I was woken by the prime minister’s secretary. She led me into a gigantic office stuffed with toys. A large white-haired character wobbled like a jelly behind a desk. Some fat men defeat age and maintain the bright smooth faces of their childhood, but this character’s immense size created another illusion: he looked like a woman. I thought I might have been shown into the wrong office. Was this a set-up, an elaborate Samoan joke? Who was this overweight drag queen who signed papers and didn’t look up?
I stood in front of the desk in my jandals and togs.
‘Prime minister,’ I said, hoping it hadn’t sounded like a question.
‘Uh,’ he confirmed.
What happened is this: the quick brown dog went at the lazy palagi idling along a narrow street after dark and took a bite out of the back of my leg. It felt like an electric shock. I squealed like a girl, and ran away. I was staying at Eden’s Edge Hotel. ‘Help,’ I said to the receptionist. ‘Sit,’ he said, and then he ran away.
I heard him talking to Mepa Apelu, the lovely funny woman who managed the motel.
‘A palagi has been bitten by a wild dog!’
‘What palagi?’
‘A guest.’
‘Where?’
‘He’s over there.’
‘No, where was he bitten?’
‘Leg.’
‘How bad?’
I craned my head around the corner. Mepa, the receptionist and the cook were at the open-air bar. Smoke curled from Zap mosquito coils on the floor. Geckos fled along the ceiling.
‘Bathe his wound in water.’
‘Boil the water.’
‘No, from the tap.’
‘That’s too hot!’
‘Now it’s too cold.’
‘Salt! Add a pinch of salt.’
‘Here.’
‘That’s too much.’
‘What else?’
‘Vinegar.’
‘Really?’
A woman joined the conversation. I recognised her boozy voice; she was a guest, a Samoan woman staying with her eight-year-old son. They were expecting his father to arrive from Australia. While she waited she drank heavily, and screeched vile abuse at her son in the middle of the night. Another of the guests, a lesbian from Canada, gave the boy swimming lessons in the motel pool. She gave him a mask and snorkel, and he learned to dive. He was quiet, sensitive, anxious. He adored her. She was in Apia for a week. Everyone at the motel braced themselves for the boy crying his heart out when it came time for her to leave.
His horrible drunk mother said, ‘What’s happened?’
‘A palagi has been bitten by a wild dog.’
‘Where?’
‘Leg.’
‘No, where’d it happen?’
‘Why?’
‘Because you need to find the dog.’
‘What for?’
‘You’ve got to take out a hair of the dog and put it on the wound. Old Samoan remedy.’
‘Okay. Is this ready? Feel.’
‘No. The water’s too hot.’
‘Here.’
‘Now it’s too cold!’
‘More vinegar?’
Samoa was somewhere between First World and Third World, leaning to the latter. It was rows and rows of tins of Oxford corned beef, it was St Joan of Arc Primary School, and Robert Louis Stevenson Secondary School, where the initials RLS were spelled out on a lawn in bright flowers. It was shops selling enormous dolls with white skin, taxi drivers hissing in the shadows, ‘Want a girl?’ and a young guy with peroxided hair sweeping banyan leaves off the pavement next to a van marked WONDERFUL TAKEAWAYS. It was the glow of leaves burning in clumps on the side of the road at night-time, and signs at the airport and throughout the island that read NO TO RAPE AND INDECENT ACTS. It was eels, roosters, dogs.
It was the loneliness of Leota Laki Sio, manager of the grandly named Galusina Village Resort on the coastal road that circled the island. You couldn’t go anywhere near the water. Big waves exploded against rocks. The road was bombed with potholes. The resort had 22 rooms; when I called in it was entirely empty and Leota was sitting all alone in the restaurant. He opened the resort in May 2010. ‘We’re still growing. We’ve had our ups and downs, uh.’ I asked about the ups. He said 30 people making a New Zealand film stayed at the resort for ten weeks. He pointed to a table. ‘Nat Lees sat there, staring out to sea day after day.’ It’s possible the Auckland actor was blissed out, but it sounded more like a case of clinical depression.
There were a lot of wonderful places to stay on the beach all through Samoa. Galusina Village Resort wasn’t one of them. Sio said, ‘It’s a different experience from the normal sand and sea resort.’
He kissed his small son good night. The boy trotted back into his house, past the resort’s swimming pool, which was the size of a home pool. It was a home pool. Leota had built the resort on his own property. He said, ‘There’s room for improvement.’ He needed an occupancy rate of 40 percent to begin to make a profit, but the rate was about 30 percent. The rooms were basic, there was a boring playground, and the sea smashed angrily at rocks. He said, ‘It’s a very nice view, peace and quiet.’ He was right about it being quiet. A sign on the road advised happy hour at the resort bar between seven and nine. It wasn’t happy. I left Leota sitting alone as dusk gathered around his sea-sprayed folly.
At the nearby village of Fagali’i I heard claims that Leota had built the resort with money – as much as 28 million tālā – he had won in a lottery in Australia. What did they make of the resort? ‘Crazy!’ Tanielu Pololua, 39, joined in the laughter. It was the sight of Pololua that had drawn me to the village. He sat in his open-air fale and washed blood off his sapelu. It was a poor village and the knife seemed to be more or less his only possession. He spoke about it with something close to reverence.
‘When you got a sapelu, oh man, you can cut grass. It’s a bread knife – it does all those things!’
Bits
