… This day were are reborn with the morning

  We are given the Light to live by …

  She started singing to ward off the memories and pain. Some of her grandchildren and helpers woke, and, sitting up reluctantly, joined her singing. Pili curled up against her flanks; she picked him up and, putting him in her lap, wrapped her arms round him. He continued sleeping as she sang:

  Bless us, Oh Lord, with physical strength

  To work another day …

  Just before the end of the hymn she observed that the mango trees to the right were flowering, and recalled that mangoes were Mautu’s and Barker’s favourite fruit. Wasn’t it Barker who’d once remarked that Satoans were children of the mango season? What had he meant by that? From over the sea the rain was advancing towards Satoa, like a transparent green curtain. She wondered what revelation was hidden behind it.

  She closed her eyes and started praying aloud. The rain hit the palms, banana trees and fale on the seashore with a loud clatter, and then it was upon their paepae, sounding like the frantic flapping and gyrations of the chicken whose head she’d chopped off with her father’s bushknife, on her father’s instructions, when she was a child. How she missed Mautu! How she missed Arona! Pili snuggled back against her breasts. The rain passed over their fale quickly.

  Iakopo, her favourite and the most Mautu-like of her grandchildren, brought her usual morning mug of koko from the house, and took Pili away with him. How Iakopo reminded her of Arona, she thought as she took her first mouthful of hot koko, and didn’t understand why it tasted acidic and slightly rancid. She took another: the same taste. Now she was feeling cold, feverish. She usually drove away such ailments with hard work so she slipped on her working tiputa and, sitting on her tattered work mat, started weeding under the mango trees.

  When she saw Lefatu and Maualuga moving about in the fale she called, ‘Come out here and pick up the rubbish!’ She ignored their muffled grizzling as they dragged their feet out to her and started picking up the fallen mango leaves. Mango blossoms fluttered down over them as they worked.

  Peleiupu emerged from her office and called Lalaga in to breakfast, which she and Tavita usually had with her, but Lalaga told her daughter to go ahead without her. The fever got worse so she got a towel and some soap and hurried to the deserted pool, where she immersed herself up to her neck in the cold water until she believed her temperature was back to normal.

  By midday, however, she was shivering almost uncontrollably as she tried to continue weaving the ie toga she’d been working on for almost ten years. She wrapped Mautu’s blanket around herself — his smell comforted her, lay down with her head on her bamboo ali, and tried to sweat out her fever, but the burning and pain in her bones and behind her eyes worsened. Soon she drifted off to sleep.

  Her conscience told her that a pastor’s wife should not be having such a shocking and sinful dream. She tried switching it off but it became more deliciously vivid and deliriously real.

  The mangoes hanging down from every branch and almost touching her head were enormous: fat and ripe for her picking. She plucked one. Pluck! Plucked two. Pluck! Ahh, she sighed as she weighed their apt solidity in her hands, rolled them across her lips, licked them with her hungry tongue. From the depths of her throat, tremors of desire shimmered down into her heart and belly. She visualised her teeth sinking into the succulent mango flesh, the thick juice bursting out and dribbling down her lips as she tried to suck it all in, in one gulping swwiittcchh! Aware she was wet, so wet, she opened her eyes. Stop! her conscience demanded. Get out of this Satan-inspired dream! But she knew she’d kill to stay in it: all her senses and pores demanded that. Lick and suck, lick and suck! The slick, smooth feel of the mango skin turned to the soft, hot touch of skin and hair. She dared to look. There, right there in the centre of her vision, her hands cupped around them, were the testicles and quivering erect penis she’d enjoyed for about forty years. Her head and body sang …

  ‘I’m not sick!’ Lalaga told Peleiupu. Lefatu had told her Lalaga was ill. Peleiupu could feel the heat emanating from her mother’s body. It was almost time for evening lotu.

  ‘Have you taken any tablets?’

  ‘You know I don’t take any of that medicine.’ Lalaga tried to sit up. Peleiupu helped her and found that the blanket was soaked through with sweat. ‘It’s just a slight fever,’ Lalaga insisted.

  Lefatu and Maualuga brought a towel and dry clothes for their grandmother. Peleiupu dried Lalaga and put the clothes on her. ‘You’re not well,’ Peleiupu said. ‘You will shift into the house so we can take better care of you.’

  ‘I was born in a fale; I’ll die in one!’ Lalaga protested.

  Many of their aiga had arrived for the lotu; they tried to look as if they didn’t notice the tension between Lalaga and Peleiupu. Since Mautu’s death the tension and heated silences had worsened.

  ‘You won’t have to stay in the house forever,’ Peleiupu argued.

  ‘I … I miss your father,’ Lalaga said. ‘I just dreamt about him — and my parents.’

  ‘I miss him too, Mama.’

  ‘So you should — after all, his love for you was greater than for any of his other children.’ A deliberate wounding but Peleiupu excused her mother because, as Poto had told her, ‘Lalaga is now grumpy and forgetful.’ ‘Well, don’t you think that was so?’ Lalaga pursued her.

  Peleiupu couldn’t stop herself. ‘Yes, Mama, and because you want me to admit it: yes, he loved me even more than you.’ She didn’t care that the tension level in the fale rose alarmingly with that remark. ‘But you loved and still love Arona — or should I say, all the beautiful stories you and others have made up about him — more than me and my sisters.’ Before she could wound further, Pili scuttled into the fale and, rushing over, slid into Lalaga’s arms.

  ‘Mama, you’re very hot,’ the boy said.

  ‘Ask Pele why!’ Lalaga snapped.

  That night Peleiupu couldn’t sleep. She feared for her mother: during lotu she’d seen that luminous aura of light that she saw every time someone was about to die. Eventually she got out of bed and, using a torch, picked her silent way into Lalaga’s fale, over the other sleepers, into her net, where she snuggled down into her mother’s familiar smell and presence.

  The next morning when Tavita asked her why she wanted Mikaele to take the Lady Poto to fetch Lefatu and Ruta she told him, ‘Only they may be able to heal my mother. And Naomi needs to be here too, in case … ’

  ‘But we now have palagi medicine,’ he insisted. ‘We can even afford for the Lady Poto to go to Apia and bring back a palagi doctor.’

  ‘That won’t heal her!’

  ‘Healers who use pagan cures certainly won’t!’

  She slammed her frustrated fist down on the table and shouted, ‘My mother is dying: she has your Disease!’

  ‘What do you mean? Are you mad?’

  ‘She has your Satoan Disease!’ She hugged herself. He put his arms around her.

  ‘It can’t be. No one’s been sick with it for years.’

  Over the next few days, while they waited for Mikaele to bring the others, Lalaga’s condition deteriorated rapidly. The nurse tried all the appropriate medicines in her clinic — none worked. Lalaga burned and vomited up everything she ate or drank, and she winced with pain whenever anyone touched her. She didn’t complain, though.

  As soon as Ruta arrived with Lefatu she started treating Lalaga. ‘Ruta will ease your pain,’ Lefatu told Lalaga. ‘She’s now a much better healer than I am.’

  Ruta mixed a nonu paste in a glass of warm water. ‘What a horrible smell!’ Lalaga complained as she drank it.

  ‘It’ll relax you, help reduce the pain,’ Ruta said.

  ‘You’ve taught her well,’ Lalaga congratulated Lefatu.

  Later, while Ruta bathed her, Lalaga said, ‘Soon I’ll only be bones and weigh what I did at birth!’ Lefatu laughed with her. ‘I’m disappearing!’

  Naomi dried her gently, and then Ruta started rubbing a herbal potion all over her body. Slow soothing strokes. ‘It feels good, good!’ Lalaga whispered. ‘The pain is going away.’

  She feel asleep quickly. They lowered her mosquito net. ‘It is time to tell our family,’ Lefatu advised Peleiupu, who sent Iakopo, carrying Pili on his hip, to fetch Tavita.

  Tavita came and sat with them around Lalaga’s net. Peleiupu sent everyone else away. They waited in silence until Peleiupu realised they were expecting her, the eldest, to speak first. She kept looking at Ruta.

  ‘All right,’ Ruta complied. ‘Our mother has been chosen by the Satoan Disease.’

  ‘It is pagan to believe such … such superstition,’ Naomi pronounced.

  ‘The Disease has considered her worthy of its ultimate blessing.’ Ruta chose to ignore her sister’s remark.

  ‘How can such a terrible pain and suffering be considered a blessing?’ Naomi attacked.

  The others looked at Peleiupu. ‘Are you speaking as a pastor’s wife or as our sister who grew up in Satoa and knows that Ruta’s diagnosis is correct?’ she asked Naomi.

  ‘Our Christian mother, the wife of our Christian father and pastor, would reject such a diagnosis!’ Naomi retorted.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Lefatu intervened, knowing a nasty argument was erupting. ‘Are you sure your mother wouldn’t agree with Ruta?’ Naomi withdrew into a soft whimpering, hands clutched over her face. Peleiupu wound her arm around Naomi’s shoulders. ‘The name of her illness is unimportant. What is important is that she has chosen to go to Mautu — and to God. Your mother has lived a long and wonderful life. I envy her,’ Lefatu said.

  ‘What are we going to tell the rest of our aiga and Satoa?’ Peleiupu asked them.

  For lotu that evening their new pastor, Taleni Sola, and his wife and many of the elders and Lalaga’s friends gathered in Lalaga’s fale. Halfway through the hymn Lalaga sat up, pushed the net aside and slid out to join the singing. Lefatu slid over and sat with her. They looked so old, yet content and happy to be old, Peleiupu thought. Pili ran over and Lalaga gathered him into her arms and lap.

  After the meal, when she was alone with her daughters and Tavita, Lalaga made them promise there would be no fa’a-Samoa at her funeral. ‘I’m not an ali’i, so there’s to be no lagi, no extravagant, wasteful exchange of ie toga and money and goods. The fa’a-Samoa is being used by greedy and unscrupulous people to benefit themselves; it is a killing burden on all of us.’ She made Tavita promise he wasn’t going to let the greedy matai of Satoa persuade him otherwise. ‘I also hope that my funeral will begin a new tradition of freeing our people of the burdens of the fa’a-Samoa.’ Naomi and Tavita agreed with her. Then, looking directly at Peleiupu, Lalaga said, ‘And don’t forget you promised your father that you’d find your only brother and bring him home.’ Peleiupu reached over and held her trembling hands.

  ‘And if we find his life has ended,’ Naomi declared, ‘we will bring home his body.’

  ‘And bury it at Niuafei beside Mautu,’ Ruta ended.

  ‘Thank you,’ Lalaga whispered. ‘Thank you.’

  Tavita summoned the fono to his faletele the next morning. Peleiupu insisted on being there, even though she knew she shouldn’t be. All the matai came, knowing a very lucrative funeral was about to happen.

  ‘I want to dispense with all formalities,’ Tavita welcomed them. ‘You know that our mother in Christ and the wife of our illustrious father is very ill. We believe she has our Disease.’ Peleiupu noted the appropriate look of shock on the matais’ faces. ‘Yes, our Disease has chosen her because she has led an exemplary Christian life.’ They nodded enthusiastically. ‘It is also God’s will.’ He paused and coughed. ‘I’ve called this meeting to organise her funeral and farewell.’

  Tutusa, Tavita’s leading tulafale, expressed the ‘great sorrow of our living and our dead at our mother in Christ’s illness’. His speech became more verbose, more ornate, more dramatic as he continued. Tavita coughed once more and his tulafale got the message and ended with, ‘We must, as a caring, loyal, grateful village, accord our mother a funeral worthy of her true aristocratic lineage and her great aristocratic aiga.’

  Tavita countered immediately. ‘Lalaga has instructed me that she does not — and I repeat — she does not want any fa’a-Samoa at her funeral. There is to be no exchange of ie toga. I respect her wishes and will carry them out.’

  Peleiupu noted that most of the matai revealed no signs of dismay, shock or protest. But she knew better.

  ‘Our mother is of the highest royalty in this sinful country,’ Tutusa opened. ‘We are very fortunate to have the daughter of the Aiga Sa-Malietoa as our mother and our connection to God and our salvation.’ There were tears in his clear eyes. The others nodded; some echoed their leader’s praises of Lalaga. Here it comes, Peleiupu thought. ‘Toanamua, our ali’i, the great son of Satoa, heir to the sacred Aiga Sa-Satoa and Sa-Tuala: this most unworthy person, because he is your most loyal and obedient servant, feels he must remind your lordship, that you and our most loving mother belong to the most noble aiga of Samoa.’ Tutusa stopped and swept his solemn gaze over the others. ‘How are those aiga … how is the whole of Samoa going to view you and our most sacred village if we do not farewell our mother in the true aristocratic manner worthy of her and her sacred connections and you, your lordship?’

  ‘That is enough!’ Tavita stopped him dead. Peleiupu couldn’t believe it: Tavita had never before demanded obedience from his tulafale in public, and so rudely. She believed it, though, when he added, ‘This matter is closed. I have just told you what we’re going to do. Hold all ie toga — you know what that means. Tell everyone!’

  ‘What happens if mourners insist on presenting ie toga?’ she heard herself asking. No untitled person, let alone a woman, had ever spoken in their fono. The other matai looked to Tavita to chastise his presumptuous wife.

  ‘The ie toga will be politely but firmly returned to them, with a sua,’ Tavita disappointed them. ‘Furthermore, from here on all funerals in our district and village will follow that principle. And when we attend other villages’ funerals, we will not take ie toga. We must teach other people to get rid of the wasteful features of the fa’a-Samoa.’ Most of the matai were now truly shocked.

  ‘What happens, sir, if Lagaga’s most noble aiga arrives and demands that they take her back with them?’ Tutusa was trying another ploy.

  ‘My mother will not be taken back,’ Peleiupu blocked him. ‘She has said she wants to be buried beside Mautu and in the village she loves.’

  Again they expected their ali’i to push her back into her proper female place, but Tavita said to them, ‘You’ve heard what Pele has said. And you all know that what Pele wants, Pele gets, eh!’ Some of the minor matai, who supported her because she always extended them credit, laughed with Tavita.

  Straight after their meeting and the generous aristocratic meal Peleiupu and her aiga provided them — they even got a fat basket of food each to take home — Tutusa and his supporters, who owed Peleiupu large debts, spread the story throughout the district that their ‘poor and loving mother, Lalaga, is to be accorded a very miserly, very un-Samoan, un-Christian, papalagi funeral by her very un-Samoan, afakasi, miserly children. And, most shameful and destructive of all, our ali’i, the son of a poverty-stricken beachcomber, has ordered that no ie toga will be allowed at any Satoa funerals from now on, Amen. Alas, what is the true fa’a-Samoa and alofa coming to?’

  Lalaga’s relatives from around the country started arriving to farewell her. Ruta’s remedies had stopped her vomiting, so she was able to talk freely. ‘Why do I, a non-Satoan, deserve this rare and final Illness?’ she joked with her visitors. ‘Why doesn’t it bless someone else with its rare, aristocratic and exquisite pain? I don’t deserve this honour!’

  When some of the visitors commented on how beautiful, gracious and generous her daughters were, she said, ‘They are really lucky to have me as their mother: they’re beautiful because I’m beautiful: they’re generous and gracious because I’m all that!’ They laughed with her. ‘They’re certainly not like that because of their father. He was a hopeless dreamer who’d chased after the guttural English language and fantastic creatures such as sea-horses, mermaids, the Roc and the Unicorn …’

  A few days later, while the others were having their morning meal in the house and faletele, and Peleiupu and Lalaga were on their own, Peleiupu said, ‘Please forgive me, Mama. I’ve always been headstrong and disobedient …’

  ‘And very spoilt by your father — and me! Why? Because you’ve always been our most gifted and, therefore, most vulnerable.’ They remained silent for a long time, with the surf swishing at the edge of their hearing. ‘You must find your brother,’ Lalaga broke the spell. ‘The pain of his birth continues. And not to know what has become of him …’ She started crying. ‘Now it’s too late — I’ll never see him!’

  ‘Tavita and I will go to New Zealand and look for him,’ Peleiupu promised.

  ‘Arona’s absence remains the one great emptiness in my life.’ Again they let the sound of the sea wash through their sorrow. ‘You and Tavita will take Pili as your own son,’ Lalaga said. ‘Promise me that. He has no one else.’

  ‘He has Iakopo.’

  ‘Yes, Iakopo looks after him, takes good care of him, loves him.’

  ‘I’ll make him Iakopo’s younger brother and my youngest child.’

  ‘God gave him to us in return for I’amafana.’ Once again the full pain of the epidemic was upon them, and they embraced and wept.

  On Saturday afternoon, as the shadows lengthened across Satoa and high tide peaked, Tavita picked up Lalaga and, sheltering under a large black umbrella held up by Peleiupu, carried her down to the church and her grave, which Mikaele and the aumaga had dug and lined with concrete, beside Mautu’s grave. Her daughters and grandchildren, with Iakopo carrying Pili, and some of her friends accompanied them. The grave was lined with siapo. Tavita carried her slowly around the grave’s edge, while she inspected it.