The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “I like watching videos,” Apii said. “Most people in Aitutaki have a video machine. We have had them for four years. Or maybe three.”

  “And blue movies,” Emma said. “Did you ever see blue movies?”

  “I have seen some,” I admitted. “What about you?” “We have,” Emma said. “One called The Tigress – something like that.”

  “Naked papa’as,” I said. They laughed. “Do young people watch them?”

  “No. Only adults,” Apii said. “Men like them.”

  “Women find them silly,” Emma said.

  I asked, “Why do you think men like them?”

  “They get ideas. They like to watch. And sometimes” – Emma raised her large hands to her face and giggled behind them – “sometimes they end up.”

  “What does that mean, ‘end up’?”

  “They end up doing what they are seeing,” Apii said. “Because the blue movies make them hungry,” Emma added.

  We were standing under some palm trees. It began to rain again, but still they shifted themselves and said they had to go. Before they left, I gave them some chocolate.

  “I would rather have nuts,” Emma said, and laughed.

  The next day I got tired of the Mormons and the tiny mildewed house, and I moved to a bungalow at a lodge another mile up the road, but also on the lagoon. Not long after I moved in, I switched on my short-wave radio and, searching for world news, I heard a familiar voice.

  I am a little incredulous still, that I am the representative of Her Majesty the Queen in New Zealand –

  It was Dame Cath, whom I had met in Fiji, who had made herself famous in New Zealand by calling one of her political enemies “a fuckwit.” She was back in Auckland, and still harping with false modesty about carrying out the Queen’s wishes.

  – and that the daughter of poor Scottish migrants should be standing here today, is testimony to –

  I switched the thing off and somewhere in the palms a cockatoo shrieked.

  That day I paddled to the edge of the reef, a place marked Nukuroa on my chart, where a father and son were fishing.

  Toupe, the father, said, “I can only live here in Aitutaki. It is small. Rarotonga is big. If you have a small place you have few people. But in a big place you get Samoans, Tongans, and all different people. I don’t like that.”

  I pointed to one of the little islands south of us. “Do you call that a motu?”

  “Yes.”

  Then I pointed to Aitutaki, which was low and green and glimmering in the sunshine. “Is that a motu?”

  “No. That is enua.”

  Enua was land. Fenua in Tahitian. Vanua in Fijian. An island was a little parcel in the sea. It was something you could see the whole of in a glance. But land was something else – it had a sense of home, it had size, it was divided, it contained more than one family. I asked Taupe for a definition.

  “Enua is not an island. It is a small land,” he said, and then he asked, “Are you married?”

  “That’s a long story,” I said. “But where is your wife?” “That’s what I mean.”

  “Not with you?” He was very persistent.

  “No,” I said.

  “That is bad.” He looked genuinely annoyed. “You will go with girls from bars.”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “I am too old.”

  “They like older men.” “I am not interested.”

  Anyway, where were these girls? Where were the bars, for that matter? They were mentioned in Tahiti, too. I never saw them. In Taiohae in Nuku Hiva one night a man said to me, All the boys have gone to the bar to pick up girls. I did not see any bar in Taiohae that had a woman in it. Fast women were muttered about in Fiji. What a shame – all the prostitutes, people said. I looked and did not see a single one. Rarotonga was reputed to be a hot place. You could have fooled me. It was jolly, but in a hearty unambiguous way. Bar girls were mentioned in Nuku’alofa, in Tonga. There were two bars; I looked; no one. I never saw anything vicious on the streets or bars of Polynesia, and my only brush with the local libido was in the Trobriands, where I had sometimes been woken with a drunken cry, Mister Paul, you want a girl? but I usually assumed it was a clumsy attempt to rob me and always went back to sleep.

  Before I left Toupe I asked him about sharks. Yes, he said, there were plenty of them in the lagoon. I showed him the four-foot spear I kept beside the cockpit of my kayak.

  “That will do nothing to the sharks we have,” he said. “They are bigger than your boat.”

  That gave me pause. My boat was almost sixteen feet long.

  On the other hand, Aitutaki was famous for not having any dogs on it. No one had an explanation for this, but I was glad in any case, because Polynesian dogs were bad-tempered scavengers. It was as though they knew that human beings were not to be trusted: and that the fate of all dogs was to be cooked and eaten.

  I went back to my bungalow that day and found six ripe mangoes on my table. Somehow the two fat ladies, Apii and Emma, had found out where I was staying and had brought the fruit to me.

  My intention was to paddle to the motus. Because it was forbidden by custom for any stranger to stay overnight on them, these involved round trips of anywhere from eight to twenty miles. But I had to be prepared for emergencies: I might get stuck on a motu if there was a storm. I bought food at the local shops – beans, sardines, raisins, cucumbers, bread – and set off, launching into the shallow lagoon. There was no local market. The meat in the shops was canned, and one store sold frozen New Zealand lamb and mutton.

  “What about chickens? Don’t you raise chickens?” An islander said, “We have wild chickens.”

  “Do you eat them?”

  “Sometimes. But they are too tough.”

  I loved the expression wild chickens.

  At low tide great bristling shelves of coral were exposed in the lagoon, and fighting the wind I was sometimes blown onto the spikes. Then I had to get out and disengage my boat and tramp away, pulling it carefully, before getting in. I always wore reef shoes in Aitutaki for this reason. After a few days the rubber bottom of the boat was terribly gouged, but I had no leaks.

  The skipping fish seemed to be stirred by low tide, too, and they sometimes surfaced in a silver sheet – hundreds of sardine-sized fish – shimmering seventy-five feet across my bow, dancing on their tails, and into the distance, a lovely sight.

  One day, making for a little motu called Papau at the edge of the eastern edge of the reef, I realized that I was low on drinking-water. If I happened to become stranded on Papau I would have no water at all, and would have to rely on the coconuts I might knock down (and that was never easy). Spotting a village called Tautu marked on my chart, on the east side of Aitutaki, I paddled there and went ashore.

  Two naked boys watched me drag my boat onto the sand.

  “What is that?”

  “That’s my boat,” I said.

  They laughed. The kayak did not look like any boat they had ever seen.

  I walked up a path and over a jungly hill and found some houses. There was no one home at any of them, though the houses looked cared-for and the gardens well tended. On the veranda of one of the empty houses, a washer was going – a wash-tub, which was open and agitating clothes, this way and that, shlip-shlop, shlip-shlop, with a laboring motor. It was a sound from my past, my mother’s washer going most of the day, it seemed – all that distance to hear that evocative noise and recover a memory of early childhood.

  Farther along the road, I saw an islander. I said I needed some water. He pointed to a house.

  A white man came out, followed by a small grubby child.

  “What is it?” the man asked in what was perhaps a New Zealand accent. He seemed tetchy.

  “I wonder if you could give me some drinking-water, please.”

  Without a word, he took my bottle and went into the house. Then he was back, handing it to me, again in silence.

  “I came by kayak,” I said. “I saw this village on the
map.

  My boat is on the beach.”

  He simply stared at me, without any interest. “Have you lived here long?” I asked. “Eighteen years.”

  “You must have seen some dramatic changes,” I said.

  He pressed his lips together, then said, “No paved roads then.”

  Yet I had not seen any paved roads even now.

  “This was all jungle,” he said.

  Wasn’t it still jungle, except for the odd little bungalow?

  “That kind of thing,” he said.

  I said, “Do the high prices bother you?”

  This seemed to irritate him.

  “It’s all relative, isn’t it?” he said defiantly. “That it costs three dollars for a cucumber?”

  “You learn to live with high prices,” he said, and now he was cross, though I could not explain why. “Just like you learn to live with low prices. You go to Australia” – perhaps he was an Australian? – “and the prices are low, and you learn to live with them. And you come back and the prices are high and you learn to live with them.”

  I said, “I suppose if you have a garden you can reduce some of your costs.”

  “A garden?” he said, sneering in incredulity. “Do you know how much time a garden takes? You could be at it all day, weeding it, watering it. Time – that’s the rarest commodity here. Time.”

  That was news. I would have thought that time was plentiful on this little island – that the one commodity everyone had in abundance was time.

  The man had a rising tremor of mania in his voice as he said, “You wake up and you’re off and there’s never enough time to do everything that needs to be done, and if it’s not one thing it’s another. Time is scarce here” – and he leaned forward at me: he was barefoot, in a dirty T-shirt, the grubby child nuzzling his legs. “I never have enough time!”

  “I’d better be going,” I said.

  “And another thing,” he said. “I’d rather pay three dollars a pound for tomatoes than thirty dollars and all the time it takes to grow them.”

  “Of course. Well, I’m off – headed out to that island” –

  Papau, in the distance, was partially misted over. “It’s two miles, you know. Maybe more.”

  “I’ve just come six miles from Arutanga. I can manage.”

  “And the wind’s against you,” he said.

  “True. But it will be an easy paddle back, or to that other island.”

  “Unless the wind shifts. Then it’ll blow you straight out to sea or onto the reef.”

  Now I saw that he had a stubbly face, and bitten nails, and spit in the corners of his mouth.

  “I was under the impression this was the prevailing wind – southeasterly.”

  “It shifts at times. Not usually at this time of year. But it shifts.”

  I had a sudden urge to push him over, but I resisted, and turning to go I said, “At least it’s not raining.”

  “It might rain,” he said eagerly. “We need rain. I hope it does rain.” He grinned horribly at the blazing sky. “And it’s four miles to that island, Papau.”

  “Then I’d better get started,” I said.

  “The reef’s at least three,” he said.

  “I was told there’s an ancient marae on the island.”

  “There’s said to be. I haven’t been out there.”

  And he had lived here for eighteen years?

  “Haven’t had the time,” he said, as though reading the query in my mind. “There’s never enough time.” He looked extremely harassed. He clutched his T-shirt. He said, “Now, I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to excuse me. I haven’t got all day for chatting. I’ve got masses of paperwork to get through. That’s what I was doing when you came. You interrupted me. You see? Time. Not enough.”

  “Thanks for the water.”

  “It’s good water. From an artesian well. It’s all drinkable here,” he said, as though I was on the point of accusing him of poisoning me.

  It took me an hour, paddling into the wind, to get to Papau. There were herons and egrets wading in its shallows. From a distance it looked as though it had a white sand beach. Close up it was broken coral and bleached rock, and it was littered with rubbish and flotsam that had floated from Aitutaki or had been chucked from ships.

  As I sat on a log, eating my lunch, the whole beach got up and started walking sideways. Shells, big and small, were bobbling all over the place. This was amazing, like a Disney cartoon, where nature starts to frolic – singing trees, nodding flowers, dancing shells. It was because I had been so still. The hermit crabs I had startled earlier began to move, but I had never seen so many of them on the move.

  I tramped around the island, looking for the ancient site, but saw nothing. It was a deserted island, with dense jungle at its center, and the remains of campfires at the edge. I had told myself that I had come here to look at the marae but once on the island, faced with thorns and tall grass and spiders, I could not be bothered to look, so I went for a swim instead, and after that knocked down some foul-tasting coconuts.

  It occurred to me that I might work my way down this long chain of motus, starting here, and then going on to Tavaeraiti and its sister motu Tavaerua. The fifth one along was in the far corner of the lagoon, almost out of sight of land. I could get close to it tonight, hit it tomorrow, and then head back.

  The idea of trespassing excited me, and there was enough daylight for me to make it to the largest of the motus, Tekopua, where I could hide.

  The wind helped me by beating against the beam of my kayak and slipping me quickly past Akaiami and Muritapua, and by then Aitutaki was almost lost on the horizon. It was a low island and at this time of day no fishermen came out this far. My only problem might be a fisherman who had came to the same conclusions as me and decided to spend the night – but there was none. I went ashore at the top end of Tekopua, and dragged my boat off the beach. I had everything I needed: water, food, mosquito repellent, and enough canvas to keep the rain off my sleeping-bag.

  Darkness was sudden. No sooner had I finished eating than night descended. There were no stars. No lights – not even any on the distant island. The palms rattled and the surf broke on the far side of my motu. That sound of surf and thrashing palms woke me throughout the night – there were no real silences on Polynesian nights: at the very least it was wind or waves. But this sound was noisier than city traffic.

  I woke very wet, not from rain but from the residue of heavy mist, and after breakfast began to worry about having camped. Now I had used up most of my water and food. If I had a problem, I’d be stuck.

  The last motu in the chain, Motukitiu, was only an hour away. I started paddling for it before the sun was up, before the wind had begun to rise; and after I had landed and had a quick drink I headed north across the widest part of the lagoon, to catch the rising wind that would take me west to the safety of Te Koutu Point.

  There were turtles on the way, and more dancing fish, and spikes of slashing coral. I realized that I had not rested well in the night when, after I had reached the shore of Aitutaki, I lay back and fell asleep. It was not even noon. But after I woke I felt refreshed, and more than that, felt that I had accomplished something in seeing each of the islets on this entire side of the huge lagoon – the desert islands of Aitutaki.

  I swam at Te Koutu – this whole part of Aitutaki was empty, except for screeching birds; and then I headed back, with a tailwind to Arutanga.

  Although I stayed a mile offshore, because of the jagged coral, I could hear loud singing as I passed the beach below a village that appeared on my chart as Reureu. I could just make out a group of men under a wooden shelter that was next to a large tree. I paddled nearer, avoiding the coral, and was debating whether to go ashore when I heard shouting. The men were waving me towards the beach.

  I parked my boat and joined them. There were about fifteen men. Most were drunk and all were singing. One man had a guitar, another a ukulele.

  “Ple
ase come,” one man said. He was wearing a T-shirt that said Rarotonga. “Have some kava.”

  He gestured to a cut-off metal drum that sat in the middle of the group of men. One of the men worked a coconut shell around in it, slopping the brown opaque liquid.

  “Is this yanggona?”

  “No. This is Aitutaki kava. Made from malt, sugar and yeast. This is beer, my friend.”

  “Bush beer.”

  “Yes. Have some.”

  I was handed a black coconut shell brimming with it. The taste was sweetish and alcoholic. I sipped. They urged me to gulp it all. I did so and almost hurled.

  “So you’re out paddling that little boat?”

  “Yes. I was out to the motus,” I said. And then, to confirm that I had indeed trespassed, I asked, “But what if I wanted to spend the night on one?”

  “If no one sees you, what is the harm?” one of the men said.

  They all wore filthy T-shirts and were squatting on logs.

  “You come from?”

  “America. But not in that boat.”

  They laughed. They were drunk enough to find this hilarious. Then they began to tease one of the men, who appeared to be very shy and possibly mentally disturbed.

  “This is Antoine,” the man in the Rarotonga T-shirt said. “He comes from Mururoa, where the French test the bombs. He is radioactive. That is why he is so strange.”

  Antoine lowered his head.

  “Antoine speaks French.”

  I addressed Antoine in French, just saying hello. All the men laughed.

  Antoine left the group and mounted his motorbike and then rode away.

  I said, “Is this a bush-beer school?”

  That was the Aitutaki term for a drinking-party, I had read.

  “Yes. He is the teacher.”

  The man dipping the filthy coconut shell into the metal drum smiled and went on dipping and slopping.

  “But it is more like a ship,” another man said. “He is the captain. He is the first mate. He is the second mate. He is the engineer –”

  “It is a club.” This man was standing against the tree. “We call it Arepuka Club. This is a puka tree. And this is an are.” He meant the little wooden shelter.

  “He is chairman.”