Noa Noa Page 3

  He is one of my neighbors, a very simple and handsome young fellow.

  My colored pictures and carvings in wood aroused his curiosity; my replies to his questions have instructed him. Not a day passes that he does not come to watch me paint or carve . . . .

  Even after this long time I still take pleasure in remembering the true and real emotions in this true and real nature.

  In the evening when I rested from my day’s work, we talked. In his character of a wild young savage he asked many questions about European matters, particularly about the things of love, and more than once his questions embarrassed me.

  But his replies were even more naive than his questions.

  One day I put my tools in his hands and a piece of wood; I wanted him to try to carve. Nonplussed, he looked at me at first in silence, and then returned the wood and tools to me, saying with entire simplicity and sincerity that I was not like the others, that I could do things which other men were incapable of doing, and that I was useful to others.

  I indeed believe Totefa is the first human being in the world who used such words toward me. It was the language of a savage or of a child, for one must be either one of these—must one not?—to imagine that an artist might be a useful human being.

  It happened once that I had need of rosewood for my carving. I wanted a large strong trunk, and I consulted Totefa.

  “We have to go into the mountains,” he told me. “I know a certain spot where there are several beautiful trees. If you wish it I will lead you. We can then fell the tree which pleases you and together carry it here.”

  We set out early in the morning.

  The footpaths in Tahiti are rather difficult for a European, and “to go into the mountains” demands even of the natives a degree of effort which they do not care to undertake unnecessarily.

  Between two mountains, two high and steep walls of basalt, which it is impossible to ascend, there yawns a fissure in which the water winds among rocks. These blocks have been loosened from the flank of the mountain by infiltrations in order to form a passageway for a spring. The spring grew into a brook, which has thrust at them and jolted them, and then moved them a little further. Later the brook when it became a torrent took them up, rolled them over and over, and carried them even to the sea. On each side of this brook, frequently interrupted by cascades, there is a sort of path. It leads through a confusion of trees—breadfruit, ironwood, pandanus, bouraos, cocoanut, hibiscus, guava, giant-ferns. It is a mad vegetation, growing always wilder, more entangled, denser, until, as we ascend toward the center of the island, it has become an almost impenetrable thicket.

  Study.

  Both of us went naked, the white and blue paréo around the loins, hatchet in hand. Countless times we crossed the brook for the sake of a short-cut. My guide seemed to follow the trail by smell rather than by sight, for the ground was covered by a splendid confusion of plants, leaves, and flowers which wholly took possession of space.

  The silence was absolute but for the plaintive wailing of water among the rocks. It was a monotonous wail, a plaint so soft and low that it seemed an accompaniment of the silence.

  And in this forest, this solitude, this silence were we two—he, a very young man, and I, almost an old man from whose soul many illusions had fallen and whose body was tired from countless efforts, upon whom lay the long and fatal heritage of the vices of a morally and physically corrupt society.

  With the suppleness of an animal and the graceful litheness of an androgyne he walked a few paces in advance of me. And it seemed to me that I saw incarnated in him, palpitating and living, all the magnificent plant-life which surrounded us. From it in him, through him there became disengaged and emanated a powerful perfume of beauty.

  Was it really a human being walking there ahead of me? Was it the naive friend by whose combined simplicity and complexity I had been so attracted? Was it not rather the Forest itself, the living Forest, without sex—and yet alluring?

  Among peoples that go naked, as among animals, the difference between the sexes is less accentuated than in our climates. Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.

  On Tahiti the breezes from forest and sea strengthen the lungs, they broaden the shoulders and hips. Neither men nor women are sheltered from the rays of the sun nor the pebbles of the sea-shore. Together they engage in the same tasks with the same activity or the same indolence. There is something virile in the women and something feminine in the men.

  This similarity of the sexes make their relations the easier. Their continual state of nakedness has kept their minds free from the dangerous pre-occupation with the “mystery” and from the excessive stress which among civilized people is laid upon the “happy accident” and the clandestine and sadistic colors of love. It has given their manners a natural innocence, a perfect purity. Man and woman are comrades, friends rather than lovers, dwelling together almost without cease, in pain as in pleasure, and even the very idea of vice is unknown to them.

  In spite of all this lessening in sexual differences, why was it that there suddenly rose in the soul of a member of an old civilization a horrible thought? Why, in all this drunkenness of lights and perfumes with its enchantment of newness and unknown mystery?

  The fever throbbed in my temples and my knees shook. But we were at the end of the trail. In order to cross the brook my companion turned, and in this movement showed himself full-face. The androgyne had disappeared. It was an actual young man walking ahead of me. His calm eyes had the limpid clearness of waters.

  Peace forthwith fell upon me again.

  We made a moment’s halt. I felt an infinite joy, a joy of the spirit rather than of the senses, as I plunged into the fresh water of the brook.

  “Toë, toë (it is cold),” said Totefa.

  “Oh, no!” I replied.

  This exclamation seemed to me also a fitting conclusion to the struggle which I had just fought out within myself against the corruption of an entire civilization. It was the end in the battle of a soul that had chosen between truth and untruth. It awakened loud echoes in the forest. And I said to myself that Nature had seen me struggle, had heard me, and understood me, for now she replied with her clear voice to my cry of victory that she was willing after the ordeal to receive me as one of her children.

  We took up our way again. I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements.

  With tranquil eyes and ever uniform pace my companion went on. He was wholly without suspicion; I alone was bearing the burden of an evil conscience.

  We arrived at our destination.

  The steep sides of the mountain had by degrees spread out, and behind a dense curtain of trees, there extended a sort of plateau, well-concealed. Totefa, however, knew the place, and with astonishing sureness led me thither.

  A dozen rosewood trees extended their vast branches. We attacked the finest of these with the ax. We had to sacrifice the entire tree to obtain a branch suitable for my project.

  I struck out with joy. My hands became stained with blood in my wild rage, my intense joy of satiating within me I know not what divine brutality. It was not the tree I was striking, it was not it which I sought to overcome. And yet gladly would I have heard the sound of my ax against other trunks when this one was already lying on the ground.

  And here is what my ax seemed to say to me in the cadence of its sounding blows:


  Strike down to the root the forest entire!

  Destroy all the forest of evil,

  Whose seeds were once sowed within thee by the breathings of death!

  Destroy in thee all love of the self!

  Destroy and tear out all evil, as in the autumn we cut with the hand the flower of the lotus.

  Yes, wholly destroyed, finished, dead, is from now on the old civilization within me. I was reborn; or rather another man, purer and stronger, came to life within me.

  This cruel assault was the supreme farewell to civilization, to evil. This last evidence of the depraved instincts which sleep at the bottom of all decadent souls, by very contrast exalted the healthy simplicity of the life at which I had already made a beginning into a feeling of inexpressible happiness. By the trial within my soul mastery had been won. Avidly I inhaled the splendid purity of the light. I was, indeed, a new man; from now on I was a true savage, a real Maori.

  Totefa and I returned to Mateïea, carefully and peacefully bearing our heavy load of rosewood—noa, noa!

  The sun had not yet set when, very tired out, we arrived before my hut.

  Totefa said to me,

  “Païa?”

  “Yes!” I replied.

  And from the bottom of my heart I repeated this “yes” to myself.

  I have never made a single cut with the knife into this branch of rosewood that I did not each time more powerfully breathe in the perfume of victory and rejuvenation: noa, noa!

  Through the valley of Punaru, a huge fissure which divides Tahiti into two parts, one reaches the plateau of Tamanoü. From there one can see the diadem, Orofena and Aroraï, which forms the center of the island.

  They had often spoken to me of it as a place of miracles, and I had contrived the plan of going and spending several days there alone.

  “But what will you do during the night?”

  “You will be tormented by the Tupapaüs!”

  “It is not wise to disturb the spirits of the mountain. . . .”

  “You must be mad!”

  Probably I was, but as the result of this anxious solicitude of my Tahitian friends my curiosity was all the more aroused.

  Before dawn, one night, I set out for Aroraï.

  For almost two hours it was possible to follow a path on the edge of the Punaru river. But then I was repeatedly forced to cross the river. On both sides the walls of the mountain rose straight up. They jutted out even to the middle of the water, supported on huge cubes of stone as if on buttresses.

  Finally, I was compelled to continue my way in the middle of the river. The water went up to my knees, and sometimes even to the shoulders.

  The sun, even in broad daylight, scarcely pierced between the two walls which from below seemed to me of astonishing height and very close together at the top. At midday I distinguished the twinkling of stars in the brilliant blue of the sky.

  Toward five o’clock, as the day was declining, I began to wonder where I was to spend the night, when I noticed to the right an almost flat space of several acres. It was covered with a confusion of ferns, wild bananas, and bouraos. By good fortune I found several ripe bananas. Quickly I built a wood-fire to cook them. They constituted my dinner.

  Then I lay down to sleep as well as I might, at the foot of a tree on the low branches with which I had intertwined banana leaves to protect me in case of rain.

  It was cold, and the wading in the water left me chilled through and through.

  I did not sleep well.

  But I knew that dawn would not delay long and that I had nothing to fear from either man or beast. There are neither carnivores nor reptiles on Tahiti. The only “wild game” on the island are the pigs which have escaped into the forest, where they have multiplied and become entirely wild. The most I had to fear was that they might come, and rub off the skin of my legs. For that reason I kept the cord of my hatchet around my wrist.

  The night was profound. It was impossible to distinguish anything, save a powdery phosphorescence close to my head which strangely perplexed me. I smiled when I thought of the Maori stories about the Tupapaüs, the evil spirits which awaken with the darkness to trouble sleeping men. Their realm is in the heart of the mountain, which the forest surrounds with eternal shadows. There it swarms with them, and without cease their legions are increased by the spirits of those who have died.

  Woe to him who will hazard into a place inhabited by these demons! . . .

  And I had this audacity!

  My dreams too were troubling enough.

  Now, I know that the powdery luminosity emanated from a particular species of small fungus. They grew in most places on dead branches like those which I had used in building my fire.

  On the following day, very early, I took up my way again. The river became more and more irregular. It was now brook, now torrent, now waterfall. It wound about in a strangely capricious way, and sometimes seemed to flow back into itself. I was continually losing the path, and often had to advance swinging from branch to branch with the hands, scarcely touching the ground.

  From the bottom of the water crayfish of extraordinary shape looked at me as if to say, “What are you doing here?” And hundred-year-old eels fled at my approach.

  Suddenly, at an abrupt turn, I saw a naked young girl leaning against a projecting rock. She was caressing it with both hands, rather than using it as a support. She was drinking from a spring which in silence trickled from a great height among the rocks.

  After she had finished drinking, she let go of the rock, caught the water in both hands, and let it run down between her breasts. Then, though I had not made the slightest sound, she lowered her head like a timid antelope which instinctively scents danger and peered toward the thicket where I remained motionless. My look did not meet hers. Scarcely had she seen me, than she plunged below the surface, uttering the word,

  “Taëhaë (furious).”

  Quickly I looked into the river—no one, nothing—only an enormous eel which wound in and out among the small stones at the bottom.

  Not devoid of feeling.

  It was not without difficulty or fatigue that I finally approached Aroraï, the dreaded sacred mountain which formed the summit of the island.

  It was evening, the moon was rising, and as I watched its soft lights gently enveloping the rugged brow of the mountain, I recalled the famous legend: “Paraü Hina Tefatou (Hina said to Tefatou).”

  It was a very ancient legend which the young girls love to tell while sitting about in the evening, and according to them the event occurred on the very spot where I was.

  And truly it seemed to me that I saw the scene now.

  A powerful head of a god-man, the head of a hero upon whom Nature has conferred the proud consciousness of his strength, a magnificent face of a giant—at the ultimate lines of the horizon and as at the threshold of the world. A soft clinging woman gently touched the hair of the God and spoke to him:

  “Let man rise up again after he has died. . . .”

  And the angry but not cruel lips of the god opened to reply,

  “Man shall die.”

  For some time past I had been growing restless. My work suffered under it.

  It is true that I lacked many of the essential implements; it irritated me to be reduced to impotence in the face of artistic projects to which I had passionately given myself.

  But it was joy most of all which I lacked.

  It was several months since I had separated from Titi. For several months I had not heard the childish, melodious babble which flowed without cease from the vahina, always about the same things, always asking the same questions, and I always replying with the same stories.

  This silence was not good for me.

  I decided to leave, and undertake a voyage around the island. I had set no definite limits to it.

  While I was making my preparations—a few light packages that might be needed on the way—and putting my studies in order, my neighbor and landlord, my friend Anani,
watched me with unquiet eyes. After long hesitation, with gestures half-begun and left incomplete whose meaning was clear enough to me and at the same time amused and touched me, he finally decided to ask me whether I was intending to leave.

  “No,” I replied to him, “I am merely making a several days’ excursion. I shall return.”

  He did not believe me, and began to cry.

  His wife came and joined him and told me that she liked me, that money was not required in order to live among them, and that some day, if I so wished, I could rest for always—there. She pointed to a burial mound, ornamented with small trees, close to the hut.

  And suddenly a desire fell upon me to rest for always—there. At least for all eternity no one would ever disturb me there.

  “You people of Europe,” added the wife of Anani, “are strange. You come, you promise to remain, and when we have come to love you, you leave. To return, you say, but you never return.”

  “But I swear that it is my intention to return, this time. Later,” (I did not dare to lie), “later, I shall see.”

  Finally they let me go.

  I left the road which follows the edge of the sea, and took up a narrow path leading through a dense thicket. This path led so far into the mountains that at the end of several hours I reached a little valley where the inhabitants still lived in the ancient Maori manner.

  They are happy and undisturbed. They dream, they love, they sleep, they sing, they pray, and it seems that Christianity has not yet penetrated to this place. Before me I can clearly see the statues of their divinities, though actually they have long since disappeared; especially the statue of Hina, and the feasts in honor of the moon-goddess. The idol of a single block of stone measures ten feet from shoulder to shoulder and forty feet in height. On the head she wears in the manner of a hood a huge stone of reddish color. Around her they dance according to ancient rite, the matamua, and the vivo varies its note from lightness and gayety to somberness and melancholy according to the color of the hour . . . .