Return to Paradise

by James A. Michener

  “Don’t worry about him!” Hedy laughed. “This is no yacht, but Johnny’s a lot more fun.”

  “You ought to keep the room cleaned up.”

  “Johnny don’t care. And besides, I can see where things are.”

  Mr. Roe was in as bad a condition as his room. His face was a pallid white and his hair needed cutting. “I think he ought to have a doctor,” Teuru said.

  “He’s drunk.”

  “How does he live?”

  “Traveler’s checks. They’re wonderful. I sign his name here, and a Chinaman cashes them.”

  “Then why don’t you pay his bills? So I can bring him food?”

  “We go out to eat now and then,” Hedy assured her, but it was obvious that most of the money went for her clothes and his gin.

  So from time to time Teuru spent her own money to provide Mr. Roe a decent meal. She delivered it secretly so that neither Hedy nor Frau Henslick could berate her. One day she was sure that Mr. Roe was dying, but that very evening he and Hedy appeared at Quinn’s. He was handsome in pressed whites. Hedy was breathless in a halter bra, a sweeping dirndl and gold slippers. Mr. Roe recognized Teuru and asked her to dance.

  “I must owe you a lot of money,” he apologized.

  “You ought to stay sober and eat more,” she advised.

  She hoped that he would invite her to dance again, but he soon became staggeringly drunk and danced no more. There were moments, these days, when Teuru was almost unhappy. She would step out of the hotel and see that gaping empty space where the Jean Delacroix had anchored and she would recall Victor and his flashing white uniform. At such moments she would wish that somehow they could have married.

  But it was difficult for Teuru to remain melancholy for long. Her happy, bubbling nature would assert itself and she would be swept once more into the rich pattern of Papeete life. In the evenings she would walk through the colorful streets, her head high, and she would find a dozen things to laugh at: tourists avoiding Chinamen as if they were killers, little girls acting like big girls and whistling at sailors, a Paumotu fisherman wrestling with a turtle. One night she stood for some time chuckling at a tiny Chinese seamstress trying to fit a very sour white woman with a white dress. Teuru’s eyes bubbled with merriment as she watched the white woman trying to look important. Then she heard a rasping voice cry, “Don’t move. Keep the light on your face.”

  She turned and saw a wretched little man of more than forty, pencil in hand, sitting in a doorway. His head was large and dirty. His clothes were borrowed and also dirty. He did not have good teeth and he was sketching Teuru’s head.

  “I must go now,” she laughed.

  “No!” he pleaded, and there was something in his voice that commanded her to stay. So she continued to laugh at the Chinese seamstress and the white woman, while the little man made hurried scratches on his pad.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He showed her the sketch. “That’s you,” he said.

  On that first night she talked a long time with Earl Weebles, even bought him some beer, which they shared in a grubby cantina while he explained what sculpture was. “I can take a piece of marble,” he began. Then he laughed nervously and said, “Damned little marble I see these days. But I can take mud or cement or even butter. And a human being grows right out of it.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Teuru laughed.

  So he took her to his small room and for five successive evenings she returned and posed for him while he hacked away at a chunk of tree he had somehow lugged into the room. “You understand,” he said in his rasping voice, “that I can’t pay you.”

  But she was so convinced that this little man loved what he was doing that she sat willingly, amused by his earnest comment. “England’s a rotten place to live,” he said. “Too cold. I almost died there. Tuberculosis. But I always dreamed of Tahiti.”

  “How did you get here?” she asked.

  “Damned near didn’t. Got caught passing bad checks.”

  “Where did you learn to carve?”

  “Never learned. Just started one day. Used to spend my last thruppence on museums. Went to Paris, too. Fine museums there. You ever been to Paris?”

  “I’ve only been here twice,” she laughed.

  “You are very beautiful,” he said. “Now! Would you like to see yourself?”

  He stepped aside and allowed Teuru to see her portrait. She was astonished that wood could be hacked away until it looked like a human head: “My face isn’t as lumpy as that!”

  He explained, “I didn’t try to make your face exactly as it is. I wanted to show it springing from the deep heart of Polynesia.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Your people,” he said earnestly. “They are the most beautiful human beings I’ve seen. You are intended to represent them all.” Then he tied a rope around the head and started lugging it into the street. “We’ll see if we can sell it.”

  He hawked it through Quinn’s, but nobody wanted it. He tried the Col Bleu with no more luck. There was a steamer in from Sydney and he offered it for two hundred francs, five dollars, thirty bob, any sum at all. He asked Teuru to stand beside it so the passengers could see the likeness.

  “Don’t look much like ’er,” an Australian fireman growled, but he bought it for ten shillings. With the money Weebles took Teuru to Quinn’s and ordered drinks. He danced, too, coming not quite as high as her forehead. Later, in his studio, he uncovered a three-foot piece of marble and said, “I’ve been saving it for something worthy. Would you pose for me?”

  “Sure,” she laughed, resuming the chair.

  “I mean … undressed?”

  She slipped off her clothes and stood in the wavering light, unconsciously assuming a pose that illustrated her strong peasant blood. “It is perfect!” Weebles said, but on that festive night when Teuru first stood in his room, he did not start to work upon the statue.

  Teuru now entered upon a complicated life. During the day she listened to Frau Henslick’s ranting. Occasionally she slipped out to get Mr. Roe some food, and in the evenings she posed for Earl Weebles as he carved out the series of heads and torsos that he peddled hopelessly through the streets of Papeete. But once after midnight, as she was preparing her bed in the studio, where she now slept, Weebles started to cough and blood came.

  Often Teuru had seen this blood-cough in the islands and she knew its meaning. She tried to stifle her cry of pain, but it escaped, and Weebles, with his death sentence smeared redly upon his fingers, said, “That’s why I stole money to get out here.”

  “But you mustn’t stay in this tiny room.”

  “I can work here. That’s what matters.”

  “No!” she protested. “You are killing yourself.”

  “What else can I do?” the pathetic little man asked, chopping away at his work.

  “You can come home with me,” she said simply.

  She would accept no argument. Earl Weebles was dying, that was plain, and if he remained in this narrow, choked Papeete hovel he would die very soon. But in Povenaaa’s big house in Raiatea he might live for many years. Accordingly, she took her savings to the shipping office near the cathedral and said, “I want two tickets to Raiatea. There’ll be a lot of baggage.” She spent three days trying to sell Earl’s accumulated statuary but in the end she had to give it away. His tools she packed and sent aboard the Hiro.

  As the little ship rolled northward to the rich vanilla lands it would have been natural for the eighteen-year-old girl to contemplate on why she, a girl of bubbling vitality, should be dragging along with her a consumptive and dying Englishman, old and ugly; but she did not engage in such speculation because what she was doing had been done in Polynesia since the first day Captain Cook discovered the islands. The natives, rich and happy in their relaxed life, had instinctively reached out to protect the embittered or confused or deteriorated white man. It was a rare Polynesian family that did not have a record of some outc
ast cured of despair. The easygoing, sun-drenched natives kept white men as families near London or New York might keep beloved puppies. The wastrels were welcome to hang around the cool porches. They were welcome to sleep with the unmarried daughters. And if the time ever came when they were able to return to what they called civilization, there was a pang of regret in the bosom of the Polynesian family that had—perhaps only for a brief period—protected them as treasured pets. So on the northward journey Teuru stood barefooted, her fine head and chest forward to shield little Earl Weebles from the rain.

  The arrival in Raiatea was not gala. Maggi took one look at the little shrimp and washed her hands of the whole affair. “Another passage wasted,” she snorted, adding in a loud voice so that all on the dock could hear, “They tell me, however, that Hedy caught herself another rich American.”

  To Povenaaa an Englishman was no better than a Frenchman. He made it a point to stumble over chunks of statuary and then moan as if his shin had been fractured. At night he would sit on his porch and shout across to Maggi, “I wanted a jeep and look what I got. A stonemason that don’t even know how to build a house.”

  But Povenaaa’s troubles were only beginning. Teuru made him haul clay to Weebles’ room and big rocks and stumps of trees. She bought him not a jeep but a broken-down old mare and it became a common sight to see sweating Povenaaa, his pants slipping down, straining along the roads, cursing bitterly while he dragged behind some huge object that raised a storm of dust and flies.

  For the closer Earl Weebles came to death, the grander became his designs. His largest group showed Povenaaa, Maggi and Teuru standing by the prow of a ship at the critical moment when it hesitates at the edge of the ocean. Povenaaa was transmuted into a fearless navigator. Maggi was the symbolic matriarch bearing food and determination into the canoe. Teuru was pregnant, carrying the seed of Polynesia to a new part of the world. In this majestic group there were no fragments of a dying race, no wormy, whining Povenaaa. Here was depicted the dayspring of Polynesia.

  It was this way with every statue Weebles carved. He did not record the death about him in Raiatea, for in the midst of his own death he saw life. He witnessed the eternal on-springing of humanity, and in his Raiatea pieces he created a testament of life. Consider only his figure of the fisherman. He wanted to use Povenaaa for this, but Teuru’s father said he’d be damned if he’d take off his clothes again for that shriveled-up Englishman. So Weebles found an old man, useless for anything, and handed him a spear. What evolved was the figure of a man rich in years, poised for one last try at the reef bonita. There was grandeur in the sagging belly lines, compassion in the old head.

  Earl Weebles saw these things. He said, “Raiatea is the most beautiful spot on earth.” It was also apparent that he considered Teuru the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Endlessly he copied her placid beauty. She would come home from working the vanilla vines, laughing, her hair about her waist, barefooted and strong, and he would insist that she stop just as she was, and he would prepare the sketch upon which he would work that night.

  It was curious that she never thought of him as an artist. He was merely an unfortunate man who needed a last home. She worked for him, posed for him, slept with him and comforted him when coughing spells attacked. She even enlisted the aid of her cautious employer, Kim Sing.

  This happened when she found that Weebles needed new tools, a sketch book and some medicine. Her own money had been used up and Povenaaa had none. So she went to Kim Sing. “Why do you need so much money?” he asked.

  “To buy rocks with.”

  “Rocks!”

  “Please, M’sieur Kim. My friend needs many things.”

  “Can he pay back the loan?”

  “He could give you a piece of sculpture, perhaps?”

  The canny businessman laughed. “None of that stuff!”

  “Then I’ll pay it back,” Teuru said.

  “How?”

  “You yourself said I was your best workman.”

  “It would take a long time.”

  “I’ll be here a long time,” Teuru insisted.

  “But why should you do such a thing?”

  “Because Weebles needs the money. Now.”

  “Are you in love with this man?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why do you seek the money?”

  “Because he’s very sick,” she said.

  By such persistence Teuru mustered the help of many people in behalf of Earl Weebles. In time she even wore down fat Maggi’s contempt, whereupon she arranged for the sculptor to take his lunch at Maggi’s, so that he could have hot food.

  “I don’t object to feeding you,” Maggi puffed. “Most island families have some no-good bum eating their food sooner or later.”

  “Why do you tolerate it?” Weebles asked humbly.

  “When I was young I liked to have a white man around. It was fashionable.”

  Weebles wiped his chin and said, “I could never express in words …”

  “I know,” Maggi broke in. “I must say that for you. You’re grateful. You take the French poet that lived with Teuru last year. What a simpleton! Used to ask me, ‘Maggi? Where has the grandeur gone?’ I told him if he ever got a good hold on Hedy he’d have more grandeur than he could handle.”

  “The grandeur gone?” Weebles repeated incredulously. “I’ve never seen such grandeur before. The hills quiver with meaning.”

  “And you haven’t seen Hedy yet!” Maggi added. In time she grew to like the wizened Englishman. “Weebles!” she cried one day. “Why don’t you move over here with me?”

  The little man looked up in amazement at the woman who weighed more than twice as much as he. “Not that,” she roared, banging the table until the plate of fried fish clattered. “I was thinking that if you left Povenaaa’s … If I took care of you … Then Teuru could go back to Papeete.”

  “Does she want to go?” Weebles asked quietly.

  “Of course she does. She’s got to catch herself a rich American.”

  There was a long silence, one of those hazy, fly-buzzing pauses during which the bedraggled Englishman stared at the fat woman. Finally he muttered, “I won’t be there much longer.”

  “The sickness?” Maggi asked, banging her chest. “It’s bad, eh?” Weebles nodded and Maggi changed the subject abruptly, “But you’ve got to do something with all that junk.”

  “What junk?”

  “Those heads. Those things you carve.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” she said, banging the table, “that pretty soon it’s going to cave in Povenaaa’s floor.” That was when she started hauling one piece after another down to the Hiro, peddling them among the passengers. She sold by weight, asking a dollar a pound, but she was usually so sweaty and puffing when she lugged the stuff aboard that she would accept any reasonable offer.

  Weebles was delighted. He had, in his lifetime, sold very few pieces and he glowed with satisfaction when Maggi reported good luck. “Remember that head of Teuru that looked like a cow? This morning I stuck a Swiss woman with it.”

  Weebles loved beer and in the evening when a sale had been made he would stand treat at Le Croix du Sud. Once, as Teuru raised the amber glass to her amber lips, the sculptor stopped, enraptured. He put down his glass, deeply affected, and begged to be excused. They heard him coughing outside and he waited in the road until Teuru left the bar. They walked through the deserted streets, down to the wharf where the sweet vanilla beans were waiting shipment.

  “I’ve never been able to talk well,” he said.

  They had never said much, Teuru and Weebles, but this night great agitation gnawed him and he said, “You’re very young …” but the precise words would not come, and he stood there by the straits from which the great navigators had set forth. His hands reached for hers and he felt the subtle structure of her bone and flesh. Finally he blurted out, all at once, “You have wasted these months on me.”

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nbsp; There was a world more he wanted to say, but he was silent, an inchoate chunk of confusion which no chisel like his own had ever quite polished to completion. When they got home he begged her to pose for him once again, and Teuru stood there naked in her father’s room. The statue was never completed, of course, for that night he died.

  He was buried, as he would have wished, near the straits of Raiatea. When the funeral was over Povenaaa said, “Now we can get some of this junk out of here.” He ordered the whole collection to be hauled away, but this was a silly command because he had to do the hauling. The smaller pieces he gave to people about the island who had posed for Weebles at one time or another. But he was stuck with the big ones. He tried to make Maggi take some, but she would have none of them.

  “If I look like a blown-up whale,” she snorted, “I at least don’t want a picture of me around the house.”

  It was she who finally talked some sense into Teuru’s head. She said, “It’s all very well to be nice to men. A girl ought to be. Lord knows, I was in my day. But it’s also necessary to look out for yourself. How do you suppose I bought this house? A rich American, that’s how. Now you get on back to Tahiti and find yourself a real man.”

  She bought Teuru her third ticket to Papeete and whispered consolingly as the Hiro blew its whistle, “You’ve had a no-good Frenchman and a half-dead Englishman. Get yourself a strong American and start having babies.”

  This time Hedy did not meet Teuru at the Papeete quay. Alone, the nineteen-year-old girl trudged back to the Hotel Montparnasse, where to her surprise Frau Henslick greeted her with an embrace. “You’re the only girl I’ve ever been able to trust,” she shouted. “That Hikeroa girl has your room again. Throw the tramp out.”

  Cautiously Teuru motioned up the stairs with her thumb. “Hedy still there?”

  Frau Henslick put down her pencil and beamed. “She’s the smart one. She’s married.”

  “To the American?”

  “That good-for-nothing drunk?” And although Teuru could hear no disturbance, Frau Henslick suddenly screamed, “Shut up, you lazy bastard.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” Teuru asked.