The Navidad Incident (26 page)

Inside the carriage, the other passengers bounced and chafed like groundnuts roasting in a hot skillet, but Lee Bo slept, noting only later that ‘whilst we went one way, the fields, houses and trees all went another'. The carriage stopped at Petersfield and Mousehill, changed horses at Godalming, then continued on to Guildford, Esher and Kingston-upon-Thames before arriving in London proper. From there they barged downstream under London Bridge and Tower Bridge, docking on the south bank in the seamen's quarter of Rotherhithe. Here lived many a sailor's family amongst chandlers that supplied sundry tackle to the trade; here boats heading upstream to land cargo often tied up overnight and sometimes tarried in dry dock to repair damages from tide & current; here rumors of the Seven Seas were the talk of the town. Stopping in first at St Mary's Church to attend a service, they continued a short walk further to Captain Wilson's home in Paradise Row where Lee Bo was to live as a full member of the family.

“What was it like, the house?” asks Matías.

“Grand and finely appointed. In Palau, three strong men could throw up a house in as many days, whereas the London builder must have needed thirty hands for well on a hundred. And the furnishings! I was given a room of my own with a bed of my own, complete with canopy and curtains. That bed was a room in itself! But even this I soon grew accustomed to.”

“Highly adaptable, for an islander.”

“Foreign cultures were ne'er a distress to me. Or perhaps I simply enjoyed the good fortune to live like a prince in the captain's house. A move up in the world, if you will.”

“Really?” says Matías.

“Aye, materially greater. The sheer scale of wealth to invest such labors in a private home, and more, to send ships halfway round the globe to some tiny isles in the Pacific.”

“So living in that big house, what did you do every day?”

“I attended the Peter Hills School in Southwark, to learn to read and write and do arithmetic—your ‘three Rs'—but fun, to be sure. Nor were the pupils so very biased.”

“Children of the empire could afford to be magnanimous.”

“Perhaps, but it being a seafaring village, the sailors' sons welcomed strangers from afar bringing their strange customs and foods and handicrafts. I was introduced as such, an exotic import, if older than my classmates. Schooling serv'd me well; they taught me to pen my own name—Leigh Beau.”

“Did you do anything else besides go to school?”

“Certainly, I was fêted by the leading lights of London who, it must be said, regarded me as a kind of pet, a domesticated wildchild.”

Matías doesn't know what to make of the ghost's remark. Is he being sarcastic or simply reporting the facts? Or else priding himself for reasons Matías can't hope to understand?

“One dandy of a poet, a George Keates, oft invited me to his house. There I met with many diff'rent persons for tea and biscuits and talk. Politely put, I was made to feel most popular; less nicely said, I was a curiosity on display.”

“Did it make you uncomfortable?”

“Nay, quite honestly, I gave little thought to inequalities 'twixt Great Britain and lowly Palau. Only later, in death, was I raised up off the ground, as it were, to a bird's-eye prospect of the world. At the time, I had scarcely the height to see. I was like a skittle fending off five players at once, the balls coming hard and fast. In some senses, perspicacious death becomes me more than life.”

“Then it wasn't so bad, your being a showpiece?”

“To be alone in a foreign land is to be one against many. Of course the English who sailed to our islands and back were in the same boat, made the objects of Londoners' curiosity, so I cannot say as it was unfair. After all, I boarded the ship of my own free will. Thinking back on it now, the days pass'd in blissful fascination.”

“What did you aim to get out of staying in England? What possible profit?”

“Aim? Profit? Hard words born of the evils of modernity. Eighteenth-century Europe was ne'er so horridly calculating as that.”

“But surely it wasn't just to see what you could see?” the President asks.

“Perhaps I thought to turn me into a proper Englishman. Is not that the truth? The intrepid soul who ventures out to foreign lands and learns their foreign ways enjoys no higher compliment than to be told, ‘Ye're as good as English.' ”

“Well, I guess. Going to Japan, I learned to use chopsticks and take a Japanese bath, to appreciate the seasons. What's different between us, though, I didn't have any gentleman of means to watch over me, no polite salon culture, so I never got in as deep as you. No one even pretended I could be ‘as good as Japanese.' ”

“These two centuries I have thought on it a score of times, that had I dwelt full fifty years in London, what would my lot have been?”

“Like they say, he who sits between two chairs falls flat on his ass.”

“Indeed. At first I did entertain a modest plan: I would stay in England two or three years, learn all there was to know, then return to my homeland embolden'd with my newfound mastery to fortify ourselves against foreigners. A scheme of modernization, if you will. The conceit was to void my vessel so as better to arm me with their cannonry. Yet study as I might, my one lifetime could not span two worlds.”

“It's next to impossible to embrace two cultures in one person.”

“I despaired. Half a year dash'd my hopes. How I yearn'd for my beloved Palau, yet knew I must stay on till capable of explaining the English and their ways to my father.”

“State scholarships carry big responsibilities.”

“Unlike your free and easy travel papers.”

“Let's not start. I had my share of hardships.”

“Each to his own. Young as I was, I quash'd my homesickness and immersed myself in daily study. Literacy, however, was of less consequence than observing civilisation at large. I did even see the Great Wind Bladder, which delighted one and all.”

To be specific, the Italian Vincenzo Lunardi demonstrated his invention, the hot air balloon, on the fifteenth of September, 1784, the first aeronautical experiment of its kind ever seen in England. A consummate showman and self-publicist, Lunardi had taken out prior advertisements in various gazetteers, and an unprecedented multitude turned out to witness the launch from the City Artillery Park in Moorfields, paying one guinea a head on the gate. Good Captain Wilson, however, did not see the merit of Lee Bo mingling with great crowds at such a spectacle, nor especially the value of spending a guinea for the same, so the Prince did not attend the festivities, but rather went to preview the bladder placed on free public display some several days in advance. Likewise, on the date of the ascent, he stood a safe distance outside the park to watch it ‘float like a blowfish' toward the northern skies of London.

Contrary to the acclaim High Society heaped upon Lunardi, Lee Bo thought little of ‘the foolish man imitate bird'. Apparently not a few learned Londoners, the eminent natural historian Sir Joseph Banks and writer Horace Walpole among them, also scoffed at the aerial enterprise, hence our Prince was not alone in his quite rational evaluation of this ‘inhuman presumption'.

Indeed, Lee Bo's own voyage, uprooted from his isle to this distant northern clime, surely represents a far more fantastic transit than the brief sojourn of that dashingly charming Secretary of the Neapolitan Embassy or his short hop of a mere twenty-five miles to the sleepy village of Standon-Ware in Hertfordshire. But whilst the famous Lunardi enjoyed the ‘heaven-sent' assistance of one brave sixteen-year-old farmgirl named Elisabeth Brett in landing his craft, the Prince was never again to alight on his native soil. For, alas, he died in England.

By December of that year, having lived in the company of Europeans for thirteen months (five months since docking in Portsmouth), he had attained a considerable degree of fluency in English. No one could impugn the sincerity of his educational ambitions nor his progress in the same, for as George Keates remarked, ‘His application was equal to his great desire of learning; and he conducted himself in school with such propriety, and in a manner so engaging, that he gained not only the esteem of the gentleman under whose tuition he was placed, but also the affection of his young companions.'

And yet on the sixteenth of December, he complained of discomfort and was confined to his bed. A rash of blisters broke out over his body, indicative of smallpox. Captain Wilson and his family had presumably been aware of the danger of contagion. Already by 1796, Dr Jenner had experimented with inoculating humans with pus from cowpox blisters, based on prior empirical recognition that someone once superficially infected did not risk further infection. So, too, must he have known that a visitor from afar would be helpless against diseases that prevailed amongst Europeans. Surely part of Captain Wilson's enjoining Lee Bo to shun the crowds at Moorfields was the fear that he might pick up ‘bad airs' there. Yet despite all precautions, the Prince took ill and lost weight. The Captain called in the prominent physician Dr James Carmichael Smyth to examine him, but the prognosis for recovery was nil. The Captain and those of his kin not yet inured to smallpox were to stay away, leaving but few friends to inform the patient why.

Lee Bo met his last with great equanimity. On the twenty-seventh of December, a cold season in a cold country, before even seeing in the New Year, our Son of the South Seas passed away at the age of twenty-one. Bearing in mind how many indigenes the world o'er were later to perish of this disease borne by men of civilised countries, it is most ironic that he should have been a pioneer in this regard as well.

“So what's it like to die?” Matías asks the big question.

“ 'Tis not half bad. You should feel no menace when your time comes, I assure you. As soon as I learnt that dying means merely moving across to this side, I realised that one's place and time of death are no reason to fret. Indeed, to take leave of the physical body is justly liberating. One can study things as one pleases. Back then I was so ignorant.”

“But at the time, you must have been one of the most knowledgeable Palauans around,” says Matías.

“To the Western view, perhaps. Though I do believe my father was better versed in the lore of the world than e'en Captain Wilson. Seven years on, when a young Captain McClure sailed his ship the
Panther
to Palau and told him of my death, my father did not even react. To us island folk, death is literally of no consequence—nothing follows.”

“So what you're saying is, I have nothing to fear from death?”

“Not in the slightest. That, I had to think, was the greatest diff'rence 'twixt Europeans and Pacific islanders. Thus, even the intelligence that I had perished in London was of little concern to them, whilst the English seem'd to fault themselves, however slightly. As my last request, in my stead, I had the
Panther
take four cows and two bulls, one Bengal ram and ewe, seven she-goats and four males, four breeding sows and one stud pig, a pair of geese, and two pairs of ducks. Not a bad trade—I daresay, it pleased my father.”

Early one morning, a bus on a rural route on Baltasár Island was slowing at a crossing when another bus zoomed in from the left. Both vehicles jammed on their brakes, just barely avoiding a collision. Luckily, the fringe of trees at the intersection was clear of undergrowth, so they could see each other coming for twenty meters. The driver of the first bus leaned out of his window (cars drive on the right in Navidad, drivers sit on the left) and yelled at the other unfamiliar bus, “Hey, watch where you're going!”

“
You
watch where
you're
going!” came a voice, but not from any driver he could see.

“You're on a side road, you're the one who's supposed to stop,” corrected the first driver.

“Didn't think anyone was coming,” said the voice.

The driver strained to make out the speaker, but the morning sun rising behind him reflected off the windows of the other bus, making it impossible for him to see inside.

“I drive this road every morning. This is my route.”

“But you ain't got no passengers, do you?” sniped the voice.

“Passengers or not, this bus runs on schedule,” said the driver.

“Pity for you.”

“And what about
you
?” the driver challenged.

“
I've
got forty-nine people riding,” boasted the voice.

“Forty-nine passengers!”

“Forty-eight, plus the driver.”

“But that's you, right?” the first man countered.

“Well, uh …” the voice hesitated.

Strange, thought the driver, taking another good look at the other bus, there didn't seem to be anyone in the driver's seat. “You mean there's no driver?” he surprised himself by asking.

“Why, of course there is. He's asleep in a back seat.”

“But then, how do you stay on the road?” he fired back sharply.

Silence.

“Okay, so who's doing the driving?”

Again, no reply. Then suddenly came a growl, “Outta my way!” and the phantom bus shot across the intersection.

“Hey, I got the right of way!” shouted the first driver, fighting an urge to ram the upstart off the road. But no, instead, he just waited for it to go by. He wished he could give chase, but that again was not the way of a scheduled route bus driver. Banishing such thoughts, he pulled out across the intersection and looked to the right, but the phantom bus had vanished in a cloud of dust. There was nothing but mangrove swamps to the right, so where—the driver wondered as he headed off—could it have been going in such a confounded hurry?

The next few days pass without incident. The mysterious handbills have leveled off, and there's no other torii gate left to topple. The bus and veterans group are still missing, but no bodies or debris have been found.
Not too bad
, Matías has to think,
for a state of emergency
. The capital, Baltasár, is calm. No scoundrels have come out of the woodwork with long-range laser beams to burn the Navidad flag in front of the Presidential Villa. Suzuki has returned to Japan with the go-ahead for the Brun Reef oil depot, while the legislators sans legislature remain nice and quiet. Bonhomme Tamang's grave is never without flowers, but then Cornelius's always has three times as many, long after his death.

Navidadians customarily show their reverence with flowers and think nothing of grabbing blossoms from their garden or hedge, woods or roadside to pay their respects (who would ever think of
buying
flowers?). Matías has Tamang's and Cornelius's graves kept under secret surveillance, and every other week Island Security delivers a list of flower-givers. Of course the “secret” part is just wishful thinking; the people all know they're being watched, and in fact there hasn't been a new name reported in three months. No, the Matías Guili regime is on track. All's right with the world.

The President's daily routine sees no real changes: pre-dawn meditation, tuna sashimi breakfast, morning paperwork, afternoon meetings and functions, evening parties and get-togethers, followed by intimate nightcaps at Angelina's. The only new variants are the young woman who sits in the corner unannounced whenever Matías meets with anyone and his distracted air on visits to Angelina, which have dropped off overall. Yet his nights away merely find him alone in his private quarters, writing copious notes in his ledger, or nursing a long drink and thinking of days gone by. He's not playing games, even Angelina has to admit that. Should she ask what's up, he'll offer some reasonable response; he avoids neither her eyes nor her hash-perfumed pleasures. And to be perfectly honest, there's no arguing about him “getting old” whenever things don't go quite right during these tête-à-têtes (until now Angelina had never realized how liberating the excuse of aging might be for a man). Still, something's not right. He might not even realize it himself, but he's not all here. So where
is
he then?

“How she doing?” Angelina asks him.

“Who?”

“María. The Melchor maid from here.”

“María … oh, you mean Améliana. She's proving useful.”

“Was
that
her name? News to me.”

“It's a better name, she says. Strange girl.”

“So what she doing, this strange girl?” asks Angelina, stroking his shriveled cock. Both a caress and a threat, it occurs to Matías.

“I have her look at people with those all-seeing eyes of hers. She's pretty much on the money,” he answers, again without dissimulating. His edginess prior to summoning the girl to the villa, hesitations about what it might mean to Angelina, fractious questions he deliberated to distraction and even referred to Lee Bo—all that is completely forgotten.

One morning, Matías is in his office plowing through a pile of pending decisions, when Améliana sidles into the room. Usually at this hour she would be helping Itsuko with the housework or out walking around town. Odd, thinks Matías, though of course she has his permission to come in whenever the “feeling” strikes.

“Am I interrupting?”

“Not at all,” says Matías, setting down his papers and reading glasses. “What's up?”

“I'd like some time off.”

He has to think. He summoned her here from Angelina's with no employment contract to speak of. How many days has it been? They never even discussed salary. Her position is nonexistent at the Presidential Villa, though presumably he can put in a word with the executive secretary to get her the going rate. She even seems to spend her Sundays here with no days off. All right, she's no ordinary employee, and he never really saw her as villa staff; he just wanted to have her on hand. Maybe he ought to pay her privately himself. But for now, time off seems to be the issue.

“How long?” he asks.

“Five days.”

Why not a week? He has no important visitors scheduled for the present. A calm and uneventful hiatus—dull even. Might as well not even be here himself this coming week.

“Okay,” he says, then pauses to think—
why these five days?
“Maybe it's none of my business, but what's the hurry?”

“On Melchor, it's
Yuuka Yuumai
time.”

That much he knows. It's printed on every calendar in the country. The festival, held once every eight years, is even on the presidential agenda. He's supposed to fly over to catch the final day. Symbolic participation as head of state in a popular traditional celebration. But what's that got to do with Améliana? Sure, she's from Melchor, but why go back for it?

“And you just want to visit?” he asks, assuming she merely fancies taking in the festivities. But wait, wasn't she driven out of her village because of her “disruptive” powers of prediction?

“I have to. I'm the seventh Yuuka.”

It takes a moment for what she's saying to sink in. The Yuuka Yuumai ceremonies are performed by eight high priestesses called
Yuuka
, who wield such absolute control over the spiritual life of Melchor that no secular power can override them. Their authority comes straight from beyond, and this young woman before him is seventh in line.

“Yes, you go, certainly, if that's what you've got to do,” he hears himself saying.

Melchor's spiritual dominion is a constant that holds Navidad society together, the exalted status of its Elders prevailing not on any formalized legal basis but simply as an article of faith. And yet, even higher in status are the eight Yuuka who meet only once every eight years to propitiate the spirits at eight sacred locations around the island.

“The boat is overnight. I get there and the ceremonies last for three days. Then another night on the return. So that gets me back here on the fifth day,” she sums up matter-of-factly, as if unaware of the weighty role that is hers to play.

“Are you really the seventh Yuuka?” he dares to ask.

“So I've been told. It's my first time. The last Yuuka Yuumai, I was still a virgin. The
Yoi'i Yuuka
decides everything.”

“So I've heard. Or no, the part about being a virgin eight years ago, I didn't know.” In his confusion, that's all he can say. Melchor society is essentially matrilineal, with the Great Mother
Yoi'i Yuuka
from the previous ceremonial cycle on top. For eight years, she searches all the households on the island for new links in the chain of honor. Long ago, Matías vaguely remembers when, as a problem child entrusted to relations, he saw an old woman once come to the door and everyone in the family fall to their knees, bowing and mumbling invocations before leading her to a back room where she was promptly seated on the only chair in the house and offered a cup of precious imported English tea heaped with spoonfuls of sugar. A startling display of piety, even if he hadn't a clue what it was all about. According to Melchor custom, girls who show spiritual powers while still virgins may be given a chance to help out at the ceremonies, but only when the Yoi'i Yuuka judges her worthy is one of them formally accepted as a Yuuka. Judging from Améliana's age, she must have proven herself in only one ceremonial cycle—wasn't that highly irregular?

“When are you going, then?”

“I catch the boat tomorrow. As soon as I arrive, there are purification rituals.”

“Okay, I can see it's very important you be there. Just promise me you'll come back here afterwards.”

“I promise.”

“And be sure to give my regards to the Yoi'i Yuuka.”

“I will.”

At that, Améliana leaves the President's office. Matías takes a long, deep breath. He tries to picture her in white ceremonial robes, then recalls the intensity of the festivities, the solemnity and frenzy. He's only really experienced a Yuuka Yuumai decades ago in childhood; never once during his years running the M. Guili Trading Co., and later only in an official capacity. It's the single most important event in Navidad cosmology, yet the President has no real role to play in it.
As if there were another separate system of rule here
, thinks Matías, before returning to his paperwork.

The following morning, Améliana stops in again at the President's office, this time wearing a white cotton dress with red buttons.

“My ship leaves at noon.”

“Will that put you there in time?”

“It gets into Melchor at five tomorrow morning. That's plenty of time.”

“And the ceremonies?”

“The
Udagan
purification is in the morning. The rites begin at two in the afternoon.”

“Well, have a safe trip.”

She acknowledges this with a slight bow of the head, then moves to leave.

“Shall I have Heinrich give you a ride to the port?” he asks.

“No, I'll walk.”

Améliana disappears, trailing a cloud of phantom butterflies, leaving him alone with his papers.

At noon, Matías lunches at the Navidad Teikoku Hotel with a visiting rep from a Japanese company hoping to set up a local franchise, but the whole time his mind is on the ship that's soon to sail. A scrap heap of a freighter, probably built in Sasebo or Nagasaki just after the war to run cargo between Kyushu and the northern Ryukyus for the next thirty years before being decommissioned and sold down to Navidad some fifteen years ago. No amount of touch-ups can stop thick scabs of rust from welling up through the white paint. A good, swift kick would put a hole in the hull—or so passengers joke. He can picture them boarding with armloads of belongings, spreading mats out on the deck, unpacking bags of home-cooked food. He knows they'll cast fishing lines off the stern, though for fifteen hours at twenty knots maximum the brightly colored lures will never catch anything. And now Améliana is walking up the gangplank. Today's weather is calm, so it won't be rocking much. He pretends to listen to the Japanese rep's business projections, but all he sees is the ship.

Visions of Melchor and the eighth-year festival haunt him for the rest of the day. The rituals at eight different holy sites, the presiding Yuuka and the attendant crowds, the unremitting recitations in the hot sun by day and the bonfires all through the night, the physical elation of the pilgrims who give themselves over for three days and two nights without sleep, the progress of the sacred barge from one site to the next by sea, followed overland by the priestesses and multitudes. Matías saw the Yuuka Yuumai as a child the year before the Japanese pulled out in defeat. Forty years later—during the previous cycle—he went as a functionary to observe the ecstatic peak of the celebrations for exactly thirty minutes. He offered formulaic respects from afar, then was whisked back to Baltasár City by plane.