Somosomo Strait is a channel off Taveuni associated with Kapena’s tourist-fishing trips aboard the Makaira. It also belongs to the novel’s wider Taveuni setting, where an evening of bridge makes the strait’s ordinary workaday geography a backdrop to questions about chance, communication, and how much observers can know from what they see.

Setting and Use

Kapena, a former deep-sea fisherman, had settled on Taveuni and taken tourists fishing in the Somosomo Strait in his technologically advanced boat, the Makaira. His experience at sea included winning first prize in the Lahaina Jackpot Tournament at the age of twenty-three, when he caught a marlin weighing nearly 500 kilograms. By the time of the dinner gathering, he had retired from competitive deep-sea fishing but continued to guide visitors.

That evening Kapena’s contribution to the Maravu gunusede was the fish he had caught that morning. The detail connects the strait to the shared meal: its waters supply the occasion’s food, while Kapena’s fishing past gives him a prominent place among the people gathered at the resort.

The Bridge Game at Taveuni

Elsewhere in the Taveuni sequence, the narrator agrees to play bridge against Ana and José. The night seems too magical for cards, but the prospect of playing the Spanish couple changes his mind. Ana and José repeatedly secure the contract or win the decisive final trick, doing so with such ease that they can keep murmuring their strange, elaborate Spanish phrases between plays. When the narrator is dummy, he uses his time away from the table to write down expressions he has overheard.

Mario voices the suspicion that the couple can see the players’ hands. After a five-club call, he complains that the bidding might as well have come from someone holding the ace; it is as if Ana and José always know what their opponents have. The narrator briefly entertains the idea that the pair might actually read one another’s minds, though he recognizes that the tropical night may be affecting his judgment.

The game also turns into an argument about probability. Mario asks how likely it is that one side would win eight hands in a row if all the players were equally skilled. The narrator points to the deal of the cards, but reasons that eight consecutive favorable distributions would be extraordinarily unlikely; the more credible explanation, he says, is that Ana and José are better players. Ana’s delighted response and her consoling hand on Mario’s shoulder make clear that she enjoys both the winning and the speculation it provokes.

Signals, Skill, and Ambiguity

José redirects the discussion from card luck to a larger question about whether natural processes are driven only by unpredictable chance. Later, the couple’s card play supplies a concrete counterpart to that abstract debate: their apparent ability to anticipate one another can look supernatural from across the table, yet the novel eventually gives the impression a practical basis. José explains that each verse of their learned texts corresponded to a card and that the couple had developed a secret language based on the deck’s colors and numbers. They sometimes whispered a few words during play to communicate the cards in their hands.

This account partly confirms Mario’s suspicion without endorsing his explanation. Ana and José sometimes cheated, but José says Mario was not entirely right to call them clairvoyant; their extraordinary partnership also involved memorized codes, close coordination, and card-playing skill. Because José does not answer directly when asked whether everything had been deception from the beginning, the disclosure leaves some uncertainty intact. The bridge game, like the discussion of chance, sustains a boundary between what can be explained and what remains suggestive.

Narrative Significance

The Somosomo Strait is not the site of the bridge match, but Kapena’s fishing from its waters establishes the material setting around the Maravu gathering: tourism, local labor, and the fish served at the communal dinner. The card game develops a parallel kind of exchange, in which players read bids and plays while the narrator tries to interpret murmured phrases. In both cases, knowledge depends on attention to signals—whether those signals come from the sea’s catch, the cards on the table, or a private language shared by partners.

The scene’s movement from suspected mind-reading to disclosed coded communication makes the bridge table a compact model of the novel’s broader interest in explanation. Probability and skill account for some of Ana and José’s success; secret signals account for more. Yet the unresolved question of how completely they relied on deception keeps the episode from collapsing into a single answer.