking stick and confess their crimes or face a terrible punishment from God.