Return to Paradise

by James A. Michener

  “My island!” de la Foret cried, and there was something in his passionate recognition of a land he had never seen that bewildered Teuru, yet at the same time she felt that she had found the one man with whom she could live forever happily. They stood like enchanted voyagers from another age as the pitching Hiro approached the island. These were the hills that had bred the bravest navigators the world has ever known. These were the valleys of the most lewd pagan rites, the sacred altars where human sacrifices had been dragged by the hair, the living monuments of a towering civilization—lost.

  But their reverie was broken by shouts coming from the wharf. Some children had caught sight of the lovers and were screaming, “Povenaaa! Teuru has her American!”

  The happy message sped through the crowd, for all the island knew of Teuru’s mission, and all the villagers beamed approval of the handsome young American. Then, as the Hiro docked, there came a fresh commotion and the crowd fell back to make a pathway for Maggi, puffing and on fire. She took one look at the young people and shouted, “By God, girl! You’ve done it?” Then she turned and shouted, “Get Povenaaa!”

  In a moment half the children on the quay were paging the town bum, and soon he appeared, barefooted, his pants falling away from his hips, his face a thicket of whiskers. Then, as his bleary eyes focused, he saw de la Foret and he cried in Polynesian, “I knew my daughter could catch herself a rich American!”

  The gangway was lowered and Povenaaa received his first shock of the day, for when Teuru led Victor ashore, the first thing the young poet did was to stoop down and kiss the earth of Raiatea. “My God!” Povenaaa cried. “Is he sick?”

  Maggi shook her fist at the Hiro and swore, “You’d give Jonah the seasickness.”

  Povenaaa led the procession to Le Croix du Sud and when the rancid butter appeared with the sour brioches he asked expansively, “And what part of America do you come from?”

  Victor smiled and said, “I am a Frenchman.”

  There was a horrible silence while Maggi stared dumbly at Povenaaa’s gaping jaw. Teuru tried to help things out by saying that Victor was really a French sailor, but that he’d been discharged on Saturday.

  “Oh, my God!” Maggi groaned.

  Now Victor tried to soothe things. “I’ve come here to marry your daughter.”

  “No!” Povenaaa exploded. “No French pig shall …”

  “Father,” Teuru pleaded. “Let’s go home.”

  “I think we better,” Maggi said limply. With anguish she paid Povenaaa’s bill—what a hollow celebration this had been—and then started for the weatherbeaten house. Once inside Povenaaa miraculously produced four rickety chairs and demanded, “Now what’s all this about?”

  “I want to marry your daughter,” de la Foret said forcefully.

  “No! She’s too young!”

  “And besides,” Maggi added. “Frenchmen are not welcome here.”

  “She’s right!” Povenaaa stormed. “No Frenchman will marry my daughter.”

  Now Teuru spoke. “But I love him. He’s very gentle. He’s a poet.”

  This caught Povenaaa off guard. He stopped blustering and leaned forward. “Poets are very famous. Do they make a lot of money?”

  “No,” Teuru interrupted. “Not yet. But some day he will. He’s writing a long poem. About Raiatea.”

  “Son of a pig, it’s strange!” Povenaaa mused. “The world full of rich Americans and my daughter picks a poor French poet.”

  Ignoring de la Foret completely, Maggi took Teuru’s hand and said, “I understand Hedy got herself a beautiful yacht. How did she get a yacht and you a poet?”

  Teuru blushed and explained, “She didn’t fall in love. I did.”

  This was enough for Povenaaa. He rose to his full height and announced dramatically, “There will be no marriage! Not between a poet and a girl only seventeen.”

  “What shall I do?” de la Foret cried, anguished that he must lose Teuru.

  “You stay here, of course,” Teuru replied.

  “Here?” he repeated.

  She lifted his bag and carried it into her small room. Next she fetched hers and placed it beside his. Then she stood in the doorway and motioned to him.

  “You mean … I’m to stop here? With you?”

  “But there’s to be no marriage!” Povenaaa warned, defending his daughter from the unwelcome intruder. When de la Foret remained rooted in bewilderment, Povenaaa reached out and pushed him into Teuru’s room. “You can stay here for the time being,” he said grudgingly. “But no marriage!”

  Disappointed and disgusted, Povenaaa slammed the door on the young lovers and slumped down beside Maggi. “A dog’s luck,” he mused bitterly.

  “It’s too bad,” Maggi consoled. “But it’ll work out … in time. The important thing is, be firm! Don’t let them get married. He’ll leave one of these days.”

  Povenaaa scratched his bewhiskered face and asked, “A poet? Do you suppose that’s much better than a sailor?”

  The disillusionment of young Victor de la Foret was catastrophic. It was not the disillusionment of love, for never had he been so happy. In the morning Teuru rose from their bed and polished the thin bamboo wafer she used on the vanilla flowers. Then she threw around herself a blue-and-white pareu and combed her radiant hair. Sometimes she would bring in pawpaw, some limes, a mango or a pot of black coffee. They would eat together while the morning birds made a symphony among the trees. Then she would kiss him good-bye and walk like some ancient goddess toward the vanilla plantations.

  Nor was it the disillusionment of life with Povenaaa, who worked each night to bring America into the conversation. The disappointed father made it emphatic that a Frenchman was a pretty poor substitute for a Yank. He also delighted in dandling Major on his knee, adding that he guessed no babies in the world were as pretty as American babies. He said—staring boldly at Teuru—that he guessed any girl in the world would be mighty happy to have a child as intelligent as Major. He taught the child to sing an amazing version of “Yankee Doodle.” Worst of all, in an old copy of Life he found a full-page color shot of a jeep. This he posted right where Victor and Teuru had to face it as they ate. But for the most part Povenaaa proved a decent sort, even though he used to ask Maggi almost every night, in a voice so loud that Victor had to hear, “I wonder when he’s leaving.”

  No, the tragic disillusionment that overtook Victor de la Foret was that of Raiatea itself. Where had the once great civilization fled? How could the godlike subduers of the vast Pacific have degenerated into Povenaaa? Why, only last week sailors of Raiatea had fled back to port when a trivial storm overtook them at sea. He studied the relics of the island, hoping to find an answer, but in no stone could he detect a trace of the grandeur that had once inhabited this land.

  Strangely, he found his only solace in Maggi, who often sat with Major on her lap, droning about the old days. She could recite the names of all the canoes that had penetrated the oceans even to Peru.

  “But what happened, Maggi?”

  “Now we stay home.”

  “But where did the grandeur vanish?”

  “It’s still here. You ever see Major’s mother? Very grandeur, Hedy!”

  “I mean the spirit of life.”

  “It’s here. Some time Teuru will take you to a real island dance.”

  Word arrived that there was to be one on nearby Bora Bora and Victor arranged for a long boat to make the trip. He rode aft with Teuru and for a breathless moment he could believe that he was sailing with the immortal canoes. Ahead rose the fantastic cliffs of Bora Bora, radiant in the sunlight. About him the birds wheeled as they had generations ago during the hegira. In counterpoint to the throbbing of the engine he could hear the men of Raiatea chanting songs whose very meaning had been lost in the dust of years. This was the historic grandeur of Polynesia: brown bodies thrusting forward into the unknown sea, frail boats riding to the sunrise. Ahead the sure knowledge that somewhere there must be an island. Behind the securi
ty of a beautiful homeland.

  He had a further sensation of historic reality when he decamped onto the shore of Bora Bora where the cliffs dropped into the fairytale lagoon. As dusk came on, lovers from all over the island gathered and a tomtom beat out traditional rhythms. Men leaped into the ring and began furious gyrations. Soon they were joined by handsome girls. They danced, as if demented, a sexual ritual that probed far back into the past, until with furious cries the men caught the girls by the waist and threw them toward the jungle’s edge. There was a timeless moment when the men leaped beside the girls as lovers ages ago had done before dragging the women into the bush. But now came a nervous giggle and the girls rejoined their friends.

  The spell broken, de la Foret had to recognize not some dim memory of the past but the harsher actualities of now. This once godlike people! Look at them! Their teeth falling out from white man’s food. Their health ruined with white man’s diseases. Even the flaming moon that had once risen above the volcano to shine down on rare, savage bodies now limped up from a dead volcano and shed a pallid light upon a doomed and dying race.

  “Teuru,” he whispered, “let’s go back.” She understood his disillusionment and tried to round up the Raiatea sailors, but they were afraid to set forth in the darkness.

  That was the beginning of de la Foret’s illness. He had no fever, no disease. He was sick of that almost incurable malady: today. When he watched Povenaaa trying to sell his daughter to some rich American, he was sick. When he dissected the trivial life of modern Raiatea, he was sick. There had once been a glory, but today it was vanished. Therefore he was ill with today’s illness.

  His poem never got beyond the first canto. True, that fragment was superb and was published with distinction. It dealt with Polynesia as a physical world: the sky, the stars, the lonely islands. It was when people were introduced that the poem turned to rot. Victor was aware of this and stopped writing. “I am sick,” he repeated.

  “You must come with me while I work the vines,” Teuru laughed, and it was there that de la Foret rebuilt himself. Day after day he watched Teuru move among the vines, grasping in her firm left fingers the flowers that looked like orchids. In her right hand she carried the bamboo wafer, which she deftly stroked along the stamen, collecting pollen. Then, with a twist of her left thumb, she snapped open the flap that protected the pistil and deposited upon it the pollen from her bamboo. Then she allowed the flap to snap back in place, whereupon she squeezed the pistil to be sure the pollen penetrated it.

  “It’s so tedious,” Victor complained.

  “Vanilla’s too important to trust to luck,” she explained. She said that every flower impregnated by her gentle method would produce a vanilla bean. Those she missed would die that night. “I do the work of bees and flies,” she said.

  Since the flowers opened at eight and closed at four, Teuru and Victor spent most of each day in the sunny fields, reworking the same vines daily to pollinate each new flower. “Povenaaa must be a rich man with so much vanilla,” de la Foret observed as he watched the long beans ripening in the sun.

  “They’re not Povenaaa’s!” Teuru laughed. “They belong to Kim Sing.”

  Then the sickness returned. The sunny islands of Polynesia were now owned by Chinese and Frenchmen and Germans. Everyone prospered. Only the Polynesians withered. “You spend so much care on a Chinaman’s vines,” Victor protested. “Who cares for you?”

  Teuru blushed. “Yes. Povenaaa was asking that last night.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She would not reply but that evening Povenaaa was most blunt. He had Major on his lap and asked, “When will you have a white baby, Teuru?” His daughter blushed and made no reply. “Well!” Povenaaa continued. “You have a man for eight months now. What’s the matter?”

  Victor was outraged. “You shouldn’t talk like that,” he protested.

  Maggi looked at him and sniffed. “Poets, hmmmm. I’ll bet Hedy isn’t fooling around with poets.” She sucked at a bone and then called for Major. Swinging the child onto her lap she counseled, “Don’t you ever bother with poets, Major.”

  Humiliated, young de la Foret left the table. Teuru found him along the shore. “What kind of father is Povenaaa?” the poet cried.

  “He knows I ought to have a baby pretty soon,” Teuru replied.

  “Stop it! Are you trying to drive me mad?” He pushed her away and stormed along the beach. When Teuru tried to keep up with him he shouted at her in a high, tormented voice and told her to go home. She sought out Maggi and reported the strange behavior.

  “Was he crying?” Maggi asked.

  “Yes,” the perplexed girl replied.

  “Good!” Maggi said, straightening her Mother Hubbard. “When a white man cries it means that pretty soon he’s going home.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t explain it,” Maggi said. “Every time you think you understand a white man, something like this happens. But I noticed that whenever one of my men cried I could start packing his things.”

  “Why are white men so hard to understand?” Teuru asked.

  “Because they’re all fools,” Maggi explained.

  “But you yourself said there were some wonderful white men on Bora Bora.”

  “Yes, but they were Americans.”

  “But Hedy told me that when the major found she was going to have a baby, he cried.”

  “What about?” Maggi asked suspiciously.

  “About his wife in America.”

  Maggi shrugged her shoulders. “It’s as I said. White men are very strange.”

  Victor returned late that night. Lighting a small lamp by Teuru’s bed, he scanned the poetry he had tried to write. It was apparently very bad, for one by one the sheets were burned. Teuru feigned sleep and watched him. Then finally she asked, “Have you nothing you want to keep?”

  Startled, he dropped a flaming page and had to extinguish it with his foot. When he had done so he sat on Teuru’s bed and held her dark head close to his. “Yes,” he muttered. “I have one thing to keep.”

  “What?” she inquired prosaically.

  “My memory of you.” Then, as if he wished to explain exactly the meaning of this day, he launched into a long apostrophe to the fact that in the midst of a dying and degenerate world he had found one clean, pure symbol of the ancient grandeur: Teuru’s placid beauty.

  “What’s ‘placid’ mean?” she asked.

  He realized that she had not understood anything of what he was trying to say, and she, realizing that he did not intend making love, sighed and pulled away. “I’ve got to sleep,” she said. “I must be up early.”

  When she rose, he had gone. He did not return and she heard that he had slept on the hotel floor like an ordinary tramp. When the Hiro arrived Major came running in with her childish news: “Victor go away!”

  At first Teuru felt nothing. Victor was going back to France. Good. She went about her work, but as she did so she saw a vision of the young sailor in crisp whites, with a forbidden red pompom on his hat, and she burst from the house and dashed along the dusty road to the dock.

  The Hiro was standing out into the channel, but she could see Victor against the railing. She was disposed to call out to him, but instead she stayed among the shadows and watched the boat recede into the distance. It was strange. As a girl she had often come, to see the Hiro sail and aboard there might be some girl she had never really liked, but at the moment of departure she would break her heart with weeping over the loss of this unimportant girl. Now Victor was leaving and she felt nothing. But then he put his hand over his eyes, as if he were shielding them from the morning sun in order to locate someone on the quay. She started to wave her hand and cry “Victor!” but she realized that the Hiro was already too far from shore.

  At last she turned to resume her work in the vanilla fields, only to find Maggi and Povenaaa weeping bitterly, consoling each other. “He was a fine young man,” Maggi said.

  “For a Fren
chman,” Povenaaa said, “he was all right.”

  Then Maggi with fortitude wiped her eyes and announced, “But we must forget him. Look!” And she produced a ticket for Teuru on the next Hiro.

  “Only this time,” Povenaaa begged. “An American. Please.”

  There was a somber quality in Teuru’s return to Papeete. The day was overcast and the brooding hills were enveloped in fog. Along the beautiful quay there was a gaping wound: the Jean Delacroix was missing. There were no sailors with red pompoms, and the waterfront looked as if it had been betrayed. Even Hedy’s yacht was gone.

  But Hedy herself was waiting at the gangplank. The slim girl had a scar across her right cheek. After she had fallen into Teuru’s strong arms she said, “He hit me with a dish. Night before he sailed.”

  “Was he a good man?” Teuru asked.

  “Pretty good,” Hedy said reflectively. “I managed a lot of presents and some money.”

  “What are you doing now?” Teuru asked as she trudged back to her old job at Montparnasse.

  “I have another American,” Hedy reported.

  “You’re lucky,” Teuru said.

  At the hotel Frau Henslick screamed, “So you’ve come back! Put your things in your old room. There’s a Hikeroa girl in there now. Kick her out. She’s no good.”

  Teuru was unpacking when the German landlady returned and announced, “Under no circumstances are you to give any food to that bastard Johnny Roe.” This, Teuru figured, meant that Mr. Roe had stopped paying his bills. She was alarmed, therefore, when the American shouted for some ice. She filled the bucket and started upstairs.

  “Remember!” Frau Henslick warned. “No food!”

  Teuru was quite unprepared for what she saw. In bed lay the young American, very drunk. That was normal, but the once neat room was a shambles. Clothes were scattered everywhere, men’s and women’s, and as she picked her way among them she saw that Hedy was perched in the armchair, peeling an orange.

  “Surprise!” Hedy cried. “I live here now!”

  “Let’s have the ice,” Mr. Roe moaned.