Hotel Honolulu

30 Local Color

In this picturesque place, one of the most stickily visual scenes I had ever witnessed occurred right next door, in the Kodama Hotel courtyard. It was nighttime. I heard chanting, sudden grunting, shouts and mutters, and then creeping toward the pool, peeking past the monkeypod and through the oleanders that hid the fence, I saw the torchlight, the gleaming bodies — Hawaiian men in loincloths and Hawaiian women in ti-leaf skirts slapping fat calabash gourds they called ipo. In counterpoint, like a heartbeat, I heard men thumping thick upright poles on the courtyard flagstones. The Kodama guests snapped pictures. Some of them tape-recorded the chanting. It proved that in the world of Waikiki, local color had not faded.

That was the first night. After that, the Hawaiians came in relays, wearing street clothes, shorts and aloha shirts, office wear, and some of them had briefcases. They brought food, they seemed businesslike, but still they chanted, some scattered ashes, and you would have thought for the ordinariness of the clothes they would have seemed unexceptional, but in fact they were more impressive standing and chanting that way, in scuffed sandals and faded shirts.

Amazing, all this traditional-seeming oddity at a fairly new Japanese hotel, where Buddy took his wahine, Stella, for sushi, to cheer her up when they were in town for her chemotherapy.

Stella said, "That music is so depressing. Do they think it's good for business?"

But the Kodama had not hired these Hawaiians, as some hotels did for torch-lighting ceremonies and hula dancing in cellophane skirts at sunset. The Kodama was trying without any success to get rid of them: the Hawaiians were not on their property but just behind it, and for some guests it provided an attraction.

The chanting was almost unearthly, filled with an urgent and solemn litany of growly sounds, a low-frequency pleading that was a repetition of sad groaning notes. The chant was made into a polyphonic dialogue between two contrasting groups. Dressed in working clothes, they attracted fewer tourists, and more and more they seemed just a nuisance, a pack of island eccentrics.

"I talked to the Kodama manager," Buddy said on one of his sushi days. "He has no idea what to do. I told him to hire them for his Happy Hour. He didn't like that."

The general manager was Japanese. He hardly spoke English. The deputy G.M., a local, spoke to the leader of the Hawaiians and reported back.

"They say this is their land," the deputy G.M. said. "This hotel stands on what was once a fishing heiau. Their ancestors have always met here and made offerings. It was a sacred shrine."

Kodama guests reading by the pool complained about the noise. No longer wearing their loincloths and ti-leaf skirts, the Hawaiians had ceased to be picturesque. The Kodama security team, three big, plump-faced, scowling Samoans, talked to them, urging them to leave, but they refused to budge.

This fuss became audible to the adjacent part of the Hotel Honolulu. "It's one of these access issues," Buddy said. But even when the Kodama security men persuaded the Hawaiians to move farther away, the chanting voices, directed at the Kodama with throbbing monotony, were still loud enough to be heard as a pulse inside the hotel. When they started wearing their loincloths again, and carrying torches, the complaints stopped.

Seeing that the accumulation of people had become a sort of vigil, I asked my hotel staff if they had any idea what was going on. Everyone speculated. Sweetie said, "They are kanaka maoli," meaning that in Hawaiian terms the people were the real McCoy. She could not elaborate. Trey said, "Maybe they're practicing for something," but he didn't know what. Keola the janitor suggested they were praying.

"What sort of prayer?"

He shrugged. Here in Hawaii, the land of long pauses, people might know the answer to one question, but never the answers to two.

"Whyan prayers not same like howlie ones," he said. "Not pono anyway."

What sort of prayers were not righteous? I went to the chanting people themselves, walked around to Kuhio Avenue and through the narrow space between the buildings. On the assumption that the fattest man slapping the biggest gourd was probably the leader, I put the question to him.

"Why do you come here every night?"

"Because we work during the day," he said.

That was logical. They had jobs. But the fat man would not say any more to me, and he would not speak to Keola. The oddest thing was that no one knew these people. If they were entertainers — and they seemed in some sense to be — they were not associated with any groups known in Waikiki. They were, as Keola had said, real Hawaiians, the big, fleshy, statuesque sort, who had been on the islands from the beginning. I did not need to be told that they were related. It was obvious from their faces and physiques that they were of the same ohana, or family. That affinity, and the way they were gathered, made them seem immovable.

"Stella thinks they're spooky," Buddy said.

I told him what Keola had said, about Hawaiian prayers not always being pious.

"Maybe they're trying to get even with someone," Buddy said. "They do these things better in Micronesia. In Tarawa, if someone wants to hurt you, he finds your shit and burns it. No matter where you are, you get boils on your ass."

Because the chanters were unintelligible, everyone invented a fanciful reason to explain their presence. They were mourning, they were praying, they were giving thanks, they were pronouncing a curse. They remained for many weeks, through Halloween and Veterans Day and Thanksgiving — perhaps there was a connection? Did it have something to do with the upcoming anniversary of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy? It was a celebration, it was a blessing, it was a protest. Maybe it was about some people who had been laid off in Waikiki, or on the verge of it. Maybe it was the beginning of some serious wage negotiations — union trouble.

None of the bystanders had the slightest idea of what these Hawaiians were doing. When they were dressed in loincloths and tileaf skirts, people took pictures, but in office clothes they were scarcely visible, like those lost souls, their belongings stacked on luggage carts, who traipsed through Honolulu Airport all day, looking like every other traveler, but much grubbier, and who slept on the benches at night. In time, the Hawaiians became like another nighttime feature of Waikiki.

Something about their chanting and slapping calabashes kept the police at bay. Hawaii was not a place where anyone was ever arrested for singing. These Hawaiians did not fall into any recognizable category of offense. They could not be compared to people who played ball on the beach or had loud radios or noisy dogs. They had children, many of them, but the children sat solemnly and chanted with their elders; they were well behaved. Such responsible people set a good example. Anyone could see that this semicircle of sonorous voices, sitting cross-legged on the sand behind the Kodama, would stay there as long as they liked.

The chanting grew darker, though, becoming lower, deeper, like the wind, but in Hawaii, where there were one hundred and thirty words for wind, this was an especially black wind, mournful on a moonless night, that seemed to issue a warning.

Remembering what Keola had said, I looked up the word "prayer" in a Hawaiian dictionary and found the word for "sorcery." It seemed there were no other kinds. There was a Christian sort of prayer, of course, but all the Hawaiian prayers seemed related to black magic, curses, and casting spells. One specific prayer, 'ana'ana, was defined as "evil sorcery by means of prayer and incantation."

"You know what 'ana'ana is?" I asked Keola.

He didn't have a clue. That was the trouble with Hawaii: the language was so secret, known to so few people, it was like part of a cabalistic ritual, even when what was being said might be no more allusive than remarking on the weather.

After almost two months, in the early days of December, as the wind was rising, they reverted to their Hawaiian clothes that looked like costumes — loincloths, leaf skirts, leis of green leaves encircling their heads like the laurel crowns shown on Greek vases — and to the thumping poles, the slapped calabashes, the scattered ashes.

An urgency gathered in the dark chanting, and all this time tourists promenaded in bathing suits and matching aloha shirts, kids ran around in baggy trousers and expensive caps worn backward or screamed in the surf at Dig Me Beach. There was traffic, too, and the wearying honk of car alarms, and the drone of planes overhead. So the chanting Hawaiians were not a single noticeable group, but rather one group out of many.

It ended one night with a scream — not theirs but someone at the Kodama, a female guest hysterical at seeing a man hurtling through the awning by the pool, tearing it and twisting the poles that held it. The man's body smacked the tiled apron near the diving board. "A jumper," Buddy said. He had fallen twelve floors.

The Hawaiians, who, it seemed, had driven him to destroy himself in expiation for the destruction of their fishing heiau — who had prayed him to death — packed their things and slipped away before the police sirens began.