Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  “Under the bright red stars hides the land,

  Cut by the perfect bays, marked by the mountains,

  Rimmed by the reef of flying spume,

  Bora Bora of the muffled paddles!

  Bora Bora of the great navigators.”

  The other occupants of the PBY were equally impressed by the island, but for other reasons. It possessed an enormous anchorage, and if necessary an entire invasion fleet could find refuge within the lagoon; but more important, the little islands along the outer reef were long, smooth and flat. “Throw a couple of bulldozers there for three days, and a plane could land right now,” an engineer volunteered.

  “We’ll fly around once more,” the general announced, “and see if we can agree on which of the outer islands looks best.” So while the military people looked outward, to study the fringing reef, Hoxworth Hale looked inward, to see the spires of rock and the scintillating bays that cut far inland, so that every home on Bora Bora that he could spot lay near the sea. How marvelous that island was, how like a sacred home in a turbulent sea.

  Now the PBY leveled off and started descending toward the lagoon, and Hoxworth thought how exciting it was to be within an airplane that had the capacity to land on water, for this must have been the characteristic of the first great beasts on earth who mastered flight. They must have risen from the sea and landed on it, as the PBY now prepared to do. When it was near the water, speeding along at more than a hundred miles an hour, Hoxworth realized for the first time how swiftly this bird was flying, and as it reached down with its underbelly step to find the waves, he caught himself straining with his buttocks, adjusting them to insure level flight, and then seeking to let them down into the waves, and he flew his bottom so well that soon the plane was rushing along the tiptop particles of the sea, half bird, half fish, and then it lost its flight and subsided into the primordial element, a plane that had conquered the Pacific and come at last to rest upon it.

  “Halloo, Joe!” a native cried at the door, and in a moment the plane was surrounded by Bora Borans in their swift, small canoes.

  Among the first to go ashore was Hale, because he knew a few words of Polynesian and many of French, and as he sat precariously on the thwarts of one of the canoes, and felt himself speeding across the limpid waters of the lagoon toward a sprawling, coconut-fringed village whose roofs were made of grass, he thought: “Hawaii has nothing to compare with this.”

  In a way he was right, for after the general and his staff had been fed with good sweet fish from the lagoon and red wine from Paris, the headman of the village approached with some embarrassment and said in French, which Hale had to interpret: “General, we people of Bora Bora know that you have come here to save us. God himself knows the French would do nothing to rescue us, because they hate Bora Borans, and do you know why? Because in all history we have never been conquered, not even by the French, and officially we are a voluntary part of their empire. They have never forgiven us for not surrendering peacefully like the others, but we say to hell with the French.”

  “Shut him up!” the general commanded. “The French have been damned good to us, Hale, and I want to hear no more of this sedition.”

  But the headman was already past his preamble and into more serious business: “So we Bora Borans want to help you in every way we can. You say you want to build an airstrip. Good! We’ll help. You say you’ll need water and food. Good! We’ll help there too. But there is one matter you seem not to have thought about, and on this we will help too.

  “While your flying boat sleeps in the lagoon, you will have to have some place to sleep on shore. We will put aside seven houses for you.”

  “Tell him we need only two,” the general interrupted. “We don’t want to disrupt native life.”

  The proud headman, dressed in a brown lava-lava and flowered wreath about his temples, did not allow the interruption to divert him: “The biggest house will be for the general, and the rest are about the same size. Now, because it is not comfortable for a man to sleep alone in such a house, we have asked seven of our young girls if they will take care of everything.”

  It was here that Hoxworth Hale, son of missionaries, began to blush, and when the maidens were brought forth, clean, shapely, dark-haired, barefoot girls in sarongs and flowers, he began to protest, but when the headman actually started apportioning the girls, the tallest and prettiest to the general, and a shy, slim creature of fifteen to him, Hale quite broke up and the translation stopped.

  “What the hell is this?” the general asked, but then the tall, beautiful girl of seventeen who had been assigned to him, took him gently by the hand and started leading him toward his appointed house.

  “My God!” the irreverent major cried. “In Bora Bora they got teeth!” And one of the girls must have known some English, for she laughed happily, and because these islanders were more primitive and ate more fish, their teeth were strong and white, and the major accepted his girl’s hand and without even so much as looking at the general, disappeared.

  “We can’t allow this!” the general protested. “Tell them so.”

  But when Hale explained this decision the headman said, “We are not afraid of white babies. The island likes them.” And after a while only Hoxworth Hale stood in the meeting shed, looking at his long-tressed, fifteen-year-old Polynesian guide. She was a year older than his own daughter, not quite so tall, but equally beautiful, and he was a totally confused man, and then she took his hand and said in French, “Monsieur le Colonel, your house is waiting. We had better go.”

  She led him along dark-graveled paths beneath breadfruit trees whose wide leaves hid the hot sun. They went along a row of coconut palms, bending toward the lagoon as they had done a thousand years before, and in time she came to a small house withdrawn from the others, and here she stopped at the trivial lintel that kept out the wandering pigs and chickens, and said, “This house is mine.” She waited until he had entered, and then she joined him and untied a length of sennit that held up the woven door, and when it fell they were alone.

  He stood rigid in acute embarrassment, holding onto a bundle of papers, as if he were a schoolboy, and these she took from him and then pushed him backwards slowly, until he sat on a bed with a wooden frame and a woven rope mattress, and he was as frightened as he had ever been in his life. But when she had thrown the papers into a corner she said, “My name is Tehani. And this is the house my father built me when I became fifteen. I plaited the roof of pandanus, but he built the rest.”

  Hoxworth Hale, then forty-four, was ashamed to be with a girl fifteen, but once when she passed where he was sitting on the bed, her long black hair moved past his face, and he smelled the fragrance of that sweetest of all flowers, the taire Tahiti, and he had never encountered that odor before, and automatically he reached up and caught at her hand, but she was moving rather swiftly, and he missed, but he did catch her right leg above the knee, and he felt her whole body stop at this command, and start to move willingly toward him. He kept hold of her leg and pulled her onto the bed, and she fell back happily and smiled up at him, with the taire flowers about her temples, and he took away the sarong and when she was naked she whispered, “I asked my father for you, for you were quieter than the others.”

  When the inspecting team convened late that afternoon around an improvised table under the breadfruit trees, by common but unspoken agreement, no one mentioned what had happened, and they proceeded to discuss where the airstrip should be, just as if nothing unusual had occurred, but as night fell and girls appeared with an evening meal, each officer instinctively brought his girl to the table beside him, and there was unprecedented tenderness in the way the older men saw to it that their young companions got a fair division of the food.

  They had not finished eating when a group of young men with long hair in their eyes and pareus about their hips, appeared with guitars and drums, and soon the Bora Bora night was filled with echoes. The audience waited until the general’s tall, s
lim beauty leaped into the dancing ring and executed the wild, passionate dance of that island. This was a signal which permitted the other girls to do the same, and soon one had the cocky major in the ring with her, attempting a version of the dance, and he was followed by a colonel and then by the general himself. It became a wild, frenzied, delightful dance under the stars, and all the older people who were watching applauded.

  Hoxworth Hale’s girl, Tehani, did not ask him to dance, knowing from what had transpired in the grass house that he was a shy man, so finally an old woman with no teeth muscled her way through the crowd, stood before Hale and did a few lascivious steps. To the surprise of everyone, Hale leaped to his feet and swung into the Hawaiian hula, at which, like most of his Honolulu contemporaries, he was skilled. The audience stopped making noise and the military visitors sat down, tired as they were from their own exertions, while Hale and the old woman performed an admirable dance. Finally, when the astonishment was becoming vocal, the major shouted, “Hale for President!” and Hoxworth broke into a much swifter version while the old woman executed a downright lewd movement, to the howls of the crowd.

  At this Tehani stepped forward, firmly pushed the old beldame away and took her place, and for a few minutes Hale and the delicately formed young girl with streams of flowers in her hair, brought an ancient grace to the sands of Bora Bora. He felt himself caught up in passions he had thought long dead, while the girl smiled softly to herself and, knowing that she was the envy of all the others for her man could dance, thought: “I got the best one of the group, and I was smart enough to ask for him.”

  The inspecting team lingered at Bora Bora for nine days, and every night during that time the entire community held an all-night celebration. From the nearby island of Raiatea, which in the old days had been known as Havaiki, the holy island of the Polynesians, a young French government official came over with a barrel of red wine which the general insisted on buying, although the gracious young man had intended it as a gift, and at dusk each day this barrel was cocked, and anyone who wished a drink could have one. The orchestra never stopped playing. In exhaustion men would drop their drums and others would pick them up. The seven girls who were tending the guests of honor rarely left them, so that in the end even at formal meetings of the inspection staff, the Polynesian girls would be there, not understanding a word that was being spoken, but each one proud whenever her man spoke forcefully on some point or other.

  During the nine days no mention was made of sex, except once when the general remarked thoughtfully, “I am amazed at what a man of forty-nine can do.” But he was taking a two-hour nap morning, afternoon, and evening.

  Hoxworth preferred not even to think of Tehani as a real person. She was something that happened, a dream whose confines would never be appropriately known. Having experienced a normal Punahou and Yale education, he had been roughly aware of what sex was, but never accurately, and his marriage had been a family affair, which for a while had been formally proper, like going on an endless picnic with one’s fully clothed sister, but soon even that had ended, and when at odd moments in the last few years he had thought about sex he had supposed that for him, at least, it had ended in his mid-thirties. Tehani Vahine, for that was her whole name, Miss Tehani of Bora Bora, had quite other intentions. She had been taught that men of Colonel Hale’s age were those who enjoyed sex most, and who were often most proficient in it; and whereas she had been wrong in both guesses about Hale, for he was both afraid and unskilled, she had never known a man who could learn so fast.

  They were days of listless, idle joy. He loved her best when she wore her sarong draped carelessly about her hips, her breasts bare and her long hair sparkling with flowers. He would lie endlessly upon the rope bed and watch her movements, as if he had never seen a girl before, and sometimes with a cry of joy he would leap up, catch her in his arms and carry her to the bed in a blizzard of kisses. Once he asked her, “Is it always like this in Bora Bora?” and she replied, “Usually we don’t have so much good wine.” And he thought: “In other parts of the world there is a war, and in Hawaii nervous men are arguing with each other, and in New York girls are calculating, ‘Should I let him tonight?’ But in Bora Bora there’s Tehani.” Like the general, he was amazed at what a man of forty-four could do … if he had the right encouragement.

  On the next-to-the-last day Tehani whispered, “Tell the others you won’t be there tomorrow,” and at dawn she sprinkled water on his face and cried, “You must get up and see the fish!”

  She led him sleepily to a spot away from her house where she had a fresh tuna staked out and cleaned. “This is going to be the best dish you ever ate in your life,” she assured him, “because it will be Bora Bora poisson cru. Watch me how I do it, so that when you are far away and want to remember me, you can make some and taste me in it.”

  She cut the fresh tuna into small fillets of about two inches in length and a quarter inch thick. These she placed in a large calabash, which she carried to the lagoon where no people came, and from the cold waters she dipped a few coconut shells full of fresh salt water which she tossed on the fillets. Then she took a club and knocked down three limes, which she cut in half and squeezed into the calabash. Carefully seeking a place where the sun shone brightest, she put the fish there to steam through the long, hot morning, cooking itself in the lime juice and sea water.

  “Now comes the part where you must help me!” she cried merrily as she pointed to a sloping palm that bent over the water, holding in its crest a bundle of ripe nuts. “I shall climb up there, but you must catch the nuts for me,” and before he could stop her, she had tied her sarong about her hips, had caught hold of the tree with her hands and feet, and had bent-walked right up the tree to where the nuts clustered. Holding on with her left hand, she used her right to twist free a choice nut. Then, with a wide side-arm movement, she tossed it inland, where Hoxworth caught it. “Hooray!” she cried in glee and pitched another.

  When she returned to earth she found a stout stick, jammed it in the earth, and showed her partner how to husk a coconut, and when he had done so, she knocked the two nuts together until they cracked open and their juices ran into a second calabash. Then she jammed into the ground a second stick, this time at an angle, and against its blunt edge she began scraping the coconut slowly and rhythmically, until white meat, dripping with nectar, began shredding down onto taro leaves placed on the ground. As her golden shoulders swayed back and forth in the sunlight, she sang:

  “Grating the coconut for my beloved,

  Shredding the sweet meat for him,

  Salting the fish,

  Under the swaying breadfruit tree,

  Under the rainless sky,

  I shred the sweet meat for my beloved.”

  When she finished grating she ignored Hoxworth, as if he were not there, and carefully gathered the shredded coconut, placing half in the calabash to join the captured coconut water, half in a tangle of brown fiber from the coconut husks, which she now caught in her slim hands and squeezed over a third calabash. As she twisted the coarse fibers, a fine rich liquor was forced out, and this was the sweet coconut milk that would complete the dish she was preparing.

  Again and again Tehani squeezed the grated coconut, softly chanting her song, though now she spoke of twisting the meat for her beloved instead of grating it, and as the palms along the shore dipped toward the lagoon, Hoxworth Hale had a strikingly clear intuition: “From now on whenever I think of a woman, in the abstract … of womanliness, that is … I’ll see this brown-skinned Bora Bora girl, her sarong loosely about her hips, working coconut and humming softly in the shadowy sunlight. Has she been here, under these breadfruit trees, all these last empty years?” And he had a second intuition: that during the forthcoming even emptier years, she would still be there, a haunting vision of the other half of life, the womanliness, the caretaking symbol, the majestic, lovely, receptive other half.

  Overcome by his vision of past and future, he desired to
revel in the accidental now, and reached out from the shaded area where she had placed him, trying to catch her leg again, but she deftly evaded him and went to a pit where yams and taro had been baking, and she now proceeded to break the latter into small purplish pieces, rich in starch, while the yams she held in her hands for a moment, showing them to her lover. “These are what our sailors call the Little Eyes of Heaven,” she laughed, pointing to the eyes of the yam, which clustered like the constellation whose rising in the east heralds the Polynesian New Year.

  Finally, Tehani chopped the onions and then mixed all the vegetables in with the thick, rich coconut milk, and after she had washed her hands in the lagoon, she came back and sat cross-legged before Hale, her sarong pulled far up to expose soft brown thighs, and her breasts free in the sunlight. “It’s a game we play,” she explained, and with him in the shadows and she in the sunlight, she started slapping his shoulders, and as she hummed her coconut song, she indicated that he was to slap hers, and in this way she passed from his shoulders to his forearms, to his flanks, to his hips and finally to his thighs, and as the game grew more intense the slaps grew gentler and her song slower, until with a culminating gesture that started out to be a slap but which ended as an embrace, Hale caught her sarong and started pulling it away, but she cried softly in her own language, “Not in the sunlight, Hale-tane,” and he understood, and swept her up in his arms and carried her into the grass house, where the game reached its intended conclusion.

  Toward noon she asked him in French, “Do you like the way we make our poisson cru in Bora Bora?” And she brought in the fish, well saturated in sun and lime juice, and Hale saw that the tuna was no longer red but an inviting gray-white. Into it she mixed the prepared coconut milk with its burden of taro and onions and yams. Next she tossed in a few shellfish for flavor, and over the whole she sprinkled the freshly grated, juicy coconut. With her bare right hand she stirred the ingredients and finally offered her guest three fingers full of Bora Bora raw fish.