This fly pimp is known as Kivi the Kava Drinker...
"The orchestra of nature began a symphony of celestial sounds. The rustling of the palm-leaves, the purling of the brook, and the song of the komoko, nightingale of the Marquesas, mingled in music sweeter to my kava-ravished ears than ever the harp of Apollo upon Mount Olympus. The chants of the natives were a choir of voices melodious beyond human imaginings. Life was good to its innermost core; there was no struggle, no pain, only an eternal harmony of joy."
"The orchestra of nature began a symphony of celestial sounds. The rustling of the palm-leaves, the purling of the brook, and the song of the komoko, nightingale of the Marquesas, mingled in music sweeter to my kava-ravished ears than ever the harp of Apollo upon Mount Olympus. The chants of the natives were a choir of voices melodious beyond human imaginings. Life was good to its innermost core; there was no struggle, no pain, only an eternal harmony of joy."
If you'd like to read a chapter about this day in 1919, including a subsequent feast and kava session, here it is:
The Vagabond, Kivi, who lived near the High Place, came down to my paepae one evening to bid me come to a feast given in Atuona Valley to the men of Motopu, who had been marvelously favored by the god of the sea.
Months of storms, said Kivi, had felled many a stately palm of Taka-Uka and washed thousands of ripe coconuts into the bay, whence the current that runs swift across the channel had swept the fruitage of the winds straight to the inlet of Motopu, on the island of Tahuata. The men of that village, with little effort to themselves, had reaped richly.
Now they were come, bringing back the copra dried and sacked. Seven hundred francs they had received for a ton of it from Kriech, the German merchant of Taka-Uka, from whose own groves it had been stolen by the storms.
On the morrow, their canoes laden with his goods, they would sail homeward. One day they had tarried to raft redwood planks of California from the schooner in the bay to the site of Kivi's new house. So that night in gratitude he would make merry for them. There would be much to eat, and there would be kava in plenty. He prayed that I would join them in this feast, which would bring back the good days of the kava-drinking, which were now almost forgotten.
I rose gladly from the palm-shaded mat on which I had lain vainly hoping for a breath of coolness in the close heat of the day, and girded the red pareu more neatly about my loins. Often I had heard of the kava-drinking days before the missionaries had insisted on outlawing that drink beloved of the natives. The traders had added their power to the virtuous protests of the priests, for kava cost the islanders nothing, while rum, absinthe, and opium could be sold them for profit. So kava-drinking had been suppressed, and after decades of knowing more powerful stimulants and narcotics, the natives had lost their taste for the gentler beverage of their forefathers.
The French law prohibited selling, exchanging, or giving to any Marquesan any alcoholic beverage. But the law was a dead letter, for only with rum and wine could work be urged upon the Marquesans, and I failed to reprove them even in my mind for their love of drink. One who has not seen a dying race cannot conceive of the prostration of spirit in which these people are perishing. That they are courteous and hospitable—and that to the white who has ruined them—shows faintly their former joy in life and their abounding generosity. Now that no hope is left them and their only future is death, one cannot blame them for seizing a few moment's forgetfulness.
Some years earlier, in the first bitterness of hopeless subjugation, whole populations were given over to drunkenness. In many valleys the chiefs lead in the making of the illicit namu enata, or coconut-brandy. In the Philippines, where millions of gallons of coconut-brandy are made, it is called tuba, but usually its name is arrack throughout tropical Asia. Fresh from the flower spathes of the cocoanut-tree,namu tastes like a very light, creamy beer or mead. It is delicious and refreshing, and only slightly intoxicating. Allowed to ferment and become sour, it is all gall. Its drinking then is divided into two episodes—swallowing and intoxication. There is no interval. “Forty-rod” whiskey is mild compared to it.
I had seen the preparation of namu, which is very simple. The native mounts the tree and makes incisions in the flowers, of which each palm bears from three to six. He attaches a calabash under them and lets the juice drip all day and night. The process is slow, as the juice falls drop by drop. This operation may be repeated indefinitely with no injury to the tree. In countries where the liquor is gathered to sell in large quantities, the natives tie bamboo poles from tree to tree, so that an agile man will run through the forest tending the calabashes, emptying them into larger receptacles, and lowering these to the ground, all without descending from his lofty height.
The namu when stale causes the Marquesans to revert to wickedest savagery, and has incited many murders. Under the eye of the gendarme its making ceases, but a hundred valleys have no white policemen, and the half score of people remaining amid their hundreds of ruined paepaes give themselves over to intoxication. I have seen a valley immersed in it, men and women madly dancing the ancient nude dances in indescribable orgies of abandonment and bestiality.
Namu enata means literally “man booze.” The Persian-Arabic word, nam, or narm-keffi, means “the liquid from the palm flower.” From this one might think that Asia had taught the Marquesans the art of making namu during their prehistoric pilgrimage to the islands, but the discoverers and early white residents in Polynesia saw no drunkenness save that of the kava-drinking. It was the European, or the Asiatic brought by the white, who introduced comparatively recently the more vicious cocoanut-brandy, as well as rum and opium, and it is these drinks that have been a potent factor in killing the natives.
It has ever been thus with men of other races subjugated by the whites. Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography tells that when he was a commissioner to the Indians at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he and his fellow-commissioners agreed that they would allow the Indians no rum until the treaty they earnestly sought was concluded, and that then they should have plenty.
He pictures an all-night debauch of the red men after they had signed the treaty, and concludes: “And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast.”
It was not for me to speculate upon the designs of Providence with respect to the Marquesans. Kava had been the drink ordained by the old gods before the white men came. Its making was now almost a lost art; I knew no white man who had ever drunk from the kava-bowl. So it was with some eagerness that I followed Kivi down the trail.
Broken Plate, a sturdy savage in English cloth cap and whale's-teeth earrings, stood waiting for us in the road below the House of the Golden Bed, and together the three of us went in search of the kava bush. While we followed the narrow trail up the mountain-side, peering through masses of tangled vines and shrubs for the large, heart-shaped leaves and jointed stalks we sought, Kivi spoke with passion of the degenerate days in which he lived.
Let others secretly make incisions in the flower of the cocoanut and hang calabashes to catch the juice, said he. Or let them crook the hinges of the knee that rum might follow fawning on the whites. Not he! The drink of his fathers, the drink of his youth, was good enough for him! Agilely he caught aside a leafy branch overhanging the trail, and in the flecks of sunshine and shade his naked, strong brown limbs were like the smooth stems of an aged manzanita tree.
He had not the scaly skin or the bloodshot eyes of the kava debauchee, whose excesses paint upon their victim their own vivid signs. I remembered a figure caught by the rays of my flashlight one might on a dark trail—a withered creature whose whole face and body had turned a dull green, and at the memory of that grisly phantom I shuddered. But Broken Plate, on the trail ahead, called back to us that he had found a goodly bush, and without more words we clambered to it.
The kava, a variety of the pepper-plant, grows to more than six feet in height, and the specimen we had found thrust above our heads its many jointed branches rustling with large, flat leaves. The decoction, Kivi explained, comes from the root, and we set to work to dig it.
It was huge, like a gigantic yam, and after we had torn it from the stubborn soil it taxed the strength and agility of two of us to carry it to the paepae of Broken Plate, where the feast was to be. A dozen older women, skilled in grating the breadfruit for popoi making, awaited us there, squatting in a ring on the low platform. The root, well washed in the river, was laid on the stones, and the women attacked it with cowry-shells, scraping it into particles like slaw. It was of the hardness of ginger, and filled a large tanoa, or wooden trough of ironwood.
The scraping had hardly well begun, while Broken Plate and I rested from our labors, smoking pandanus-leaf cigarettes in the shade, when up the road came half a dozen of the most beautiful young girls of the village, clothed in all their finery.
Teata, with all the arrogance of the acclaimed beauty, walked first, wearing a tight-fitting gown with insertions of fishnet, evidently copied from some stray fashion-book. She wore it as her only garment, and through the wide meshes of the novel lace appeared her skin, of the tint of the fresh-cooked breadfruit. She passed us with a coquettish toss of her shapely head and took her place among her envious companions.
They sat on mats around the iron-wood trough and chewed the grated root, which, after thorough mastication, they spat out into banana-leaf cups. This chewing of the Aram-root is the very being of kava as a beverage, for it is a ferment in the saliva that separates alkaloid and sugar and liberates the narcotic principle. Only the healthiest and loveliest of the girls are chosen to munch the root, that delectable and honored privilege being refused to those whose teeth are not perfect and upon whose cheeks the roses do not bloom.
Nevertheless, as I smoked at ease in my pareu upon the paepae of my simple hosts I felt some misgivings rise in me. Yet why cavil at the vehicle by which one arrives at Nirvana? Had I not tasted the chichabeer of the Andes, and found it good? And vague analogies and surmises floated before me in the curls of smoke that rose in the clear evening light.
What hidden clue to the remotest beginnings of the human race lies in the fact that two peoples, so far apart as the Marquesans and the South American Indians, use the same method of making their native beverage? In the Andes corn takes the place of the kava root, and young girls, descendants of the ancient Incas, chew the grains, sitting in a circle and with a certain ceremoniousness, as among these Marquesans. The Marquesas Islands are on the same parallel of latitude as Peru. Were these two peoples once one race, living on that long-sunken continent in which Darwin believed?
Dusk fell slowly while I pondered on the mysteries in which our life is rooted, and on the unknown beginnings and forgotten significances of all human customs. The iron-wood trough was filled with the masticated root, and in groups and in couples the girls slipped away to bathe in the river. There they were met by arriving guests, and the sound of laughter and splashing came up to us as darkness closed upon the paepae and the torches were lit.
Lights were coming out like stars up the dark valley as each household made its vesper fire to roast breadfruit or broil fish, and lanterns were hung upon the bamboo palisades that marked the limits of property or confined favorite pigs. A cool breeze rose and rustled the fronds of cocoanut and bamboo, bringing from forest depths a clean, earthy odor.
The last bather came from the brook, refreshed by the cooling waters and adorned with flowers. All were in a merry mood for food and fun. Half a dozen flaring torches illuminated their happy, tattooed faces and dusky bodies, and caught color from the vivid blossoms in their hair. The ring of light made blacker the rustling cocoanut grove, the lofty trees of which closed in upon us on every side.
Under the gaze of many sparkling eyes Kivi pierced green cocoanuts brought him fresh from the climbing, and poured the cool wine of them over the masticated kava. He mixed it thoroughly and then with his hands formed balls of the oozy mass, from which he squeezed the juice into another tanoa glazed a deep, rich blue by its frequent saturation in kava. When this trough was quite full of a muddy liquid, he deftly clarified it by sweeping through it a net of cocoanut fiber. All the while he chanted in a deep resonant voice the ancient song of the ceremony.
“U haanoho ia te kai, a tapapa ia te kai!” he called with solemnity when the last rite was performed. “Come to supper; all is ready.”
“Menike,” he said to me, “You know that to drink kava you must be of empty stomach. After eating, kava will make you sick. If you do not eat as soon as you have drunk it, you will not enjoy it. Take it now, and then eat, quickly.”
He dipped a shell in the trough, tossed a few drops over his shoulder to propitiate the god of the kava-drinking, and placed the shell in my hands.
Ugh! The liquor tasted like earth and water, sweetish for a moment and then acrid and pungent. It was hard to get down, but all the men took theirs at a gulp, and when Kivi gave me another shellful, I followed their pattern.
“Kai! Kai. Eat! Eat!” Kivi shouted then. The women hurried forward with the food, and we fell to with a will. Pig and popoi, shark sweetbreads, roasted breadfruit and sweet potatoes, fruits and cocoanut-milk leaped from the broad leaf platters to wide-open mouths. Hardly a word was spoken. The business of eating proceeded rapidly, in silence, save for the night-rustling of the palms and the soft sound of the women's hastening bare feet.
Only, as he saw any slackening, Kivi repeated vigorously, “Kai! Kai!”
I sat with my back against the wall of the house of Broken Plate, as I ate quickly at the mandate of my host, and soon I felt the need of this support. The feast finished, the guests reclined upon the mats. Women and children were devouring the remnants left upon the leaf platters. The torches had been extinguished, all but one. Its flickering gleam fell upon the aged face of Kivi, and the whites of his eyes caught and reflected the light. The tattooing that framed them appeared like black holes from which the sparks glinted uncannily, and the kava mounting to his brain or to mine gave those sparks a ghastliness that fascinated me in my keen, somnolent state.
From the shadows where the women crouched the face of Teata rose like an eerie flower. She had adorned the two long black plaits of her hair with the brilliant phosphorescence of Ear of the Ghost Woman, the strange fungus found on old trees, a favored evening adornment of the island belles. The handsome flowers glowed about her bodiless head like giant butterflies, congruous jewels for such a temptress of such a frolic. The mysterious light added a gleam to her velvet cheek and neck that made her seem like the ghost-woman of old legend, created to lead the unwary to intoxicated death.
The palaver came to me out of the darkness, like voices from a phonograph-horn, thin and far away. One told the tale of Tahiapepae, the Girl Who Lost Her Strength.
Famine had come upon Atuona Valley. Children died of hunger on the paepaes, and the breasts of mothers shrunk so that they gave forth no milk. Therefore the warriors set forth in the great canoes for Motopu. Meat was the cry, and there was no other meat than puaa oa, the “long pig.”
Then in the darkness the hungry fighting men of Atuona silently beached their canoes and crept upon the sleeping village of Motopu. Seven were killed before they could fly to the hills, and one was captured alive, a slender, beautiful girl of ten years, whom they tied hands and feet and threw into the canoe with the slain ones.
Back they came from their triumph, and landed on the shore here, within spear's-throw from the paepae of Broken Plate. Their people met them with drum-beating and with chanting, bringing rose-wood poles for carrying the meat. The living girl was slung over the shoulder of the leader, still bound and weeping, and in single file heroes and their people marched up the trail past the Catholic mission. Tohoaa, Great Sea Slug, chief of Atuona and grandfather of Flag, the gendarme, was foremost, and over his massive shoulder hung the Girl Who Had Lost Her Strength.
Then from the mission came Père Orens, crucifix in hand. Tall he stood in his garment of black, facing the Great Sea Slug, and lifting on high his hand with the crucifix in it. Père Orens had been made tapuby Great Sea Slug, to whom he had explained the wonders of the world, and given many presents. To touch him was death, for Great Sea Slug had given him a feast and put upon him the white tapa, emblem of sacredness.
Powerful was the god of Père Orens, and could work magic. In his pocket he carried always a small god, that day and night said “Mika! Mika!” and moved tiny arms around and around a plate of white metal. This man stood now before the Great Sea Slug, and the chief paused, while his hungry people came closer that they might hear what befell.
“Where are you going?” said Père Orens.
“To Pekia, the High Place, to cook and eat,” said Great Sea Slug. Then for a space Père Orens remained silent, holding high the crucifix, and the chief heard from his pocket the voice of the small god speaking.
“Give to me that small piece of living meat,” said Père Orens then.
“Me mamai oe. If it is your pleasure, take it,” said Great Sea Slug. “It is a trifle. We have enough, and there is more in Motopu.”
With these words he placed his burden upon the shoulder of the priest, and heading his band again led them past the mission, over the river and to the High Place, where all night long the drums beat at the feasting.
But The Girl Who Lost Her Strength remained in the house of Père Orens, who cut her bonds, fed her, and nursed her to strength again. Baptized and instructed in the religion of her savior, she was secretly returned to her surviving relatives. There she lived to a good age, and died four years ago, grateful always to the God that had preserved her from the oven.
He who spoke was her son, and here at the kava bowl together were the men of Motopu and the men of Atuona, enemies no longer.
The voice of the Motopu man died away. A ringing came in my ears as when one puts a seashell to them and hears the drowsy murmur of the tides. My cigarette fell from my fingers. A sirocco blew upon me, hot, stifling. Kivi laughed, and dimly I heard his inquiry:
“Veavea? Is it hot?”
“E, mahanahana. I am very warm,” I struggled to reply.
My voice sounded as that of another. I leaned harder against the wall and closed my eyes.
“He goes fast,” said Broken Plate, gladly.
A peace passing the understanding of the kava-ignorant was upon me. Life was a slumbrous calm; not dull inertia, but a separated activity, as if the spirit roamed in a garden of beauty, and the body, all suffering, all feeling past, resigned itself to quietude.
I heard faintly the chants of the men as they began improvising the after-feasting entertainment. I was perfectly aware of being lifted by several women to within the house, and of being laid upon mats that were as soft to my body as the waters of a quiet sea. It was as if angels bore me on a cloud. All toil, all effort was over; I should never return to care and duty. Dimly I saw a peri waving a fan, making a breeze scented with ineffable fragrance.
I was then a giant, prone in an endless ease, who stretched from the waterfall at the topmost point of the valley to the shore of the sea, and about me ran in many futile excitements the natives of Atuona, small creatures whose concerns were naught to me.
That vision melted after eons, and I was in the Oti dance in the Paumotas, where those old women who pose and move by the music of the drums, in the light of the burning cocoanut husks, leap into the air and remain so long that the white man thinks he sees the law of gravitation overcome, remaining fixed in space three or four feet from the ground while one's heart beats madly and one's brain throbs in bewilderment. I was among these aged women; I surpassed them all, and floated at will upon the ether in an eternal witches' dance of more than human delight.
The orchestra of nature began a symphony of celestial sounds. The rustling of the palm-leaves, the purling of the brook, and the song of the komoko, nightingale of the Marquesas, mingled in music sweeter to my kava-ravished ears than ever the harp of Apollo upon Mount Olympus. The chants of the natives were a choir of voices melodious beyond human imaginings. Life was good to its innermost core; there was no struggle, no pain, only an eternal harmony of joy.
I slept eight hours, and when I awoke I saw, in the bright oblong of sunlight outside the open door, Kivi squeezing some of the root of evil for a hair of the hound that had bitten him.
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