Lonely Island -- Chapter One

Lonely Island

A True and Fictional

Tragical Historical yet Comical Account

Of the Myriad Mysteries and Enigmas

Of Easter Island

Clayton Bess

Chapter One only

boblocke@csus.edu

http://webpages.csus.edu/~boblocke/index.htm

Lonely Island

Chapter One

The Mysteries

They say we ate people. I think probably we did.

But that was a long time ago. I was not even alive. I myself did not eat the people, not myself. Our people did. If they did. And although I think they did, what does that have to do with me? What does that have to do with today? Perhaps we will need to eat people again. Things happen that way sometimes when you live on an island.

They say we are a friendly people. I do not think I am friendly, so much. I do not think I am unfriendly, either, so much. I am who I want to be: Toromiru.

From the way I am writing this, you are going to think I am mad. And perhaps I am mad. Perhaps that is the reason I am writing this, because I am mad. I am mad because people from so many different places around the planet keep coming here to look at us. They want to take our photos. My brother is very handsome and my sister is very beautiful; so these many people from their many places want photos of my brother and sister especially. My brother says, “Why? Where will I see that photo?”

The reason my brother says that? Perhaps my brother is mad, too. He knows that when the people go back to their homes around the planet, then perhaps they will use that photo in a story that perhaps they will write about us. So many different people are always writing about us in so many different languages. They all descend upon us wanting to know about our island because our island is “mysterious” and our island is an “enigma” and so what? And we are the people who live on this “mysterious and enigmatic island” and so what? And so they put our photos in their stories. And sometimes what they write is not true or even close to true, but they have our photos anyway. But when my brother asks them why they want his photo, he says it with a grin, and they go ahead and take his photo anyway. But I think inside, perhaps, my brother is not grinning.

My brother is the one who takes the different peoples who speak English. I call them the Englishers: the Americans and English and Australians, of course, but also usually the Germans and the Japanese, and all of those who understand the language of English better than they understand the language of Spanish. My sister is the one who takes the Spanishers. Those are the different peoples from South America and Central America and Spain, and often the Italians and the French, too, or wherever they perhaps understand the language of Spanish better than the language of English. Those are the only two choices. Nobody who comes here knows our own language—Rapanui, as it is now called by our people and by some of the other peoples—and so it is no use to speak our own language to them. Nobody speaks it but us.

I usually follow my brother so that I can learn the English better. I am not allowed to lead the tours yet—if ever?—because I am too young. Or that is what they say. But that is not true either. I am certainly old enough, but perhaps no one trusts me enough, which is why I ask—"if ever?"—in the way that I do. There is always the matter of the lying and the doubting vis a vis the telling of the truth, that which is prickly.

I can take the Spanishers better than my sister because I have read many more books than she. And because I have followed my brother so many times I can do the Englishers equally good as to him. Perhaps better because I am always listening to the Englishers talking to each other at the same time my brother is talking to them. So I know the questions they have but do not have the opportunity to ask him. Or perhaps they do not want to ask him for fear of offense, and often these questions are indeed offensive, but then, what is to be done about that?

My brother sometimes reads some books, but so do I. And I listen. And I always tell the truth, except out of playfulness. My brother sometimes makes up the truth. If he does not know an answer to one of their questions, he might open his eyes wide and lower his voice to a whisper and say, “It is a mystery.” He knows this always works because everyone who comes here knows already that our island is full of mysteries and enigmas; in fact, as I have indeed explained already, that is exactly why they do come here. And what they do then, when my brother tells them it is a mystery, and opens his eyes wide? Then will they nod their heads very slowly and open their eyes wide also, like my brother, and raise their eyebrows. It is very comical. You would laugh to see it.

My sister makes up her own truth all the time because she does not really know anything, and that is the easiest. The other day at Rano Raraku a man from Paris, France asked her in Spanish, “How old are these statues?” When my sister did not answer right up right off, the man provided, “Two thousand years? Three thousand?”

My sister then replied, “Yes, between two and three thousand years! No one knows! It is a mystery!” My sister learned that trick from my brother, you see. Only since she was speaking in Spanish to the Spanishers, what she actually said was, “¡Es un misterio!” In Spanish, you are called upon to put the exclamation marks at both ends of the sentence, which of course doubles your exclamatory effect. And because of the extra vowel sounds in Spanish, I have found that you can open your eyes even wider and you can stretch out “misteeeeeeeerio” for a longer time. In English, you would have to say “mysssssssstery” to say it long enough to open your eyes wide enough to get the same effect, and that would make you too silly to take serioussssssssly.

The Frenchman then turned to his wife and translated into French for her: "Ah, oui! Un mystèèèèèèèère," opening his eyes wider, I believe than anybody I have yet seen. The French are even more impressionable than anyone else, as you will see later.

I have read very many books about our island and our people, but still my brother and sister do not let me lead the tours yet. I think they think I know too much. I think they think I will get confused. Perhaps they are right. The more you know, the more you know you do not know.

One of the good things about following my brother or my sister when they take the tours is that the people begin to look upon me as one of the mysteries. I never say anything, and that is mysterious to most people. And when there are people who are my age, they are drawn to me because of my mysteriousness. Also because I am their age. Have you noticed that? Young people like to be with young people, especially if they are traveling with their parents who are, often, very dull to them. And so I wait. I look at the young people with my eyes, and I know they will come to me. At night, I make sure that I am near their hotel, and that they see me. Then they will always come to me. They always want to sneak out of their hotels at night to the same places they went during the day, with me, alone, in the darkness, with only the moon to show us the island.

I can drive. I am not allowed to drive, but I drive anyway. My favorite times are when the young people want to go back out to Rano Raraku, which is my favorite place. This is the quarry where the moai were carved out of the volcano and where they still stand, still waiting—after all these centuries—for their carving to be finished so that they can be moved to the shore. The mana of the moai is like electromagneticity, I believe, as I think I understand that word; the air hums with their mana; the breezes move among the moai and through the waving grasses like fishes in schools, and you can gulp them; in the moonlight in the dark you can breathe the mana into your own body, and you can be one with them.

Figure 1: Here are a few of the moai at Rana Raraku. Can you feel the mana of the moai from this photograph? I think not. I do believe you must be with the moai to feel their mana. And the mana of the moai is most powerful at night, when a camera does not work properly. A photo from a camera is not the best way to capture moai, to capture them as you might a school of fish, in one gulp.

The moai at Rano Raraku face down the hill, those that are not fallen down. All of them stand at different heights, all of them from one-quarter to three-quarters buried, some with only the tops of their heads showing, looking as though they are trying to keep their noses above the soil which each year grows a little higher up their necks. Most of the moai are straight up and down upright, but some of them are at an angle, as though they are drunk. In the moonlight, they are beautiful, and they are sad. And if it is a girl that I take there in the moonlight to Rano Raraku, she might cry. If it is a boy, he might be completely quiet as we walk among my ancestors on the edge of the volcano. There is no talk of the mysteries because the mysteries are right there revealed to us, surrounding us, blowing the breezes that wave the grasses at our feet.

Figure 2: Here is another angle at the moai, again hoping to capture the mana of the moai for your eyes, again probably failing by nature of a mere photograph.

If I can get my compadres to dare to climb to the top of the volcano, one of the highest places on the island, we can see the ocean all around us, shining a rippling silver in the moonlight. For me this is something truly special and stirring to my soul. For the others, they are then thrilled. Or they may be terrified.

One girl named Eden was terrified. She was from the state of Kansas in the United States of America. If you know the film The Wizard of Oz—which is a film that I find very amusing—then you know that Kansas is flat and you can not see the end of the land no matter in which direction you look. I can not even imagine a place like that, except that I understand it is true. When Eden stood on the edge of the volcano and looked around at the ocean on every side of us—which is very much the opposite of Kansas—she started crying at first and then, rather soon, screaming. She needed to go back down, and she needed to go back down right then. I was not worried about the screaming because nobody but the moai could hear, and they always remain silent about our doings. I held her arm tight as I climbed down with her, and when we got back to the parking lot at the bottom, about a half hour later, and she was safe inside the van, I waited for her to stop crying, which she did after rather a long time. I asked her what was wrong. She was not able to say exactly. Her bounteous bosoms were still heaving with the sobs, and the sobs would not allow her to speak except a word at a time. But this is what I think: I think she was terrified by the loneliness.

She kept saying how far we were from anywhere. Even though she had flown over the broad Pacific Ocean from Kansas to the island of Tahiti, and from Tahiti the two thousand four hundred miles across that same ocean to our island, and even though she had been on top of Rano Raraku in the daylight, it had not yet sunk into her head how far she was from the rest of the world. She kept saying, “What if…” but she could not finish the thought. This is what I think she thought: I think she thought, “What if this island sinks into the ocean?” or “What if the plane tomorrow cannot take off before it reaches the edge of the island, and we crash into the ocean?” which always appears to me a distinct possibility, as I watch the airplanes come and go in their little hugeness. Or perhaps Eden was thinking, “What if there has been a nuclear war in Kansas while I have been here, so far away?” I believe that is considered a distinct possibility also, in the world of today.

Figure 3: Where Kansas is. Perhaps you know enough geography to compare this map and this photograph of our Earth, a snapshot from space, I believe. (That is quite possible, too, I understand, is it not?) Perhaps you know where Kansas is situated in the United States of America, rather centrally? Perhaps then you can see—and then imagine—how far this Eden must travel to reach our island, and why she might become hysterical on the rim of Rano Raraku, particularly when our island is so small that it cannot even be seen from space, even as a dot.

These thoughts of Eden are thoughts with which one cannot argue, and I did not try. For my part, I tried to imagine standing on a prairie with nothing but flat land around me no matter which way I turned. That made me want to scream and sob, but I kept it to myself. And after Eden finished with her sobbing, I drove her back to her hotel.

There was one of the Englishers who was named Daniel. He looked older than me by perhaps a year or two, with the soft beginning hairs of a beginning beard. Perhaps he was seventeen or eighteen, although I have found it very difficult—with so many peoples of so many places—to guess at age because their styles of dressing and of acting are so different. I think, too, that Daniel was from one of the islands of England, on the other side of the planet, but since I could not understand except every third or fourth word he spoke, I never did know exactly where he did call home. Also, there are many names of many places that I have not yet learned, and people forget this obvious fact when they say to me so proudly, "I am from Blank."

I think Daniel had read in some of the books about how our people are sexy, and I think that is what Daniel wanted: sex. But the ways of Daniel were gross, and I think none of our people would want to play with him. Our people may be sexy and very playful, but they are not gross.

Daniel wanted me to show him The Cave Where Men Are Eaten. On some of our maps, it is called Cannibal Cave. There is nothing much to see in this cave except some pictures painted on the ceiling of the cave, but Daniel, I think, did not want to see the pictures, so much. He paid them little attention when I shone on them with the flashlight. I think what Daniel wanted was to find some human bones that had been gnawed by human teeth. He kept asking me to shine the flashlight in and around the rocks on the floor of the cave. When he tried to take the flashlight from me, I would not allow that.

I think Daniel was attracted by the name of the cave. He wanted me to tell him about the great battle of “The Long-Ears” and “The Short-Ears” and when I would not—because that is a story I do not like, although I will tell it to you later—Daniel then wanted me to tell him a different bloody story. This other bloody story that he must have also read about somewhere in the many books written about our island was about a different battle. In this other battle a warrior said to his men, "Bring me the body of the man with the beautiful name so that I may eat him." Daniel wanted to know what that name was. I pretended I did not know that story because that is also a story I do not like. I did, however, know the name. And I shall tell it to you (in a whisper) at the appropriate time.

But for now, I just want you to know that after I showed Daniel The Cave Where Men Are Eaten, I left him there alone, because of repugnance and because I was afraid he would take the flashlight from me because he was much more powerful than I. I climbed out of the cave, and I did not come back for him. That was probably dangerous for him, on the rocks above the ocean, but there was a full moon, and his ways were gross. I think he may have tried to make trouble for me after that, and I think that is one of the reasons why my brother and sister do not let me lead the tours, even though I am qualified. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are not.