by Ferenc Máté
Dugger raised sails, attempting to capture wind that wasn’t there. Darina was buried in Segalen; Kate wrote in her diary with the deliberation of an engraver etching into metal; Nello fixed things that didn’t need fixing, and Guillaume read, for the hundredth time, his curled sheaf of notes.
“We should swim often,” he suggested. “The Polynesians say you need much less water if you swim. Cools your body. Or wets your pores. I’m not sure which, but it works.”
“You know a lot about the Polynesians,” Nello said almost in accusation. “Is it all written there in your stack of papers?”
“No,” Guillaume said flatly. “I spent three months on Nuku Hiva a few years back.”
“You never mentioned that,” Dugger said.
Guillaume shrugged. “You never asked.”
The albatross, sitting nearby on the smooth water, raised its head from the shadow of its wing. A breath of air stirred all around the ketch, and near the curve of the horizon a veil of rain drifted under meager clouds.
“On Inishturk,” Darina said wistfully, “it drizzled every day.”
The cloud came near and brought its thickened veil. A few drops fell. They splattered on the deck and tickled their skin. Then stopped. The veil moved on. The hot, wet air engulfed them once again.
“Were you snuffing out a revolution on Nuku Hiva or starting one?” Nello asked Guillaume.
He didn’t reply right away, just stared off past the bow far into the distance. “No.” He smiled. “I was snuffing out candles on the captain’s table. I was in the navy. A petty officer, I think you English call it.”
“No one here is English,” Darina snapped.
“I meant ‘in English.’ Never cared for the sea much. Just wanted to go somewhere far away.”
“Who doesn’t?” Dugger grumbled.
“Those contented in their lover’s arms,” Guillaume replied. “On Nuku Hiva, I learned how to be a secret agent, how to deceive, how to lie. That’s when I realized I’d been playacting all my life. So, I figured, why not get paid for it? So I signed up for the Secret Service.”
“To turn people against each other?” Darina said, her voice brittle. “You French did that to us. Told the poor Irish to rise up against the Brits, and you’d be there to help. Well, we rose, didn’t we? Then we died. And the rest of us ended up worse than before.”
“We meant well,” Guillaume said. “You just misread what we told you.”
“My brother went to Dublin to fight with the Brotherhood. He was shot and beaten and driven from Ireland because he received a shipment of pistols from the French and mistook that for the first of more to come. Well, nothing came; not even bloody bullets. Except the ones the Black and Tans pumped into his back.”
“Five thousand Frenchman died on Irish soil fighting for you at Bayonne,” Guillaume rebuked her. “And we helped Wolfe Tone in 1798. We just tried to give a helping hand again.”
“It was bullets we needed, not your helping hand.”
She was gripping the edge of the seat with both hands, her face flushed with anger. Dugger and Nello stared at her. Kate watched the men watching her.
Guillaume went to the canvas bucket and poured what seawater was left in it onto his head. “Revolutions,” he said with a sigh. “come from deep inside. You can’t start them. And can’t stop them. They just explode. You can tinker with them, fool yourself into thinking you have an effect. But . . .”
Darina didn’t answer. She walked out into the sun and climbed down the rope ladder into the sea that felt no cooler than the air.
Kate followed, and they swam away from the ketch. Dugger and Nello climbed down too, floating near the stern, while Guillaume swam slow circles around them, with long, patient strokes. The sun sank suddenly and the world went red: the clouds, the water, the murky and misty air, and they all stayed in the water until the sun was gone and a quick green flame flashed across the sea.
FROM THAT DAY ON, Guillaume kept his notes in the drawer of his berth and spent all his spare time poring over charts. Kate was the first to note the change in him. The smile, the eyes, the floating eyebrows remained, but he kept his gangly limbs close to his body, tucked in tight as if afraid of injury. He became more vertical.
After lunch, with his sheaf of papers, he withdrew into the shade, read without looking up and made notes in the margins. When he rose, near sunset, he walked aft and gave a weary smile to Darina, alone at the helm. “To defeat your enemy,” Guillaume said, holding up the pages, “you have to know him better than you know yourself.”
“And if you don’t know yourself at all?” Darina ventured.
“Then you’d be the world’s worst secret agent.” He laughed an honest laughter. “Which I might just be.”
“And your enemy . . . ?” she said, pointing at the papers.
A moment of confusion clouded his eyes. Then he said with genuine admiration, “Magnificent.” He began to open the papers but at once caught himself. “Fascinating. Imagine a handsome man, a European, living as a savage. Loving as a savage. Shedding his civilized affectations for the jungle, the bush, the sea. And shedding his clothes, and covering himself instead from head to foot with pictures. Tattoos. Like Marquesan chiefs and warriors did decades ago. After each battle they told the story of their conquest, or defeat, in pictures; on their flesh. That was how they remembered, that was their history. But that was long ago. The custom vanished.”
“Along with the dances . . .” Darina said.
“And for good reason. Tattooing was a big thing, you see, a special house was built for each event. These places were tabu, sacred, for tattoos also protected you from evil.” He fell silent, leaving out the part about how evil could penetrate through ears, mouth, nose, vagina, any hole, and all those places for men and women alike were patiently tattooed with a bone needle or mother-of-pearl needle with a handle. And he left out how the people were held down so they wouldn’t writhe with the pain of the needle being hit with a hammer to make the wound, and how the wound was filled with the soot of burned ama nuts, mixing with the blood and forever turning blue. Thousands of holes punched in the skin. Then the house was burned and a great feast began, with dancing and coupling and human sacrifice. So the priests stopped it. “Too brutal,” he simply said. “But now it’s back. And not on a Marquesan but on a white man. Imagine. Why? Why would anyone suffer so much? For some pictures? And pictures of what? For who to see? What does this strange, strange man have in mind?”
“Maybe he was just a painter without a canvas.”
“Maybe,” Guillaume said, unconvinced. “But now he wants all the islands as his canvas. To be painted in blood. Not his, of course. The poor island devils . . . Him and his revolution. Un homme bizarre.”
From his sheaf of papers, he handed one to Darina. It was a copy of an old etching. It showed a man, naked but for a twisted loincloth, of good musculature, standing, holding a tall, carved war club, staring into the distance. His head was shaved but for two twisted tufts near the temples, and his whole body, save his hands and feet but including the top of his head, was covered with tattoos. They seemed to be arranged in a couple of dozen zones, framed with clear skin. Like pictures. There were fine lines crossed that looked like nets, and there were pointed teeth and fishtails and faces.
“Weeks of pain,” Guillaume said. “At first I thought, how could he be so crazy? A cultured European. What vile madness drove him? And you know, at first, the very question gave me a sense of calm, a sense of sanity. I was grateful I wasn’t him. But as days passed, that sense of superiority ebbed. And the questions changed: What great passion drove him? I asked. What visions ruled him? In the night? At twilight?
And I found myself overcome with sorrow—oh, not for him, he’s fine, but for myself, for living with the lid shut so tight on my emotions. Barely a notable pulse. Barely a breath. I sometimes wonder, if you put a feather under my nose, would even the finest of down near its stem give a flutter?”
He smiled a
distant smile and put the etching back into the sheaf and tied it with a string. “So that is the enemy I have to get to know. If I don’t know him, I can’t find him. And if I can’t find him, how can I kill him?
“I had an old teacher in Neuilly. He said, if you know what makes a man laugh, you know him. And if you can make him laugh, you got him.” Then he tapped his papers with his forefinger. “I wonder what it takes to make him laugh.”
THE AIR WAS STEAM. It has to rain, Dugger thought. It just has to rain. The sun, the haze, the sea all glowed like coals. When the twilight changed to darkness, not a star came out, and the night had an eerie luster. At eight bells, lightning flared. At first in wide flat horizontal sheets, then straight down like blades slashing through the dark.
The squall slammed the ketch, tipping her hard and taking everyone’s breath. Then they were happily drowning in a great downpour of rain. They shouted and laughed with joy; Kate tossed her hair to rinse it in the rain; Guillaume thrust his face skyward, tongue out, mouth ajar; and Nello ran to check the canvas trough that led down to the tanks, and dragged his salt-caked clothes to slap them on the deck, which was ankle-deep in fresh-water.
When the squall passed, a breeze remained and, by morning, grew into steady trades. The ketch was making eight knots under a brilliant sun.
THAT NIGHT, ALONE ON WATCH, Guillaume waited until the lamp below guttered out. He moved silently, tightening the sails, trusting the rush of water to cover the noises. He went back to the wheel and changed course twenty degrees. The ketch obeyed and turned a bit eastward. Just before his watch ended, he eased the sails again and edged the ketch back more westward.
AFTER THE SQUALL, Kate saw Dugger bloom. He had not shaved since Mexico, and his look of brooding sadness was compounded by his stubble. But now in the crisp sunlight the creases smoothed near his eyes, and in the corners of his mouth there often lurked a smile. The morning after the rain, with the water tanks both full, he had heated some water and shaved. He looked to her many years younger, and the smile, though barely perceptible, became permanent.
DURING NELLO’S NIGHT WATCH, Dugger came on deck. They didn’t speak. Nello steered by keeping the forestay pointed at a star. After a long while Nello asked softly, “Do you trust him?”
Dugger said, “He has honest eyes.”
“But did you notice how suddenly they harden? Turn suspicious? Follow you? Just for a second or two, then he catches himself.”
“He is a spy. Must be a habit.”
“And the gold? Do you believe him about the gold?”
“I don’t know. Why not? It’s as good a thing as any to believe in. Besides, he has so many details. Who would invent all that make-believe?”
“He’s a spy. His life is make-believe.”
“But why make up so much? I mean, fourteen tons . . .”
“If he had said fourteen ounces, who’d care? Who’d go that far for a pound of gold? But if the lie is big enough . . .”
“Why are you so suspicious now?” “Because my dead reckoning has been strangely off for days.”
A FEEBLE LIGHT filtered on the east horizon. Nello looked over the side to check their speed. He smiled. “Two hundred more miles, Cappy. Tomorrow we’ll be basking in paradise.”
“Palm trees and sand.”
“And beautiful women,”
“And ferocious men.”
“And the most alluring in-betweens,” Guillaume added. He had come up silently, unnoticed in the dark. “All through the islands firstborn boys of chiefs were brought up as girls, to spare them in case of war, when all the men might be killed off or taken away. Intriguing, don’t you think?”
Neither of them answered. They were counting the miles. “I’ll start getting the anchor ready,” Dugger said.
Chapter 25
They spent the day in a restless, seldom-broken silence, staring often ahead at the bare horizon.
On the last watch of the night, Darina, with her eyelids drooping, steered the ketch as best she could, holding course by pointing the bowsprit at a curved constellation that sank lower and lower in the southern sky. Halfway through her watch, she saw a shape rise from the foredeck and amble haltingly toward her but not until it was close enough to touch did she recognize Dugger. She had seen him in the moonlight sleeping on a sail bag, but once the moon had set, she had forgotten he was there.
“Segalen wrote,” she now blurted to cover her surprise, “that the natives paddled out half naked in canoes to greet boats sailing into their harbors. They sang and brought gifts of fruit and flowers. Do you think they’ll do that for us?”
The sound of flapping wings shuddered the air beside them. The albatross had abandoned its customary post and now flew past them, dark against the stars, then banked toward the east and vanished.
“I’m the wrong one to ask, “Dugger replied, his voice coarse with sleep. “I always expect the best.”
Darina lost the constellation and had to swing the bow to find it again.
“Are you ever disappointed?”
“Always,” he blurted. “But I get over it. Like a kid who doesn’t get the present he’d hoped for. He just dreams about the next time.”
She looked at him warmly. “You do have this air of . . . a big kid.”
“Thank you. Just what every man wants to be: an overgrown child.”
“I just mean you’re uncomplicated. It makes people comfortable.”
The compass light was just enough that he could see her eyes. They seemed direct and defenseless in the pale light.
There was movement overhead right above the mizzen, and the silhouette of a frigate bird—fine-tipped V-shaped wings and long split tail—circled against the stars.
“Jesus,” Dugger whispered. “We must be near . . .”
“Oh, good,” Darina said, but her eyes drew tight with dread.
A GOOD BREEZE BLEW, the sea heaved low, and the distant billowing clouds grew brighter against the dawn. Near their center two looming peaks stayed dark, and between them, like a beacon, hung the morning star.
Dugger reached for the bell-rope and gently rang the bell. He paused, then rang it louder once again. One by one sleepy faces came blinking into the dawn. Without a word he pointed past the bow toward the peaks, then said softly, “Land.”
THEY SHEETED IN THE SAILS, the ketch heeled, and they headed into the wind directly toward the peaks.
“Land,” Kate said a whisper. “I’d forgotten what it looked like.”
“I love land,” Darina said.
“You’ll love this land more than you can imagine,” Guillaume said. “The natives call it Te Henua Enana, Land of Man.”
“And the women?”
“They don’t have to call it anything. It’s theirs.”
FOR ALMOST AN HOUR no one said a word, gazing at the land that seemed to grow more inhospitable the nearer they came.
Dugger had the helm. Nello stood beside him with the chart partially unrolled in his hands, glancing nervously down, then up, then all around them at the empty sea as if expecting something to pop up out of the darkness. “I would guess Nuku Hiva,” he said without conviction.
“Then you’d be wrong,” Guillaume said, with a tinge of hardness they hadn’t heard before. “Nuku Hiva’s mountains have more crags.”
“What, then? Ua Pou?”
“That’s too small. It looks like Hiva Oa. The current must have set us to the east.
Dugger searched the chart until he found it. “So is that good or bad?” he asked testily.
Guillaume smiled. “It’s very good.” But his smile faded quickly.
PASSING A HEADLAND as serrated as cracked crystal, they sailed near black rocks that lined the shadowed shore. Waves climbed lazily, foaming white over them. As day came, the steep slopes showed tangled greenery, and from a saddle between the peaks, a waterfall cascaded down onto the black-sand beach five hundred feet below. The clouds pinked but never left the island, scattering only enough to reveal farther sh
arpedged ridges, like bent and twisted blades. Around the tallest peak, to the west, a ring of a cloud hung slightly askew. Like a wreath on a tombstone, Darina thought. The clouds whitened, the sea shone bright; it was morning. “Look,” Darina exclaimed, and pointed at the headland in surprise.
There must have been a shoal beyond the headland, because where she pointed the waves rose high, curled, then ran in a lazy arc into the next bay; and, ducking in a perfect curl, riding on a board, a slim, dark figure weaved and swerved alone.
“La planche,” Guillaume uttered. “A surfing board.” The surfer’s naked body shimmered wet and dark, and only when a boat-length off did the curves of her hips and breasts become plain to see. She bent at the knees and dropped a shoulder, dragging her left hand in the water to turn back into the wave, her long hair falling in wet clumps around her neck.
“A girl,” Darina remarked, awed.
“Must be from Inishturk,” Nello said without lowering the binoculars.
The girl swung near the ketch, and seeing her audience, she broke into a smile. He watched in helpless fascination. Beyond her alluring nakedness and unaffected smile, there was a kind of instinctive grace in her fluid, sensuous movements; the grace of the curling waves.
Now she leaned forward, shifted her weight, then cut hard to her right and vanished behind the point.
They entered the bay.
What seemed from afar like gnarled scrub now showed a tall, lush jungle on the slopes. A narrow strip of palms surrounded the bay, and just behind them, dark and steep, ran a broad curve of black rock hundreds of feet high, some freestanding in spires, forming a fortress-like wall between the land and sea. Near the middle, between towering formations, a narrow crack cut through the steep black stone and led into a shadowed canyon.
From the jungle slopes, a mist slid seaward, confounding shapes and distance. The ketch inched toward land. Flanking a peak, the sun rose blazing, and on a crest, a single palm stood black against the sky. A low swell broke with a murmur on the sand. There was no sign of life ashore: no movement, smoke, or fire.
Around the bay, the slopes fell with unwelcoming steepness into the sea.