Headhunters on My Doorstep

by J. Maarten Troost

  There is no original art remaining in the museum, just desultory reproductions. His years on Hiva Oa must have been miserable ones. He did not have long to live as his body was ravaged by advanced alcoholism and syphilis. Or perhaps it was a fatal dose of morphine that finally did him in. More telling, is the stunning absence of friends or companions during his last days on Hiva Oa.

  Standing before his tomb, which, I noted, carried far fewer prayer stones than Jacques Brel’s plot, I turned to Mareile.

  “He’s not really there, is he?” I said, pointing to the grave.

  “Probably not,” she acknowledged.

  “So, we’re just standing here looking at a pile of rocks.”

  “Most likely.”

  “And, any idea where his bones might lie?”

  “Well, they could be in a mass grave in the old, overgrown cemetery. More likely, he was buried in the bush somewhere. He was just regarded as another poor, dissolute foreigner on the island. He wasn’t the only one. And when they died they just disposed of the bodies as they saw fit.”

  See, alcoholism/drug addiction bad. Smoking okay. No one misses Paul Gauguin. We’re not even sure where he is. Sure, we like his work, though knowing a little more about him, I can’t quite figure out why his paintings command the big bucks. They seem so idyllic, so natural, so innocent, and yet, if you know anything about their creator, you realize that they are morally fraudulent. These are no celebrations of the primitive, the pure, the uncorrupted. They now seem cloying and sentimental to me, except for his self-portraits, which are unsparing and painted with a gimlet eye chronicling the wreckage of the passing years.

  As I walked through the town—there really isn’t much to see, frankly—I found a tourist office, which surprised me, because as far as I could tell there weren’t any tourists, save for ourselves, and we’d just be lingering for a couple of hours, perusing the lives of a couple of dead men. I walked in, met a friendly young Marquesan woman, and asked in French whether she happened to have a lot of visitors to Hiva Oa these days. “Non.” She smiled, shrugging her shoulders. And then she thought about it for a moment. “Quelques Chinois.”

  I swear you cannot go anywhere in this world without running into the Chinese. Which is good, and bodes well for the future. Travel is the great mediator between cultures. Also, I lived in hope that mainland Chinese tourists would descend en masse on the world’s so-called Chinese restaurants and give the owners a stern talking-to. What is this Won Ton Soup? And Sweet and Sour Chicken? And who the hell is General Tso? How about some real Chinese food? The people, they are a-yearning.

  But I digress. I asked if she happened to know whether any of Gauguin’s descendants could still be found on Hiva Oa. Yes, she said. They lived on the north coast, in the village of Puama’u. Excellent, I thought. And did they take after their illustrious ancestor?

  They have his nose, she informed me with a giggle. And a few are artists working with paint or charcoal.

  And by chance might they be known for their fondness for drink.

  “Ah oui, monsieur. Ils boivent beaucoup.”

  Twelve cases of Heineken. Thirty-six cases of Hinano. Three cases of Orangina. One case each of Sprite and Fanta. Three cases of water. And one refrigerator.

  Yes, I counted. This was what was off-loaded from the Aranui as we anchored off Puama’u. It’s a strange sort of village for the South Pacific. Elsewhere, people tend to live in a fairly compact area. The homes are near to each other and you’d rarely need to raise your voice to speak to a neighbor. Not so in Puama’u, which was an elongated sliver of a village, a mere three hundred people living as far away from each other as they could while remaining in the same jurisdiction.

  We had come not for the town, however, but for the nearby Me’ae Lipona, perhaps the most important archeological site in the Marquesas, and home to an impressive eight-foot tiki, the largest outside of Easter Island. It is located in the shadow of a steep cliff, which back in the day was used as a defensive fortification and as an excellent place to bury skulls. It seemed like such a lofty and grand place, safe and sound, surrounded by the comforting skulls of your ancestors. As long as you weren’t squeamish about bones, it looked like a fine hangout, a place of contemplation, like a monastery on a hill. Heyerdahl had come here too, and of course, in his eyes every stone-gray statue was further evidence yet of the Marquesans’ Incan origins. There is, for instance, the “Flying Tiki,” which appears to be of a woman giving birth to a god, but has a kind of bas-relief upon which many see the image of a llama, which would be most unusual because there aren’t any llamas in the South Pacific. But where do we find llamas? In South America, of course. Some say that it’s actually an image of a dog, though many, speaking in a dark whisper, say that Heyerdahl intentionally defaced the tiki to make it appear that right here in the middle of the Marquesan jungle there just happens to be a South American llama. And over there, that stone tiki with the bulbous eyes? That could only be a Peruvian frog. It’s like beer goggles for archeologists. Put them on and you can see anything you want.

  The entire site was well tended and cleared of brush, and as a consequence it made it more difficult to see, to feel the pulse of the place. I much preferred the glimpses of old settlements that I’d seen in the jungle, half buried under a new growth of trees and ferns, where you have to listen, to be still, to open your imagination to what once was. The Me’ae Lipona, in contrast, had been scrubbed and polished and now, for me, felt as lifeless as a museum exhibition. I like a building with soot on it. I prefer my medieval paintings stained with the smoke of incense and a thousand candles. And I like my tikis mossy and hidden amidst a tangle of banyan trees and ferns. Sometimes you need to see less to see more.

  I walked back down to the village, which was fronted by a golden-sand beach, a rarity in the Marquesas. I took note of the waves, which were big and frothy, and dove in for a swim. Soon I was joined by the rest of the contingent of Aranui passengers and now the real carnage began. You could tell right away who was a coastal dweller and who lived far inland, where waves and oceans were about as familiar as unicorns and leprechauns. The former always beheld the water, its movements, the sudden onset of a particularly gnarly set of dumpers, and dove and bobbed accordingly. The landlubbers waded in waist-high, right into the break zone, turned to look at the shore, perhaps to smile for a picture, as a wall of water rose above them, peaked, curled, and broke upon them, smashing them underwater, the poor souls emerging with bathing suits askew and startled faces and battered bodies. And no matter how often you yelled Attendez it would happen over and over again, causing me to doubt in the healing powers of neuroplasticity, because here, very clearly, was some novel stimuli that demanded a swift adaptation in behavior, and yet it never came. Again and again it happened to the very same people. Just turn the fuck around, I felt like yelling, as I cringed every time they were smashed and held under and swept forth in the collapsing froth. Man, I thought, how is it that some of you are still in the gene pool?

  And just when the impeding catastrophes could not get any worse, they did. Three local boys had now joined us, mounted on steeds, and proceeded to run their horses through the clumps of visitors, whether in the shallows of the sea or on the beach itself. They’d wait until they could sneak up on them and then send their horses into a gallop, missing the pensioners by inches. I could only endure this for so long before I yelled, Arrêtez. C’est dangereux, you dim-witted punk-ass sons of bitches. But then I noticed their big noses and figured that here were a bunch of little Gauguins. These apples, clearly, didn’t fall far from the tree.

  Finally, I gave up and just watched the mayhem unfold from a log in the shade, where I was soon joined by Marc, a Frenchman, who spent his time between the Marquesas and Patagonia in Chile. He’d lived between the two for twenty years now. Clearly, this was a man ready for the apocalypse. To which he readily agreed, beginning a long exposition on the grim ma
dness of our global economic system, its glorification of consumption as the end-all-be-all measurement of human progress, the surge of inequality, the perfidy of the bankers, the utter insanity of polluting our atmosphere to the point of irreversible climate change, the instability and suffering that will be unleashed for the generations to come, the tragic shortsightedness of inflicting such pain on our planet for the sake of a few dollars more for a very few, the inability of our political systems to address the globe’s problems, the prevailing sense that we were on the cusp of some catastrophic, unstoppable change that would alter the face of the earth and all who reside upon it.

  Wow, I thought. I always figured I was bad at small talk. But I found myself nodding, uh-huh, exactly, as he articulated my own inchoate sense of the world. But this was why I loved these serendipitous encounters on the road. Sometimes you need to travel far to see your own thoughts articulated into words. Marc had lived in the Marquesas long enough to have known Gauguin’s daughter, who had died at the age of eighty-one. “She was a slim Polynesian woman with long gray hair and Gauguin’s nose. Her mother had her at the age of thirteen, the same year Gauguin died. The family didn’t think much of Gauguin. If anything, they harbor a sense of shame. They felt that he was a drunken pervert, no different really from so many other foreigners who washed up here during that time. Their perspective is very much framed by the Catholic Church. The Church despised Gauguin. He was always trying to prevent people from working on roads or schools or churches. He wanted his vie sauvage.”

  We watched the men unload the cases of Heineken and Hinano, as the boys on their horses continued to terrorize the pensioners, while still others continued with their ocean battering. And I thought, it’s funny how after a while, a skull-strewn redoubt on a quiet clifftop deep in the jungle can seem like the most placid spot on the planet. Sometimes, when searching for serenity, it’s best to be among the dead. They don’t drink; they no longer abuse the living; their sense of humor has presumably evolved (and no longer consists of terrorizing the old with charging horses); they are wise to nature and unlikely to get battered by a wave; they just lie there, body-less, with empty sockets staring into the void. Sure, their craniums may have been bashed in by a war club, but they seem to have accepted it now, and moved on, staring blankly at infinity—and God knows what resides there—and I resolved to find a skull or two when I got home. Nothing quite preaches perspective like the wide-eyed stare of another’s scalp. So I was grateful to be here in the Marquesas. I’d found something else to look into. Next time I’m in a flea market and I see a skull, that thing is mine.

  Chapter Nine

  Let’s step back for a moment and consider our hero, Robert Louis Stevenson. The first thing one gleans is that he does not mess around—no hemming and hawing for him, no dithering, no extended multichapter clearing of the throat. Open up In the South Seas and by paragraph three he’s making landfall. In a mere two paragraphs he’s told us that his health was sketchy, that a voyage to the South Seas was recommended, and accordingly, he’d chartered a two-masted schooner of seventy-four tons.

  In June 1888, he departed San Francisco and set forth for what he termed the eastern islands—what we now call French Polynesia. Early the following year, he found himself in Honolulu. Unwilling “to return to my old life of the house and sick-room” he sought passage on a trading schooner and spent the subsequent four months adrift in the equatorial Pacific, roaming among the low-lying atolls of the Gilbert Group, until he reached Samoa in the winter of 1889. “By that time gratitude and habit were beginning to attach me to the islands; I had gained a competency of strength; I had made friends; I had learned new interests; the time of my voyages had passed like days in a fairyland; and I decided to remain.” He wrote, “At this very moment the axes of my black boys are already clearing the foundations of my future house; and I must learn to address readers from the uttermost parts of the sea.”

  Whew. We’re just going to let “the axes of my black boys” reference slide for now—the lingo of the day can clang from time to time. What follows is this: “The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Seas Island . . .” And now we’re off, the book unspooling as a record of observations and experiences made as he voyaged among the luminous islands of the South Pacific, each island like a self-contained planet, orbited by history and legends, islands that were now in flux as the old manners encountered the ways and predilections of foreigners who’d arrived upon their shores, eyes aflame with possibilities. But who was this masked crusader at the center of it all?

  Stevenson was a sickly boy, growing up among a modest family of lighthouse engineers. Life, every waking minute of it, was precious. Perusing through the index of my favorite biography of RLS—Louis: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson by Philip Callow—I noted that after “Writing” and “Letters,” the lengthiest entry was for “Illness,” a half page that takes us from “Australia” through “bronchial diseases,” “California journey,” “France,” “hemorrhages” (163, 176–177, 185–186, 200, 244, 277, 304), “Morbidity about,” “Pacific Islands,” “sciatica,” all the way to “Youth.” Very helpfully, this last entry was followed by See also “Depression.” Which I now also did—“Depression,” 32–33, 108, 124, 138, 302–304, 310, and just as I was feeling pumped that we managed to go from page 138 to page 302—the Pacific Island chapters incidentally—without any black moods whatsoever, I was being guided to See also “Death”; “Morbidity,” and really, I don’t think we need any more.

  In short, childhood was rough. He spent much of it in a state of recuperation under the care of a nurse he’d come to know as Cunny, who read him biblical tales and attended to his bronchial coughing and hemorrhaging. He was accepted to the University of Edinburgh, where he followed his father’s wishes and studied engineering, and predictably found it miserable. In childhood, he’d spent so much time alone, swimming in his head, creating fantasies and penning prose, and now he was doing battle with quadratic equations, linear algebra, applied physics, and civic engineering. He did what he could, but mostly he drifted into the Bohemian orbit, growing his hair long as he assumed a wardrobe of velvet jackets fastened with snake buckles, topping it all off with a jaunty Tyrolean hat. Like a Brooklyn hipster, he experimented with creative facial hair—an etching from the era shows him with a prison-style handlebar and a soul patch. Also, he was wearing a hat, not Alpine, more like a Turkish fez. In any event, he had it going on.

  He picked up the pen and soon was participating in the literary salons of the day, contributing essays and stories, engaging in literary spats, joining cliques and departing them in acrimony. Some biographers claim that he was a denizen among the whorehouses in old Edinburgh, though proof is scant. Maybe he did. Maybe he just wanted to talk. His sexuality—and really, this is just based on my own amateur sleuthing into his life, and not sourced on anything particular, more of a sum-of-its-parts kind of thing, so please don’t go on Wikipedia and write, “RLS may also have been gay”—remained curiously ambiguous. Eventually he dropped out of his engineering studies and pursued a degree in law. He would never practice a day in his life.

  From time to time, whether due to sickness or anxiety, he sought relief in laudanum, a tincture of opium and morphine. Whenever I hear someone describe the wonders of modern medicine, I think with a quiet sigh of what you would have found in your average nineteenth-century corner drugstore—cocaine, opium, morphine, heroin, all available without a prescription, and all advertised, whether as “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup” or “Dover’s Powder,” as a cure for anything from coughing to consumption. Even the pope at the time, Leo XIII, was a daily consumer of Vin Mariani, a mixture of red Bordeaux and a generous serving of coca leaves. Being a gin-consuming lush was generally frowned upon during this genteel age, but nodding out on heroin was considered healthy and ingesting cocaine was regarded as a satisfying means to sharpen the mind—see, for instance, She
rlock Holmes or Sigmund Freud.

  Laudanum was, predictably, a very popular drug among writers and poets, including Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, as well as for the working class and certain women chasing the look of the day, which, interestingly enough, corresponded very closely to the heroin-chic faze of the mid-1990s—pale, skinny, and androgynous, with dark raccoon circles under the eyes. Evidently, during the Victorian era, Kate Moss would have been considered quite the hottie.

  Stevenson, however, would never become an addict. He was more prone to worrying that, one day, he’d become one of those sad souls swimming in the bottle, like those he sometimes encountered in the taverns of Edinburgh. On board the Casco, in a reflective mood, he wrote of his youth: “How I feared I should make a mere shipwreck, and yet timidly hoped not; how I feared I should never have a friend, far less a wife, and yet passionately hoped I might; how I hoped (if I did not take to drink) I should possibly write one little book, etc. etc.”

  His relations with his parents were largely good, though they came to an impasse when his father, Thomas, a Tory to his bones, suspected his son of atheism, a devastating charge. This was also the age of Darwin, when science and faith began to diverge, leading to a kind of generational schism, like in the sixties, except RLS dressed way cooler than the bell-bottomed hippies. But with time, the stern Mr. Stevenson would loosen the checkbook and dispatch funds to his struggling son, who’d set out to pursue a literary career, then as now a remarkably stupid way to make a living. It was a tension that would pervade his life—the urge to be the Bohemian roustabout, unmoored by custom or bourgeois expectation, while attaining the success, prestige, and income that afforded him grand hotel suites and a long correspondence with Henry James.