Thursday: Papeete
Landing at Faa’a airport in late evening, Clay was breezily waved through immigration and greeted by the balmy air and grin of his young transfer driver, Thierry. Not so pleased, though, by this long-haired French émigré’s driving skills, left hand solo while texting, phoning a girlfriend and puffing away on a ciggie for most of the journey. The road down the west coast was fortunately dormant, but also dark, so Clay could gain no insight into his shadowy surroundings, except the humidity, for he was already prickly with perspiration, still bundled up in wintry garb. An hour later he was dropped off at his relais, shown into a spacious room that opened out onto a garden and unpacked.
Next morning he was awakened by the hum and draught of his ceiling fan, the bright rays of sunshine filtering through the drapes and a burble of voices at the long breakfast table on the patio. Having briefly introduced himself to the two French couples and the older, more reticent German pair, he tucked into slices of tangy grapefruit, reassuring cornflakes, a soft sweet banana rationed by each plate, a chocolate croissant and serial cups of coffee. Then with keen anticipation he set out to discover the delights of a sub-tropical paradise. Walking along the narrow grass verge at the side of the two-lane road, he soon located the entrance to the plage publique, already crowded by nine o’clock with the car park almost full and bodies hugging the broader square of sand where a stream trickled into the lagoon.
Pretending not to notice the bronze statuary of topless women of various ages, European and Polynesian, he halted at the edge of shore to ingest his first vision of that iconic image of a paradisal island – the long, low, level line of lacy white ruffles of surf tumbling over the hidden reef, a view that lingered across the bay. And to the north-east, a distant bluey-black mass of a sister island a dozen miles away, Moorea, a mirage louring against dazzling light.
Then trudging over the sand towards wavelets purling close to the tree-line, he found a spot sheltered from the sunshine too blinding for his wintry eyes, plumped himself in the roots of a low-branching tree with white flowers and took out his notebook.
‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ he said cheerily to the recumbent figure of his neighbour. ‘Quelle sorte d’arbre avons-nous ici? I notice it has reddish-brown nuts.’
‘Voici, c’est temanu en tahitien. Vous etes australien?’
‘Oui. Je regrette que mon francais est tres faible.’
‘Donnez! Let me write it. This wood, it is used for making the bottom of pirogues . . . err canoes. Voyez-vous le long de la plage, les lianes, le purau la-bas . . .’ He was pointing to a shrubby-looking tree. ‘Ca, c’est pour les fibres . . . err cords to hold canoes of wood together.’
‘Merci beaucoup, monsieur. Ca, c’est tres interessant.’
‘Mais tristement,’ he added, shaking his head, ‘The Tahitians once had everything they needed. But now, huh.’
‘Pardonnez-moi.’ Already Clay was stripping off T-shirt and board shorts. ‘One of my ambitions is to swim in the South Seas.’
‘Attention! C’est merdique!’
Mindful only of large stones and dead coral formations in the shallows and the shifting coral crush, he failed to enjoy his brief dunking, except that the stickiness of his body was relieved from the sauna. He was still rubbing his eyes when the stolid figure of his neighbour said what sounded like ‘salte’ with an 'e' acute. ‘Tres salte, n’est-ce pas?’
‘Do you mean “salty”, Clay replied. ‘Or “sale”?’
‘Salty, bien sur. And dirty, obviously. Didn’t you notice the trash you were swimming in? I’d never swim here, certainly not on a public holiday. You’ll make yourself ill.’
‘Christ, my eyes are stinging!’
Jean Claude was about forty, with thick white chest hair, a thickening girth and body ‘assez bronze’. Based in Papeete, he worked the numerous islands of French Polynesia for an assurance company.
‘I see that you are mesmerized by the reef and the rolling of surf,’ he said. ‘Don’t be tricked. Beyond this hypnotic vision lies the tragedy of many a matelot.’
Clay was prepared to risk his rusty schoolboy French, but Jean-Claude was more willing to test his solid grounding in English. And even more willing to discharge his disenchantment.
‘Since the 1960s France has pumped so much money into Tahiti,’ he was recounting. ‘The locals just pocket the money. They desire to imitate the Europeans with consumer goods. Their philosophy is hedonism, living for the day. And why not?’ he shrugged his burly shoulders. ‘The seasons scarcely change. In contrast, the Europeans, especially those from the north, really suffer winter and have of necessity learnt to plan for the future.’
‘But aren’t Tahitians worried about climate change?’
‘Of course, Polynesians know climate change is happening. The coral motus are only three metres above sea-level and marine biologists predict that seas in French Polynesia could rise four feet by the end of the century. What do you think will happen to all those villages that occupy the narrow coastal plains? But for Polynesians when they wake up in the morning, the sun is always shining. So they become lazy, more self-indulgent. Many turn to alcohol, tobacco, drugs. Cannabis is grown locally on many properties. How can the police keep an eye on it when, as you can see, most properties back onto thick maquis . . . err bush. You can grow anything up there on rich volcanic soil. I’d say many families in Tahiti have ready access to drugs, soft drugs. America supplies the hard drugs.’
Sensing the burning sensation on his pinkish-white body, Clay wrapped the beach towel over himself, for now they lay sprawled in stripes of shade.
‘So welcome to the dark side of life in Tahiti. Only last week there was a French television documentary that showed French army helicopters tracking pakalolo, that is to say marijuana crops in our jungle, police burning tons of drugs, scenes of miserable poverty, domestic violence, prostitution, you name it. Apparently, the police seize over one hundred and ten million dollars’ worth of weed every year, but they claim that is only a small fraction of the business. And yet now there is a push to legalize the drug trade to aid the economy. Even more disturbing is that no family here in Tahiti can escape from knowing some victim of incest, rape, prostitution and in particular pregnancy among the young girls unmarried. Here is a situation of great shock, n’est-ce pas?’
‘Tell me, Jean-Claude, what’s stopping you from going back to France?’
‘I can’t go back. I wouldn’t recognize the place I once loved. What’s more, I have a quite good life-style in Tahiti. Yes, I admit it, and a secure job that gives me the occasion to travel.’
‘Even so, it’s your homeland,’ said Clay, observing Jean-Claude’s far-away gaze beyond the fleecy surf-break. ‘You know, I used to dream of settling down in Nice. Ah, la Baie des Anges. Ca, c’est vraiment magnifique!’
‘In France racism is a big, big problem, even in Nice, not whites against blacks, but blacks against whites. It was President Mitterand, a left-wing socialist, who made tensions much worse. He introduced an immigration policy that at first seemed successful. Immigrants were encouraged to assimilate into French culture and Christianity but were permitted ‘the right to difference’. But since when have ideals measured up to practical reality? In recent years we have seen the fabric of French society being torn apart. We didn’t predict the problems for the children of the second and third generations of North African Arabs. They were living in the poor housing projects in the outer banlieus of Paris and could get no work. Is it a surprise when they rebel with so much anger? Chirac was obliged to declare a state of emergency against anarchy absolute; Sarkozy deported those rioters who were French naturalized.’
‘Yes, I saw the riots on TV, all those cars torched, the hatred and violence of the barricades all over again. A dreadful shock. Of all the cities in the world, Paris remains my favourite, but I haven’t been back for many years.’
‘It’s just not the same. French culture has been diluted. In the schools too there is a lack of discipline and intellectual rigour.’
‘Even in the lycees?’
‘Mais oui, even there. More egalitarian attitudes since ’68 have led to a loss of respect for the professors, a loss of interest in learning but emphasis on passing exams and getting a comfortable job in the professions. Mon dieu, the parents blame teachers for their children not winning the marks desired. This is absurd. It is necessary for these parents to take more responsibility. Attention, regardez l’heure! Maintenant je dois voler a un rendez-vous tres important. Excusez-moi.’
‘Eh bien, monsieur, beaucoup de remerciements pour vos impressions de Tahiti,’ said Clay, shaking Jean-Claude’s hand. ‘A bientot!’ But rather hoped it wasn't.
‘Jouissez vos vacances. Et rappelons-le: Tahiti, c’est un paradis perdu.’
Downtown in the Marche de Papeete, Skye was bowled over by the exotic perfumes and explosion of rich colours from the bounty of varied flower arrangements, flower necklaces and headbands, the flame-coloured spears of the Birds of Paradise dazzling, before she located the gaudy flower-patterned and sun-drenched Tahitian sarongs and was running a hand over the fabrics on display. ‘What is this white material?’ she asked the beamng, eager-to-please assistant, up on her toes with every step. ‘The texture is very fine.’
‘Voici tapa or cloth made from bark of tree, ute. You say, paper mulberry tree.’
‘And this rougher cloth, the chocolate-coloured one?’
‘Ca, celle de aoa or banyan.’
‘I like very much. I will take three,’ she said, holding up three fingers, ‘but give me a few minutes to look at all these designs.’
‘D’accord, mam’selle.’
Skye took her time appraising the various motifs of lizard, tiki, shark teeth, the Marquesan cross, fish tails, human figures dancing. She’d take the dancing figures herself and give a couple to best friends she geeked out with - perhaps. Her mother, no, she wouldn’t appreciate that sort of pressie. ‘We’re not squandering our savings or super on you. The bucks stop here!’ was a tirade still etched with acid. ‘Once you’ve got your degree, you’re on your own, my girl!’
‘Voila, mam’selle. And do not forget to put a tiare Tahiti behind your right ear if you don’t ‘ave a loverrr and you will take a step more closerrr to paradis.’
‘Merci bien. Yes, I should be right with this monoi insect repellent, Temptress nail polish and a new bikini I’ve just bought.’ And laden, descended the stairs for an espresso and chocolat fondant.
Now twenty-two, Skye had taken her degree in actuarial studies, done what Dad had recommended for future security, but god, what a bore that bloody course! Still, she’d hustled for part-time work at Financial Solutions and at the same time graduated in a fun correspondence course in travel writing, much to her father’s consternation.
Anyhow she could afford to splash out a bit, book a cabin for herself on the Transit de Paradis and pay the single supplement. More than once she’d been warned that by-lines for travel writers are only paid in advance to pros with proven track record, but it wouldn’t take long to write the notation: ‘For sale at your rates’. What the hell, she’d kick up her heels in a cruisy life-style and tuck a flower behind her right ear; besides, she deserved a three-week break from the home guard.
At Pa’ea, a few minutes from his relais, Clay found a super marche where he bought a baguette and packet of Emmental, but he wasn’t so much hungry as thirsty. He’d boiled some water the night before and put it in the fridge. Beyond the plunge pool he sat down beneath a coconut tree for his pique-nique modeste. Above, the clusters of green coconuts were so small they looked like plump acorns in tan helmets burgeoning on long, thin twigs of twisty spider legs. Rags of fibrous matting hung limp from pliant olive green branches arching over the grass and knotted roots of a fig tree with a pointy rabble of prehensile claws.
Apart from a couple of nodding hens scrimmaging in the earth, it was very quiet, that time after noon when every Frenchman evaporates for a two-hour siesta in the heat of the day. Though in the dry and mild season of June, the temperature would be hardly 25 degrees. Certainly the air away from the fumes of the main road was sweet with the scent of yellow hibiscus and jasmine.
Late afternoon saw Clay turning up the allee from his guest-house, the relais, toward the hills along a rutted, pebbly track of private residences, a typical Polynesian allee, narrow, quiet, but a world in itself to young kids on their bikes or a pair of teenage girls walking up and down glued to mobiles, a whirr of red-throated sparrows alighting on a stone wall, squeet-squeet, one, two, three, four in sync, chickens by turn darting and scrabbling, a cockerel flapping onto a wall, then crowing his territorial rights. These private residences boasted well-tended lawns, a sleepy dog or two, invariably the tall, slender-boled coconut palm leaning high over the fare, a tiare tree, the national tree, white petals like in-curving propeller blades, a breadfruit tree with its spread of long leaves and plump, round fruit in green skin and a pamplemousse, providing giant, thick-textured grapefruit that one sliced rather than halved.
Then up on the last terrace, mainly short grass, coils of lengthy hose and children’s swings looking seaward over the coastal plain, a banana tree with four decks of baby green bananas, from which extruded the ribbed tail of a devil and fluted mauve leaves of its flower and a banyan tree with several organ pipes bunched tall and straight. Up ahead, the bush with sheeny verdancy, bloodied with the red flowers of frangipani, impenetrable and silent. In a scarcely visible clearing just beyond the edge, he spied a children’s tree-house and pondered the whereabouts of the cannabis plantations.
Between the tiered boughs of the canopy, Clay could glimpse the sun as blinding orb above the silhouette of Moorea, streams of smoke seeming to rise from the rocks at the island’s base, the sea a quivering silver.
In the evening he strolled along the main road to the playground of the local primary school where a mobile van with cooking ranges, a solitary roulotte, was serving sweet and savoury crepes and waffles. It was a cheap meal, the almond, chocolate and banana pancake with raspberry coulis, but he relished the different sweet taste at first before the sugariness made him wince, but he enjoyed the darkness relieved solely by the van’s string of lights, the warm evening air with the scent of gardenia, the few excitable kids skipping in from the shadows of the car park to place their order at the counter followed by a single parent and the sense of quiet in the darkness, for the traffic had eased considerably. He recalled a distant memory of a Greek island, dining at a small table right down on the harbour front, secluded in the dim orbit of one’s own lantern.
Back at her pension, Skye was impatient to experiment with different wraps for her pareu. The assistant had told her there were at least twenty methods, as every island had its own style. The cloth, patterned with Marquesan symbols in a bright orange with diagonal bands of darker orange, measured about six feet by three. She followed basic instructions.
Now, let’s see. Take two ends of the pareu and hold them longways behind your back. Next bring them round to your front. Hold the edge of one end over your shoulder and bring the opposite edge of the other end around to join it. Tie both ends together over your shoulder. Et voila! Vous etes tres belle, mam’selle, she said, winking with a pout at the three-quarter length mirror, glancing over her shoulder as she spun into a series of appreciative half-turns.
From time to time, Clay had been chewing his lip about the family he had left behind. The excitement of adventure to do something by himself for himself was mitigated by pangs of guilt. But he had been quiescent too long, hadn’t he. It was all very well for Mercedes to be dedicated to her career, earning as a hard-nosed solicitor over twice as much money as himself, but ever since their two daughters had reached adolescence Mercedes had somehow managed their lives, just as she appeared with her energy and certitude to dominate his. And now that he had reached the big 5 0 and his daughters had graduated from uni, he felt the ties to his marriage paying out ever more loosely. Now he was sailing in uncharted waters.
For more years than he cared to remember he had been senior partner in a small publishing company that produced a handful of self-published biographies of seniors who wanted to circulate copies to their family and friends, usually a modest run in memoriam. Clay would refer to a standard list of basic questions to ask the would-be author, his principal strategy to tease out the most interesting details and dramas and ensure the sitter did not waffle too long. There was little scope for imagination, but he shared other people’s happy moments and sympathised with their bouts of hardship and suffering. Until recently, the most popular enquiries had come from World War II veterans; nowadays increasing interest was shown by Vietnam vets. After tape-recording the author’s account over half a dozen sessions only – otherwise one would lose the compulsion and possibly the narrative thread - he’d spend a month editing, not changing the characteristic style, the individual voice had to be authentic to readers, but tidying up the expression and checking the sequencing of events. His business also derived an income stream from publishing an educational magazine with national circulation fortunate enough to enjoy the rights to syndicated articles from Time magazine.
Clay had taken an intensive four-week course (non-credit) on the Post-Impressionists at La Trobe uni to do something a bit more stimulating and discovered that Paul Gauguin’s yearning to escape to a remote island in the South Pacific chimed with his own inner needs. He finally plucked up the gumption to broach Mercedes about – wait for it; he held his breath - cruising the Marquesas Islands.
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘It’s about time you took some initiative. Where on earth are they?’
At first stunned that his wife wished to shuffle him off so readily; at second, relieved that civil war had been averted, if only temporarily; then thirdly, increasingly anxious about the hidden costs of wanderlust in extremis.
‘I think both of us need a decent break,’ she said briskly. ‘I might consider flying solo myself soon.’
Clay’s stomach gave a lurch. What did that mean exactly? Flying solo? But he knew Mercedes wanted him to ask, so swallowed any vestige of pride and jealousy. Besides, if Marlon Brando could find dreamboat Tarita in Tahiti, then who knows? In the meantime he’d better get down to some serious reading on the great French painter.
Having dumped his case next to the others by the gangway, Clay mounted the ladder and presented booking papers at reception and received a key-ring. Soon the next group of boarders was requested to muster at various stations to meet the guides who would show them their quarters.
‘Bonjour, je m’appelle Mareva. Good morning, my name is Mareva. I am going to take you to your dormitory. Please follow me.’
Clay was amongst half a dozen who stepped out on to the narrow side of the restaurant deck and walked along the gunwale towards the stern. The guide, a thick-set Polynesian in her thirties, black hair in a bun and a white flower behind her left ear, unlocked a sturdy metal door, ‘Mind the step!’ and gathered them up in a gloomy square room divided by two rails of coat hangers. Round its perimeter were storage lockers for cases as well as double-decker bunks closed off by café-style curtains.
Then amid mutterings: ‘Is it mixed? Men and women?’
‘Yes, it is uni-sex,’ was the matter-of-fact snap, followed by one or two startled looks and raised eyebrows, as if ‘share accommodation’ had been interpreted as something quite different.
‘Some of you are in here, which has space for everyone to hang their clothes or washing. There you see the number of your bunk.’ Mareva pointed at two small cupboards at the base of each tier of bunks. ‘If you are in the upper bunk, you must take care of the ladder. The others are in the next room.’ Which proved to be a dark, narrow coney warren: entry passage with two short wings.
‘Hmm, tight fit,’ as they squeezed in. ‘Oops, pardon me.’
‘Here you have your security cupboards for valuables as well as clothes. Your second key will open them. So don’t lose your keys, huh?’
Clay was already fussing with pockets for passport, wallet, thank goodness, the keys . . . Now where the hell did I put my traveller’s cheques?
‘And first door on the left, very important, huh, you have toilets, showers and washing basins. Have you some questions?’
‘Yes,’ said Clay. ‘Where’s our luggage?’
A gracefully sleek white ship, the Transit de Paradis, with distinctive orange bubble on the prow at water-line. The front half of the vessel was given over to the hold for cargo, dominated by two enormous yellow pincers, arms of the Liebherr cranes, facing each other at rest but swinging out over the side with a hoist for 4-wheel drives, autos, mopeds, outrigger canoes and general stores unloaded at small villages, which might be transported to outlying communities and hidden valleys. Also mounted, tenders for disembarking passengers and four orange lifeboats. Freight to be collected might include goats, citrus and noni fruit for health-allergic Californians. The biggest export was copra, the solid, dried coconut meat, which contained an oil that Polynesians use in cooking and making margarine and soap.
Some 350 feet in length, 50 feet wide, the Transit de Paradis boasted a restaurant, two bars, lounge, conference room, small gym, swimming pool, library and sun decks. In fact, Clay was exploring decks, stairs and lifts when an announcement was made that he ignored. Already he’d located the gym and tested an exercise bike while gawking out to sea through a porthole. He’d met no one when he made his way back up to the restaurant deck, found his way to the heavy door, tripped on the high metal step but was propped up by the stubborn door and spotted his suitcase amongst others in the middle of the square room. He decided to unpack while his shipmates were otherwise occupied.
All of a sudden there was an almighty explosion, as if a boiler had blown up in the engine room, before it dawned that the beginning of a traditional Polynesian welcome given by the musicians to the new arrivals had struck up, the almighty thwack of a pahu anaana, a bass drum two metres tall. By the time the resounding of heavy drumming and slighter refrains of plangent singing and bursts of applause had ended, he had shoved his case into an empty locker and piled his clothes and odd items aimlessly into his security cupboard and posited electric razor, glasses case and the leaky sun cream lotion into the small drawer beneath his lower bunk.
Then rejoined other passengers on the boat deck for a beaker of punch and handful of nuts. The Transit de Paradis was already ebbing smoothly out of port, then once beyond the barrier reef rocking with gentle rhythm. Digital cameras in hand, those freshly embarked were looking back at the slowly disappearing houses burrowing up the hillsides of Papeete and teetering on the edge of deep-cut ravines or snaking up over the newly bulldozed brown slashes that scarred their view.
Sunday: Fakarava
In the darkling dawn the first flames of sunrise. Spiky silhouette of palms. Sparsely planted fares with shiny roofs along a thin line of atoll. Castles of cloud banked on far horizons. The Transit de Paradis inscribes a half-circle towards the anchorage a hundred metres from the slender littoral. The smallest motu or islets floating in the sea look sinister, like grey-edged black microbes under the microscope. Slate grey reef herons with greenish legs are feeding off the mud flats.
Alighting from the barge at the pier meant a short walk to the sliver of paved road through Rotoava Village, on either side of which lay the open sea and the expansive lagoon. The expected stalls were laid out by patiently smiling locals without any hassle for visitors to buy the local speciality of black pearls or wooden mementoes or tapa cloths.
Several incursionists split for the beach for a snorkel or swim close to the reef. All adrift, Clay fell in with other couples sauntering toward the Catholic church to witness rather than attend mass. In the front pews to the right of the aisle young children, perhaps five or seven, nearly all girls dressed in best white dresses, were singing Polynesian hymns in bursts of enthusiasm, verse after verse, whipped along by a middle-aged conductor marking the beat with her emphatic downward gestures. Dandling babies in their laps, a dozen proud mothers were sitting in the back pews with other perfectly dressed infants, their menfolk presumably fishing out on the reef.
In the garden of one wooden fare a small group including Skye were making hats by weaving pandanus leaves over and under, secured by wiry coconut fibres.
From some preparatory reading, she recalled James Michener narrating how one day in the oceans of time, perhaps a million years ago, a coconut chanced to bob up on the volcanic soil of a remote Pacific Island.
‘So much depended on the coconut,’ the middle-aged lady in her bright flower-patterned pareu was saying, hunkered on the ground, a dry, scrubby dirt overlaying the splinters of dead coral, ‘specially for the original habitation of these islands. How many names do you think there are for the different stages of the maturing coconut?’
‘Isn’t it twenty-eight?’ said Skye.
‘At least!’ said her instructor, with a giggle and gleam in her eye, as if daring anyone to challenge the number. ‘First, some jelly is scooped out by old people or sick people. Then when the nuts are still young, they provide delicious water. When they’re old, precious oil or sweet milk. The palms are used as thatch for the roof of our fares. Wood from the trunk – as you see there are no branches - is used for building fares and bridges or carving gods. Hard shells make cups and containers. Ribs from the fronds we use for starting fires. See those large, feathery leaves?’ she said, pointing to the tall palm leaning over them. ‘Their sharp ribs make darts. Very painful,’ she giggled again. ‘Strips of leaves make hats, mats and baskets. The sap of tree blossoms makes a sweet drink called toddy or tuba and is also used to make sugar, vinegar and an alcoholic drink. Fibres from the husks give us this sennit or twine and also the short, stiff fibres called coir that we weave into mats, ropes and brooms.’
‘So that’s the story of coconut,’ added Skye, studying her reedy green bonnet with approval. ‘What more would you need? And it even grows on the coral atolls with precious little soil. Awesome!’
Exoticism, eroticism was far more than a wet dream; it served to refine the sensibility of Baudelaire, whose sensual love for his Venus Noire, her sculptural beauty and heady scent, transported him into the land of dreams. Gauguin too felt that ‘terrible itch for the unknown’. As early as 1887 he declared, ‘I am off to Panama to live there like a savage’. And later: ‘I am off to Martinique’; then ‘The matter is irrevocably decided. I am off to Madagaskar’; then ‘to Tonkin.’ Eventually: ‘I shall be leaving shortly for Tahiti, a small island in the Pacific where one can live without money.’ Letters of Gauguin
And Clay smiled at the recognition that he himself was off to destinations unknown.
Monday: En Mer
A languid mood pervaded the Transit de Paradis under a dome of lacustrine blue.
So even an invitation to the navigation deck lent some structure to the morning. The perky chief engineer ushered the English-speaking group into a room with a wide-angle view on three sides of the stark Pacific. Standing in spaces between radio gadgets, banks of controls and computers, the group gravitated towards the prominent bucket chair facing out over the wide blue plasma of ocean. With a cheeky grin, Skye promptly claimed the seat. ‘Now where’s our global positioning system?’ she asked.
‘Everything’s on cruise control,’ retorted the chief engineer with good humour. ‘At least, I hope it is.’ And proceeded to explain the 12.5 km cruising speed of the Mak engine, the power of the diesel generators and the efficiency of the desalination system.
At reception, passengers could borrow specialist books that explored the cultural life of the Tuamotu and Marquesas Islands. Clay signed for a couple of tomes in English on the life and works of Gauguin and took them up to the lounge. A heated discussion was already brewing at the bridge table, the well caparisoned lady from East Perth vituperating against a penalty; an American couple were deep into Scrabble, Jim frequently apologizing to Nell about transgressing the time rule; and occasional transients were checking out the library annexe for popular paperbacks and magazines bequeathed by previous voyagers. Clay grabbed a hot chocolate and was flipping through the illustrations of Gauguin’s oeuvre when he was taken by an oil painting of Two Tahitian Women on the Beach, 1892.
The women fill the canvas from border to border; although in effect, the top of the head of one and complete right arm of the other are cut off. The strong vertical architecture is bridged by a dog’s body and legs, while the ground of watery rose and two bands of orange sand brushed in as decoration is rapid and carefree to give an ‘unfinished’ look - characteristics of twentieth century art. Both women are statuesque and solid, especially from the waist down, providing a dignity that belies the popular designation of ‘savage’. However, the profile of the woman with her back to the observer has a ‘primitif’ face that suggests a culture tracing back hundreds of years before European discovery in the late sixteenth century.
Whilst there was a sensuousness about their bearing, these were not the beautiful erotic women of the western male’s imagination; indeed, there was a modest gesture, one arm covering both breasts, held by the woman on the left, but a natural un-self-consciousness. Nor was there a hint of that lightness of movement and undulating hands practised by the graceful dancers that had delighted passengers on the Transit.
Coming across the illustration ‘Vahine no te miti’ (‘Woman of the Sea’), a large-boned woman whose valleyed back and boulder-like posterior dominated the frame, a band of orangey sand providing bright contrast with her dark skin tones and black hair, Clay was reminded of a co-incidence that had occurred only three days before in Papeete. He was meandering back from the Musee de Tahiti et Ses Isles via the surf break, then cutting through a field of mango trees alongside the Hotel Meridien to the beach beyond its overwater thatched bungalows. There was no one about as he scanned south, for the beach backed onto the walls and concrete steps of relais and private properties often guarded by snarling guard dogs. Every so often streams and run-off through pipes would be flowing down from the mountains, spilling out into several deep pools which he would gingerly transverse.
Sauntering, sometimes scrambling, back along the narrow strand of sand pocked with pebbles and beach hibiscus, deep pools and incoming currents, he was suddenly struck. The other side of a tree growing out from the stones, angled at forty-five degrees, was a coppery-skinned woman lying on her back on the sand. He checked his step for a moment, then circumspectly approached the contorted mass in a widening arc. Something strange about the woman’s frame appealed, for it seemed larger than life, save for a foreshortened head slightly aslant, but her long black hair was knotted with a flame-coloured ribbon and plumed out to one side like drapery. Her big strong thighs were jackknifed and slightly splayed out in front, so that the arch of her legs dominated with fleshy calves. Breasts, smooth oval discs, had slid down her sides as if too heavy for their customary pose.
With his slow, softly, softly trudge in a widening arc, scarcely taking his eyes off her, wondering at rather than admiring the still, sleepy, intimidating form that reminded him of Picasso’s colossal mock-Classical figures of the1920s. He sat down about fifty metres from this vision, bemused, his gaze cutting from the hypnosis of coral surf ruffling the reef to a fixation on this Amazon marooned. Until his attention was disturbed by the backpacker who chanced along, passing close by the woman’s feet with surprise then incredulity, pointedly ignoring Clay, who was ready with embarrassed acknowledgement. And parking himself forty metres beyond the Australian, stared out to sea, presumably waiting for some further revelation. Now feeling uncomfortable, as if confronted by his alter ego, a Peeping Tom, Clay reluctantly resumed his ramble round the bay, still marvelling at that imposing vision, exiting eventually at the public beach of Pa’ea..
Slathered in 30+ and an application of French White nail polish on her toes, Skye was stretched out on the banana lounge in the missionary position, fidgeted with the underside of her new bikini top, white tiare petals on red ground, then lay back with her head again pointing heavenward in bliss. She’d bunched up her frizzed black hair at the back to avoid irritation.
What was irritating her was not the CD’s monotonous thump of double bass and wail of Polynesian singers emanating from the bar overlooking the swimming pool, but her story.
Or rather the failure of her travel article to write itself.
Occasionally, she flipped over on her front and unhooked the strap at her back, and extended the undersides of her arms as if flying through space instead of gliding through these level, satiny blue waters of the vast, outlandish Pacific, shot through with the thinnest of milky striations and the diffused riffle of white wake, no vessel in sight, nothing green sighted since the last coconut palm on the atolls.
Tootsies snugly poised on white plastic chairs or stools, passengers, American, Australian, German or French, were soaking up sun as well as the much vaunted local beer, Hinano Tahiti, liqueur de coconut, le rhum brun and other exotic ruby red or blue heaven cocktails served by the big-boned, bare-chested barrel of a pony-tailed, muscle-toned Polynesian barman with the blank stare of a tiki petroglyph and a deep cavernous growl.
When suddenly Forrest, the American from Florida, said, ‘Say, waita minute. Isn’t that there bird a frigate?’
There was a scrape of deck furniture and scrambling lurch to the stern rail, pocket-sized cameras conjured up from nowhere.
‘Wow, he’s a beauty, isn’t he?’ waxed Forrest, a big, bluff blond guy with a calm but smooth voice in an easygoing American lilt that could dominate a ten-seater table in the restaurant. ‘No kidding. Probably checking out the wake for food scraps. Funny thing, yer know, we’re so focused on the touch screen of our i-Pads that we don’t even notice the sky.’
The lone black bird hung in the air with distinctive broad, M-angled wings, long enough for the happy snappers. Skye vaguely heard the buzz of excitement but was sinking too far into her doze to stir from her haven of warm comfort.
Tuesday: Ua Pou
A sense of eager anticipation amongst the early risers scuttling about with cameras for best vantage point on the upper decks. Virtually a somnambulist, Clay had already ghosted into the lounge for a coffee to kick-start, then the library for a quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas to inscribe in his notebook:
The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense.
At first blush the mountains dropped from the shrouds and the basalt stacks slowly stretched knobbly fingers into the underbelly of sleepy, sombre-grey puffs of cloud.
Dark green ravines with scree of Gauguin’s viridian green sloped down to the faces of cliffs chalky-white to orange. Clay spotted a black maw of a deep, dark cavern, then wedged in a narrow valley the curt landing-strip cut down from the hills to the beach for low take-off over the sea. A vertical groove of what might have been a cascade frozen and hills denuded, rounded, mined to dirt, grey-scored with a dusting of chocolate earth.
Round the promontory, the first signs of a small township hugging the shore and a scatter of white houses nestling further up the valley. Prominent over all in the foothills of peaks pleated with green skirts, a large white cross stood tall.
Rays of sunshine break through, casting an orange luminescence over this rugged terrain and clump of bushes clinging to steep hillsides. Here flourished the white fairy tern with the most perfect black pearl for an eye.
Cautiously, the Transit de Paradis turns in the mouth of the bay and edges its stern towards the sheltered harbour devoid of visible movement and seacraft, save four yachts and a white catamaran bumping out to sea.
But on the village pae pae the musicians were ready with greetings, perhaps the first tourists they’d seen in three weeks, with Marquesan songs on guitars and medium-sized drums, tutu, and women to place leis round the neck of each passenger. Ultramarine lorikeets gathering nectar and flower pollen from local gardens gave piercing shrieks. A flock of red-browed firetails was feeding in grassy fields.
‘I’m no foodie,’ said Clay, gawping suspiciously at the goat cheese mousse.
‘Oh dear, you poor old thing. There’s humanity in an act of gourmandise, you know. Every time we zest up our lemon custard with a grand cru Marquesan vanilla clove, we peek into the varieties of human experience and improve our chances of expressing individual elan. Ultimately, it’s precisely that exciting melange of aromas, flavours and cultures that warms the cockles of humanity.’
He was still savouring a smidgin of the liver-coloured mousse, a hunk of baguette at the ready in case he needed to smother the taste, then nodded with almost reluctant appreciation.
‘There you go. It didn’t burn off your taste buds, did it?’
‘Not yet,’ he replied. ‘Anyway, my name’s Clay from Melbourne, Australia.’
‘And I’m Marianne from Woolloomooloo. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Likewise. So what sort of work do you do, Mary-Ann?’
‘Marry Anne,’ she said pointedly. ‘I create edible artworks.’
‘You do what?’
‘I suppose you could say I’m a food stylist. Or you could say I’m a pseudo-Tussaudiste.’
‘I would if I could get my tongue around it. Please explain.’
‘I just lerrv the work of the Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. You’ve heard of him, I suppose?’
‘Haven’t the foggiest.’
‘Arky was a genius. He painted human heads as pieces of fruit or veggies or flowers etcetera etcetera. What a scream! Remember he was a Renaissance man.’
‘Really? Mm, very bold-o. So you’re a painter, sort of?’
‘Rather! But a painter manqué. In effect, a photographer. I cheat, of course. I use clay and blue tack to stick my heads together before they wilt or go mouldy. Whereas a Gauguin self-portrait may crudely be described as oil on canvas, my typical sconescapes could be defined as crudités digitales. Or star fruit, taro, breadfruit, limes, papaya, banana, what-have-you.’
‘Creating what exactly? Arkimouldo?’
She shrugged a shoulder and gave a shrewish pursing of her lips. ‘I could do a mock-up of your mug with liquorice allsorts in no time. A more satisfying creation would be a tiara of tiare flowers ensconced on a pamplemousse head, with flower stone eyes, onion ears, a sweet banana moustache and a neck of yam. How’s that for starters?’
‘Hmm. Very down-to-earth.’ Though he looked gob-smacked. ‘More wine?’
It was evident that Gauguin’s bright, bold colours became more sombre in several of his last works after the death of his favourite daughter, Aline, in France in 1897. What surprised Clay was that in spite of the artist’s physical deterioration, syphilis, serious heart condition, severe case of eczema, paranoia, attempted suicide, he was still able to do some of his best work, even captivating dreamscapes of The White Horse with the green tinge of the white horse set against the red horse with naked rider, perspective askew through a tangle of blue branches; and the pink sand that also dominates the ground of Riders on the Beach:
Colour, which is vibration just as music is, is able to attain what is most universal yet at the same time most elusive in nature . . . I dream of violent harmonies, wrote Gauguin in a letter to Andre Fontainas in 1899.
But it is Self-Portrait with Spectacles which Clay contemplates with admiration. Painted shortly before his death in 1903, Gauguin levels a steady gaze at the viewer, as if accepting the reality of imminent death. The bronzed bullet head and penetrating eyes testify to an inner strength and a determination to reveal the truth as he sees it, the stubbornly proud head of a defiant outsider.
Wednesday: Nuku Hiva
Departure in convoy of forty jeeps up a narrow, winding road through the mountains towards Hatiheu. Views over the dense green valleys dizzying. At the second look-out, the procession of vehicles parks along the edge of the road, from where one seeks the Transit de Paradis lying in state, the solitary vessel in the bay. Skye feels an immediate rush of warmth, recognition that the white-hulled ship has already become a homey assurance.
Suddenly, a skirl of shrieks. Someone, a woman, has collapsed to the ground down a slippery bank. Still she screams as a dozen flock round to help, but most hold back for fear of aggravating what sounds like a serious injury. Crumpled up, hidden by bystanders, others turning away while sensing ominous pain, the stricken woman’s imploring, begging, ‘Non, non!’ screaming in stabbing bursts, more gutteral with every slight adjustment of movement or physical touch from every well-intentioned gesture.
‘Stand back, everyone!’ calls Diodore, one of the French-speaking tour guides, rushing in to the circle.
‘Where’s the doctor?’ mutters Nell through clenched teeth near the edge of the mountain. ‘This is horrible.’
‘I think it’s her ankle,’ offers another.
The portly ship’s doctor is trotting downhill with medical bag in hand, but as soon as he kneels by the woman’s side the intermittent screams rend the air briefly, then die.
Muttered rumours pass around the outer circles that are already drifting away to gaze out at nothing in particular: ‘Perhaps the bone has broken through the flesh.’
At last a hush has fallen over the body, over the whole tour. Within twenty-five minutes an emergency vehicle has roared up the mountain. It’s the last the injured party glimpses of the Marquesas, from a stretcher; the last news the holiday-makers hear of her officially. On the grapevine, Martine was airlifted to Papeete for treatment to her broken ankle; then she and her husband were flown back to Paris.
Clay had been speed-reading Herman Melville’s Typee. What did the very young American whaler turned author have to say about the Marquesas Islands in 1842?
What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up? Naked houris – cannibal banquets – groves of cocoa-nut – coral reefs – tattooed chiefs – and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with breadfruit-trees – savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols – heathenish rites and human sacrifices.
Never use clichés, advised her tutor, Aeneas Wunderlich. Skye was casting a critical eye over a typical piece from her community newspaper she’d brought along as a reminder of the pitfalls of travel writing. She set about underlining the hard-sell clichés, verbal and imagistic: ‘Treat yourself to a slice of Paradise’ . . . ‘awesome beauty’ . . .’lunch on the private beach sounded simply too good to pass up’ . . . ‘in time for sunset cocktails and a veritable feast served under the stars’ . . . ‘for un-spoilt, secluded luxury, Rangiroa is hard to beat’ . . . ‘unparalleled views of the azure waters of these fantasy islands’ . . . ‘this is the stuff deserted island fantasies are made of’ . . . ‘ranked high on many Aussies’ must-see, must-visit lists’ . . . ‘for a break filled with underwater wonder and natural beauty that is literally breathtaking, the Marquesas Islands have it covered.’
‘You need a good lead,’ Aeneas had advised. ‘Write down key words to build each paragraph with a sense of unity. You’ll soon find yourself tearing up draft after draft and discarding some of your best ideas.’
No such luck. If only.
‘Cross out gushy superlatives, like ‘lovely’, ‘terrific’, ‘unbelievable’, ‘best’, ‘supreme’, ‘ginormous . . .’
Which didn’t leave too many words to play with. Fanbloodytastic!
Clay was puzzling over one of Gauguin’s last works, D’Ou venons-nous, Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous? (‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’). He was firstly struck by the intensity of the colours, particularly since Gauguin was usually too poor to spend money on paint, let alone canvas. The numinous blue, reddish browns and dark greens were predominant colours but by no means naturalistic.
The painting seemed to be a synthesis of images, though tellingly devoid of male figures: sensuous and contemplative females; religious and secular; Biblical and Polynesian symbols. You could read the painting from right foreground to left to reflect the journey of life, from the sleeping baby to the old woman facing death. The central figure, like Eve, is reaching up for a mango, suggesting fertility and the pleasures of life, countered by the idol with rigid upraised arms pointing to the Beyond or inevitable death or warning against breaking tabus. Two young girls appear to be contemplating their own destiny. Animals and birds also belong in this luxuriant tableau and the pattern of twisting vines adds to the dream-like atmosphere.
He could barely wait to rub up against the spirit of Gauguin on the morrow.
Thursday: Tahuata, Hiva Oa
Hiva Oa, shaped like a seahorse with jagged tail. The Transit de Paradis anchored in its gullet at Atuona.
The second busload was dropped close to Calvary Cemetery, to which they walked on a steady gradient that offered a splendid view over Baie des Traitres. Jacques Brel’s headstone with plaque featuring the images of the Belgian singer and his mistress was situated just inside the entrance, that of Gauguin two rows up to the right, erected on a slightly higher mound with an arthritic frangipani struggling cross-wise out of it, a handful of white, yellow-centred flowers hanging on. On the headstone stood his bronze casting of the clay figure, Oviri, a naked female divinity – Gauguin described it to Mallarme as ‘a cruel enigma’ - treading on the bleeding head of a wolf as she strangles the cub. Perhaps suggesting that the tormented artist was finally destroyed by his own demon – his driven talent. Or was he hinting at the enigma of our own final destination?
‘Highly over-rated, eh,’ declared Zak, a Canadian from Alberta whom Clay had been trying to avoid on account of his acute deafness, which meant repeating every comment half a dozen times, during which the guy with creased forehead and screwed-up eyes was struggling to read his wife’s lips for an interpretation. Yet he could be as sharp as a cut from live coral. At their first encounter over lunch when Clay had asked her, ‘What part of the States are you guys from?’ Zak had read his lips quick enough, reached over the table to grab his wrist in a vice and threatened to administer a Chinese burn with a breathy ‘Say, Mac . . . ‘
Palms out hastily raised, Clay was about to issue a public apology when his wife stepped in, ‘Can it, Zak! The gentleman didn’t know.’
‘I’d still like to pay homage,’ retorted Clay testily.
Then the group straggled down toward the Magasin Gauguin, an old clapboard general store where the artist had bought his supplies, including bottles of liquor that he kept cool in a well beside his house. A huge mango tree grew alongside, some fallen fruit rotting along the side of the road, sniffed at by a half-starved dog with rib-boned undercarriage. Clay fell back, suddenly taking it into his head to examine the faces of the local womenfolk to check out any resemblance to Gauguin’s offspring or sultry models from five generations back. The first woman who approached, forty-something, slowed down to a standstill, glared back in turn, disconcerting him into turning away to cough theatrically into his fist as she drew level. Then a bare-footed teen lingered on the store’s veranda, staring with curiosity at the passing tourists, before skipping down onto the narrow roadway. With a more surreptitious appraisal from lowered eyes, Clay was unnerved to look up at such a blinding smile and giggle that he quite forgot the aim of his research.
A more likely prospect emerged, shoulder-length raven hair tied in two plaits, red hibiscus flower tucked behind her ear, wearing a pareu halter-style.
‘What’s the dilly-o, stare-cat? You havin’ a perv at me?’
‘Excuse me, I was wondering if you were a descendant of Gauguin or one of his models?’
‘No way, man. Moleskin I mebbe, but I ain’t no sex on a stick Poly, if that’s what bakes your biscuit.’
‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I thought . . . ‘
‘Now you quit that hasslin’, you old noodle dick. I’m on vacation from Maui.’
Crushed as coral heads by careless flippers, Clay could barely walk straight, let alone think. He was in no mood to search for Gauguin anywhere, least of all in the Paul Gauguin Cultural Center. Duty-bound, he mooched around aimlessly. The gallery threw up much reading about the many paintings on display, but he could only stare blankly. Till his attention was arrested by the epitaph from the local bishop:
The only noteworthy event here has been the sudden death of a contemptible individual named Gauguin, a reputed artist, but an enemy of God.
‘Huh, Lady Gaga would’ve been incensed by such damnation!’ muttered the young journo, locking eyes with Clay, giving a shrug and ironic grin before hurrying on.
Clay smiled ruefully at Skye’comment, but felt thoroughly let down by the lack of originals. Like many Marquesan artifacts, he learned, nearly all Gauguin’s paintings are housed in European museums. Even the artist’s Maison de Jouir had been re-built with copies of carved wood panels and lintel, on whose inscription he almost choked: Soyez amoureuses et vous serez heureuses. The original House of Pleasure evidently a poke in the eye to the local bishop disgusted by Gauguin’s bohemian life style. But none of the other visitors appeared disappointed by this collection of mere faint-hearted copies. Could his own perception be so misguided, so snobbish?
Leaving the store with only a few postcards, chewies and a can of coconut water, Skye headed for the Jacques Brel Cultural Center. She’d never heard of the Belgian singer/composer but had just learned that he had performed many charitable deeds in the Marquesas. Apparently, he’d died of cancer and wished to spend his last days in an earthly paradise. She contented herself with standing at the entrance, from where she had a close enough view of his Beechcraft Twin Bonanza airplane, Jojo, hanging from the rafters.
While she’d been driving her rented car around the two-lane coastal road of Tahiti a few days before, Skye was composing: ‘the sun was painting a glorious vermilion and tangerine sky over the gold and purple ridges of Moorea’; ‘the island mirage some twenty kilometres distant’; and once she’d motored bumper-to-bumper in rush-hour traffic beyond the township of Pa’ea, ‘the brilliant white sand and the opaline green of the lagoon, and the virgin bush to her left, running down steep valleys from The Diademe, Mt Aorai and Mt Orehana in such an intensity of emerald shades’; ‘at Cape Matavai the warm sand on the popular beach comprised grains of the finest ebony’; and when the Transit de Paradis ‘lauded it over the whole wide world of the balmy Pacific’, she would simply describe ‘a lapis lazuli pane of glass beneath a canopy of cerulean sapphire’.
Oh yes, she could write all right. Thank god, she was making progress. Every so often she would take out her navy-bound Austral Journo Syndicate pass to prove to herself she was indeed a freelance travel photojournalist. Have lance, will travel, yeah, paki, paki, paki!
Next morning she woke early to the shudder and start-up rumble in the bowels of the Transit de Paradis. Oh, shit! She sensed at once that her choice of writing style was too dense, surreal even, without breathing space, as luxuriant as the magic realism of South American novels, straining credibility and utterly inappropriate. And yet, she screamed inside her head, if you had just revelled in Paradise, how on earth could you bloody well use simple words to describe the goddamn place!
Friday: Fatu Hiva
Early morning found Clay once again hunched up in the library next to the two computers, dead but for occasional games of patience that absorbed a stray crewman late at night, reflecting on a quotation from Thor Heyerdahl’s book, Fatu Hiva: Back to Nature.
Our wonderful time in the wilderness had given us of what man had abandoned and what mankind was still trying to get even further away from. Progress can be defined as men’s ability to complicate simplicity.
But Heyerdahl also witnessed how mosquitoes bearing elephantiasis could scratch away at the idyll.
Looking toward Fatu Hiva from the lounge balcony, Clay wondered what impression Alvaro de Mendana might have received from this first European sighting of the Marquesas Islands in 1595. What did he actually see after a month exposed to the glare of the empty, unremitting Pacific? Perhaps cranky on a poor diet or ill, for he was only months away from his death from malaria in the Solomon Islands. He was certainly jittery when lying off the neighbouring island of Tahatua next day. After he’d gone ashore in the bay that he named Madre de Dios to celebrate mass and replenish his water supply, his caravel was surrounded by canoes of hostile warriors. After the mother of all skirmishes, two hundred Marquesans perished as cannon fodder.
So would Mendana even have had time to wonder at the chimneys of basaltic stacks? Or the green ripeness of valleys bearing down on his tiny batch of cobbled timbers? Would anything strike a sixteenth century navigator as aesthetically beautiful? Words like ‘sublime’ and ‘awe’ seldom appeared in the English language until the second half of the eighteenth century, the blossoming of the Romantic sensibility of Rousseau and Wordsworth.
As for himself, Clay could never get enough of these oh so intensely verdant, virginal valleys sloping down to the ocean, struck dumb by their majesty, their distant beauty, their intimation of calm. Polyunsaturated he would ever remain, surely.
At Omoa, Skye was fascinated by the village women at work. They appeared to be the dominant inhabitants and most in touch with preserving old customs. Three of them demonstrated beating the barks of blackberry, banyan and breadfruit trees to make tapa cloth for clothing. The women’s hair was adorned with umehei, a bowknot in which sachets of aromatic plants and flowers were used as love potions – scents of spicy basil, mint, sandalwood, tiare, ylang-ylang. Indeed, Tahei, the tall, slender, shyly good-humoured English-speaking guide, snuggled up to one of the women fifteen years older to prove their seductive appeal. Skye kept the spike of the white-flowered ylang-ylang that had passed round and tucked it into the button-hole of her shirt.
Dipping through The Happy Isles of Oceania, she had read Paul Theroux’s description of Fatu Hiva, the American's choice of most beautiful island in the world:
It’s the way the daylight plunges into it only to be overwhelmed by the darkness of its precipitous valleys and the dangers of its shoreline that give it the look of a green castle.
Wow! How could she ever write something so vivid, so charged with the energy of spirit, so perceptive about elements intangible?
A small group of twenty or so hike across the cliff-top path from Omoa to Hanavave, another small village further round the coast, Friedhelm and his video camera surging ahead. They begin the ascent through groves of cashews and ush valleys roamed by herds of wild horses, cross Mt Teamotuto with near-sighted views of two phallic peaks along the skyline of Hanavave Bay. Much to Diodore’s relish, the early explorers had christened the bay Baie des Verges (Bay of Phalluses), which outraged the missionaries who re-christened it the Baie de Vierges.
‘Mutt’s nuts!’ Skye exclaimed with a belly-laugh, much to the utter confusion of the French-speaking guide.
Descending into the valley of Hanavave, she glanced back at the visage of George Washington atop his own grey-headed basalt stack and tossed a casual John Wayne salute.
In her cabin, where occasional waves would slosh against the porthole, Skye was running her eye over one hundred possible titles that her tutor had posted which might inspire. Nothing leapt out, but half a dozen set her imagination racing.
How to blow your money on safari.
The black pearl capital of Polynesia.
Does global warming affect your mood? Hot places for ‘hot’ travellers.
Burping, belching, flatulence. Go easy on exotic fruit.
The most seductive dance in the Pacific.
Which races have the most to smile about?
And she immediately thought of Vainui, the waiter extraordinaire, whose appearance and manner had held her in thrall in the restaurant. Friedhelm, the German travelling by himself whose cabin was in the same passage, had pointed out that at every meal-time Vainui always wore the same colour watch as his shirt or pareu and his coronet of gaudy flowers, white or red or blue, whatever. But his big round eyes beneath thick black eyebrow liner and black mascara on both eyelashes and his extraordinary gracious movements and effeminate gestures and high-pitched voice and beaut smile of a man who loved his work, gliding, sometimes sweeping, about the tables, it was all a bit bewildering at first. Then Friedhelm explained the Tahitian custom of mahus, how some young boys might be brought up to play the feminine role and were more inclined to enjoy doing work traditionally associated with island women. They were not necessarily gay, though some did solicit foreign tourists in Papeete.
But Vainui was the epitome of charm itself and it was soon apparent that this man with fascinating personality, albeit a mysterious life-style, was warmed to by everyone. She acknowledged that she wasn’t the only woman on board who would have happily given him a cuddle, more so than those tall tattooed men with six-packs who’d whisk her into the whaler.
Then, of course, there was Marana, who had the gift of the gab, tons of energy, especially when the audience responded to him enthusiastically and he could feed off their energy. And when the dancing class was making a hash of the steps, there was Marana cracking a joke or demonstrating the movements with gushing attention. His instant ear-to-ear grin was infectious. As was his running commentary at the fashion parade round the swimming pool to show off the hats made from pandanus leaves in which he described every contestant in encouraging terms as well as close detail of their pareu. Then he made his pet pitch for applause, ‘Paki, paki, paki!’
Most thrilling was his high-octane dancing, those incredibly strong thigh muscles in solid forward crouch, those leg muscles quivering in scissor-cross at frantic speed, his long-jawed stare of hostility as he became thoroughly immersed in his warrior role, his unflagging energy that kept the audience spellbound. What an entertainer and sexy with it, she thought. Paki, paki, paki!
Saturday: Hiva Oa
At Meae Iipona, Puamau, the tall, emaciated and fragile stone tikis are amongst the largest in Polynesia, except for those on Easter Island. The tallest of a warrior chief stands at 2.43 metres. Some anthropologists credit people from Puamau as the first settlers of Easter Island.
But it was the traditional pig dance that seemed to animate the extensive stone-scattered marae, as Marana’s troupe recaptured both the tension of hunters scouring the jungle for the wild pig and then with much deep aerated grunting and a full sideways upturning sweep of the neck the wary reactions of the quarry snuffling the scent of its pursuers - a ritualized dance executed at frantic and relentless speed.
Skye had attended most hour-long rehearsals for the Polynesian dancing class. On two occasions during meals three female staff had sashayed up the main aisles of the restaurant, while the band of four crewmen provided lilting music on ukuleles and guitar. It was a bit of a struggle, she thought, remembering the Marquesan words of the song, though she could hold up a copy just in case, more particularly to pronounce every syllable and remember the alternate rhythm of consonant/vowel, consonant/vowel. Which meant consciously opening and elongating the mouth.
She was pleased that the presentation would not be too fakey; no grass skirts or bikini tops, no supposedly erotic hyper-active bottom-wiggling. In fact, the young trainee waitress, the modest, sweet-smiling Moea, served as inspiration with her oh so gentle and graceful movements rendered in an understated way, especially the slight faltering tuck-in behind the leading leg and rocking motion held before the countering sway back. Really, really cool.
Sunday: Tahuata
While most of the party were observing Sunday mass at the Catholic church, Skye found her way to a studio nearby. She was tempted by the simple decorative motif of Hei ta’ vahna, representing a crown of cockerel feathers that resembled a bracelet in arrowhead pattern. More interesting because more complex were the geometrical patterns of Kova’eh, coconut leaves on the inside wrist, red and black, with an oval containing the now-familiar tiki face, beady eyes and lolling tongue.
Why not just do it? Bodily adornment was a beautiful art form today as well as a measure of personal identity. For Polynesians at the time of Captain Cook’s first visit in 1769, tattooing was regarded as sexually alluring, driving many of his sailors to cop the pain of a razor-sharp shell cutting intricate patterns into their paler skin. She ummed over the decorative patterns, admitting that their meaning no longer reflected status or wealth, not even initiation, a quaint, old hat notion. Besides, not just her peers with the fad of sleeve tattooes but even her parents’ generation were sporting nose studs and the initials of loved ones machine-worked on their private parts. No doubt her father would be disappointed, her mum disgusted.
And the simplest design would take the best part of the day to execute, which would be pretty boring. As the tattooist was pulling on a fresh pair of surgical gloves, Skye laid eyes on the needle for the first time. A slight shiver ran up her spine.
Clay sensed that his focus on Gauguin had waned with the superficial and hollow representation of the painter’s legacy on Hiva Oa. As much as he enjoyed his brief study and gained some insight into the artist’s psyche and oeuvre, he didn’t gain a true inkling of the flat colours vibrating in Gauguin’s authentic work. Besides, he began to reflect more upon the driven nature of the artist, the extent of emotional torment and hardship he endured to get in touch with the ‘savage’ aspect of his own nature. Did he admire the man’s steadfast integrity of his artistic vision? Of course. All these traits were heroic. But what about the notion of placing duty to one’s art above duty to one’s family? In particular, a father’s responsibility to nurture his young children? Wasn’t there something demonic about such costly self-actualization?
Monday: Ua Huka
Crescent shape and high plateau deeply indented by narrow river valleys. A volcano formed by magma forced up from the bowels of the earth; named the Marquesan hotspot. Unlike other Marquesan islands, dry scrub beyond the valleys, laid waste by herds of feral goats and wild horses.
Will our Polynesian Night prove a second Marquesan ‘hotspot’? Skye wonders. You must be kidding, girl.
With stealth, against the blaze of sky and smouldering clouds at dawn, the Transit de Paradis chugs through the keyhole, Invisible Bay, the narrowest in the Marquesas and most dangerous for a vessel of her size. The choppy waters fling foam against the black rocks piled beneath sheer cliffs that enclose the harbour in giant pincers. The Transit begins its slow turn to port, 180 degrees, with few metres to spare either side. Black undersides of rock reveal striations of dark chocolate brown edged at their peaks with a close shave of cropped greenery.
In two dinghies, careering forward in a widening arc to left and right, two pairs of seamen furrow a course to hold the mother vessel steady with long, floating hawsers. Sure-footed as the feral goats just visible on the steep slopes, the matelot in bare feet bends forward, teetering, poised on the prow of the dinghy, suddenly springing onto wet rocks to secure the nylon hawser that holds the ship fast to a bollard cemented into rock. In the aft his steersman is cajoling the Yamaha engine, nudging close, closer, steady now, steady, to the bollard, through the heavy spray of surf crashing, the bucking dinghy nosing closer and closer, the matelot calculating the precise moment, then leaps with ridiculous ease.
Early-birds filming from various vantage points or watching in admiration burst into spontaneous applause. Then the second team perform the same manoeuvre over the other side of the harbour and earn further acclaim. The four men return to the loading bay in the hold and winch the lines to stabilize the Transit in the middle of the bay.
Forrest for one was shaking his head in wilderness wonder. ‘Yer know, every morning my wife and I get up in the dark in case we miss anything at sun-up. We’re so anxious, our nights are like going through the ringer of the Miami turnpike. No kidding. But no complaints. This sure is a wonderful, wonderful trip.’
‘Listen, this is very important,’ said Maeva. ‘It’s a little rough out there. Make sure you have both hands free when you go down the ladder. Trust the crew who will help you get into the barge. You must step onto the black platform and wait till the crew say okay. Okay? They will lift you across. We don’t want any heroes. Just relax. We haven’t lost anyone yet.’
There was some uneasy laughing and pinched mouths and anxious glances at those wittering behind in the queue on the main deck. Clay was caught up in readjusting the strap of his carry-all of wet weather gear, towel, mosquito repellent and plastic bottle of eau Royale from over the shoulder to round the neck, so that it hung down his front beneath his life-jacket and turned him into a stuffed pullet.
The queue shuffled forward but pressed up since no more than six were allowed on the gangway ladder at one time. The waves slapping up against the Transit did indeed look violent, rendered more menacing by the barge rocking away from the stepping-off platform. For a brief moment Clay wondered whether to retreat to the library for a quiet perusal of Gauguin’s paintings, but the fidgety press behind deterred. Barred by the arm of a crew member at the top of the ladder, Clay watched Forrest, the inveterate yachtie of the Keys, being restrained by the crewman standing behind the black platform almost nonchalantly, one hand hanging onto the ladder. Given the okay, the big American with a whoop and long drawn-out ‘All right!’ was steadied into the barge by the arms of two crewmen. Mamie, his much younger wife, seemed to have something to live up to, but ‘Come on, sweetie, you’ll be fine!’ yelled Forrest, who was urged to sit down and stop rocking the boat. As if he could, in those conditions.
Meanwhile Clay was making his way gingerly down the ladder, not daring to look away from each bevelled rung, clinging on tight to the rails, but given a fright when he realized the left rail might jam up against the side of the Transit and crush his knuckle, but could hear the generous applause for Mamie’s safe landing and Forrest’s high-seas roar of approval. As he all but collapsed into the arms of the crewman at the bottom of the ladder, he half-expected Forrest to yell out, ‘Step up to the plate, man! You can do it!’
Instead, ‘Relax!’ ordered the brusque female voice from the middle of the barge. But the open side of the barge was bucking away several feet, then coaxed back but too far the other way. Clay peered into the roiling depths and envisaged himself mashed and mangled, gone for all money, shredded in the blades of the propeller and spat out as shark bait. Now the barge was correctly positioned but suddenly kicked in the air, to the gasps of the safely settled, sloshing his feet and whetting him across the face.
Then all of a sudden: ‘Okay!’ barked the two Polynesian wide receivers.
‘Nuh, no!’ he whimpered.
‘Just relax! ‘And stand up straight!’ urged Maeva, the commandant. Clay jerked his body up half a metre, braced and took a deep breath.
‘Go!’
Before he quite understood, he was somehow winched, hoisted and bundled into the sturdy arms of the waiting crewmen. To whipped-up applause, he puffed out his cheeks in relief, performed a mock stagger hand on heart to a seat, jolted by a slap on the back from Forrest with the reassuring tones: ‘We’ll make a seaman of you yet, Clay!’ and a warm glow of relief mixed with a soupcon of pride.
In a tizz at the handicraft centre in Hokatu, Skye bought up a collection of wooden turtles, tikis, platters and hair pics for her bezzies.
Two of the small complement of Kiwi passengers had come up with the notion of performing the Maori haka dance for Polynesian Night. Marana jumped at the idea and urged the two Caucasians to join his own troupe of Transit dancers who worked behind the scenes and who regularly performed in Papeete’s hotels during their week’s shore leave. Thrilled with the suggestion, they cast around for any Aussies who might wish to join them. Clay, who had been liberally oiling himself with Sauvignon Blanc, mulled over the notion of hoofing the haka, specially since he felt guilty at refusing point-blank to join the Aussie contingent with their vocal rendition of Tie me kangaroo down, sport. There was still an hour or so before the Polynesian dancing that would provide the climax to the evening’s entertainment, time enough to practise a few basic steps in the conference room.
Clay removed his Indonesian shirt with the burnt orange-to-fawn ground and swirling leafy patterns picked out in navy blue that suggested the eye of a peacock’s tail; his wreath of crinkly dried leaves; his Ocean brown sandals from Best for Less. Marana had rustled him up a pareu, which he girded into a loincloth and tucked in, unsure whether he’d remembered the various folds and tucks demonstrated on How To Wear Your Pareu night. He regretted that his medium-sized, scrawny body was not very warrior-like, especially when he cast an envious eye over the heavily tattooed bodies of his Polynesian cohort favoured by an impressive V-matting of jet chest hair. Then reassured himself that one of the two Kiwis was short, stringy and bespectacled, though, he had to concede, the guy did look quietly confident, sincere, full of patriotic fervour. Oh, Christ! Clay sank quick gulps of white wine and vowed to compensate with demented, growly demeanour and fist-clubbing gestures.
The girls, or rather ladies, mostly over forty-fives but some a game sixty plus, filed and flowed onto the pool deck, looking for the most part unself-conscious in their variegated pareus purchased from the Transit boutique, arms delicately, gracefully extending with tender emotion as if in parting or suffering a sense of loss, one side, then the other, palms open, wavering from wrist extended like palm fronds in a gentle breeze, appealing, soft voices plaintive and haunting:
E reo, e reo o ta’u i faroo
E reo no te manava
E reo no te aroha
E reo, e reo o ta’u i faroo
From amongst the crew, the bare-chested musos were already stolid in position, the drummer, none other than the pony-tailed barman with drum-like torso, Tamatoa, two side drummers and two ukule players and guitarist, as the warriors strode out to the pool deck stage. Fuzzy in the head, Clay suddenly realized what it meant to be exposed in the front row with a sea of smiling, even chuckling, faces, some no doubt disbelieving this non-troppo manifestation, and in the shadows of his corner a host of passengers seated beneath the metal steps leading up to the sun deck. Facing across the pool, he put on his fiercest scowl with dropping lockjaw, readied his arms as if to brain someone and angrily plonked down his legs in half-squat pose with a beefy grunt.
When the thunderous thumping revved and the warriors struck their familiar aggressive stance, Clay was already showing his lack of practice or lack of timing or lack of militant purpose. Worse, a ritualistic dance requiring complete unison to rouse the gods to lend courage to their violent assault, revealed an alarming vulnerability on the left flank. Continually sneaking a low glance to his right to imitate or rather catch up with the sequence of movements, a vacuous smile on his shiny face, more bemused when he stomped to starboard without perceiving that fellow warriors, bawling murderous threats, all steely-eyed and grim-jawed, were pounding to port; or when amid a crescendo of horrible cursing chants as they were rolling the whites of their eyes, Clay was poking out his tongue to his scissor-leg routine that was more Chaplinesque than Maori or even Polynesian; or when they were leaping and flourishing their imaginary weapons, he was bugging out his eyes. And when finally the whole phalanx advanced a sidelong step to stare down the enemy with the most pug-ugly rictus and belly-roar of hate, Clay hopped back in line ten seconds too late to utter his solo snarl that suddenly broke into a falsetto scream as he snatched at his pareu unravelling.
Wolf whistles pierced laughter, uninhibited gales from the men, sniggers and smirks from the ladies, wide toothy white smiles from the Polynesians and a sheepish, red-faced, lop-sided grin from the ersatz-warrior himself.
Tuesday: Nuku Hiva, Ua Pou
Despairing of his conversational French, Clay would repair to the library and occasionally dip into a copy of the XIXe Lagarde et Michard. He chanced to come across the sonnet Parfum Exotique, in which Baudelaire recalls his voyage to the Indies in sensuous images. The charm of ‘l’evasion exotique’ transports him into a land of sunshine and well-being: the scents, visions and songs of an exotic culture lift his soul towards the world of dreams, where he imbibes long draughts of the wine of memory. Resonances of Gauguin, surely:
Une isle paresseuse ou la nature donne
Des arbres singuliers et des fruits savoureux;
Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,
Et des femmes dont l’oeil par sa franchise etonne.
A poor sleeper at the best of times, Clay would wake up two or three times in the middle of the night, draw the curtains aside, trying not to scrape his kneecaps on Amandine’s bunk above for fear of disturbing her pleasant dreams and tiptoe to the toilet without brushing past the coat hangers of madame’s wardrobe clinging to every hook and handle and waking Chantal in the bunk nearest the doorway, who suffered from apnoea but who slept with earplugs, fervently assuring Clay that it wasn’t on account of his snoring but her own.
On three such nocturnal forays he was mortified to cross the mincing path of a woman in white nightgown bent on the same purpose. Scarcely daring to look at each other in the murk and certainly too embarrassed to speak, they sidled round each other and disappeared into adjacent cubicles.
For one shore visit they made a grab for the same life-jacket and both opened their mouths to laugh, but couldn’t emit, save the lady with her eyes. She was very much a loner, Clay noticed, a woman with a ghastly white make-up that gave her a haunted demeanour, a feline face highly expressive in a flicker of one eyebrow, slight nod or two as if she sensed you could read her thoughts, and a modest moue with pursed lips.
Then one evening he made for a ten-seat table at the far end of the restaurant and sat primly in the middle facing the entrance. For what seemed a very long five or eight minutes Clay sat there alone, hardly daring to look at the later arrivals passing through the doorway, trying to give the air of someone unperturbed by his increasing sense of isolation, mocking himself for the just desserts of his reserve. Even Mary-Ann or Marry Anne had cast a dubious once-over in his direction then skittered over to a gent with boiled egg for head and cauliflower ears. Beat, who had introduced the Aussie contribution to Polynesian Night and had acted the kangaroo with limp fore-paws hopping along the line of faint-hearted singers, had told him as much: ‘There are some people on board who don’t make the effort to mix.’
To which he had to bite back the rejoinder teetering on the edge of his tongue. ‘Not everyone is fortunate enough to have their partner in tow as first reserve.’
Just as he was about to transfer to another table and risk being rejected there also, a short waif with eyes lowered was walking towards him on pale spindly legs, then raising one eyebrow in that odd way of hers. He noticed the tattoo of red pustules from nono bites below the gauzy hemline.
Resisting the temptation to say with a hollow chuckle, ‘We mustn’t keep meeting like this,’ Clay nodded a firm because grateful nod. ‘Bonsoir, madame. Je suis Clay. De l’Australie.’
Without any trace of irony, as if they had never met in clandestine fashion in the catacombs of their joint home in their darkest hours, the white face flickered into animation: ‘Je m’appelle Eulalie.’
‘What a euphonious name! And where do you come from?'
‘Marseille.’ Already she was worrying at those insect bites.
’Allow me to pour you some wine. Rouge ou blanc?’
‘Rouge, merci.’
‘And what is your profession?
‘A singerrr.’
‘J’aimais Johnny Halliday.’
‘Mais oui. Johnny Alliday,’ she nodded.
‘Francoise Hardy. J’ai jete mon coeur.’
‘Mais oui.’
‘Et j’aime encore La mer de Charles Trenet et oh aussi Non, je ne regrette rien by Edith Piaf, c’est formidable,’ and found himself humming the opening defiant statement and conducting with his knife.
Suddenly the cat-whiskers of a smile was stretching across her thin lips caked with ruby lipstick and a twinkle in her watery eye. Clay bit his lip in embarrassment then noticed for the first time that the other eight seats been filled and everyone was staring at him. Throughout the canard a la prune he acted the clam.
Hi, guess what! I’m the youngest kid on the block. The average age of the boat people is all of eighty-five! Yeah! . . . Nuh, just kidding . . . More like fifty-five . . . I don’t fancy the pants off anyone here and no, I’m not begging for it . . . But there's this guy I went snorkeling with, Fried Helm . . . Dead keen on photography, sometimes flashes his underwater photies, like this humongous manta ray with undulating fins like wings . . . No, it’s harmless, so’s Fried Helm . . . Fat chance. He’d prefer to nuzzle up to a reef shark or take shots of Monument Valley or some endangered species no one else could even see! . . . No, Friedhelm’s okay, a decent pork fritz, fit as a trout and not testoed, task-oriented, I must say . . . No, he didn’t show me his sea-cucumber. The guy’s a curlie, if he’s a day. Now listen. Listen! I had a rare time in Papeete and I bought you a battery-operated boyfriend . . . No, course not . . . seriously, I got you a lovely Polynesian number . . . to wear, stupid! . . . You’ll look fanbloodytastic!
Aeneas had drummed into Skye the imperative of checking facts. There was no room for slovenliness or wilful distortion. Or a slight exaggeration about the friendliness of the locals to make an article more appealing.
Think of an angle; come up with a good lead, such as ‘The dangers of women travelling alone’. Bloody ridiculous! she scoffed
What would her readers mainly be interested in? Scenery, food, history, people, customs, cost of living, shopping, flora and fauna etc etc.
Probably the footy results back home, she thought.
If all else fails, declared Aeneas, make a list spontaneously of ten things that you have enjoyed doing. It may just work.
Wednesday: En Mer
Clay clambered out of the pool, having been swamped by a wave that swirled over the side and caught him by surprise. The water, chlorine and salt choked him, all but drowned him, and he dog-paddled frantically to the ladder a metre away in a splutter.
‘Ah, this is the life,’ sighed Jim, his open book lying at the side of the banana lounge. ‘Somerset Maugham, eat your heart out.’
Clay was dousing beneath the hose, then rubbing himself down. Is this really the life? he ponders.
Some unusual experiences on the Transit de Paradis that I have enjoyed:
I have designed and made by hand my own Polynesian outfit from natural fibres.
I have learnt to snorkel and swum with reef sharks and manta rays.
I have followed on horseback Herman Melville’s escape route from pursuing cannibals.
I have learnt to wiggle my hips more gracefully and dance the tamure.
I have witnessed the most beautiful sunset in the Marquesas Islands.
I have hooked a grouper and cooked it amongst coconut palms on Rangiroa.
I have observed an oyster inoculated with an irritant to create a black pearl.
I have eaten pork cooked on pandanus leaves in a traditional earth oven.
I have sat in the captain’s chair on one of the world’s last passenger/cargo ships.
I have plucked star fruit and mangoes fresh from the tree for a delicious snack.
Panicked into getting the assignment done, she enumerates with surprising rapidity, so relieved that she will meet her deadline. And if the editor makes suggestions for alterations, so be it. She’s bought more time. In any case her memories would remain fresh and unforgettable for at least a month. Especially the pork piece de resistance sampled at an island restaurant that arrived dry, tough and unrecognizably chewy.
On-board entertainment that evening after the poisson cru of raw red tuna and coconut milk was karaoke. At the back of the lounge, Mareva was insisting that Eulalie, who nestled deep in an armchair, should sing. Several times she refused, growing more flustered, but urged on by her compatriots, whose penchant for such entertainment clearly outshone the extroversion of other nationalities, eventually yielded.
La mer
Qu’on voit danser
Le long des golfes claires
A des reflets d’argent
La mer
Des reflets changeants
Sous la pluie
La mer
Again the verses rolled on:
Les a berces
Clay was gulping back the tears himself when Mareva descended upon him with the microphone. ‘Now it’s the turn of the English speakers.’
‘No, I’d rather not,’ came the pathetic mutter, but the shrinking violet was prevailed upon by the French resistance and a Chris de Burgh song that suited his baleful mood and crackly squeak that might just about talk its way through the lyrics:
I’ve never seen you looking so lovely as you did tonight,
I’ve never seen you shine so bright . . .
I never will forget the way you look tonight
The lady in red, my lady in red
My lady in red, my lady in red
I love you
Again, the applause seemed heartfelt. Even so, Clay was a blubber of mush, unable to stir, exhausted but somehow cleansed, head bowed, his fixed gaze lost in a blur of tired red carpet.
At last, Rangiroa, one of the highlights of the cruise, and again the bustle of several groupings and camera-clickers eager to lay claim to the biggest reef in the Tuamotus, named for ‘long sky.’ Over seventy kilometres in length, consisting of seven motus, and twenty-six kilometres wide.
They can just make out the long, low grey smudge of line, the pencil-thin gleam of sand, a pallid yellow, almost white. Occasional combers. Thick clumps of palm trees stretch across the horizon like tufts of grass. The rising sun scintillates the wake of the Transit de Paradis with a scatter of sparklers.
In calmer waters now. Little sign of habitation. A single-decker bus or Le Truck beetling along the shore road, a smatter of gleaming white-roofed houses and thatched brown roofs like traditional Japanese hats. Not a boat in sight, but closer, and two specks of fishing boats drifting towards the pass. Where suddenly someone in a crow’s-nest yells, ‘Dolphins!’ and the chorus of ‘Oohs’ and ‘Get yourself over here, Jim, pronto! Jimbo!’ and ‘Did you get it, Chretien?’ and ‘Jetzt los, Friedhelm!’ and a scuffle to the starboard rail to witness their welcome and escort, frolicking grey humps, sometimes three leaping in unison, then closer to the Transit’s hull zillions of flying fish, mere sharpened pencils from this height, skimming away like torpedoes to avoid breakfast, pursued by the yellow bills of dive-bombing crested terns.
The supposed strip of sand close by the entrance to Tiputa Pass clarifies as sea-wall.
The yellow arm of the crane swings out to starboard with the first whaler of three helmeted crew on board being lowered to assist the pearl seekers to disembark. The second group will beach before a coconut grove on gravel-like dead coral and cranky tree roots.
Drifting in intimate scrum over the coral gardens, glass-bottom boats offered an extravaganza: butterfly, angel, parrot, damsel were just a few of the multi-coloured fish, striped, marbled, barred, electric, darting in and about the reef ledges. Most memorable were the rainbow parrot, the yellow-tailed butterfly with black mask and the Emperor angel with alternating stripes of yellow and purplish blue.
‘C’etait tres belle,’ Clay said to Nohoarii, their guide who had been very reserved, almost sullen, in his terse commentary, to lift his spirits as he stepped ashore. ‘Il me semble que le changement de climat n’est pas encore trop de probleme ici.’
For an awkward few seconds Nohoarii studied the Australian in the ridiculous floppy, lop-sided sunhat that sat deflated on his head and whose soft rim covered his forehead down to the ogling shades from beneath his beetle brows. ‘Vous etrangers, vous ne comprenez rien,’ he muttered.
‘Que voulez-vous dire?’
‘You, les privilegies, you visit our islands and demand more hotels with hot showers and mosquito nets, more big croissieres, cruisers, runways, you even push for an aeroport international. Ca, c’est absurde, une idée impossible. Our eco-systeme is so delicate. What is going to happen to our traditional way of life?’
‘But tourism gives you a better living, surely.’
‘For some, peut-etre. But the truc . . . the trick is, more tourists means death to the old ways, and it’s these old ways the tourists want to see. The change of climate has already caused many problems for the Tuamotu people.’
‘What sort of problems?’
‘Do you know that the temperature in the lagoon rose suddenly near four degrees in 1998 and in a few months much reef was dead?’
'Hmm, I do remember now something about the effect of El Nino.’
‘Oui, exactement. This caused a lack of crevettes . . . little shrimps . . . ‘
‘Plankton?’
‘ . . . so the young fishes of the reef had no food. Today we see that the number of adult fishes is very small.’
‘Yes, I understand. I’m very sorry to hear this.’
‘But what are you doing here? You do nothing to help us, nothing. You collect data, yes, but nothing changes. Yet you come here to live comme les grands seigneurs, so you can forget the contamination you have caused in your own countries.’
Ten minutes later, having meandered awkwardly between stacks of dead grey coral to a stretch of white sand and pellucid warm water, Clay was rolling over on his back, utterly glum, floating like a corpse of cork, with nary a twitch of a stroke. It was some time before his reverie was broken by a frigate circling down to attack a flock of terns, realising all of a sudden how buoyant the water was and how thundering difficult it was to get his old sneakers back down onto the sand.
Friday: Papeete
Having eaten of the lotus every day, the touring party bade their farewells over breakfast or hugs and kisses in the reception area or even promises to write down on the wharf, awaiting luggage or transfers. Half a dozen men were cradling their new hand-crafted ukulele.
Marana, touting for business, still trying to sell his group’s CD of Polynesian music – mainly traditional, some surfer-cool, fast ukulele riffs and exorbitant drumming -successfully button-holed Clay to make up numbers for his round-the-island tour.
Led by Marana, the five passengers were walking into a narrow valley, completely deserted and peaceful, the Arahurah Marae, an ancient temple erected on a black stone platform in a beautiful well kempt garden among pandanus trees. Marana pointed out two totems painted red that represented royal warriors, a path of burning stones which young men nerved themselves to walk over to illustrate their strength of mind, and the area where the skulls were displayed to boast the victors’ power.
‘Now you westerners,’ he was saying, ‘want to make too much out of cannibalism. You should know that the winners did not eat the whole body of the losers, but just a very small piece, enough so that the mana or spirit of the fallen warrior was passed onto the winner. Of course, sacrifices were made. Here you see stone pens for pigs to be sacrificed to the gods. Sometimes humans and prisoners.’
‘Was the religion similar to what we used to have in Hawaii?’ croaked the elderly American.
‘Very similar,’ replied Marana. ‘Priests would pray for the gods to descend and reside in carved tikis.’ He paused, his demeanour uncharacteristically solemn. ‘In Polynesia we don’t write too much down about culture or religion, but we do speak with genuine feeling and gesture. Our words are sacred, our breath is sacred. Ideas about religion we release only a bit at a time, keeping it among ourselves.’
At Marlon Brando’s ‘swimming pool’ at Faone, just beyond the Orange Valley and the white-sanded beaches of the Sea of Moon, the sight of Marana suddenly stripping down unabashed to his under-daks left them all startled, as he tentatively walked into the torrents of water crashing down ice-cold from the mountains upon his head, then standing resolutely long-jawed, presumably to prove his indomitable strength of mind, staring back dead-pan at the five tourists munching on star fruit they’d just plucked and watching out for his next trick in amused disbelief.
It was in rural Mataiea that Gauguin found a measure of peace. He shares his hut with a new ‘wife’, ‘a child of about thirteen’:
Tehamana yields herself daily more and more, docile and loving; the Tahitian noa noa pervades the whole of me; I am no longer conscious of the days and the hours, of Evil and Good – all is beautiful – all is well. Journal, 1893
Gauguin already knew that the paradise of ‘the noble savage’ and his supposed innocence had long since disappeared; more significantly, the artist had overcome his huge disappointment and discovered the tropical paradise within his own imagination.
Clay had resolved from the outset to forgo the slap-up feed at the lagoon-side restaurant.
‘You should eat with us,’ Marana almost pleading. ‘It is major part of our Polynesian life-style to share big feast with our friends.’
‘I’m sorry, Marana, but I plan to clap eyes on at least one Gauguin original. This is my last chance. Ever.’
‘But we cannot enjoy all this lovely food if you don’t share it with us. Come, there is plenty of room, we can enjoy the best dishes on the island and we have our own beautiful white sand beach to look over.’
‘Sit down, man,’ the American practically whispered. ‘Just take it easy!’
Impatient to be off but trembling, Clay walked out of the restaurant with a determined, ‘I’m very sorry. I really must go.’ But when he reached the entrance to the Musee Gauguin, he saw the notice: ‘Closed for renovation.’
Bitterly disappointed and increasingly embarrassed, he walked around the building and along by the river, then back through the botanic gardens to wear off his ill-humour, scarcely noticing among the variety of trees, the palms and chestnuts, the astonishing palette of orchids, oblivious to what the Persians would have called a paradise garden. Instead, his thoughts were buried in a pond of water lilies.
Is this the life? he asked himself again. As much as I’ve immersed myself in the Marquesas with all those indelible images and feel refreshed by this . . . time-out or escape? I know I couldn’t live in one of their villages for long, however charming and peaceful. I’d crave more brain food, otherwise I’d get bored witless. At the same time I need some bolt-hole in my imagination to retreat to, some hint that one day things could be happier, even if that’s a self-deceptive trick to keep hoping. They probably won’t get better in an Aristotelian sense, because even the word ‘virtue’ has been mocked out of currency. Moral codes seem devoutly adhered to only by rigidly fanatical sects.
What we enjoyed on the Transit de Paradis, some might call the good life. Okay, for an annual holiday it’s a fantastic experience, but from another perspective it’s pure drooling decadence. Yes, I still feel twinges of guilt, not just about jetting off and leaving the family, but about not being of much service to anyone. And how many people dropped dead from starvation while I’m consuming my marlin steak? Thousands!
As a student I was never taught to equate the good life with amassing wealth or material things, as Jean-Claude reckoned was becoming the norm in Tahiti. Yet if at the same time he’s right about the increasing incidence of drug abuse and domestic violence, then the materialist quest is cannibalistic, utterly immoral. By contrast, the Marquesans still appear to prefer the traditional ways and a fairly simple lifestyle. Yet even on the islands, several households boast ownership of three vehicles per capita. So is the answer to strike a balance between the spiritual and material? Perhaps for some Marquesans. But where does that position me?
Admittedly, Epicurus taught that the only good in life is pleasure but he did concede that not all pleasures are good. In any case I don’t experience real pleasure much, or happiness for that matter. Rather, contentment is a more apt descriptor of my best states, an inner peace. Fess up, Clay, you’re just emotionally repressed! No, wait a mo! Happiness is fleeting, transitory, right? I do frame many scenes from the past with a golden glow. Mere nostalgia? Or does one’s own perception of past events change according to one’s mood of the moment?
Look, are we entitled to pursue happiness? Yes, according to the American Constitution. But surely striving for happiness per se seldom leads to lasting pleasures; more likely it leads only to the frustration of desire. Isn’t that something like Buddhists believe? It may also demote the importance of a range of other deep emotions which serve to define our humanity, valid though possibly painful, which many refuse to own up to. I understand Gauguin’s desperate desire to withdraw from the splurge of western materialism, but I have neither the courage nor self-belief to do so, nor, most important, the talent or spiritual anchorage to hold me steadfast. What work could I do to sustain myself? Conduct interviews in Polynesian villages? For what purpose? The preservation of traditional culture is already being reclaimed by trained anthropologists. The restoration of tiki? I’m not the physical or practical outdoors type.
O god, perhaps in this life I haven’t used my intelligence actively. Or wisely.
For half a century, Clay concluded, he’d lived the not-so-good life.
Marana greeted him warmly when, head hung in shame, he dawdled back into the restaurant, pretending to look at the ocean through the windows. ‘Come and join us, Clay, and help us finish all this food. In Polynesia we never like to leave an empty plate.’ As if to demonstrate, he forked up some French fries and handed the rest of the king prawns to his bulbous driver, who was cracking, scooping and swallowing like a conveyor belt.
‘Sit down, man,’ mumbled the American. ‘Try to be an ambassador.’
‘No, really.’ At last Clay confronted his dilemma: traitor or hypocrite?
Gradually his mood lifted with the ascent of the four-wheel drive up along the narrow, winding road to the Taravao Plateau, the scenery suddenly transformed from bush to rolling European farmland lush and unspoilt, with fields of cows and horses and a sweeping vista over plunging cliffs to both coastlines of Tahiti Nui.
Clay was keen to see where Captain Cook had observed the transit of Venus, as they drove onto the low sandy peninsula covered with ironwood, the northernmost point of Tahiti. Captains Wallis, Cook and Bligh had all landed ashore on the neck of this very beach after anchoring their ships beyond the reef in Matavai Bay.
With spurts of indignation, Marana described another massacre of his people. When Captain Samuel Wallis’ warped into Matavai Bay in 1767, one quarter of his crew was ill with scurvy, including himself. From their canoes, the Tahitians hurled stones at the Dolphin, which returned favour with cannon fire. Two days later the locals launched an attack on both the vessel and the watering party ashore. Wallis trained the guns first on the canoes, then the retreating warriors on the hill, massing there with women and children under a hail of grapeshot. Wallis sent a party ashore to destroy homes and canoes, before the Tahitians sued for peace. In the terms of the trade agreement, young women were offered who, in the words of the captain, ‘played a great many droll wanton tricks’.
‘When the Protestant missionaries landed at Point Venus in 1797,’ continued Marana, ‘they were shocked by my people’s customs. They stopped our dancing, our songs about love, said no-no to our tattoos, our naked bodies, our habit of making love to different partners, even wearing flowers in our hair. These were all tabu. And our tradition of accepting boys to be brought up living life as females, mahus, was regarded as an ‘unnatural crime’. So,' he said through gritted teeth, 'those missionaries gave us the sense of sin and Mother Hubbard.
‘Also whalers and traders followed the missionaries. They spread diseases that we Polynesians could not resist. Their arrival led to a taste for alcohol and more weapons and prostitution.’ He paused, his stern, wide-set eyes ranging over all five tourists, finally boring in on Clay. ‘Free love is a myth in Tahiti today. So take care, eh? And remember: most prostitutes, even the most beautiful, are disguised transvestites.’
Clay picked up a wodge of fine black sand still warm to the touch, suddenly flung it spilling out to sea, before turning slowly to mosey back through the tree-shaded park to the tall, white lighthouse.
‘Cook estimated the population of Tahiti to be forty thousand,’ said Marana. ‘By the 1820s it had fallen to six thousand. So you see why many Polynesians hate Captain Cook! Not just those who are pushing for independence.’
Returning through traffic-snarled Papeete to deposit passengers, they drove along Rue Paul Gauguin. Mainly a nondescript commercial street, the fidgety, eager-eyed Clay concluded. The great painter would have loathed it.
Back in his stop-over room at the Sofitel, Clay turned to face the bathroom mirror. The stare was reflective, sliding into dejected. Abruptly, the end of his trip had sheeted home. Hardening his features, he puckered his nose and shunted out deep, breathy pig grunts, then rolled his head in an exaggerated sweep and toss like a savage beast scenting those bloody-minded human hunters. And snuffled. He could almost smell methane.
Skye was bent on having an early evening as her flight back to Melbourne via Auckland departed at eight o’clock, requiring her to be at Faa’a by five-thirty, which meant getting up at four.
Conveniently situated near the Fare Terirooterai, her guest house up the hill on Rue Venus, was the Italian restaurant set in a grove of trees on Boulevard Pomare across from the waterfront. The only Italian couple on the cruise had invited her to join them. Caught in two minds, remembering Aeneas’ injunction to own a sense of adventure and not dine at a posh hotel, she reluctantly gave in, not wishing to let go the Transit experience completely. Having enjoyed her course of veal in Marsala wine and a coffee and feeling mellow but a little saddened, if not disorientated, she was strolling in the warm night air amid distant carnival singing and monotonous drumming toward the Jardin Paofai with its thatch-roof buildings and then on to Tohua Toata, the popular gathering place for families at inexpensive snack bars for a final circuit.
Suddenly, she felt an arm on her left elbow, a physical presence and warm breath on her cheek, another man up close on her right side.
‘You want to have a good time? We teach you to dance the tamure at the amphitheatre,’ said the tall one, with a dark patch, a tattoo, beneath his ear, giving a sudden gyration of hips that caused Skye to quick-step away in alarm, drawing their chuckles.
‘No thanks,’ she frowned. ‘I just want to be left alone.’
‘We have some pot,’ the tall one said, as if that explained everything.
‘Very good pot,’ said the other with tush-teeth and the charm of a feral goat.
‘I’m not interested.’
‘Fresh from the hills above Puna’avia. We know very nice beach next to the pirogues. Just over there. You know our famous racing canoes? It’s number one sport in Tahiti.’
‘Mako is famous canoe star. If you like, he can give you ride in his canoe’
‘I don’t like. I’m flying home early tomorrow, so goodbye.’
‘No, no, please,’ Mako persisted. ‘You come with us. We give you good time.’
‘Piss off!’
‘Where you from?’
‘Bugger off or I’ll call the gendarmes!’
Skye felt a prod in the back, then a hefty shoulder barging her towards a picnic shelter.
‘Get your filthy hands off!’ she screamed. Kicking out like a savage, she brought a knee hard up in the sleazebag’s coconuts. 'Yeah, go flog yourself!'
Sunday: parahi, Faa’a
The sign at the entrance to the airport caught his eye: Bienvenue au Paradis Tahiti. Clay felt an instant pang of regret. Yet when he met up with half a dozen of his Aussie crew seated in the same row of seats, chatting away like old buddies, he could only nod and smile at their ‘How’s it goin’, Clay?’ and ‘Back to reality, eh, mate?’ he kept walking to a seat behind a pillar. So he hadn’t re-invented himself. There was no island scene tattooed on his back with surf break, palm tree and reef shark. Or tiki emblazoned on his forehead. Nor was he eager to rejoin his wife, who no doubt would still insist that going to her pump and spin classes was strictly her own down time. But in spite of occasionally making a fool of himself, being socially gauche and timid with some residual anxiety, why yes, in his own way he had in effect been quite happy without even realizing.
Skye was sitting alone, chewing gum, impatient to board. She wouldn’t cry on about it. No harm done. Maybe her pride, self-respect or something. At least she’d given whatshisface, that Mako creep, the order of the boot. Too many night owls, thank god. Could’ve done with a joint, though. Monday morning, first thing, she’d go into Financial Solutions, try to wangle her old job back. Stick it for a bit, then stick it up ‘em. They owed her.
Michael Small
June 2-August 8, 2011
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