Robyn and I had lined up for most of the morning, to change a traveler’s cheque, at the BancoEstado. The hours, like Hanga Roa’s street plan, and the commission charges, were irregular. We left the bank for the long wind-blown grassy slopes of the speckled water caldera of Rano Kau. Here, from 1540, inside the low entrances of the elliptical stone houses at Orongo, was born the Birdman Cult, rising in megalithic structures of flat basalt, as the hardened volcanic ash ancestors were huri moai tumbled to the ground. Nearby were the richest collections of petroglyphs in Polynesia, carved and painted in homage to the chief god Make-Make, komari vulvas, and sea turtles. Fitness, fertility, and fortune. At this ceremonial village, every Austral spring September for more than a century, the ivi-atua priests, the ‘kinsmen of the gods,’ held a competition to determine who would hold and administer the island’s new mana, for the coming year. The young male hopu competitors raced down the sheer southwestern cliff face of the volcano, until its increasing verticality forced them to dive off into the boiling surf a thousand feet further below and, on the small totara reed paddleboards they had jumped with, swim across the two kilometer shark-infested expanse, to the last of three islands in the deepest of Southern Seas swells, the summits of seamounts another thousand feet tall. Robyn and I stared down in disbelief at the physical dimensions of the challenge, and wondered how anyone would have survived even that part of the ordeal. The race contestants continued, past the tall fang-shaped spire of Moto Iti. They finally reached Moto Nui, and scrambled up its steep ledges to search for the first eggs of the nesting Frigate birds, back from their annual migration. Each candidate tied one into a small forehead basket, like a Jewish phylactery, with all the prayers outside. He swam back across the treacherous sea, and climbed up the precipitous volcanic rock face, to present it to the waiting priests. No one knew if any egg had broken during the ordeal until its basket was open. The one with the first intact egg to see daylight on the Orongo side would be named Tangata manu, Birdman. His head and eyebrows were shaved, eyelashes plucked, and his body painted, before he was locked in total darkness with just a priest for company for the next twelve months. Not even his wife could enter the dwelling. His nails grew until they curled like claws. In exchange for this enforced eccentric reclusiveness, the Birdman was imbued with a spiritual mana so powerful, that he could take the land and lives of other tribes, including the consumption of their flesh in sacrificial ceremony. And a year later, he would be squinting into the sun, screaming the start of the next race for the next Birdman. The film critic Gene Siskel had thought that the Rapa Nui ‘egg hunt’ sequence was ridiculous.’ But the ritual was real, as real as the birdman’s avatar was a scary swirling image, a goggle-eyed, curved beak-egg-clutching idol, carved into the rock of ages and myth, and the glyphic Mayan-like mysteries of the still-undeciphered Rongorongo script.
The village of Orongo is just over the hill from Mataveri airport. And I wondered what a Birdman would have made of our 200-ton Lan Chile Boeing 767, landing on the other side of his volcano.
As the number of bird bones in the middens began to decrease, a new style of art emerged, showing people with exposed ribs and distended bellies. But the Polynesians had landed, and had started eating, and had never stopped, and knew how to eat. All the eggs had been broken. All the birds had been eaten, and then the pigs, and then the dogs. The islanders had moved into fortified caves, with narrowed entrances and crawl spaces with ambush points. One was known as Anakai Tangata, the ‘Cave where Men are Eaten,’ where fingers and toes were considered the most palatable bits of kai-tangata, and the age of warfare and cannibalism had begun.
In the evening after Robyn and I had visited Orongo, we ate in a restaurant that served a variety of local fish- piafi, toremo, atun, po’o po, kana kana, mata huira. The fishermen had spoken Spanish. The boats were from the mainland, painted wood. Our dinner arrived on an elliptical metal pan, with little nametags stuck in the flesh of the fillets. The Chilean owner set it on an imported wooden slice of tree slab, burnt with a Birdman design in the center, and rough bark still around the outside. She brought a bottle of Los Vascos sauvignon blanc from Santiago, covered in a blue plastic insulator, decorated in Mandarin script, and a Chinese pagoda. Her son was obese, and sat in a corner, brown eyes glued to the television, both hands in a bag of Chis pop. We finished at another place for ice cream. Frangipanis had been sprinkled on the tablecloth.
Later, I dreamt. Of trees and frangipanis and fish and ice cream, and eggs unbroken.
“As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of
infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.”
Boris Pasternak
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