by Pietro Villari, 1993 and 2023. All rights reserved.
Posted in Italian on 2 May 2, 2023 in Italian and in English on 4 May 2023. Tise article contains a chapter of a report written by the author for the newspaper “La Sicilia”, where it was published on April 8, 1993.
At the beginning of April 1993, the newspaper "La Sicilia" dedicated
the entire page "Culture and Society. Sciences” to a popularizing report,
commissioned by the editorial staff a few months before. It consisted of
several articles dealing with the prehistory of Easter Island (2) and
the archaeological explorations I had carried out in the months of October and
November 1991, in a portion of the northern area considered sacred territory by
tradition. I had arrived there after having participated in a tough excavation
campaign in a sacrificial enclosure of the Great Pyramid of Nazca, located in
the Peruvian coastal desert, then moving to Santiago de Chile requested as
archaeozoologist and stratigrapher following an Italo-Chilean archaeological
expedition financed from individuals. However, shortly before leaving for the
island, the Chilean government decided to entrust me with scientific tasks
directly and confidentially, through a permit that gave me ample freedom to
carry out scientific activities in the zoological (and therefore
archaeozoological) field on the island. I agreed on behalf of the Museo
Nacional de Historia Natural and in order to enlarge its collections (3).
For me that article, to be drafted for an Italian newspaper, was just a
tedious way of getting a fair amount of money to pay for a life at that time
led as a free man thirsty for knowledge, or rather for exploration, travel and
beautiful women. I couldn't image that thirty years later it would become a
document of historical-ethnographic interest of a remote community, in progress
to be swallowed by the now ubiquitous "sustainable tourism economy"
by global liberal exploitation.
The editorial staff of "La Sicilia" titled it on the whole page
"The giants of Easter Island" (with an odious subtitle winking
at Sicilian pride: "Travel notes of a Sicilian archaeologist in eastern
Polynesia"). I obtained a large success of readers, as the newspaper
received a number of positive letters and phone calls, with the most disparate
contents. I was therefore offered to be included among the foreign
collaborators of the journal, with the task of writing further accounts of my
travels in exotic lands for a fee. I had to make readers dream, traveling with
me on an adventure to a totally different life (4).
This, I was promised as if it were the key to the door of paradise, would
in some years also yield the right to obtain registration in the national
register of journalists. I took the money as I thought I deserved it, and since
at that time I was constantly empty-pocketed. But enrollment in the Register
was an "opportunity" that I didn't want to exploit. I wanted to
remain free to write what I wanted, without so called "professional
ethics" and other similar constraints imposed by the dominant system,
aware that sooner or later they would take the opportunity to discredit me,
expelling me from the congregation with the usual regime reasons.
My answer was not taken well, but for some time I continued to publish
articles in various newspapers until, as expected, a few years later came the
order that close all those doors. To better understand each other, those doors
of newspapers who receive the millionaire welfare funds that the Italian State
bestows annually in support of Information, binding them to itself. I continued
to publish only with the bimonthly magazine “Grifone” until the first years of
the new millennium.
Arising out of nowhere the year before my arrival, thanks to a substantial
donation from an American who sent everything needed for its construction,
until the first decade of the current century the Toroko remained one of the
last examples of a fossilized disco in the North American standards of the
second half of the 1980s, with the particularity of being frequented by
families belonging to the indigenous community. This typicality made it
possible to get to know Rapanui uses and customs by having brief discussions
with the local people, eager to talk to strangers or by simply sitting at a
table to observe the customs present in the social relationships of the
natives. The tourists belonging to the wealthy classes who arrived on the
island preferred another disco, the Piriti, a nice place near the airport, much
more expensive and with all the comforts required in the western standard.
Both nightclubs survived. The nocturnal activity begins at one in the
morning, and it is possible to dance until five in the morning, to the rhythm
of modern Polynesian music alternating with South American ones.
When one night, accompanied by local people, I arrived on horseback in
front of what had been defined to me as the Easter Island discotheque, the
Toroko, I was rather perplexed as externally it looked like the modest home of
an Amazonian farm, entirely built with wooden deck, without windows, the roof
made of corrugated iron plates. Outside was a line of horses with their reins
tethered to a fence, and a line of sleeping drunks with their backs to the
wall, bottles in hand and drover's hats pulled down over part of their faces.
As soon as I crossed the threshold, I thought I had physically entered a sort
of surreal mirage: on that volcanic rock, isolated in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean, there was an avant-garde high-tech disco equipped with an impressive
quantity of records from the 1980s and a good choice of those of the previous
decade. The walls were padded with soundproofing, there were sturdy 1960s-style
chairs and tables (capable of withstanding the worst of saloon brawls), and a
generator in the back storage room.
I leave the description to the article I published in 1993, reproduced here
in the original version. My third and last article concerning Easter Island
will follow shortly, dedicated to the great changes that have taken place on
the Island in the last thirty years and to the inevitable onset of social and
environmental problems. Marine pollution, rising sea levels and the spread of
epidemic diseases are all linked to the uncertainties of the tourism industry
future, nowadays the backbone of the island's economy.
From “La Sicilia”, 1993. Toroko, the
disco on Easter Island.
Easter Island, November 1991. The horse is the only quick way to get to the
village of Hanga Roa from the distant paths of the north coast. Two hours of
careful walking, trotting, galloping, up and down expanses now rocky now
grassy. The full moon make it look like a silver mantle.
It is almost midnight when I knot the bridle to the large pole in front of
the current Pascuense temple of music, the Toroko. The image
is that of every weekend: an already long line of drunks, drenched in all sorts
of alcohol & Cola (5). The bouncers of the club have diligently
arranged them with their backs against the wall of the portico, as if to
support the building. The semi-darkness and the dust raised by the wind make
them sleeping caryatids, the face desperate from the existential problems of
the Polynesian pariahs. The rest is music that seems light years away, as if it
came from another dimension. The smell of the sea abundantly sprinkled by the
high waves breaking on the opposite pier.
I put a blanket over the back of my horse, rented for a handful of dollars
a month, and climb the wooden steps towards what is here the paradise of
perdition.
It is also for me who have been living camped out in the deserted land of
Puna Marengo for weeks, to better carry out my archaeological activities. Who
can live without music? I have to admit: even if so far away, in the
magnificent wild, I still need a ration of sounds and frenetic movements of the
world I culturally belong.
Inside, the Toroko (Pascuense term for "pasture grass") looks a
little reassuring, a sort of Polynesian saloon where alcohol and tobacco are
peddled at low supermarket prices. Admission is free, the system is of quality,
the self-gift of an eccentric, or rather, bored American.
At this time the place begins to fill up with young, less young and old
people. They arrange themselves at the tables as if they were seats assigned by
a theater to season ticket holders or by the army to soldiers in the trenches,
each in the area assigned to their own family clan, to which friends belonging
to other clans can access, if permitted. I can thus imagine how in ancient
times the island was divided into tribes that populated different areas and
waged a ferocious war, conceptually similar to that of the modern "feuds"
in Southern Italy.
The hostilities have ceased for some time, but the subdivisions and the
grumblings survive despite the decimations due in the past to the plagues and
the plunderers atrocities.
The right rhythmic roar of the music (Western, South American, Polynesian)
consecrates the smells of pisco and
the dubious smoke (hence the name of the place), which hovers in the large room
and in the toilet, enveloping men and women. Some dance alone tipsy in their
solitude of unforgiving seniority. It envelops newly married couples, or
betrothed, or occasional companions, engaged in uninhibited love effusions even
during dancing. Exorcising tomorrow. And on everything reigns the
entirely Pascuense fashion of dressing and the typical
gestures of young people from eighteen to sixty years old.
Long frizzy hair and beards, tanned and tattooed bodies, unbuttoned shirts,
earrings, boots. Constructions halfway between the globetrotting clochard and
the filibuster of the past, before which the tourist women, here in the version
of Western hunters of men-objects, capitulate without escape for a few weeks of
frenzies. Memories to tell to their friends or, from elderly reprobates to
their grown granddaughters.
Polynesian women are simpler. Equally authentic in their acclaimed exotic
femininity for centuries, often mercilessly ugly, sometimes beautiful and
irresistible sirens. Their gestures are fascinating, graceful. Taste-smell of
firm and velvety limbs, of foaming waves and tiaré flowers.
Many women refuse marriage, they don't want masters. Nevertheless, they
still surround themselves with children from several men who, in this way, are
bound to protect them from violence. Those who are married or engaged are
controlled by men who are often madly jealous, well aware of the predisposition
of their loved ones, of their extraordinary passionate attitudes.
Men like to release their aggression, expressing it in power. Most are
fishermen accustomed to the dangers of the always hostile sea, which they
challenge daily with their boats. They know that no one will be able or willing
to help them when, hundreds or thousands of kilometers from their remote
island, the gigantic waves of the Pacific could engulf them. Or when, while
hunting lobsters underwater, they encounter the ferocious and immense
tiger-shark.
Someone has returned from Europe, a distant mythologized land, where they
left a family formed by a spirit of adventure: “I couldn't live with those
people. I am not a machine. My ancestors were warriors…”, Pitaki recites to me,
a sort of mature savage pirate with eleven years spent in Germany, once
exported by a blonde Walkiria, or rather with a wife and children to forget. He
lives, like others, with his horse along the prairies of the north coast (the
sacred territories), sleeping in the caves. Sometimes with the passing
foreigner. Underwater fisherman, tour guide, shell collector in Polynesia… you
need little money to live from day to day (6).
Four o'clock in the morning, tomorrow is a holiday. Heaven closes its
doors, and I am among the survivors. We eat a good portion of raw fish sitting
in a circle among the rocks of the pier, offered by those who fished during the
night. I mount my horse and set off on the north-west path, I will stop to
sleep for a few hours in the shelter of a rock spur in a valley not far from
the village, I wrap myself in the warm blanket already lent to my horse. One
last look at the starry sky.
Footnotes (added May 4, 2023)
1) translated from Villari P., 2 May 2023, Toroko,
1991. Un ricordo della prima discoteca dell’Isola di Pasqua (Rapa Nui, Easter
Island), in “The Reporter’s Corner”: https://www.thereporterscorner.com/2023/05/toroko-1991-un-ricordo-della-prima.html
2) also in this second article dedicated to this island, I continue to use the
terms Pascuense and Isla de Pascua (and its translation in English, Easter
Island) for the sake of literary coherence, as up to thirty years ago it was
still prevalently used internationally. That said, I can't help but agree that
today the Chilean government to which the island belongs has started using the
Tahitian denomination of origin, preferred by the natives: Rapa Nui.
The local language is the Rapanui, a Polynesian dialect in which linguists
have identified peculiar affinities with Maori and Tahitian, which, due to
centuries-old periods of isolation of the island population, has created
modifications and new terminologies to the point of making it much more similar
to a real own language spread only on this island. The inhabitants of
indigenous descent are very attached to it, as the greatest of the ancestral
and distinctive cultural testimonies that have survived on the island.
3) as regards the definition of my role and the relationship with the
Chilean institutions, I refer you to notes 2 and 11 of the article: Villari P.,
10 April 2023, Easter Island (Chile), 1991. Testimony of N.O.E. (not
ordinary experiences) lived during the archaeological excavations conducted in
Puna Marengo, The Reporter's Corner, available online at https://thereporterscorner.com/2023/04/easter-island-chile-1991-not
ordinary.html
For my activities carried out on the island:
Villari P., Excavation essay in the area of a "hare moa"
located in Puna Marengo (Isla de Pasqua, Chile), Ultramarina Occasional
Papers, Number 3 (November 1997, pp. 1-12, Amsterdam;
Villari P., 8 April 1993, The Giants of Easter Island, in La
Sicilia, p. 32 (full page with several of my articles dedicated to the topic);
Villari P., 20 December 2000, Eindpunt, Tokerau and the old woman,
in Grifone, bimonthly organ of the Ente Fauna Siciliana, year IX, n. 6 (file
48), pp.6-7.
4) among the journalists working at the newspaper "La Sicilia"
I grateful remember two dear friends of those years, who have passed away for
some time now: Giuseppe Sperlinga, at the Catania editorial office and talented
astronomy enthusiast, and Gino Mauro, director of the editorial staff of
Messina.
5) the bar was quite stocked and the barman was skilled in preparing a
number of cocktails. Rum, gin and pisco mixed with Coca Cola or a series of
syrups of various types of fruit, seemed to me at that time the most requested
by the local population.
6) years later I saw him again in an American film, projected on a cinema screen in Amsterdam. Along with other islanders he had been recruited for several appearances in Rapa Nui, the film directed by Kevin Kostner.
