Tuputala

by CAPTAIN ROBERT P. PARSONS

1

LIKE most Americans in Mapusaga, I became acquainted with Tuputala’s saxophone before I met him. One evening during our early days at Mapusaga I was sitting in the old Mormon church, where we had our administrative office, when there came to my ears the sweetest saxophone notes I had ever heard. What interested me was that anyone who could play such pure notes should be playing so falteringly.

The fellow was playing Schubert’s Serenade, but he would play a short phrase or two, then stop and repeat it, and then wait several moments before going on with the next phrase. I went out to investigate and found Tidwell (one of the fine vocalists of our hospital corpsmen) sitting on a cargo crate beside a large, light-brown Elysian man. The Elysian was holding a saxophone and listening to Tidwell singing Schubert’s Serenade, a phrase at a time. It was Tuputala, hearing the Serenade for the first time. In a few minutes Tidwell sang the whole piece through without a stop. Tuputala, sitting motionless and all ears, was allowing it to register on his infallible musical memory. Then he put his lips to the sax and gave the lower hillside as flawless and sweet a rendition of the Serenade as anyone could want.

That was my introduction to Tuputala’s saxophone, but I had to wait some weeks before I exchanged words with him. A few evenings later I went to my first Elysian dance, at a fale in Faleniu. That was the first time I saw and heard the great Tuputala getting hot with a hot Elysian dance orchestra.

He was a musical clown as well as a musical artist. He could play almost any instrument — and whatever the instrument he started to play, he invariably pronounced it his favorite. He would have given his soul to own a saxophone, but he had never been able to save enough money to buy one. In fact, the only musical appliance he ever had a clear title to up to that time was a small piece of steel he used in producing steel guitar effects on an ordinary wooden guitar. He could get more fine melody from a three-dollar ukelele than many competent fiddlers can produce with a violin.

At dances he would beat time with his size fourteen bare foot, which went flap-flap on the floor so loudly you could almost consider it a part of the drum section. He also kept time with his head, and when he got into the hot and fast runs with his saxophone, his neck went through some alarming contortions. If the stringed instrument of a near-by player was the slightest shade off tune Tuputala would reach over with one swift movement, in the middle of a piece, and give the proper tuning key just a hair of a turn and go on as though nothing had happened. I don’t think that was clowning. It was just that Tuputala could not endure a chord with a flaw in it, even a flaw too small for detection by ordinary ears.

2

ONE night in August, 1942, I was reading in my tent when a vague awareness came to me that something or someone was near the tent entrance. It might have been a moving shadow or it might have been a noise no louder than the moths made around the electric light, above the table. I looked up from my book and there in front of the tent entrance stood Tuputala. How long he had been there I couldn’t say. It might have been a half hour.

That is the Elysians’ way of making a call. They just sneak up to your front door and stand there until you call them in. From their point of view there is a reason for this method. They can hear bare feet approaching at fifty yards, no matter how stealthy the approach. At twenty yards they know who it is, day or night, and at ten yards they know your mood and what you are thinking about. So before you are within twenty yards of their fale they can welcome you in.

If they don’t notice you, it isn’t because they don’t know you are there — it means your presence is not desired. I have excellent hearing and vision, by the white man’s standard, but the Elysians considered me, like all palagi (white people), practically deaf and blind.

I was speechless for a moment as I looked at Tuputala and he looked at me. He said, “Oxcoose me, gentlemans Kaptin, you say I come in?”

“Sure,” I said. “Come on in. You’re Tuputala, aren’t you?”

“Sure,” he said, “dat’s me.” He sat down crosslegged on the floor in a corner of the tent. Then he wouldn’t say anything for a few minutes. Just short non-informative answers to my questions that were partly social amenities and partly for the purpose of finding out the reason for his visit. But you can’t hurry an Elysian in conversation. He has to go through the preliminaries, whether they take five minutes or a half hour.

If a high chief comes to call and only wants a bucket of garbage for his pigs, he will st.art by saying, “I call upon the mercy and love of God. It is so nice for us to meet this pleasant morning. All the round shells are in the bag and all the oranges are on the twig (meaning ‘Well, here we are assembled together’). We are meeting, I hope, in the best of health, but not in disturbances.”

Tuputala was embarrassed. It took him some time to come to the point, or points. At last he said, “Say, Kaptin, I got big trouble with Tuia.” Then for half an hour he related how Tuia had induced him, three months earlier, to leave a good stevedoring job in Fagatoga and come to Mapusaga to play in one of Tuia’s dance orchestras.

At that time a clever dance racketeer could operate different orchestras in different villages every night in the week and with fifty cents admission make a net profit of fifty dollars from each fale where one of his orchestras was furnishing the music. The musicians themselves received two dollars for the evening’s work — if they could collect it from the orchestra owner.

The orchest ra owners really owned the orchestras — bodies, souls, and instruments. They either owned all the instruments (as Tuia did) or had obtained exclusive orchestra rights in certain villages through arrangements with the high chiefs of those villages. There was no muscling in. You either had exclusive village rights or you had nothing. It was tighter than a musicians’ union in the States.

The proposition had looked very attractive to Tuputala because two dollars a day was considerable money for doing something that he loved to do anyhow. It did not appear remarkable to Tuputala that he, acknowledged in every village as the number one saxophonist of the island, should not own a saxophone, or that he should be working for two dollars a day for a boss who was making so much money on Tuputala’s playing that the boss could not even imagine what to do with it all.

The only thing worrying Tuputala was that he had never been able to collect one evening’s pay in three months. That evening he had demanded a settlement. Harsh words had been exchanged. Tuputala had dared to talk back to Tuia and to tell Tuia what he thought of him because Tuputala was not, strictly speaking, a citizen of Mapusaga — and therefore not subject to the caprices of the chief.

Tuia had called Tuputala the equivalent of a base and uncouth yokel. He would pay Tuputala off and be rid of him and never again could Tuputala play in one of Tuia’s orchestras or even touch one of Tuia’s saxophones.

The “big trouble” about which Tuputala was now complaining to me had occurred in the pay-off. Tuia had shown him a lot of arithmetic, proving that he owed Tuputala exactly fifteen dollars. Tuputala thought it should be thirty dollars. The sums were so small because Tuputala’s “board and room” were deducted from his salary. He had been occupying a mat in Tuia’s fale and had moreover been eating four meals a day at the Tuia menage. Also Saki, Tuia’s wife, had been washing Tuputala’s lava-lavas for him.

I asked Tuputala what he was going to live on, now that he was blacklisted from Tuia’s orchestras and had been thrown out of Tuia’s fale where he had been eating and using a sleeping mat. Tuputala was at a loss to understand my concern on this point. No Elysian has ever been known to worry about what the morrow will bring or fail to bring. He said that he would get his taro “okay same like before” because he was now living with his “cushin” (cousin), Tavili, whose fale was only two fales down the hill from Tuia’s.

I suggested that his cushin would expect some payment sooner or later for this, to which he replied, “No, dat is my aiga (family) and we don’t pay no money to aigas.” Maybe he would give his “cushin a presents sometimes like maybe can salmon or can peaches or pisoupo.” (Pea soup was the first type of canned food to reach the islands. Thus, all canned food was likely to be called “pisoupo.”) I asked him how long he could buy things like that with fifteen dollars. “Maybe long time,” he said. “Tuia will give me de odda fifteen dolla when he hear you gentlemans Kaptin know about dis.”

“How will Tuia hear about it?” I asked him.

“He maybe know about dat now,” he said. And probably he was right, because nothing much was ever said or thought in Mapusaga that didn’t spread to every fale in the village within a few minutes by some telepathy. Tuputala wanted to change the subject. He didn’t want to be reminded that some day soon his money would be spent and his welcome at the home of his cushin might be worn out.

3

TUPUTALA made many visits to my tent after that. He wanted especially to talk about music and his musical ambitions. On the other island he had been a prize fighter, at ten dollars per infrequent fight, and since his early youth had made a bare living playing in dance orchestras or concert orchestras when not engaged in plantation labor. His only happiness had been with music. He could be supremely happy if he could live by his music and not have to work as a stevedore or in taro patches.

All he really needed to make him happy, Tuputala said, was a saxophone. He wanted to make a down payment of twenty dollars with me, have me arrange for the shipment of a good secondhand sax from the States, and then pay a dollar or two at a time until the account was settled. I told him I would write to the States for a sax but that I should own it and he would play it. If he owned it, I told him, he would sell it at some period of want and then he would be unhappy again. The deal delighted him.

Tuputala talked about music. He said that all Elysians were pretty good natural musicians but that only rarely would one make the effort to study music seriously. That was why they didn’t know the difference between a major and minor chord, or a major and minor key. He said they sang church music, popular American music, and their own folk songs all in minors just because they liked it that way, not because they knew what they were doing. He said, “De way dey sing ‘De Sta Spangle Banna,’ you American have hard time to know what it is dey sing.” Tuputala was quite correct. You could scarcely recognize the music or words, but a chorus of Elysian school kids singing “De Sta Spangle Banna” was always so beautiful and soulful that it was a sure-fire tear-jerker for any American.

During the months we waited for the sax to arrive, Tuputala entertained me scores of times with guitar or ukelele. He could glance at a piece of sheet music, hum it to himself a moment while he flapped time with his bare foot, and then play it through flawlessly. He could listen to a new song on the radio, shut off the radio, and repeat it, usually better than the radio performance, without missing a word or a note. What awed me as much as his music was his ability to remember the words. Another of his stunts was to accompany popular music with my ukelele, which he did to perfection, even when the number was one he had never heard before. He loved my radio. He loved the symphony concerts on the radio but said that only a rare Elysian could “know to like dat kind music.” When he had daydreams he thought about going to Honolulu to study music seriously, like blind Joe Salonoa, the public school music teacher at Fagatoga.

Just a few nights after Tuputala’s big quarrel with Tuia I borrowed Tuia’s saxophone for Tuputala to play at one of our hospital crew dances. It broke Tuia’s heart, to do it and he said I was asking an impossible thing of him; that I was asking him to love an enemy who wanted to kill him. I reminded Tuia that he was an elder in the Mormon church — which upheld the Bible that advocated loving one’s enemies, and that furthermore he didn’t have to love Tuputala in order to let him play his saxophone at our dance.

Tuia said, “All right, I will lend the saxophone, not because I love Tuputala, but because it is your desire and because I love the Americans of this village.”

When Tuputala came to see me the next day, I related how Tuia had wept in righteous protest before lending the saxophone. Tuputala’s comment was: “But jus’ only face his cries; sweet lips he got, but heart his is mad want to kill.”

4

THE new saxophone arrived from Montgomery Ward ($75.00) a few days before Christmas. I sent word to Tuputala to come up and try it out. My new fale was perched high on the mountainside, difficult to reach without gett ing short of breath.

Tuputala came up the path in a full run. He stood in the doorway, panting. Sweat was streaming from his bare torso onto a freshly laundered lava-lava, He didn’t wait to recover his breath; he even saw fit to dispense with the customary conversational preliminaries. His eyes were intent and his face was set in a smile of pleasant expectancy.

“You got it?” he asked, looking at me. Then his eyes shifted to the case in the corner of the room. “You got it!” he said.

“You unpack it and put it together,” I said.

While assembling it, he doted over and fondled that saxophone like a mother dressing her first-born.

He put the mouthpiece to his lips and ran up and down a fast chromatic scale to test all the keys. “Oxcoose please, gentlemans,” he said, “what you want de fust numba?”

“ ‘In the Mood,”’ I said, knowing that to be his current favorite of the hot and fast section.

He made it moan and whine; he gave it rippling laughter, chortles, plaints, ineffably melodious sweetness, everything but actual words. He continued all evening, until we both had exhausted our memories of musical composition titles.

Three months later it was “necessary” for Tuputala to return to the island of his “auntie.” When it comes time to make a journey to another island, there is no use talking about it — in Polynesia certainly no use talking against it; it is as natural an event as the migration of birds. Now he was torn between the migratory pull and a saxophone he didn’t own but couldn’t leave behind. There was only one solution.

He came to my fale on the evening before his departure, and stood on the porch so silently I didn’t look up from my book until he said, “Hello, Kaptin, I come say tofa (farewell) to you.”

I knew what he was leading up to; he had to take the sax with him. “But how can you do that? I have seventy-five bucks in that sax.”

Grinning, he reached down under the waistband of his lava-lava and brought out a wallet. He walked over to the table and emptied its contents. We counted it — exactly seventy-five dollars.

“And where in the world did you get that?”

“My cushin,” he said. “He want I look like a big man when I go my auntie’s fale.”

More months went by. I was missing Tuputala’s visits and his recitals. Then I had occasion to be on the island of his auntie for a few days. I had no idea what village he might be staying in. No one seemed to know of him around the large village.

But on the last evening of our stay on the island we drove out to see Isaako, a native Mormon missionary, formerly of Mapusaga, who lived at the village of Nofo Alii (Home of Kings). We were sitting around the kerosene lamp, visiting with Isaako and his family, when I heard coming from a fale off in the bush some strains of uncommonly fine dance music. It sounded like a practice session of a small dance orchestra.

“I thought only one man in these islands could play a saxophone that well; a man named Tuputala,” I said to Isaako.

“That is Tuputala,” Isaako said. He told me about Tuputala’s very wonderful saxophone. “Three hundred dollars it is worth,” he said, “but some officers get it for him for only a hundred fifty.”