The Atua Man

by John Stephenson

  Melanie couldn’t stop laughing and Jason could tell that she had seldom felt this free in her life. The natives loved it too. They took great pleasure in offering this joy to the foreigners visiting their paradise.

  Larry turned on his charm and persuaded David into going ashore by offering to buy him a beer. Larry seemed to need his companionship, and David suspended his judgment for the moment and went along. They found a table under the thatched awning of the Chinese store and ordered two beers. The beers were the last two on the island, according to the merchant. The trading steamer was due any day, but nobody knew when because of the bad weather.

  “Did he raise the price on us?” David asked.

  “Probably. He’s Chinese. In the past, when we ended up following the steamer, the natives were all drunk and eating Spam. I like it better when the natives are out of beer and canned goods and live like true natives.”

  That statement revealed another dichotomy in Larry’s character, David thought. Larry was a racist, yet he’d married a Polynesian woman and loved the people. The two men sipped their beers and watched a native woman in a Gauguin type pareu sweep the dirt in front of her thatched house.

  “When I sailed these waters with my second wife back in the ’60s,” Larry said, “you couldn’t trust the natives up here. They’d rob you blind, and if you weren’t careful, they’d kidnap your women. Marquesans hate the French almost as much as they hate the Tahitians. They’re completely different from the Tahitians, and they stubbornly resisted the change brought by the colonialists. The Church was brutal in converting them and it needed the backing of the army to do the job. I’m here now, hoping to find some cultural awakening, like what’s been happening in Hawaii.”

  “I’d like to find Gauguin’s pink beach,” David said.

  “I can show you his grave.”

  “We’re stopping there?”

  “It’s the government center for the southern Marquesas. The leaders on these minor islands, like Fatu Hiva, just want to collect entries in their logbooks, but someone from the government will inspect us in Atuona, where Gauguin’s buried, I’m sure. These people like to think of themselves as a separate country. Did you see the past entries I made in the logbooks at Rangiroa and Manihi?”

  “I did. You’re obviously really well-known in those waters.”

  “Maybe notorious is a better word. But it’s been a long time.”

  Larry took a pull on his beer while looking intensely at David. He had turned up the charm. David felt Larry was attempting to win him over, and he resented that. But David was willing to listen, given that they were virtually married to the boat and voyage.

  “I want to explain to you what happened when Jason fell overboard,” Larry said. “I seriously thought that to maneuver the boat in that weather would break our mast.”

  David didn’t say anything but thought that Larry had revealed something important; that he cared more for his boat than for Jason.

  “I respect your seamanship, David,” Larry continued, “and know you’ve survived some very heavy weather. You have the right instincts.”

  David nodded. “So does Jason.”

  “I just froze,” Larry interrupted. “I couldn’t think straight. The last thing I’d want to do would be to lose Jason at sea, or any of us for that matter. But Jason makes me so furious that I want to make him suffer. He’s never had to work hard for anything important. Everything’s been handed to him. There’s been no trial by fire.”

  “How would you know?”

  “All the great spiritual masters have suffered,” Larry continued ignoring David’s question. “It’s what drove them to overcome the material. Why doesn’t God favor those who work hard and study all the time and pray without ceasing instead of giving His grace to someone who doesn’t even care about it?”

  David didn’t say a thing. He had to force himself not to leave.

  Larry’s face was tormented. There was a brief crack in his ego and David felt Larry’s desire to understand what Elizabeth St. John taught. For a moment David could see why Jason had admired Larry, so open to the Spirit, yet at the same time living through his senses and by his wits; a man struggling to conform to an idea of what makes someone spiritual, and yet filled with judgment toward those who don’t measure up. David realized that Larry had a strong concept of how a spiritual person should behave and Jason did not fit that image. Did Jason feel the same way now? David didn’t know.

  “I was asked to leave these islands twenty-two years ago,” Larry finally continued. “Petty bureaucrats with delusions of power ruined my business, my marriage… and my life. But I bless them. They thought they were doing what was right, what was in the best interests of the islands. They were colonials who had no awareness of the people living under their thumb. French expats were not what these islands were about. But, like I said, I blessed them. Without that shaking up, that taking from me all that was good and beautiful, I would not have found the depth of soul that I have now.”

  David finished his beer, shook the can to make sure it was empty, and wished there were more.

  “It was painful” Larry said. “It took years, but now I’m back, in peace, in love, forgiving and compassionate. Jason needs to face his demons. He doesn’t even know how deeply attached he is to this world. I thought this trip would show him another side to life, show him how simple and fulfilling it can be without all the adulation and reverence for the heir apparent to his mother. But he’s asleep. He can’t see what I’m offering.”

  “Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. I don’t think you know him that well, Larry.” David said.

  “Oh, believe me, I know him,” Larry said in the most egotistical way. “But who am I to change him? I’ve given him the opportunity, but he’ll have to rise to the occasion. I’ll keep giving him opportunities. This is my gift to you kids, and I’m going to enjoy it. Just say ‘thank you’ once in a while.”

  David had a hard time not reminding Larry that they all had paid in one way or another for the trip. Jason worked on the Mata‘i for three months without pay, and David had used the last of his European money to cover his food and board.

  “Basically, I just want to enjoy our voyage.” Larry finished his beer and pulled an air horn from his bag. “Give two blasts on that and I’ll bring the dinghy ashore,” he said.

  He got up and headed back to his boat.

  A few minutes later Jason and Melanie came down the trail from the waterfall holding hands. David saw them and looked away, stunned. He didn’t want to intrude on their moment by watching them. He thought of Lillian, and how often Jason seemed to abandon her.

  Then Melanie and Jason saw David and walked over to him.

  “Any beer left for us?” Jason said.

  “Last one,” David said. He dismissed the hand holding as not meaning anything serious.

  “Was Dad here?” Melanie said, noticing the air horn.

  “Yeah. He’ll come and get us when we’re ready.”

  Monday, June 16, 1989

  The next day, Larry wanted to putter around the boat and relax. When he found out that his crew was planning to go the highlands, Larry became professorial.

  While David and Jason loaded the dinghy, Larry said, “It was here on Fatu Hiva that Thor Heyerdahl came up with his theory that the Polynesians were originally from South America. He thought the Marquesan temple sculptures were similar to those of the Incas. His Kon-Tiki expedition was to prove that. But his idea that the Polynesians had drifted from South American in crude rafts was discredited by the voyages of the Hawaiian sailing canoe, Hokulea. Up until the late seventies Europeans wouldn’t believe that native people had the skill to settle the Polynesian islands. But they were wrong.”

  Finally, the crew were able to shove off and took the dinghy ashore. They pulled the Mata‘i Iti above the high-water mark on the rocks. The village was quiet. The villagers went about their business in another world from the aoes from the yachts. Their needs were simple, and
the abundance of food was all around. Their houses were neat, and the walkways always swept. Their priorities in life were singing and dancing; everything else was secondary.

  Melanie, David and Jason grabbed their rucksacks and headed inland. The trek to the highlands took a couple of hours climbing a switch-back trail to reach one of the promontories overlooking Hana Vave Bay. As they left the valley the air became cooler and there were fewer bugs. In the highlands the trio found a grassy pasture. They explored the meadows. Melanie found a bleached goat head stuck on a tall stick. The views of the bay and coastline were spectacular.

  “This is fabulous,” Melanie said. “I’m imagining myself in Eden. Everything is beautiful. Everything is warm. Everything is… well, it’s paradise! I hope we stay here a week. I can see why Dad wanted me to see this.”

  They unpacked their picnic and spread out one of Larry’s tablecloths. Sitting around on top of this island, they were completely removed from the yacht, and the sea, and all the challenges below. Up where they were on top the world and everything about it was peaceful.

  “I’m sorry you got stuck with Larry,” Jason said to David.

  “Oh, we had a great time. The last beers on the island.” David’s sarcasm wasn’t lost on the others.

  “You’ve got to forget what happened at sea,” Jason said.

  “I know. I can see where he’s coming from. I’m okay.”

  “Where is he coming from?” Melanie said. “I can’t figure him out.”

  “I never imagined he could be so mean,” Jason said.

  Melanie and David laughed. Melanie said, “Are you kidding? You never knew he was mean? He’s always been mean. It’s just that he’s so much meaner now.”

  Jason laughed too. “Your father can’t stand not being in control, and under pressure he loses it.”

  “That’s not all of it,” David argued. “He’s trying to atone for something that happened a long time ago. That’s why he’s so zealous in his spiritual work. He’s so compartmentalized that to face his sins is agony. I assume that’s why he’s making this trip. I just hope he can keep it all together.”

  “Are you two finished psychoanalyzing him?”

  “Just trying to be helpful,” David replied.

  Melanie got up and walked to the edge of the cliffs. The yachts looked smaller than toys in the bay below. “Oh damn,” she said.

  The boys got up and followed her gaze. A French naval vessel had pulled into the Bay of Virgins and had dropped anchor just seaward of the yachts.

  “Dad won’t like that.”

  Larry had the boat ready for sea when his crew returned from their excursion. He wasn’t willing to share his paradise with the French Navy. He wasn’t curious about where Jason, David, and Melanie had been, or what they’d seen. His dark mood was back.

  They pulled the dinghy onboard and left as soon as Jason and David could get the anchor up. By midnight Mata‘i was miles to sea, Fatu Hiva now a memory. The Milky Way stretched across the sky from the southwest to the northeast and Scorpio sat in the west. To the Polynesians the Milky Way was a great shark and the scorpion was Maui’s fishhook.

  Chapter 33

  Tahuata, Marquesas Islands

  Tuesday, June 17, 1989

  Mata‘i reached Tahuata in the morning and sailed into Vaitahu. A red-roofed church stood at one end of the cove and the tin-roofed houses spread out from there. The mountains rose gently from the lee shore, and the terrain was dryer, with yellow meadows between the valleys dense with jungle. And the water was exceptionally clear. Three yachts were anchored off the beach. Larry saw the yachts anchored in the bay and European people on the beach. That whole picture turned Larry off, and he tacked back out to sea.

  “What now?” Melanie was videotaping the beach and turned her camera on Larry.

  “I think Gauguin’s pink beach is just up the coast,” Larry said in to the camera. “Let’s play there and forget all these strangers.”

  Two hours later Mata‘i inched close to a pristine beach. The aquamarine water was so clear that twenty feet looked like two. Jason took a continual sounding, measuring the depth moment by moment. He was sure they were going to run aground. When the Mata‘i finally dropped her hook, she was just a few feet from shore. Dense coconut trees framed a quarter mile of pink sand, and every one of the crew felt like they were the first people on Earth. Larry kept the dinghy in its chocks, and as soon as the stern anchor was set, to keep the boat from swinging on to the sand, all four denizens of Mata‘i dove overboard and swam to a beach that had no footprints. The rest of that day was spent in the water, snorkeling and exploring. It was so salty and buoyant it took no effort to float.

  While Jason watched a cowrie make faint tracks in the sand, and contemplated picking it up as a souvenir, he thought about how great Larry’s gift was to bring them here. This was how Larry expressed love; by sharing his vision of paradise. Jason decided to leave the shell in its natural environment.

  Melanie felt guilty making footprints in the sand but got over it. She made sand angels instead of snow angels, and later, Jason and David built sand tikis at the waterline. When not in the water, the three of them lounged in the cockpit while Larry tended to one of his never-ending projects. The Mata‘i was Larry’s most enduring relationship.

  Melanie and David had bought a couple of native banjos in Hana Vave, and Jason showed them some Tahitian riffs on his ukulele.

  The sunset turned Gauguin’s pink beach golden and at long last Larry looked happy.

  Chapter 34

  Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands

  Sunday June 25, 1989

  Atuona, the major town on Hiva Oa, fronted a beautiful beach with strong waves, making it unsuitable as an anchorage. The yachts, and the trading vessels calling on Atuona anchored in the adjacent harbor of Tahauhu, where there was a wharf for the steamers and a small pier for the tenders from visiting yachts. A fleet of sailboats were tightly packed in the small bay when the Mata‘i arrived. She anchored near the pier.

  Larry went ashore alone, taking the passports and the yacht’s papers expecting a quick clearance. Instead, he returned a couple of hours later with a French gendarme who thoroughly searched Mata‘i. Larry wasn’t happy. Most yachts were given a cursory look at their papers, not a thorough inspection of their personal goods. Larry showed the gendarme the guns and what little ammunition they had left in an effort to keep things aboveboard. Larry had convinced David, in their talk at Hana Vave, that his previous activities in French Polynesia had been forgotten. But David saw that he was wrong. He was no friend to the French, and they seemed to have a long memory.

  When the gendarme left, Larry told his crew that the next day they were to have lunch with an old friend and then tour Ta‘aoa Valley to see an important archeological site and swim under another waterfall. At the moment, David wasn’t interest in tomorrow. He was anxious to get off the boat to spend time with Paul Gauguin, alone, before the sun got too low. He excused himself and took the dinghy ashore.

  David walked along the revetment on the east side of the anchorage to a narrow road that went over a hill, separating the harbor from the town. When David crested the hill, Atuona spread out below him, a town of about a thousand people nestled under a thick canopy of coconut trees. The white sand beach was fringed with breakers, and inland toward the base of the hill was the cemetery. David imagined Gauguin walking here, and it dawned on him how remote this island was. Eighty-five years ago, it was at the end of the Earth. Gauguin was looking for a pureness in life, the guiltless race, that noble savage uncorrupted by modern man. He sought a people untouched by industry, people without masters and serfs, people free from Western belief. He sought paradise on Earth, but he didn’t find it. The priests had gotten there first.

  It was not hard to find the artist’s grave. Someone, perhaps Gauguin himself, had carved his name, like his signature on his paintings, into a black lava rock and painted the letters pink. At the head of his tomb were two of his cerami
c tikis, and behind his headstone a frangipani tree bloomed. The afternoon sun sent rays of light, like a spotlight, through the clouds that illumined the tree. David stood in awe before the tomb, filling his mind and heart with all that Paul Gauguin had wanted to tell the world. Yes, there were colors in nature like the colors he painted. There were pink beaches and green skies and lavender clouds. David saw the people he painted walking the streets and sitting in the meadows. But this was no paradise. There were devils everywhere, in the cobalt shadows lurking behind the mango trees. There was no joy. No amount of genius could pierce the landscape to the heart of the people, because their collective heart had been stolen. The soul of the islands was nowhere to be found. This was France with exotic foliage and a different colored skin.

  Monday, June 26, 1989

  Larry roused his crew at dawn. Melanie came on deck first and sat at the cockpit table where Larry had laid out the boat’s weapons. The boys came up from the salon, followed by Larry carrying an armload of cereal boxes, which he stacked on the table. His crew had no idea what he was up to.

  “That’s rather cheesy keeping all that food hidden,” Melanie said.

  “You wouldn’t want to eat this,” Larry replied. He opened the boxes and dumped the contents on to the table. To his crew’s amazement, there were hundreds of rounds of ammunition hidden in the corn flakes. “Here’s the deal. I want you guys to match the ammo with the weapon.”