by Gavin Young
There were other forms of life in the tiny mess. Cockroaches clung to its walls, looking like decorative studs until they moved. When, on the second midday at sea, a cockroach plopped from the ceiling onto my plate, Captain Alphonse yelled, ‘Capitaine Cook! Give the place a spray with the American stuff.’ But that evening the cockroaches were quite unaffected; they even seemed to have acquired a somewhat self-satisfied air. Whatever ‘the American stuff’ was, it must have contained vitamins.
Cockroaches were ubiquitous on the Taporo: there again it was like the Ann. Going to the galley to fill a glass with cold drinking water, I discovered pots and pans with herds of ‘cockies’ browsing on them. I could feel them at night on my blankets. Fortunately I don’t worry about cockroaches. Snakes, leeches and scorpions – I care about them. Once I was almost driven to distraction in a hotel at Meknes in Morocco by bed bugs so big that, roaming about in my pillow stuffing, they sounded like elephants in dense pampas grass.
To contain the rats that Captain Alphonse admitted were virtually ineradicable in the cargo area, there were two purposeful-looking cats aboard. They were small now, but they knew their job, the captain said. ‘You wait, they should get bigger every day.’ The cats had oddly splayed toes. In the moderate swell they prowled about sticking their funny flat feet out to each side – like true sailors crossing a bucking deck.
*
My notes:
‘Les Iles du Roi Georges,’ the chief officer, Eric Maamaatua, says, pointing. From the wheelhouse, King George is just visible. We roll a good deal, but it has a soothing quality about it. In the bows, a sailor is playing a guitar and someone is singing a tangy Pacific island song.
Three scruffy, unshaven French youths lie on the deck. A thin, bearded Frenchman is a technical teacher at a new government school at Nuka Hiva. His wife comes from there. A youngish, heavy lady in a loose, cool dress, she never seems to smile or speak. Her expression shares the hopelessness of the nude girl in Gauguin’s painting Nevermore. He’s been out here ten years. He dislikes Papeete intensely: ‘Pourri, pourri – ruined.’
How much longer would he stay?
‘Ouf – difficult to say.’
Next day, before our landfall at Hiva Oa, the French teacher says he will introduce me to an engineer friend in Atuona, the main ‘town’. He explains his poor wife is terrified of a rough sea like the one they had going to Papeete. Reverting to his remark, ‘Papeete, pourri,’ he explains that too many no-good Frenchmen are coming here, getting footholds in various fields. ‘Oh, lots of things. There’ve been people selling electric blankets to the Tahitians on islands without electricity. That sort of thing.’
What about the ban on kava?
‘Ha – that’s the curé’s ban – he’s a powerful force.’
I note that people – French, at that – talk to me about the powers of Church and State in modern Tahiti in the scornful tones that Gauguin used about it in 1900.
Approach to Hiva Oa. 8.45 p.m. Captain on the bridge in singlet and shorts. A sky full of shooting stars. A great range of cliffs: moonlight strikes down on sharp, knifelike outlines of rock. A star falls like a cigarette end and goes out in mid-flight.
We head for a narrow opening in the inky masses ahead. Hiva Oa is the long, high outline, black with blacker shadows, that Alvaro Mendana – the first European here – saw when he came from Peru in 1595, naming the island group after his wife, the Marquesa de Mandonca. He left two hundred dead ‘Marquesans’ and three large crosses to commemorate his passing.
Waves break on tall black shoulders of rock – white shapes leaping up like dogs to welcome their master home. Captain Alphonse checks the radar. We are entering a tight little bay. A shimmering circlet of lights is visible at the foot of the soaring screen of blackness that is slowly enfolding us, and above which the Great Bear is standing on its head.
Then, a breeze and – very distinctly – the smell of flowers and vegetation.
‘Ah, oui,’ Captain Alphonse waves a hand. ‘The noa-noa – the parfum. The flowery valley.’
He whistles sharply. The anchor is let go. We are surrounded by silence, and the perfumed air of Aruona.
Once upon a time, the whaling fleets anchored here and carried off a complement of women for their next voyage. Now it is yachtsmen, mostly from America and Canada. Here, unlike in Western Samoa and the Solomons, the damage has long been done. In the 1840s, the Handbook tells me, the population of the Marquesas was twenty thousand; now it is two thousand.
Ashore next day, I experienced nothing of the harassment R.L.S. received from the ‘ruffianly fellows’ from a whaling boat, who surrounded him ‘with harsh laughter and rude looks’, reminding him of the inhabitants of ‘the slums of some great city’. It was peaceful and orderly now. The village (Atuona can only be called that) straggled up the valley along a few narrow, asphalted lanes. There was a modern school; a gendarmerie post at a junction; everywhere flowers. In a central store, in the Café de la Paix, a few ‘yachties’ stood chatting and drinking beer or soft drinks from cans under an advertisement for a Bal à la Maison des Jeunes – repas sur place (avec pâtisserie).’
‘How ya doin’?’
‘Pretty good. How are you guys?’
They were re-meeting after sailing from Hawaii or San Francisco. They were the World Outside, just as much as a memorial in the lane that read: ‘Mort pour la France. 1914–1918: Soldat Naspuo A. Puu Fafiau. 1939–1944: Soldat Tehaamo Tohiau.’
I plodded up a lane towards the house of the teacher’s friend – he had drawn me a sketch map – past a post office, a bank, the gendarmerie and the Maison des Jeunes into a dense valley which sloped gradually upwards through the trees and foliage in which I could hear an invisible stream running over rocks. Here nondescript bungalows with iron roofing crouched among fruit trees and plants with flowers like white stars, or scarlet bells, or mauve firecrackers, and little things of yellow and blue that looked suitable for any British hedgerow. Added to that, there was the noa-noa – the extraordinary perfume of the valley – even stronger here than it had been the night before. Occasionally jeeps passed up or down the lane, their drivers occasionally sunburned white men, presumably French.
I found the French teacher’s friend in one of these bungalows. He had a striking name – Jésus L’Evêque – and obviously liked visits. His wife was in Papeete, I think. He was not perturbed by the absence of his friend the teacher, whom I had left wrestling with some video equipment on board. He had been a plumber in Paris; now he ran a job-training school, he said, when we both had beer in our hands. An experiment. The idea was to keep the local youth occupied, but, more than that, to teach them rudimentary techniques of construction, engineering and so forth. To make young Marquesans proud of their traditions – the tradition of house building, for example.
‘There are no Marquesan houses left,’ he said. ‘I want to get my pupils to build one – you know, bamboo, wood, leaf thatching. Just to show them how it was done. And I want them to learn all the old, beautiful, forgotten designs for tapa, the bark cloth.’
In Oviri, his Writings of a Savage, Gauguin had written:
We don’t seem to suspect in Europe that there exists, among the Marquesans, a very advanced decorative art…. Today even for gold you can no longer find any of those beautiful objects in bone, rock, iron-wood which they used to make…. There is not the prettiest official’s wife who would not exclaim at the sight of it, ‘It’s horrible! It’s savagery!’
‘The Tahitians today don’t give a damn. They want video, Papeete, Paris. We try to get the young Tahitians to copy the old delicate tapa patterns. But it takes a foreigner to tell them.’
He brought me a book of strong, simple tapa patterns, saying, ‘See. A German made that book. Take the valleys of the Marquesas,’ he went on, ‘they were kingdoms, fiefdoms. The old civilization – if you’ll excuse the expression – was in these valleys.’ He shook his head. ‘No Tahitian or Marquesan is interested in all that. We, foreig
ners, know more about the corners and valleys and bays. They don’t give a damn for culture, for their past in any form. It’s video, Papeete, Paris.’
It made depressing hearing. Who, I thought, made them aspire to Western-style material wealth? We foreigners. Who undermines the will to independence? The French, and elsewhere the Americans. Of course, the real Marquesans had been destroyed ages ago. Still, I had to confirm the ban on lava-lavas and kava. Could there exist such an impertinent interference with other people’s culture?
Apparently, yes. L’Evêque said at once, with a laugh, ‘The bishop here forbids the pareo – that’s the local word for lava-lava. Absolutely. A girl was turned away from school the other day for wearing a dress that only came up to her collarbones and only fell to her calves. The principal said – and she was supported, of course, by the curé – that she must cover her shoulders. Yes! Can you imagine? And no pareos for anyone. As for kava – forbidden. Completely.’ He looked at me, still laughing. ‘Madness, you say? Oh, yes, I agree.’
L’Evêque broke off here and put some fruit on the table. ‘My wife produces pineapples, avocados, paw-paws, mangoes, limes…. Polynesians are lazy. They grow just enough for themselves. They’re not commercial. That’s why the French and Chinese are able to import far too many things.’ He shook his head. ‘They take the commission. The Government takes the tax. And the cost of living soars…. The Tahitians don’t like us French at all really.’ He reflected on this for a moment, then continued, ‘They’d much prefer the Americans. Did you know that?’
‘The Americans have more money.’
‘That’s it. They see the yachts and the dollars coming in. People in Bora Bora, one of the islands nearer Tahiti, had an American base dumped on them in the war.’
‘Forty years ago.’
‘Yes, but they still can’t forget those wonderful dollars.’
We ate in silence for a while.
‘Remember, too,’ the indefatigable L’Evêque went on, ‘the best French are not coming here now. Some are good, of course. Others are misfits, bombastic, here to feather their nests. The Tahitians notice these things.’
‘Could they manage independence?’
‘Oh, no. Tahiti runs on subventions from Paris. It exists on them. That’s the power of the French here.’
After a while, I thanked him and said I would go and visit Gauguin’s grave. I only had a day here.
‘Gauguin’s house – nothing remains of it now. They may be going to restore his Maison de Jouir, that’s what I heard.’ Gauguin’s house had been a two-storey affair of wood and bamboo, with a large, six-windowed studio upstairs. Over the entrance he had put up a provocative sign, Maison de Jouir – House of Pleasure. That and his consumption of alcohol – two hundred and twenty-four bottles of wine, fifty-five litres of rum and thirty-two litres of absinthe in the single year before he died in Atuona, according to his liquor supplier’s books – his habit of wearing a blue pareo, a green shirt and a green beret, and his deliberate cutting of officials and priests at every opportunity, had outraged the small, stuffy, white community of the day.
‘The Maison de Jouir was more or less where the mayor’s office is now,’ L’Evêque had said. Yachties, male and female, were standing about there in scarlet baseball caps and tight shorts when I passed. No curé would be outraged by tight shorts today – not even in Atuona.
I puffed up the hill to the cemetery and was relieved to find it was empty. There was no church. Under frangipani trees anonymous, undecorated white crosses poked up indistinctly through long, unkempt grass. I had no need to search about for Gauguin’s grave – round it, at least, the grass was cut, and the grave itself was not white like the others but composed of sombre, distinctive slabs of lava that made a coffin-shaped platform on the foot of which was carved in the lava – ‘Paul Gauguin 1903’. Someone had draped a wreath of fresh flowers and garlands of seashells and coral over the tomb, and the overhanging trees had shed brown leaves and a few white, starlike blooms to brighten the sad lumps of lava. At the painter’s head, like a fierce, ambivalent bodyguard, stood a copy of his ceramic statuette Oviri, the enigmatic Tahitian god-goddess.
Nothing could be more appropriate. Gauguin had found the burial place he wanted and deserved, eleven thousand miles from France. To his right is the tomb of the Belgian singer, Jacques Brel, who died here of cancer in 1978. Behind lie other memorials – one, ironically, is to a forgotten bishop – half lost in long grass and undergrowth. In front the cemetery slopes sharply down – simply by raising his head a fraction, Gauguin, like Stevenson on Mount Vaea, could look over his feet to the sea far below. Tilting his head farther back, he would see towering ridges; he is, you might say, perfectly suspended between mountain and sea.
The sun moved in and out of clouds, blurring or bringing into sharp focus the wooded crest of the mountain. Raw scars of rock began halfway down it, and then the tide of trees lapped up from the valley where Jésus L’Evêque lived. It was warm. I was alone at Gauguin’s feet with a few whistling mynah birds. I was in no hurry; I wished I had a book and a picnic. I smelled the sun in the hot grass and began to think I was on a summer hillside in Provence. My eyes drooped. I slept….
It was cooler when I woke, but the sun still warmed the lava boulders of the tomb. Oviri looked at me impassively. I got up and pushed into the long grass, wary for snakes, and squatted down, carefully avoiding some sharp, up-thrusting plants like green bayonets. A call of nature has to be dealt with even in a cemetery. I was busy dealing with it when I realized I was not alone. I heard the first step quite soon, but it was some time before the second followed it. Then, in quick succession, came a third and a fourth. Slowly and furtively, someone was approaching the spot where I crouched with such lack of dignity. The sexton? The curé? Would I be taken in charge? Would I return to the Taporo in company with a gendarme? – ‘The charge, monsieur, is – sacré nom d’un nom – defecating on consecrated ground!’ The steps continued to approach. An embarrassing exposure seemed imminent. I coughed – some small modest sign that I was there seemed appropriate. Meanwhile, I was not inactive. I wrestled extensively with my clothing and was still painfully wrestling (an aggressive sprig of cactus had entangled itself in my shirt-tail) when, with an exasperated snort, a head thrust out of the shrubbery. At my elbow, within touching distance. I froze. The head had a great, long, curving nose. Heavy-lidded eyes slowly blinked at me, then widened in astonishment; an upper lip as grey and thick as a slab of boiled beef curled back from monstrous discoloured teeth that pushed out towards me … I have the impression now that, for a hundredth of the second, I believed I was face to face with a hideous, outraged manifestation of Gauguin–Oviri. But, no. I put out a hand and patted the long, hairy, Bottom-like nose. I stroked the melancholy, drooping, hairy ears and I think I murmured, ‘There, there,’ in soothing tones. I have always loved horses. This one was small, old and lonely.
*
We took on board a jeep, twelve goats and a black and white pig. Leaving Hiva Oa our decks were cluttered with crates, sacks, bags, boxes and an outboard motor. The goats bleated and butted each other as if they were competing for the pig, which squealed continually. The upper part of the ship was festooned with banana plants and coconuts. We might have been part of one of Captain’s Bligh’s botanical expeditions. By the time we passed the mountainous outline of Ua Pou Island that claws the sky with the jagged fingers of a drowning witch – one of the least forgettable of all island outlines – the sweet noa-noa of Atuona had given way to more barnyard smells. But the image in my mind remained – still remains – of a foot-high statuette under a frangipani tree, dominant on a grassy hillside peopled by squabbling mynah birds, a lonely old horse and heaven knows how many Marquesan tupapau (the aitus of these islands). The spirit of Oviri, a frigate bird and several small terns travelled with us towards Nuku Hiva.
Twenty-seven
Tai-o-hae Bay.
‘The Snark rested in a placid harbour that nestled i
n a vast amphitheatre, the towering walls of which seemed to rise direct from the water. Far up, to the east, we glimpsed the thin line of a trail, visible in one place, where it soured across the face of the wall. “The path by which Toby escaped from Typee!” we cried.’
Whether or not we (like Jack London) were looking at Toby Green’s actual escape route, the word ‘amphitheatre’ was certainly the appropriate one to describe the main anchorage of Nuku Hiva. There was the glorious bay where in 1842 Melville had seen from the Acushnet’s deck the six-ship fleet of the French Admiral Du Petit Thouars in the process of sandbagging the Marquesas Islanders into the service of France. He made scornful remarks about the French warships calling there, ‘floating batteries, which lay with their fatal tubes ostentatiously pointed at a handful of bamboo sheds, sheltered in a grove of coconuts!’
Herman Melville hardly had time to worry too much about the iniquities of French colonial conquest. The ship was soon entirely overrun by a laughing swarm of Marquesan girls – a ‘dashing and irresistible party of boarders who succeeded in getting up the ship’s side, where they clung dripping with the brine, their jet-black tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half enveloping their otherwise naked forms’. The debauch then – needless to say – began. ‘But the feeblest barrier was interposed between the unholy passions of the crew and their unlimited gratification…. Alas for the poor savages …!’
No such welcome greeted the Taporo. I am sadly able to state that I walked down the jetty to which we tied up without so much as a handshake being offered to me by man, woman or beast.