The Adventures of Vela
Albert Wendt
In memory of Hone Tuwhare
and Epeli Hau’ofa
Note: Some of the characters in this novel actually exist/existed in real life. However, the lives the author has given them are largely fictitious.
Contents
Book One: Beginnings
1 The Adoption
2 Vela’s Beginnings
3 Mulialofa
4 The Contest
5 War Correspondent
Book Two: The Chronicles of Nafanua
6 Arrival
7 Nafanua Unleashes
8 All Night Recital
9 In Search
10 Exemption and Riddle
11 (((A Breather)))
12 Uiga-o-Vae
13 Grave by the Sea
Book Three: Travel
14 Nei
15 Olfact
16 Nightflight
17 A Sequence
Book Four: The Last Adventure
18 The Return
19 The Priest’s Tale
20 Nafanua Returns
21 The Final Revelations
Copyright
Book One:
Beginnings
1
The Adoption
Is Vela of my dreaming? Or am I the object of his?
Now he’s got me perceiving through his riddles and metaphysics
Truth is we can’t survive without each other in a planet teethed
with silver dollars and ruled by aitu of various fang shapes
and skin colour or as Vela has sung:
All streets lead to the Fale of Terror
Above its front door is this question
WHAT’S ALOFA GOT TO DO WITH MONEY?
Merchants with bible-black eyes and smiles
as bright as new coins hook themselves
to the ice-blue walls inside
Assess in orderly litanies the various cuts
decide on weights and prices
the profit and sources of supply
and at their meetings echo this refrain
What’s alofa got to do with money?
What’s alofa got to do with a person’s price?
Literally one morning I woke to him sleeping beside me
in a public ward Moto’otua Hospital
Admittedly he was in the next bed and tubed to hanging bottles
feeding his anaesthetized slumber
Like me his lifelong duodenal ulcer had perforated
corroding poisons into his centre the surgeons slit
open and mopped out that midnight
(I’d come two weeks before and my stitched
belly was healing nicely)
So figuratively our mutual dependence was born
of the same planet-wide malady: the Sacred Moa bursting
to let us wear our Century’s medal — upright belly scar morse-coded
both sides with stitchdots a wicked centipede
permanently crawling upwards: Camus’ Sisyphus
repeating the Mountain Odysseus tied to Rock and Eagle
Yeats’ glad-eyed seers climbing Lapis Lazuli Mountain
Maui in Hine’s unforgiving tunnel Kuki Kaa fixed
into my vocabulary and Baxter detailed in our coffee bar conversations
and carried to a Wanganui Jerusalem which filled his questing
mouth with the communion bread of aroha (Vela later admired
my translations of Baxter’s sonnets)
Enough free-flowing symbolism back to a perforated Vela sieving
sleep as Mahatma Gandhi’s physical reincarnation
ebony hide tightly gathering in frugal bone and muscle
scars not folds fat honed away by perilous journeys endured for generations
a mythical creature polished to lava hardness but now caught
in the solid grasp of that hospital siever of the sick and dying
For days he was curtained with doctors and nurses
who broke in and out of his coma and replenished his feeding bottles
though they pronounced him dying: he’d been found bleeding
from every orifice on the Town Clock steps
What heartless children would abandon
their father! Nurse Fa’afetai whimpered (Very un-Samoan I suggested)
The other perforated ulcers in our ward agreed we were losing
alofa in our hunt for the mighty Tala
Aunt Ita Old Testament prophet of my upbringing had visited
and injected fear of eternal damnation and for my promised
return to God’s correct premises she’d prayed success into my operation
Grateful for her divine intervention I was sticking religiously to diet
and exercise regulations reducing stress by avoiding other victims’ problems
However Gandhi’s abandoned reincarnation — the resemblance was uncanny —
kept corroding that resolution as if he’d chosen me
his last disciple witness accomplice
Each day I fled his curtained silence to the veranda
and in gay view of Mt Vaea where RLS is tombed for tourists
feasted on my son’s science fiction collection
(My wife brought love in my favourite soups
My daughters continued my conversion to Cartland
and the Mills and Boon stable)
He slipped into my night sleep as flyingfox — cheeky batwinged rat
squealing estatically as it devoured upsidedown my dreams’ marrow
(Later he’d reveal that was his atua and insist I tell him
all the stories about Dracula Batman and Batwoman who from then on he referred to as his ‘revered cousins’)
Zipp! Pause Zippp! Pause Zippp!
And I was awake to the final Zipppp! of my dying neighbour uncurtaining
the morning and then crosslegged he started unplugging his lifelines
Nurse Nurse! I shouted unwilling to be accomplice
to his suicide pinning his arms sidewards (God he stank like flyingfox)
Nurse Fa’afetai and another wrestled him prone to mattress
and chastised him for ingratitude
No verbal protest but his bulbous eyes were fired at my betrayal
Verandawards I retreated while Nurse Fa’afetai doped him
back to sleeping obedience
She couldn’t understand why he wasn’t dying
as Dr Falani had predicted (Vela hated fulfilling others’ prophecies)
Judas! The snake hiss stung me to his mischevious chortling
as he picked his toenails and raised black pick to nose to savour
Did you speak? I asked but he ignored me and inhaled the fragrance
of his toedirt (Connoisseur of Toejam my children later labelled him)
By evening without permission he’d discarded his lifelines
and was roosterfit for dinner which he unpicked of meat
eating only the overcooked veggies toothless mouth pumping like an
accordion
Day after day after day so Coleridge might’ve written
Vela maintained his haughty silence refusing all medicine and our existence
Poor beggar’s nuts! Some patients whispered
Manic depressive! Dr Falani Freud’s disciple interpreted
Nothing true alofa can’t cure! Nurse Fa’afetai offered
Why can’t others’ problems leave me alone! I protested to my wife
But he’s only pintsize she insisted
He’s the weight of our total history the mountain of ash
smothering my night breathing I told her
That night secretly I packed to escape homewa
rds
Don’t go his whisper blew the mountain skywards
Sit listen to the tales of my journey
And I was trapped in the sieve of his breathing
So he began night after night and out of the hospital
to my home wife children year after year after year plaiting
the delicate rope across the abyss of our forgetting
Sometimes he’d disappear I never asked where
but guessed to recharge breath at the source of all stories
or to win more heirs to his chronicles
Vela the Cooked
Vela my adopted father who taught
me the biology of language
Tagaloaalagi whispered into Vanimonimo
Vela who appointed me his chronicler
in the written script of the Albinos
2
Vela’s Beginnings
Runt to complete the litter of six brothers and five sisters (remember
Christ had twelve disciples) but unlike Maui Ti’iti’iatalaga
and our other superheroes he wasn’t born of a randy atua
and delighted accepting mortal: his ringwormed father had to carry
his filariasis-bloated balls around in a sling
his mother bred heirs in obstinate silence and was always hungry for pork
(They’d squeezed him in one rainy afternoon in their taro patch
in between weeding and planting — too quick a squeeze they hadn’t enjoyed it)
Unlike our ancestral demigods he was to be
no ingenious faitogafiti
no lusty adventurer
no reckless stealer of fire ‘oso and ava
no expert fisher-up of islands
no conqueror of Mafui’e Atua of Earthquakes
no plaiter of magical snares
no snarer and beater-up of arrogant La
no suicidal challenger of death Goddesses
He wasn’t even to be his parents’ favourite
to be envied despised picked on by jealous older kin
In truth they’d let him fatten his sinews
off their uncomplaining generosity
(afterall aiga must feed aiga)
Our grand songmaker was to be punily unheroic
inventing his beauty in songs fished up out
of his moa the storehouse of our genesis:
(1) Le Tupu’aga
In the Beginning there was only Tagaloaalagi
Living in the Vanimonimo
Only He
No Sky no Land
Only He in the Vanimonimo
He created Everything
Out of where He stood
Grew the Papa
Tagaloa said to the Papa Give birth!
And Papata’oto was born
And then Papasosolo
And Papalaua’au and other different Papa
With His right hand Tagaloa struck the Papa
And Ele’ele was born the Father of Humankind
And Sea was also born to cover
All the Papa
Tagaloa looked to His right
And Water was born
He said to the Papa Give Birth!
And Tuite’elagi and Ilu were born
And Mamao the Woman
And Niuao and Lua’ao the Son
In that manner Tagaloa created
Everything else
Until Tagata Loto
Atamai Finagalo and Masalo were born
There ended the children of Tagaloaalagi and the Papa
(2) Vela’s Birth
The Lulu Atua of his aiga swept in at his birth
and perched on the fale rafters
gazing down
In the Atua’s moonbright silence
he was to hear his death song
at the moment of his birth
Death
Death is
Death is a song
To hear it early is to decipher
all paths to all songs
Each song wellcaught wellshaped wellsung
illuminates the ocean path that dances
from the Fafā at Falealupo World’s End
and the agaga begin their shuffle
to Pulotu Estate of Saveasi’uleo half-man
half-congereel who cannibalized his brothers
in the waves and in repentance retreated
to Pulotu to await the promised fulfillment
of his genealogy in Nafanua his daughter
the Clot-of-Blood-that-was-Hidden
Atua undefeated uniter of our islands
last to relent to the Albino aitu
with their magic Book and preaching sticks
Our songmaker started in the Lulu’s gazing
and like us had to pace the lava channel
until he was agaga in Tagaloa’s reflection
leaping up into Saveasi’uleo’s inventive mouth
(and the promise of time without end)
to survive each shade of Po:
Potagotago Night-that-Gropes
loto searches for the yearning body
Pouliuli Night-that-is-Black
agaga can’t map the moa’s geography
Posoloatoa Night-that-is-Forever
when fear in the soul has no ending
Pomalemo Night-that-Drowns
finagalo is abandoned in the formless tide
Potuputupu Night-that-Grows
mana’o reaches the atua’s bowels
Pofanau Night-for-Giving-Birth
Tagaloa’s maggots become human
Pomaliu Night-for-Dying
masalo is convinced there is an ending
Poula Night-for-Abandonment
the senses break into dance and orgy
loto agaga fear finagalo mana’o
maggots masalo fuse in the uninhibited
conjunction of sprung phallus and vulva
and we are born with wisdom
(3) His First Song
Uncauled but slick still with amniotic fluid and blood
roped to his mother as the impatient midwife drags
him out he slaps into the Ao and screams/sings:
Va-Va-Va-Va-aaa!
His first song is of the Va the Space between all things
like the birth fluid holding all in the Unity-that-is-All
Va the relationships that must be nursed and nurtured
Va the Harmony in which we are one: stone bird fire
air fish atua blood bone shit sound colour cloud
tree smoke eye lizard turtle shark
The raftered Lulu deciphered our songmaker’s first song
and decided ‘All his life he’ll want to swim back up
his mother’s sacred passage’
(But remember brothers Maui in
his valiant quest for immortality was ground
to sad meat in Hine’s obsidian channel!)
(4) His Name
Our ancestral superstars sometimes
took their names from
their birthday’s omens
No auspicious signs on our
songmaker’s day though: the midwife griped
about not being fed
the placenta was shoved
into a shallow hole under a palm (dogs
would dig it up that night and devour it)
in Niusā the Sacred
PalmGrove the wind dozed
in the conch’s mouth
no vaisalo for
the exhausted mother who didn’t care
what name he got
in the bay his brothers
raised their night lobster traps
and found them empty
their father snored on
under sad dreams floundering in
the rafters of the aumaga’s fale
Someone suggested Vela Cooked
because he looked red and hot
(The records don’t identify the suggester)
So Vela it was to be
Ordinary Hom
ely Easy
on the tongue and to forget
Over the elusive stretch of his self-
making he was to be called
(in order of aging):
Velaputa Fat-Vela who at
two was as cuddly as
a succulent suckling pig
Velavaetoga Yaw-footed-Vela who at
twelve sprouted screamingly painful yaws
as large as hibiscus flowers
Velasoso Stupid-Vela who at
fifteen stuttered at the girls
and tripped over their cruel giggles
Velafaipese Vela-the-Songmaker who at
twenty and the arrival of Mulialofa
sang his gay way everywhere
Velalēāu Vela-Can’t-Reach who at
thirty was wifeless (or haremless as was
the practice) and childless
Vela-ma-le-Ma’ila Vela-with-the-Scar
who at thirty-five got speared in the arse
for seducing the blind widower next door
Etc
Etc
Etc
(5) Songs of the To’elau
Yet unfluent in the sea’s languages
in the beach’s dreaming in the coral’s pain
in the turtle’s talk in the dolphin’s leaping
in the sue’s slow dance in the octopus’s grasp
at ten he could catch the To’elau’s fluent skip
sweep and leap its quivering caress on his skin
its wise songs of islands to the south where
men ate dogs sharks and one another sucking up
the blood’s salt tunes and mana and hung
their agaga from āoa trees to dry
and the fat daughters of Po suckled insatiable aitu
with dog claws and pig mouths on the milk
of the earth’s languages
as his lean mother had tuned him at her hungry breasts