The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  The standing man smiled: the only man sober enough to be able to stand up had to be chairman, I supposed.

  “How long has this club been in existence?”

  “Three years.”

  “You come to drink every day?”

  “Excuse me. We have meetings every day.”

  “What do you do at your meetings?”

  “We drink beer.”

  “And then?”

  “We sing.”

  “How long do you stay here each day?”

  “Until we are drunk and cannot stand up.”

  All the men laughed hard as this unsmiling man explained the workings of the club to me.

  “And then we go home.”

  “What songs do you sing?”

  “About the island.”

  “Is it a nice island?” I asked.

  “It is like paradise,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because we have everything we want – food, beer, vegetables, fish – ”

  Suddenly the man next to me snatched my hand and began reading my palm.

  “You are thirty-six years old,” he said, squeezing my hand. “I can see it here.”

  Another man said, “It is better here than in New Zealand.”

  “Have you been there?” I asked.

  “Yes. It is too fast there. Too much busy.”

  “Some Cook Islanders come back to Aitutaki from New Zealand and go to the latrine and say, ‘It is dirty. There is no flush. Look at all the cockroaches.’ But there is much water in New Zealand for flushing. We have little water.”

  “After two or three weeks they stop complaining,” someone said.

  “What do you think of New Zealand people?” a man asked me, handing me another shell of beer.

  “They are very careful people,” I said. “They obey the law. They eat carefully. They speak carefully. They spend money carefully.”

  “Because they have no money!” one man cried out, and the others laughed. “They are poor.”

  “Are you rich?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Being poor doesn’t mean you spend money carefully. Poor people can often be very generous.”

  “And rich people very mean with money,” a man said.

  We discussed this and I became so engrossed in this topic I soon realized that I was drunk and that my head hurt. When I shut up for a while they began to sing.

  “What was that song about?” I asked when it was over.

  “About Ru. Our ancestor. He found Aitutaki. With his four wives and his brothers.”

  That legend was mentioned in my guidebook, how Ru had voyaged from the island of Tupuaki, in what is now the Society Islands, which had become overcrowded. The first name of Aitutaki was Ararau Enua O Ru Ki Te Moana, “Ru in search of land over the sea.”

  In spite of the missionaries, local legend was alive and well. And the Cook group had been one of the first in the Pacific to be converted by the passionate clergyman John Williams: he had left Aitutaki a Polynesian convert, Papeiha, in 1821, and the Aitutaki Christian church, oldest in the Cooks (1828), had a tablet in the churchyard, one side extolling Williams, the other extolling Papeiha.

  I said, “Where did Ru come from?”

  “Maybe the Society Islands. Maybe Samoa.”

  “And before that?”

  “Not Asia. I think Asia Minor. Where Adam and Eve came from.”

  Ah, that was the link between Polynesian legend and Christian tradition. Ru the voyager had sailed his canoe from the Holy Land.

  I said, “What do you like best about living on an island?”

  “We are free,” one said.

  “We can do whatever we like,” another said.

  I said, “But what if other people come? Papa’a. Or tinito. Or manuiri. Or Japanese?”

  “We would kick them out.”

  “This is our island. We have everything.”

  They sounded fierce, but they were merely tipsy, and they followed me staggering to my boat and urged me to come back the next day. They promised to sing for me.

  I could not explain why, but in the waning light of day, the sun going down beyond the lagoon, and paddling past one of the prettiest – and friendliest – islands I had seen, I felt very lonely. I heard that man saying Where is your wife? and the fact was that I no longer had one.

  Soon I was paddling in night-blackened water, splashing like mad toward the lights on shore.

  Being alone was the oddest aspect of my traveling in Oceania, because the island people of Oceania were never alone and could not understand solitude. They always had families – wives, husbands, children, girlfriends, boyfriends. To the average person on a reasonably sized island, nearly everyone was a relative. Wasn’t this extended family one of the satisfactions of being an islander? Living on an island meant that you would never be alone.

  There was no concept of solitariness among the Pacific islanders I traveled among that did not also imply misery or mental decline. Book-reading as a recreation was not indulged in much on these islands either – for that same reason, because you did it alone. Illiteracy had nothing to do with it, and there were plenty of schools. They knew from experience that a person who cut himself off, who was frequently seen alone – reading books, away from the hut, walking on the beach, on his own – was sunk in deep musu, and was contemplating either murder or suicide, probably both. Now and then, people would mention that a place had a much higher suicide rate than I could possibly imagine, and in truth I was usually rather surprised to hear the figures. Then they would describe the method – nearly always taking a dive off the top of a palm tree.

  Marriage was seldom stressful, because the rest of the family was usually so supportive – the husband had his male friends, the wife had her female friends, the children were raised by all these uncles and aunties. When a marriage was that complex and seemingly casual, divorce was somewhat irrelevant. (And lots of people stayed married by having absolutely nothing to do with each other – by rarely being in contact.) This big family was circumscribed by the island, and so an island family was like an entire nation.

  I met divorced people now and then. In the Trobriands a divorced woman was permanently eligible for marriage and was regarded with horror by single men: “I might have to marry her,” they said. The Presbyterian stigma of divorce which had been imposed on the islands by severe missionaries in the nineteenth century was harsher than tradition had ever been, and was like the Mark of the Beast. Often a divorced person simply left the island – he or she had disappointed too many people or made enemies. They were the women who worked in hotels in the capital; they were the men who emigrated. Generally, it was not easy to become divorced without seeming like a traitor.

  All this made my position awkward: being solitary made me seem enigmatic, paddling alone made me seem like a true palangi “sky-burster,” reading and writing made me look like a crank, and my being wifeless was a riddle. My condition was hard for anyone to relate to and impossible for me to explain. And I seemed to be challenged a lot in the Cooks. Where’s your wife? Oh, God, let’s not go into it. I could only approximate my feelings to them, and it would be like explaining something like Westminster Abbey but using only their references: “This very big are has a marae inside, and petroglyphs on the walls –”

  I sometimes felt like the only person in Oceania who had wrecked his marriage, and I was reminded of that overwhelming sense of remorse I had felt that dark night in New Zealand, when I looked through the front window of the California Fried Chicken Family Restaurant on Papenui Road in Merivale and I saw a happy family and I burst into tears.

  My solution was to keep paddling.

  One evening, musing in this way, I was dragging my boat up the beach and saw a man strolling among the palms. He was white, probably a tourist, but something about his physique commanded my attention. He was an unusual shape – he was tall, with a full belly, and narrow shoulders, thin arms, rather spindly legs
, and a large head; he was as unlike an islander in his general shape as it was possible to be. He looked like an English squire or ship’s captain, who never missed a meal but seldom walked anywhere; well fed but under-exercised.

  I turned my boat over and parked it under a palm. The man had paused and was looking back at it. He was grayhaired, with thick glasses, rather dainty hands that matched the slenderness of his arms. He was alert, perhaps restless, but he had a ready smile. For all I knew it was the simple good-will and fellow-feeling of one papa’a for another, but it was a bit more penetrating than that, not just an acknowledgement but a welcome.

  “You look familiar,” I said.

  “David Lange,” he said. “I used to be prime minister of New Zealand.”

  “How about a beer?”

  “Lovely.”

  Now you are not alone, I told myself.

  I had admired David Lange from a distance for helping to make New Zealand anti-nuclear. Here was one of the poorer industrial nations, needing world markets for its butter and lamb and wool, risking the economic retribution of America and Europe by lecturing them on the dangers of nuclear dependency, and going further and not allowing THE COOK ISLANDS: IN THE LAGOON OF AITUTAKI warships carrying nuclear material into New Zealand’s harbors. It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled; this seemed like political suicide. But Lange stuck it out and won friends, and more than that he became an example for many world leaders. There were some exceptions. It was well known that the prime minister of Australia hated Lange for taking a stand, but then Bob Hawke – as Lange himself might have put it – had uranium on his breath.

  And there was Lange’s separation. It had been the current topic when I was in New Zealand – his estranged wife yelling her grievances, his mother denouncing him, and the combined snipers in the Kiwi press doing their best to destroy him. I had felt for him. His turmoil had come at the time of my own separation. I had identified with him, and in a quiet way felt he was an alter ego. We were almost exactly the same age. I read items with headlines like “David Deceived Me,” Says Lange’s Wife and I would cringe for him and for myself.

  Yet what a funny old world it was. Here we were under the trees of Aitutaki, by the lagoon, in the failing light of day, the former prime minister and the former writer – which was how I felt – two clapped-out renegades taking refuge on a remote island.

  I told him my name.

  “Really? The writer?” and he named some of my books. “Are you writing something here?”

  “No, just paddling.”

  But he of all people had to understand how a writer’s denial was not very different from a politician’s denial.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said, though he didn’t seem convinced. “I’d love to write something about Aitutaki. I’ve been coming here for years. I’ve thought of writing some kind of book – like one of yours, about this place. Aitutaki is full of wonderful characters.”

  POLYNESIA

  While we were seated having a beer, he said suddenly – his manner of speaking was rapid, he had a restless impatient intelligence – “You write about trains,” and gulped his beer, and said, “Ultimate railway story. I was traveling from Delhi to Bombay in 1967. I was a student. In those days it took thirty-seven hours, but they had a wonderful dining car, with heavy silver and cloth napkins and waiters running to and fro. I had beef curry. The meat tasted strange, but of course it had been heavily spiced. I was violently ill afterwards, and I spent days in bed. I have never been so ill with food poisoning. And I wasn’t the only one. Most of the people who had the beef curry on that train ended up in the hospital.”

  He chuckled at the memory and then went on, “About a month later I read that one of the waiters on the Delhi to Bombay run had been arrested for supplying dismembered human corpses to the dining car, claiming they were fresh beef. They were hardly recognizable, of course, after they had been turned into curry.”

  The nature of a politician is to talk; the nature of a writer, to listen. So here we were on this lovely island, the public man and the private man, with plenty of time to practice our peculiar skills.

  Lange talked often and well, and was affable. He greeted strangers, he had a good word for everyone, he introduced me around the island. If a small group congregated he took charge, and to simplify matters he would launch into a long humorous monologue as a substitute for a halting conversation. He had a parliamentarian’s talent for avoiding all interruptions – rain, falling coconuts, loud music, pestering strangers, awkward questions; and he had the successful politician’s gift for being able to repeat himself without being boring. I could vouch for Lange’s ability to tell the same complex story (involving accents, mimicry, historical detail and mounting suspense) three times in as many days with the same gusto.

  I had gotten a sunburn on my jaunt down the chain of motus. I needed to stay under a tree for a while, and so the next three days I spent on and off with David Lange, who knew Aitutaki well, and we discussed (he talked, I listened) the Rainbow Warrior affair, the future of New Zealand, ditto of Australia, Ronald Reagan’s senility, Saddam Hussein’s paranoia, Margaret Thatcher, the Queen, Yoko Ono, Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore, Rajiv Gandhi, Chandra Shekar, the characteristics of various Pacific islanders – Tongans, Samoans, the Cooks, the characteristics of various Christian religions.

  The most unsatisfying international gatherings Lange had ever attended, he said, were Commonwealth heads of government meetings. It was not just Margaret Thatcher nannying everyone and swinging her handbag, or Bob Hawke of Australia being personally abusive. It was the utter waste of time. The Bahamas meeting of 1985 was notable for its host, the prime minister of the Bahamas, “a remarkable character who came unscratched through an inquiry as to why in the past year he had put in his bank account an amount eighteen times greater than the total of his salary.” At a similar meeting in Vancouver, Lange discovered that the Botswana delegation had made $1,300 worth of phone calls and charged them to his total bill. The Ugandans at that same conference, “took advantage of their leader’s absence at a retreat to invite a fair number of Vancouver’s prostitutes to their hotel. They refused to pay and had the police evict the women. Those were the greatest excitements of the conference.”

  I liked his frankness, and I found him funny. Lange was on familiar terms with the entire world and with its events. He had spent his working life making the acquaintance of powerful people. Whom had I met? I fished around and mentioned my trip to Fiji. Lange brightened. “Rabuka’s a POLYNESIA bully, and Kamisese Mara the prime minister is a stooge of the military government.”

  “I want to ask you about Dame Cath Tizard, your governor-general,” I said.

  “She won’t be doing much governor-generalling,” Lange said, talking a mile a minute and never ceasing to smile. “She’ll be in court most of next year in a libel suit – she called someone an incompetent, and she’s being sued for fourteen million dollars.”

  I began to explain my impression of her extraordinary table manners, but Lange rumbled on, still smiling.

  “Her ex-husband’s quite a character – caused an amazing fuss in Japan after the Emperor died and various world leaders were sending their condolences. He said the Emperor of Japan should have been cut into little pieces after the war.”

  Any conversational lull was my cue for asking a question, and he always gave me a straight answer, and this included questions about the break-up of his marriage and his relationship with his speech-writer, Miss Pope, and his mother’s sticking her oar into the whole affair.

  “Your mother apparently denounced you.”

  “Yes!” He was smiling. “She went on television! You should have heard her!”

  “Was it one episode that ended your marriage or –?”

  “We had been drifting apart,” he said. “It happens so subtly you hardly notice. Then one day you look up and your marriage is over.”

  “But there’s a woman in your life now?”

 
; “Oh, yes. Margaret. Lovely person – you must meet her.”

  “What did your children say about the divorce?”

  “Older child’s in India, studying. That’s my son. My daughter said, ‘I suppose I’ll have to get used to being spoiled, the way children of divorced parents always arc.’ She doesn’t miss much.”

  “Did you ever get sad afterwards, thinking of the happy days of your marriage?”

  “We had rather a turbulent marriage. Didn’t you?”

  “No. It was pretty quiet most of the time,” I said. “I often find myself looking back and feeling awful.”

  “You’ve got to look ahead,” he said, sounding decisive. “Do you think you’ll ever go back to your wife?”

  “It’s much too late for that,” he said. “She’s not doing too badly. She’s just published a book of poems.”

  “What about you?”

  “Here I am at the age of forty-eight and I don’t have a bed or a chair. My wife got the lot.”

  He laughed out loud – not a mirthful laugh, but not a bitter one either. I was inexpressibly grateful to him for not evading my questions. He was not whining or blaming or trying to turn the clock back. I wanted to be as resolute as that, and in a way I wanted to stop paddling and reacquaint myself with the sort of contentment I had known in my early life – loving and being loved.

  This divorce conversation produced the only silence that occurred between Lange and me.

  And then he was back on world leaders, Oliver Tambo of the African National Congress: “When I met him he tried to justify ‘necklacing.’”*

  “As prime minister of Britain, Harold Wilson was a tricky man,” he said, “but what’s the future of the Labour Party of Britain? Bryan Gould? He’s a New Zealander. He was my room-mate at college. How could he lead the Labour Party – he’s not even British!”

  He had just finished a book, Nuclear Free – the New Zealand Way, about his anti-nuclear policy in the Pacific and he was full of stories about sinister French plots.

  “The French are swine,” he said. “The night before the Arbitrator in the Rainbow Warrior affair delivered his verdict to the tribunal his house was broken into. Only one item was missing. The word processor which contained his files of the proceedings had been stolen, and a carving knife was left in its place.”