A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga: Stories: Luminous Short Stories from the Natural World – Tales of Animals, Women, and Liberation - Softcover

Whitty, Juila

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618119809 ISBN 13: 9780618119806

Verlag: Houghton Mifflin, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Bringing a unique perspective and a singular voice to contemporary fiction, A TORTOISE FOR THE QUEEN OF TONGA features lush, poignant stories about the natural world. Here are mammals, historical figures, everyday people who discover the liberating properties of memory and knowledge in the face of captivity and loneliness. We meet a forlorn tortoise forced to live among humans. We witness orcas at Ocean World staging a revolt, using celibacy as their weapon. In a French cave, a young computer animator draws parallels between Cro-Magnon and modern women. One story even travels to heaven, where Charles Darwin seeks the source of human happiness.
Whitty joins her authority about wildlife and her rich imagination to spectacular effect. Drawing on twenty years' experience with making nature documentaries, she takes readers inside the minds of animals and people struggling to overcome their limitations. In a voice as magical as it is informed, A TORTOISE FOR THE QUEEN OF TONGA bridges the mythical and the mundane, the animal and the human. Julia Whitty is a brilliant new storyteller in American short fiction.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JULIA WHITTY's first book on oceans, The Fragile Edge, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal Award, the PEN USA Award, and the Kiriyama Prize. Her cover articles have appeared in Harper's Magazine and Mother Jones, where she is an environmental correspondent. She blogs at the Blue Marble and Deep Blue Home.

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A Tortoise for the
Queen of Tonga

She died in the palace gardens in 1966, of extreme old age and a
heart that had swelled insupportably from nearly two centuries of
loneliness. For a day no one noticed, not because she was neglected
but because her metabolism was so inert that immobility did not
arouse suspicion. The crabs discovered her first, hordes of frenetic,
land-dwelling red crabs with pincers for cutlery. The dogs found her
next, but because they neither bayed nor howled, they kept the secret
to themselves. Only when the pigs got wind of it and began to squeal
with excitement did the queen's gardener rouse himself from the shade
of a casuarina tree and stroll with detached curiosity toward the
community of living things that had gathered to feast on the remains
of the tortoise.
"Tu'iMalila is dead," the gardener announced to the queen's
secretary.
"Your Royal Highness," said the queen's secretary to the
king, "Tu'i Malila is dead."
"Royal Wife and Queen," said the king to the queen, "Tu'i
Malila is dead."
The queen did not rise from her wrought iron chaise under the
banyan tree, but she did signal to her ladies in waiting to stop
swirling the palm-frond fans around her head as her huge moonface
quivered and her dark eyes filled with tears.
For more than two decades, long after the pigs had been spit-
roasted and the umu ovens had been dug for the funeral feast, which
drew nobility from all over Tongatapu, the giant tortoise lay where
she had died. In the course of time her empty carapace became as much
a feature of the palace gardens as the huge Norfolk Island pines and
the red gingerbread gables of the wooden palace. Generations of
princes and princesses played hide-and-seek behind her shell, until
in 1988 she was moved to the new Tonga National Center outside
Nuku'alofa, where her remains were displayed alongside portraits of
the monarchs. Visitors wondered at the vast parchment of her shell,
its surface scarred, chipped, burned, and in places worn as thin as a
fingernail from her encounters with pirates, explorers, missionaries,
kings, queens, and hurricanes.

Captain James Cook bought the giant tortoise in 1776 from a Dutch
merchant in Cape Town, South Africa, as he embarked on his third and
final voyage of the Pacific. She was not yet an adult, although she
was probably thirty years old, her skin young and supple with the
soft patina of sea glass. The Dutch merchant had bought her from
English pirates, who had manhandled her from her home on the atoll of
Aldabra, off the coast of Africa. She spent weeks in the dark bellies
of various ships, trussed, unwatered, and unfed, panicking at the
strange motion of the sea, the perpetual blackness, the stench of
men, the attacks of sea lice and rats. The sailors did not treat her
as a living thing. They kicked her, or carelessly dripped hot lamp
oil on her, and laughed.
She retreated into a hallucinogenic state in which she could
see in her mind's eye the yellow light of Aldabra, the turquoise sea,
the opalescent sky decorated with the black kites of soaring frigate
birds. In that quiet world the rumble of surf on the barrier reef was
punctuated only by the trilling calls of terns or the scratching of
crabs scrambling across the rocks or the soft thud of giant tortoises
settling down for a nap. Most afternoons brought showers and thunder,
but even those were soothing sounds marking the passage of day toward
night. Nothing she had known in her native home could have prepared
her for the din of a wooden ship in rough seas, crowded with men and
livestock.
Captain Cook took her aboard along with a menagerie of sheep,
goats, cattle, horses, and chickens, which turned his ship,
Resolution, into a floating ark. The giant tortoise was considered a
particularly valuable part of his oceangoing savings account, because
she could survive up to a year in the hold without food or water.
When called upon in a time of need, she would become turtle soup.
The sailors lowered her into the dank hold and the hatches
dropped down onto darkness. Resolution plunged south into the
mountainous waves of the Roaring Forties, where the ship began to
leak, squalls tore the mizzen topmast off, the horses tap-danced
nervously, and the sheep shivered and died. When a fog as dense as
smoke settled over the sea, Resolution and her companion ship,
Discovery, maintained contact with each other by the steady firing of
their guns.
Months later the ships reached the tropical islands of Tonga,
where William Bligh, the young master of Resolution, oversaw the
tricky business of getting the tortoise onto a launch. Two sailors
ran the deck winch while three others waited below in the open boat.
The tortoise emerged from the darkness with her head drawn deep into
her shell and her eyes squeezed shut.
"A dozen lashes to any fool who drops it," shouted Bligh as
the sailors heaved. But the ropes shifted, the knots slipped, and the
tortoise crashed onto the boat's thwart, chipping a bony plate on the
left side of her carapace.

Captain Cook accepted a gift a day from the Tu'i Tonga, the king of
the islands of Tonga, which Cook called "the Friendly Isles." He
accepted a sacred red feather bonnet, bowls of intoxicating kava to
drink, and exquisite paintings on bark, called tapa. In return, the
king took few gifts, showing no interest in the novelties that his
people borrowed with infuriating regularity from Resolution: cats,
muskets, buttons, nails, anchors. The king did not care for such
things. He accepted only one small glass bowl, some livestock, and
the tortoise, which Cook calculated that he would no longer need now
that the ship was sailing through lands of plenty. "For my wife,"
said the king, turning and awarding the tortoise to the queen.
The queen adored the tortoise from the start: her lustrous
shell, her eyes as darkas mirrors, the way she stretched her long
neck and tilted her head and hissed. It was a soft and undemanding
sound, yet one that never failed to catch the queen's ear, even above
the sibilant hissings of the court.
Nearly a year had passed since the tortoise had been taken
from Aldabra, and by the time she arrived on Tonga she was emaciated
and dehydrated. The queen understood this at once and began to feed
her by hand, offering tempting gardenia blossoms, fe'i bananas,
coconut milk, and, wonder of wonders, the tart fruit of the
Polynesian screw pine. This screw pine was so much like the one on
Aldabra that when the tortoise ate it, the yellow flesh frothed up on
her lipless mouth and damp rings formed around her
eyes. "Faka 'ofa 'ofa," said the queen, recognizing the tortoise's
favorite, and she promptly summoned slaves to bring in screw pine
fruit from all over Tongatapu and, toward the end of the fruiting
season, from as far away as Vava'u. The tortoise responded to these
feasts by swelling back into her skin so that the wrinkles and sags
disappeared.
The queen admired the tortoise's girth. The queen was also
stout, the stoutest person in the islands other than her husband.
Serendipitously, the tortoise met all the criteria for Tongan
royalty: hugeness, ponderousness, dignity, silence. Soon the tortoise
began to join the king and queen on their stroll down the beach each
morning, their three stately bodies drifting in corpulent elegance
from the shade beneath one palm tree to that beneath another. To an
outsider they looked like a trio creeping against a hard current
under water.
"The tortoise lives faka tonga," the Tongan way,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Houghton Mifflin
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0618119809
• ISBN 13: 9780618119806
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Product Safety Manager; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; HarperCollins, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin 1; D01 C9W8; Irland