The Pacific Room Page 13

  Inventive hands, conjuring in their quickness. Today she has hauled an old candle box in from the garden. Fleshy fingers, immune to splinters. Setting it up on the old card table in the smoking room, Aolele rubs it down with one of the painter’s knotted rags, releasing a rivulet of silverfish.

  Calmly from the corner the portrait watches her, still mesmerised by her hands. Even without rings they flash. Suspicion in his eyes, but then, she notes, he has rarely shown any respect for the painter’s craft: Like the study of music it does little to expand the mind in any direction save one. She can all but hear his dipping, dismissive tone.

  In the short time remaining she is to paint a portrait of sorts, perhaps more of a caricature. Certainly with faces it always pays to exaggerate just a little. And start with the eyes. Once you have captured these, everything else seems to fall into place. So Signora Oggi had told her all those years ago at the painting academy in Florence.

  It is a maxim she has applied in her work as an amateur painter in the decades since. Constant subjects have been her children, offering their faces as dutiful signs of love. Though strangely she has never painted him, her husband. Perhaps because from that very first sighting at Grez it was as if he had been conjured by her easel – those bulging eyes and that faint tremor of a mouth in a face too big for his body.

  Yes, we all get the face we deserve. After all these weeks of floating, this she can see clearly now.

  Short wavy hair parting to an unsmiling bust of a face with large sleepless eyes. So her son had captured her that one time, emerging from beneath the ragged skirt of his camera to record a face downturned at the mouth, a dead calm between the eyes. And old enough to be the Scottish writer’s mother. Dear weird woman, so her husband’s letters begin these days.

  Her mind races, beginning to echo the hectic birdsong outside, its buzzing growing louder as the day drains of light and there is nothing left to see. It seems impossible to contain these darting thoughts, to corral them for action … At which point she reminds herself of the maxim that had been written just for her: hands to be kept employed in useful work cheerfully done.

  After all these years his words still steady her, summoning her to act.

  So when she finally starts to prime the wooden box, her hands become wildly animated, filled with the industry of a devil or a bee.

  ‘Aolele! Aolele!’

  It sounds like a lullaby, Sosimo’s song.

  The wagon has yet to return from the harbour and it is still too early for the nightly call for prayer – the sound of the conch which gathers them on the verandah in a sweeping circle of lamplight.

  Both a question and a command: it is as if Sosimo is summoning the night and with it the scent of the sea. Even up here, high in the hills, there is the stench of seaweed which mingles blithely with the sound of tree frogs and ironwoods creaking in the forest. So much insolence to be kept at bay. It was around the time of the painter’s arrival in August that Sosimo had told her the story of the aitu fafine. The forest had been the scene of a battle in King Malietoa Laupepa’s youth, perhaps thirty years before. And from this place of death a spilit had grown restless – this soul of the unburied dead, the aitu fafine.

  Sitting on the ice chest, a flower behind his ear and hair freshly limed, Sosimo could have been describing himself.

  ‘She lives in the spring and moves with a rushing wind,’ he said. ‘Not until the body is properly buried will the aitu rest in peace.’

  ‘How will we know this place?’ she asked.

  ‘The women of the dead will know,’ Sosimo replied. ‘Across the ground they will place a sheet around which they will move and watch. If anything falls from the forest it will be brushed away once, twice. On the third time it is known to be the spirit of the dead, which is then folded into the sheet and carried home, the aitu rested.’

  His arm shot out to show Aolele the spot, pointing up from the verandah to the mountain: ‘There!’

  In her mind’s eye she had pierced the mountain’s impenetrable canopy, travelling swiftly like an arrow. In a valley over the mountain she had pictured the beehiveshaped hut of Malietoa’s rival, Mata‘afa. Busy bees they had been.

  Around the time of Sosimo’s story back in August, her husband had ridden there in white cap and yellow half boots, like an adventurer from one of his tales, accompanied by Lady Jersey in her hunting tartans. But his real purpose was strapped to the horse’s haunches – wrapped in fine mats and bound in lengths of siapo cloth. There were reports in the newspapers that he had been selling rifles to the rebels, in an independence war of his own making.

  In the months since, Aolele has heard the unhappy echo in her garden, has seen the camouflaged faces passing behind her curtain of climbing beans, a war without fighting. Not a gunshot had been heard, just insults traded in London newspaper columns and letters to the editor.

  For months now she hasn’t worn a watch, preferring to keep what they call Pacific time. Marking her days have been the most vivid of dreams. In these dreams her husband has summoned her, his face beseeching her. And all the while the Italian painter has worked away at his portrait downstairs. From her early sighting of the painting she has been loath to call the subject her husband; it is what she fears.

  From that first sighting, the portrait figure seemed at war with itself, changing pose before her eyes, the outline advancing and retreating as if disfigured by the very act of transformation. Not even laudanum could bring clarity to the image.

  There has been no end to these dreams. Such a restlessness of spirit that she has become convinced that it is the soul of the unburied dead, something grafting onto everything that she sees. Beseeching her is her husband’s face; reflected in his eyes is the aitu fafine, a single scarlet swirl.

  ‘Only you can make it true and go away,’ she had heard Sosimo say.

  And so it shot through her, alone in the jungle of her bed, the idea swiftly taking shape, this strange contraption parked on the old card table in the smoking room. An old candle box with loose banjo strings strung at the back, susceptible to the wind, and the beginning of a crudely drawn face on the box’s white-primed front.

  The rough wooden surface is thirsty for paint, but first impressions are often best – when will the Italian painter learn this for himself? The bulbous eyes come first, then the pointed teeth and flaring nostrils. The face is not so much drawn as released from her brush, the flames shooting from the aitu’s head. She is catching a likeness before it has time to form.

  Early in the morning she will sit it among the rows of eggplants and cabbages, draped in beads, to keep the hungry ghosts at bay. With the Italian artist’s scarlet paint, it could be an amanuensis for these drumming spirits in the garden. Some call it a Tyrolean harp for, when the wind blows, the aitu will sing.

  And once summoned it can be buried.

  There is still a rivulet of red left gleaming on the palette, just a daub or two. Her next impulse is instinctive; Nerli’s portrait asks for it. It is what is missing from her husband’s face, the reflected thing in all their minds this spring. But the hog’s bristle is too insensitive for this particular task. So with her finger dipped in crimson she presses at the corner of the portrait’s eye, dabbing the canvas as if drying a baby’s tear.

  Stepping back on the lion skin she feels her instinct has been right. The aitu fafine dances in the corner of its eye. She is present in the picture.

  Chapter 28

  FINDING FALESÁ

  The library is no longer empty. The books seem to gather around him, a shantytown of compressed words: some thinlipped and anonymous, alongside more magisterial leatherbound volumes; others leaning, tottering, collapsing. Pages turn and stay open, with others stacked up, spines spooning. Tusitala’s five years at Vailima have produced a wilderness of words.

  Across the reading table Lewis watches the stories and words before him plant themselves like a garden: novels, letters and diaries commingling across time, their covers buckling and b
egging not to be closed – not yet. Anything but to become one of those tombstones on the shelves.

  He reads Tusitala’s letter to his friend in England, the great American novelist, writing of ‘a little slip of a half-caste girl about twenty’ sitting in a white European house with its rose garden, looking out at the palm trees and listening to the sound of the surf. How much easier to look out than in.

  And there is the story Tusitala was writing at the time of the painter’s visit, a novella. Of the cynical copra trader Wiltshire, who comes to Falesá, where superstitions sprout like weeds. With his one-night bride, Uma, Wiltshire finds himself ostracised from beach life – the subject of a taboo placed on him by rival trader Case. To keep the local villagers in his thrall, Case has constructed a temple of false gods in the jungle: candle boxes coated with luminous paint and strung with banjo strings, which sing through the trees when the wind blows.

  The sowing of so many stories and words.

  Then, like a ghost conjured in this pocket of air conditioning, the painter arrives, his pointy black beard emerging sharply from the steamer smoke, announced with the blank promise of a calling card. The Samoa Times reported on 27 August 1892:

  It is the intention of this gentleman to reproduce, mainly in oils, some of our magnificent scenery, and also to make some portraits of the Samoan natives, which he proposes to exhibit at the Sydney Exhibition.

  And just as suddenly as he arrives, the painter vanishes. Other characters and events take over, deemed by history to be more important. Nor is there any mention of the portrait among these written accounts being shielded from the humidity outside. It’s as if the painter has retreated between these un-inking words, to darken the paper that crackles in Lewis’s hands. The sketcher of shadows.

  But then something falls loose from Tusitala’s diary. They are but a few stray words that start to return this painted wraith to marrow and muscle:

  We had a visit yesterday from a person by the name of Count Nerli, who is said to be a good painter also a drunkard and a sweep, and looks it. Altogether the aristocracy clusters thick about us.

  And then, written the same day to a friend in San Francisco, a few more words that fire a bullet into his heart:

  For the Count, it shall rather be my study to ignore him. He is only a foreign Count and the morals of Jules Tavernier.

  Tavernier was a painter acquaintance of Tusitala’s who had shot himself three years before Nerli’s visit. And so, it seems, the Italian painter had been jinxed before he even began. Cast out to the harbour’s fringe, to the shadow world of beachcombers and traders, to a return berth aboard the Lübeck and an ocean of obscurity. Just a few stray words but, for Lewis, as explosive as nitroglycerine. The Scottish writer might as well have placed a curse, a tapu, on the hapless painter.

  The portrait will be lugged back to Sydney and then Dunedin, where it fails to sell, again and again. And then on to Wellington where, two and a half years after its painting, it is finally exchanged for forty pounds to a Mrs Turnbull from Kelso, Scotland.

  Debt will trail the painter in his journey from one century to the next, from the New World to the Old. Copies of the portrait begin to mysteriously circulate, increasingly pale and lifeless diminutions of the original in oil, pastel and engraving, fifteen in total. Yet even these counterfeit faces have the effect of keeping the writer alive, just as a cheap knock-off handbag will memorialise the luxury of its original. If anything, the memory of his face grows stronger and sharper – even as the black pointy beard recedes back further and further through time, behind a horizon smudged by steamer smoke.

  He will end up in an unmarked grave in Genoa, on the Italian Riviera, its location known only by his widow, Marie Cecilia. An Auckland groundskeeper’s daughter, she will outlive her husband by thirty-three years and do somewhat better with a grave – modest, but marked by a prodigiously flowering pink cyclamen. (Lewis has seen the photo.)

  The painter wouldn’t care to be remembered like that, Lewis thinks, closing the books that have accumulated around him, silencing them. He is, after all, Tusiata. A smudge through time, an unfinished tattoo.

  Instinctively he looks up for Mary, with her elegant tilting neck and intelligent eyes. An attendant would do – anyone to share his discovery with. But he finds himself all alone in the Pacific Room. With just these words stirring to life, to bloom briefly in this room rained on by memory.

  It wasn’t until he moved to Sydney in his late twenties that Lewis nearly lost his virginity. Over dinner at No Names, he and Mary had drunk a bottle of wine between them and he noticed then that the powerful teeth and jaw she employed each lunchtime now produced a smile so reckless it seemed to stretch across her face, which was pleasantly flushed and furry.

  She had accompanied him home. When together they had stretched out along his parents’ old black leather couch, he had felt the stirring of something deep within him, distinct from the feeling of panic that next brought him swiftly to his feet.

  Later his doctor would tell him how his libido had been neutered by his mix of medications, as though it was something surgically removed from his brain. But at the time it was inexplicable, this quick succession of feelings – the death of desire. When he eventually saw Mary off in a taxi, what he missed most was the way their bodies had spooned so perfectly together.

  When he finally looks up, it’s not Mary he sees but the skylight above. In the grey-green of late afternoon something else is absent. The glass has drawn clear, and he realises: the rain has stopped. At once he feels the muscles in his face relaxing, and then he does something quite unimaginable. He smiles.

  After his time in the library, it’s as though the figure in the portrait has finally begun to shift and smudge, the painting’s surface breaking down to reveal the chalky residue of the original outline buried beneath.

  The Pacific Room has taken him back to the teeth of the canvas itself, its raw weave ready to absorb the world anew, thirsty for new brushstrokes. He’s learnt as much from this absent portrait – that it’s all about looking and listening, gathering the voices around him, conducting this island of voices in his head.

  Chapter 29

  LORD OF THE NIGHT

  Wilhelmina keeps her headphones on as she begins to clear away the books, the music releasing in little curlicues of sound. Tottering on the table, the books threaten to collapse under their own musty weight. On the rare occasion they journey out from their shelves – like they did today with the Australian stranger in his teal-coloured shorts – she longs for the moment their covers snap shut and they can be slid back into place, to occupy their slivers of darkness again.

  She feels a pleasurable emptying out as her head fills with sound and she returns the last of the books to their homes. Dionne’s smoky voice soon expands in the space, feeling its edges and filling out the little grooves and bumps along the shelves.

  She feels close to the vocals this afternoon, even if in a sense all the songs she hears are the same. Dionne is always walking down a street, trying to hide her feelings.

  Just tell me that we’re through …

  After a sleepless night and a slow-moving day, the song’s emotion is all she can feel. The previous evening at Tropicana had panned out not unexpectedly – in a trail of beer and cigarettes which lit up the dawn. With the Australian set off safely in his taxi, she and Tara had sat out on the darkened deck, their umbrella an island in the rain as they reprised the wedding, playing out its trio of sadness. From Shema’s viewpoint to Henry’s to Teuila’s they had shifted, taking it in turns – even re-enacting the ceremony, with Tara substituting a tablecloth for a veil.

  ‘Shema never had it so good,’ she spluttered over a sudden heavy downpour of rain.

  Wilhelmina played Teuila, mimicking perfectly her slumped shoulders and downcast looks. Even the way she let her tears run, unfettered, down her face was like Teuila. But they were real. For Wilhelmina sees it as her duty to serve Teuila by channelling her, to love her by inh
abiting her soul, to feel her sadness, but also to imagine a different future – a future where Teuila and Henry might be together, not through.

  It’s four o’clock and closing time for the Pacific Room. Wilhelmina always feels reluctant to leave. She’s been entrusted with the words in these books – just as Dionne has been entrusted with the lyrics to Burt Bacharach’s songs. She accepts them with good grace and respect, even though they don’t always respect her in return.

  It strikes Wilhelmina how Dionne might lose her man in the end, but she always gets the song; she says a little prayer. So Wilhelmina thinks as she puts the last of the books away and turns the photocopier off, its lights trailing off and its trays rattling into silence. The books might hunker down in darkness each night, but come morning she has the power to switch the lights on and summon them. In this way she thinks of every unopened book as an unsung prayer. It’s up to her to release them.

  Up through the skylight Wilhelmina can see the canopy of the coral trees outside. As she turns off the light, all she sees are the trees. At once the bookstands retreat into peoplesized shadows, shyly circling the reading table which holds the last of the light. With everything where it should be, everything back in its place, history can at last recede into the distance and the room begins to fill with a different kind of knowledge.

  As Wilhelmina locks the library doors for the day, she imagines the forest spilling once more down to the sea.

  It was her father, and his father before him, who had told her the lesson of the trees: to admire the gatae not for their coral blossom but for their scabby bark – a precious balm for centipede bites. And it was her great-grandfather Carl who had first passed down the story of the forest: how, being a volcanic island, each plant had journeyed from far across the water to arrive here – by person, bird or bat.