The Navidad Incident (28 page)

“My other clothes are in the bag in back. Make sure you bring them when you come to pick me up,” says the old beachcomber.

“Sure thi—” The pilot doesn't even have time to finish two words before the squat figure shuffles off behind the hangar. Is no one meeting him? The pilot rubs his eyes in disbelief.

Rounding the corner of the hangar, Matías walks across the unfenced airfield and straight out onto the road. No one sees him; the dusty streets are deserted. No local officials have been alerted about his visit, nor has any car been sent. He sets off on foot in the direction of the first ceremonial site at Giba, a few hours away, though not ten minutes later a pickup truck pulls up and a stocky-armed matron leans out the window.

“Goin' to Giba?” asks the woman in that old familiar Melchor accent.

“The festival, you betcha,” answers Matías, reviving his childhood drawl.

“Get on in,” says someone else.

There are already half a dozen people or more riding in back. Matías thrusts one rubber-sandaled foot onto a tire, and a strong hand reaches out to help pull him up. It's been ages since he's hitched a ride in the back of a truck like this and even longer since he's known the goodwill of strangers. To his surprise, he feels elated to be returning to his anonymous roots. Men and women of various ages all nod greetings and the truck lurches into motion. In one corner, a boy of maybe seven is dozing on a mat, his head pillowed on a bright orange lifesaver. It's a wonder anyone can sleep on the iron bed of a truck chugging along an unpaved road, thinks Matías, grabbing the side panel to secure a hold. The boy bounces wildly each time they hit a pothole, but keeps sleeping through it all. Matías watches enviously out of the corner of his eye, wishing he had the knack for such oblivious rough-and-ready rest himself.

Cultural anthropologists have offered various interpretations of the Yuuka Yuumai celebrations. As early as the 1920s, when the eight-year events first came to the attention of the outside world, scholars arrived with their notebooks and pet theories. Here was a cargo cult in somewhat altered form, ran the principal explanation at the time, as the rites centered on a single ceremonial canoe that traveled around to multiple ceremonial sites carrying a hallowed messenger and a sacred object. As soon as the rites finished at one location, the presiding shaman-priestesses headed by land to meet the canoe “delivered” by a team of youthful rowers to the next site, where the ceremony started anew with a ritual greeting on its arrival.

The cargo cult proper was a messianic faith found exclusively in New Guinea from the mid-nineteenth century on, when natives saw white men receiving crates of strange industrial products that could not have been made by human hands and prayed for such heavenly bounty to find the tribe instead. Whereas in times past the gods would have delivered the goods directly, the Europeans were seen as somehow intervening with the gods to make off with items rightfully destined for themselves. So now the tribe entreated the gods to please send things to the correct recipients, typically by prostrating themselves before boat- or later airplane-shaped ritual objects made of wood and vines.

This line of explanation, however, went only so far when applied to what was actually observed on Melchor. The next wave of scholars on the scene saw the Yuuka Yuumai as a ritual recreation of the ancestors' first canoe voyage to the islands, intended to give thanks to past generations for this hard-won birthright and to beseech the spirits for their continued blessings. This theory made more sense, for indeed the verses sung at the ceremonies, however difficult to parse the ancient Melchorian, do seem to tell of the joy of reaching verdant shores and thus, by analogy, of inheriting an earthly paradise. Even so, exactly when people first came to inhabit the island is subject to debate. The local mythology has little to say about any such arrival, suggesting either all recall was lost long ago or some traumatic episode caused them to suppress it. But then, such rites surely bypass verbal transmission of racial memories anyway.

Yet another strong candidate for comparative anthropological relevance is found in the religious practices encountered in the southern Ryukyus and various parts of Polynesia that mime “rare visitant” ancestors and divinities. Once a year, or occasionally at greater intervals, spirits are thought to appear bearing good fortune from afar, whereupon people greet them with rituals and festive performances, before sending them back in due course across the seas. The joyous arrival theme heard in the sacred verses of Melchor thus probably better accords with a repeated visitation than the reenactment of a one-time protohistoric landing. Once every eight years, the islanders rejoice in welcoming “rare visitants” to their rich green homeland, in return for which those spirits—gods or ancestors, it remains unclear—bless the islands with continued abundance. The actual festivities affirm this two-fold character: the symbolic receiving of spiritual gifts is answered by giving offerings in thanks. Hence many scholars today subscribe to this “value exchange” scheme as the most viable interpretation.

The festival runs for two days and nights nonstop. Starting from Giba, the celebrants move seven times to other locations where similar acts of ritual dancing and singing are performed, culminating in the largest ceremony at Sarisaran. All proceedings are directed by the chief priestess or Yoi'i Yuuka, followed by seven lesser Yuuka and their virgin attendants. Laypersons gather around—solemn and boisterous by turns—chanting in chorus and generally making merry for forty straight hours until sheer exhaustion induces a trancelike state; they go “out of their minds,” losing all sense of self and even gender before the otherworldly presences they claim to see with their own eyes. This is how Melchor Island gives itself to the spirits once every eight years.

After driving for fifteen minutes, the pickup nudges its way through a scattered flank of people advancing at a brisk pace, until ten minutes later the numbers have packed in so thick around them that wheels are of no use. They abandon the truck in the middle of the road, and everyone climbs down to join the pilgrims all pressing ahead in the same direction. Even the driver gets out and starts walking. Other cars dot the area, but the people just flow around them as if they were rocks in a stream. Matías is walking as quickly as his short legs will carry him, when he remembers the sleeping boy. He turns around to look but sees no sign of the truck, let alone any of the others who were riding with him. Did someone wake the boy? Is he riding on his father's shoulders? He tries to recall his own boyhood Yuuka Yuumai experience. All he can remember from that time is the crush of people and how dark and scary it was at night.

Yes, but night is a long way off. It's barely past noon now, and the sun beats down mercilessly from high overhead. The ground is burning hot. He's sweating. No Nissan to chauffeur him about here; he's walking on his own two legs. Not a soul here knows he's the President, no one even cares that this country
has
a president. It feels wonderful to lose himself in their midst wearing only an aloha shirt, shorts, and baseball cap. But he's no youngster anymore, so how long can he hold out? If his physical strength fails, well, then let it. When the time comes, let him collapse by the roadside and sleep.

That's how the forty-hour festival goes. Whoever gets tired whenever sleeps wherever—and that sleep becomes part of the celebrations, no different than for those who stay awake to sing and dance. Hungry or fed, old or young, man or woman, rich or poor, it makes no difference. You're always free to sleep, if you're a lay pilgrim, that is. The Yuuka, the virgins, and the twenty-odd musicians have no such liberty. All of them must marshal their strength until the very end. The thought gives the anonymous Matías some measure of comfort. Yes, it's hard to be up on high, the focus of attention from below, and such a relief to cast it all aside.

Presently the crowd slows, foot traffic jams back to back. The people in front are now close enough for him to smell their excitement. Short-legged Matías can't see over the heads, not that anyone can see very far; all he can do is absorb the carnival atmosphere passed along the jostling bodies. Pilgrims have come to this island of a mere ten thousand all the way from Baltasár and Gaspar, and from even more distant outer islands. Foreign scholars, travel writers, and tourists push into the fray, all trying to get closer to the Yuuka and the sacred barge, to follow them around the island to the different sacred precincts. Very few will actually see the rituals with their own eyes; their limbs must become feelers to sense the shifting edges of the melee that moves them along like particles in a wave.

Matías tries to creep forward, but the crowd is at a standstill. All forward passage is blocked, so he leans to one side, finds an opening between two stout islanders, and with a decisive grunt, wedges himself under them toward the sound of flutes and drums. For the next hour, he crawls his way through the masses. Most festival-goers are resigned to staying put and react vehemently against the burrowing mole, elbowing him as hard they can. Still, little by little, he works his bulk forward each time anyone budges, until finally he finds himself almost at the outer perimeter of the sanctum. With eight pilgrimage sites, everyone stands a good chance of coming within viewing distance at least once. Experienced pilgrims have their own favorite vantage points, though few would try to take in all eight locations. Crowded though it is here, Giba is apparently a less popular site.

People are swaying to the rhythm of the drums up ahead, stepping back and forth as far as the next person will allow. Some, if they can raise their hands without striking their neighbors, mimic the motions of the oarsmen or the Yuuka who surround the sacred barge, blessing and being blessed. None are yet in a trance, but currents of nervous anticipation spread through the crowd. There is still much, much further to go.

Matías has threaded in as far as he is likely to here at Giba. He can only listen to the music and sense the ritual proceedings, storing up the prevading aura. Buoyed on the energy here among countless strangers, that distant, familiar, gently rippling music transports him—one phrase, then another alternating between breezes—into a state of harmony with the spirit of the occasion. No longer the President of the Republic nor Angelina's lover nor proprietor of the M. Guili Trading Company, he is simply one more Melchor islander again. He has been on his feet for hours, with nothing to eat or drink since breakfast, yet mysteriously his body does not protest; he doesn't even feel tired.

Then, long before the Giba ceremony is over, he decides to stake out somewhere closer at the next site in Zaran. Like a nail drawn to a powerful magnet, he extracts himself from the captivated crowds and, stopping only to drink from a spring, takes a path through a deserted settlement to walk the three kilometers to Zaran. There he finds several hundred people already milling about the village square. Poised in expectation, their faces are expressionless, purged of personality—conversely, a mark of faith.