Suzanne Falkiner

CHAPTER 14: Troppo Troppo

“All right,” he said, “if you know so much, have you ever heard of a piece of music marked troppo agitato?”

“I don’t think it’s possible,” I said.

“I think it is. I want to hear it. At the end, all the instruments would be in bits.”
“I’ll bet it’s been done,” I said.

“Ah, but this would be tropical,” he said. “I can see it,” he said. “The glue would melt in the heat, and the wood would warp, and the strings would rot away with damp and snap, one after the other. The brass would turn green, and mildew would be growing out of the woodwinds. When it was finished, the instruments would be thrown in a heap, and they’d begin to sprout and turn into the trees they were made from. And reeds and vines, and the wind would blow through them and the birds would come. That part I’d mark finito, or troppo troppo.”

— Visitants, 1979, page 48

After his last diary entry at the end of June, Stow’s thoughts and movements are difficult to trace with any exactitude. The last of his fortnightly letters that Mary Stow kept from this period was dated 22 May 1959. Helen, his sister, remembered that her mother subsequently received others, but destroyed them, evidently finding their contents disturbing, or ‘not making much sense’.

Sometime in 1960, probably in England, Stow would add some fragmentary notes — undated memoranda — to his diary about his remaining time in the Trobriand islands:

Remember the green fireflies like eyes in the dripping trees—the owl — the smell of palm leaves drying.

At Toboada in August the flowers were out—vinca, convolvulus, hibiscus, painted lady, and some kind of pea like a violet, very sweet smell.

Bwita too, a fragrant cream coloured flowering ficus. Very windy. Stayed there three weeks. Then Sinaketa, on the sea. When tide is out pigs went to waterline foraging among the mussels etc. Reef beyond at waterline. Awake all one night and saw before dawn Katamapula Guyan take out his canoe fishing. Extraordinary blue world.

Vakuta three weeks. Remember the terrible broken and desert coral forest. Surf smashing on the forsaken cliffs. Kitava, and the strange hospitality and character of Kam the King. Iwa—island left alone by Europeans—high coral cliffs, grey with just a little vegetation, rising out of a sea that was clear as the air itself, or clearer, and showed the fish and coral as if through a magnifying glass. A long moonlight trip back to Kitava, not a disturbance on the sea but our own wake. Then the sickness — cold, all day and night—and finished or tried to at Muwo.

Remember Dokonikan cave, the one at Kitava — old woman at census whose husband and son had died—evening when the lamps were lit—changing colours of palm fronds at different times of the day—much else. Was happy, often.

Probably, therefore, it was sometime in late June or early July, in an abnormally rainy period while they were still at Omarakana, that the milamala occurred. In 1959 it was the turn of Liluta, some five miles away, to organise the yam harvest festival in the area.

However, there had been a longstanding feud, dating back to Malinowski’s day, between Mitakata and Iobokwau’u, the present chief of the Kwainama matriline (or sub-clan) at Liluta (who, through intermarriage, was the son of To’uluwa, the previous Guyau of Omarakana). Chief Iobokwau’u, an active old man, had frequently visited Julius and Stow at the Omarakana rest house, but would never enter the village proper to talk to Mitakata.

Now, at Liluta, wrote Charles Julius, a huge central platform, especially built, was laden with yams, pigs, taro, sugar cane, betel nut and many other good things, in tribute to Mitakata, who was asked to make magic to improve the weather. There was much blowing of conch shells as the men of the other villages marched in, with Vanoi leading the Omarakana delegation — Mitakata had stayed behind, evidently too old to travel the distance. This festival would for last several days, and would involve night-long singing and dancing and much courting and sexual activity among the younger people.

At Sinaketa, the fishing village in the southern part of Kiriwina where pigs foraged at the waterline, Stow and Julius would pass the next six weeks. Here, awake all one night, he watched a lone fisherman in his outrigger slip out before dawn on a motionless silver sea — the still moment when, in Trobriand belief, the soul sets off by canoe from Bomatu Point in the northeast for the ‘isle of the dead’, embodied by Tuma Island some twenty kilometres to the west. In this ‘extraordinary blue world’ the two men stayed through 25 August to 8 September, witnessing the occasional arrival of Kula canoes on their long journey from the D’Entrecasteaux and Amphlett islands to Kitava, bearing soulava necklaces for ceremonial exchange, while the mwali armshells passed in the opposite direction.

For two weeks, until 22 September, they stayed in the village of Okina’i on the island of Vakuta, across the narrow strait at Kiriwina’s southern tip. Now came a steady build-up of ominous images: a product perhaps of Stow’s own darkening mood, or of the uneasy atmosphere that sometimes prevailed—due to some quarrel or incident of sorcery—between the small island communities. Stow later remarked in a letter to anthropologist Michael Young on the ‘strangely redecorated’ church at Kaulaka, a village toward the ocean side of the island, and a similarly abandoned structure in their own vicinity, where the ghosts of ‘dimdim’ religious ceremonies were held. In Visitants he would add to this ‘church-casino’, drawn from life at Kaulaka, the bizarre carved figure of a wartime pilot crucified on a wooden plane.

….. After four months in the field, Mick’s physical health, like Julius’s, was deteriorating. His mother had already mentioned his dysentery, an affliction often accompanied by feverish symptoms and weakness. Earlier, both men had suffered from flu, and Stow an infected hand. The local diet — heavily dominated by yams, taro and green vegetables, with bananas and coconuts, supplemented by fresh fish (when available) and tinned meat — was ostensibly healthy, but it was lower in protein than most Europeans were accustomed to. Stow, with an inclination to ‘live native’, was by this date suffering from vitamin deficiencies and malnutrition.

Perhaps it was this feeling of debilitation that led him to stop taking his daily Chloroquine tablet, a prophylactic against malaria. With its unpleasant metallic taste, Chloroquine’s side effects sometimes include headaches, blurred vision, nightmares and gastro-intestinal problems, as well as — with long-term use — a slow onset of mood change, anxiety and depression. At any rate, at some point Stow may have contracted the mosquito-borne malaria parasite, which for now lay dormant.

LANDFALL

And indeed I shall anchor, one day—some summer morningof sunflowers and bougainvillea and arid wind—and smoking a black cigar, one hand on the mast,turn, and unlade my eyes of all their cargo;and the parrot will speed from my shoulder, and white yachts glidewelcoming out from the shore on the turquoise tide.

And when they ask me where I have been, I shall sayI do not remember.

And when they ask me what I have seen, I shall sayI remember nothing.

And if they should ever tempt me to speak again,I shall smile, and refrain.

—Outrider, 1962

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