Headhunters on My Doorstep

by J. Maarten Troost

  Thank you God for helping me stay sober today. And thank you for providing me with material so that one day I may be able to justify the cost of this trip to French Polynesia, which has been hideous and crippling. But an anti-Semitic Frenchman? An Israeli Jew with a lust for gold? Really? This is what You send me? You know that as a Gentile, I can’t touch that. What’s next? Will I be encountering a black man eating a watermelon tomorrow? A Chinese guy doing kung fu? A WASP in seersucker shorts? A gay man with a lisp? You, Sir, have a very twisted view of comedy. But thanks for the cannibal. Good night. Amen.

  And I spent the rest of the night listening to my neighbors being all romantic-like. Seriously, God, did I mention that you have a peculiar sense of humor and a warped sense of justice?

  I awoke with the sun and headed to the beach to do some yoga, what I called Bikram-lite, starting with the Standing Deep Breathing and moving on to the Half-Moon Pose, the Awkward Pose, the Eagle Pose, a wobbling Head to Knee Pose, and onward through the Balancing Tree and the Triangle Pose, bypassing entirely the Toe Stand Pose (it defeats me), followed by a little Wind Removing, a nice, stretchy Cobra and a Full Locust, leading into the Bow Pose, and a blood-releasing Fixed Firm Pose, a relaxing Half Tortoise, an excruciating Camel Pose, a little Spine Twisting, and then the welcome relief of the Dead Man Pose, where I lingered for a good long while, feeling the warm water lapping at my feet as the tide came in. And then I opened my eyes and wondered where the hell everybody was.

  Typically at dawn, the Pacific is a bustle of activity. It is what passes for rush hour on an island. Homes are swept; the boys are in the trees gathering toddy; the fishermen are out on their boats; the kids are marching to school, but here . . . nothing, just the quiet movement of the sea and the slow ascent of a golden sun. Maybe if I’d drank vin and had sex all night, I’d still be slumbering too, but I traveled as a monk—early to bed and early to rise—and now I was bereft. Clearly, even out here, they kept French hours, so I headed back to my room and opened Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas.

  Coming from the north, Stevenson and the Casco first arrived at Anaho Bay, on the other side of the island, where there was once a sizeable village. They anchored and were soon surrounded by canoes, and their ship was suddenly aswarm with islanders “tattooed from head to foot in awful patterns; some barbarous and knived . . . I knew nothing of my guests beyond the fact that they were cannibals.” His visitors, however, were hardly barbarians. They had come to trade and to admire the fine lines of his ship. The women too clambered on board, declaring it finer than any church. “I have seen one lady,” Stevenson wrote, “strip up her dress, and, with cries of wonder and delight, rub herself bare-breeched upon the velvet cushions.”

  This gave me pause. I took a glance around my room. This seemed unlikely to be replicated. The furniture, for instance, was made of cane and not conducive to any bare-breeched delight. I read on. Stevenson’s account, to say the least, is confusing for the uninformed reader. He moves, helter-skelter, from Anaho to Taiohae, where Fanny Stevenson, very thoughtfully, teaches the local queen how to roll her own cigarettes (count me a fan of her), with side trips to Hiva Oa, a few digressions about Kiribati and Samoa, and seemingly random expositions on depopulation, missionaries, ghosts, the treatment of children, death, French colonizers, chiefs and tapus, and all seemingly based on five minutes of observation, followed by ten pages of discursive explanation, which makes him the father of long-form journalism, I guess. This didn’t really bother me since I was more interested in the creator than the creation. Most of his best work on the Pacific lies in his fiction—The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide, in particular. But I was looking for some experience, some adventure that I could follow, so that I could see and feel what Stevenson discerned as he explored the islands. He has a nice take on cannibalism, observing: “We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions, and organs with ourselves; we feed them on babes, though not our own; and the slaughter-house resounds daily with screams of pain and fear.” He goes on to express the torture the pig endures as he is led to slaughter. “Ladies will faint at the recital of one tithe of what they daily expect of their butchers.”

  But of the island’s cannibals? “They were not cruel; apart from this custom, they are a race of the most kindly; rightly speaking, to eat a man’s flesh after he is dead is far less hateful than to oppress him whilst he lives, and even the victims of their appetite were gently used in life and suddenly and painlessly dispatched at last.” The German yachtie killed and consumed in the hills above Taiohae would probably dispute this, but I liked Stevenson for his fresh perspective, his easy willingness to discard the conventional wisdom of his day, and his open-eyed humanism. In his mind, cannibalism was largely the inevitable result of overpopulation and famine on finite islands, where the opportunity for other food sources was limited. That it was ritualized was just human nature. And yet, of course, the eating of another’s flesh makes an impression. Even Stevenson, tolerant, understanding, culturally sensitive, given the times, ends a chapter in the Marquesas with a recounting of a cannibal chief holding the hand of Mrs. Stevenson: “His favorite morsel was the human hand, of which he speaks today with an ill-favored lustfulness. And when he said good-bye to Mrs. Stevenson, holding her hand, viewing her with tearful eyes, and chanting his farewell improvisation in the falsetto of Marquesan society, he wrote upon her a sentimental impression which I try in vain to share.” So gifted with the tongue, Stevenson was rendered speechless. Seeing a cannibal holding the delicate morsel of your wife’s hand will do that to you.

  Stevenson was often sick in the Marquesas, but he did manage to go horseback riding high in the hills above Hiva Oa, where he encountered “a woman naked to the waist, of an aged countenance, but with hair still copious and black, and breasts still erect and beautiful.” She offered him “two crimson flowers.” I was no longer on Hiva Oa, but I figured this—a horse into the high hills of the Marquesas—was something I could do, and if I encountered a woman with “breasts still erect and beautiful,” well, bonus points for me.

  Hungry now, I found a café nearby, and was soon greeted by a friendly, heavily tattooed Marquesan woman and her husband, a white man, also tattooed in Polynesian script and built like a Mack truck. The Marquesas clearly were no place for small people, local and foreigner alike. He took my order—coffee, fresh juice, fruit, yogurt—and I watched him lumber toward the kitchen. I knew who he was. The yachties had spoken of him. He was, apparently, a former French Foreign Legionnaire, a German. The French station a regiment of Legionnaires in Tahiti. They don’t fuck around, these French, with asserting their authority in their colonies. I made it my mission to learn his story, which would be difficult I knew. Foreign Legionnaires aren’t exactly known for their chattiness.

  “So,” I said, as he brought me a pot of coffee, which was excellent by the way, “I gather you’re German.” He looked at me blankly. His eyes could only be described as cruel, as if they’d seen much that a normal man could not even begin to fathom. “I spent a lot of time in Germany,” I said, barreling on. “My father used to live in Nuremberg.” Again, not even a hint of some kind of conversational give-and-take. Maybe it was wrong to mention Nuremberg with its Nazi associations. These Legionnaires, I suspected, trended to the right. “So where are you from in Germany? Bavaria? Lower Saxony? Berlin? The east?” I asked, mildly, just making chitchat.

  “Just Germany,” he said. And then there was a long, uncomfortable pause. “I haven’t been back in many years.”

  Yeah, probably because you have a criminal record and numerous outstanding warrants, I thought. Isn’t that the typical Foreign Legionnaire’s story? A young man involved in petty crime, seeing no outlet, until he hears the siren song of the French Foreign Legion. Sign up, gain a new identity—including a name and passport—submit to a few years of brutality and a seven-year stint in France’s disposable legion, and walk away free, should you live. It beats prison
, presumably. And the hoodlum’s life on the streets.

  But I had known some former French Legionaries and admired them, sort of. The idea of honor seems so antiquated in our day, though with a Legionnaire it’s hard to know where noble distinction starts and violent bloodlust ends.

  “I spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe back in the day,” I said, sipping my coffee. “In Bosnia. During the war.” This was true, but only because I was an idiot. “I was in Mostar.”

  The German looked upon me with some interest now. “And what were you doing in Mostar?” he asked.

  Oh, I don’t know. I was twenty-three. I was freaking out. Pissing my pants. Getting shot at. Crying for my mommy. Nearly getting blown up. Whimpering. That sort of thing.

  But instead I said I was a journalist. I had attached myself to the Bosnian Army, which was then getting annihilated by both the Serbs and the Bosnian Croats. The Bosnian commander assigned me to a bunk with the “international volunteers,” the ex–French Foreign Legionnaires, a half-dozen Brits, Scots, and Canadians. On my first night, as soon as I heard the shelling, I cowered underneath my bunk. An Englishman spoke: “Those are outgoing shells, you know.” Oh, swell then. Shall make a note of it. And then I removed an assault weapon from my bunk—surprisingly heavy, these things—and tried to get some sleep, whereupon the outgoing barrage was met by incoming shells. “Might want to move away from the windows now and stay next to the sandbags,” I was told. It took me a couple of days until I could distinguish between incoming and outgoing mortars, but really, it made no difference. I saw the grim explosive cracks of sniper bullets pinging off nearby walls and felt the concussive waves of bombs landing next to what remained of the Stari Most, the old bridge that would soon be sunk by a Croat’s shell. And everywhere I wandered there were the makeshift graves of those who had fallen, most notably in Mostar’s busiest roundabout.

  It’s not the sort of thing I like to think about. Much easier to write about the gutter of alcoholism than the grim reality of that war. But this was my introduction to French Foreign Legionnaires. Of course they weren’t “official” soldiers then. Others would call them mercenaries. But this implied that they were fighting for money, of which there wasn’t any in Bosnia at that time. In the evenings I’d smoke weed, which grew wild in the mine-infested hills around Mostar and drink slivovitz with the ex–Foreign Legionnaires as shells and sniper fire rained upon the town. They’d tell me of the Bosnian civilians they saw nailed and crucified on the door of a mosque, and the Chetniks—the bearded Bosnian Serbs—that they beheaded as the radio squawked with the taunts of the Serbian soldiers in the hills. Pass the slivovitz, I’d said, and could that joint make its way back to me now, please? What these soldiers loved, more than anything, was “action”—that was the word they used. To be in action was to kill or to be killed. It was the ultimate adrenaline rush, and whenever they discussed the day’s events on the front, their eyes would glaze over in orgasmic delight. They were the ultimate adrenaline junkies, and even the regular Bosnian soldiers kept a wary distance from them.

  But I mentioned nothing of this to the German. He simply asked me when, exactly, was I in Mostar.

  “March/April, 1993.”

  He nodded. He knew his history. “I was never in Bosnia,” he said. “But I spent a lot of time with you Americans.”

  No surprise there. Nearly every battlefield over the past decade has been occupied by Americans.

  “I spent some time training at your Fort Bragg.”

  “With Delta Force?” I blurted. It was their home base, and I figured that’s where international special forces went to mingle. Of course elite American Special Forces were encouraged to survive, whereas the Foreign Legionnaires were meant to be France’s cannon fodder, the expendables.

  And now he looked upon me hard. “Who are you, exactly?”

  What could I say? “I’m just a traveler, curious about the people I meet.”

  “I spent most of my time in North Africa,” he said. “And I think that’s enough about me. Now, would you like some more coffee?”

  I didn’t. I’m a jittery mess when hyper-caffeinated. The nature of this conversation had clearly come to an end and I spent a few minutes tapping my fingers until I remembered the raison d’être for my being here. “Hey,” I said. “I’m hoping to do some horseback riding up in the hills. Would you happen to know of someone who could help me out?”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes suddenly alive. “I’ll send you to Celine. You’ll like her. She’s a real man-killer.”

  And with that, his wife punched him hard in the gut.

  Chapter Eleven

  Celine was a Marquesan woman with an indeterminately aged countenance, but with hair still copious and black, and breasts still erect and beautiful. I know this because she didn’t bother with a bra underneath her white T-shirt. Her shoes also didn’t match. Nor her socks. This was a woman who marched to her own drum, unpretentious and direct, and I liked her immediately. I admire a person comfortable in their own shoes, and if they’re mismatched so be it. Know thyself and be true. We drove off in a battered red pickup truck and spent much of the morning visiting her entire family, which is to say every residence and shop in the greater Taiohae area. “I have ten brothers and sisters,” she said in French, as I prepared for another day of brain-frying linguistic exertion.

  As a kid, I’d gone to a school in Canada in which half of all my lessons were taught in French, but that was a long time ago now, and I still felt the crushing disappointment of discovering that my neighbor here in Nuku Hiva was not, in fact, an American. How I’d been looking forward to speaking a language where I didn’t have to think twice about verb conjugations. It’d been nearly a month now since I’d spoken more than a few sentences in my natural tongue, and pleased though I was that I could still recall my schoolboy French—why is it so easy to recall what you learned thirty years ago, and brow-crushingly difficult to remember what happened last week?—I yearned to be able to speak thoughtlessly, which is my de facto conversational modus operandi. But perhaps it was best that here, at least, there was some kind of pause between thought and spoken word as I searched for just the right bon mot. First thought wrong, I was told in rehab. So true.

  “I have ten brothers and sisters,” Celine said, and I believe I met each and every one of them, as well as cousins, uncles, nieces, and nephews, as we moved from shops to homes and waved at every soul we encountered along the roadside. Celine’s family appeared to be single-handedly repopulating the Marquesas.

  “Yes,” she said with a laugh. “But that’s why young people can’t marry anyone from this island. We’re too close. So they find husbands and wives from other islands—Hiva Oa, Fatu Hiva, Tahiti, or France.”

  Wherever we stopped, the conversation slipped into Marquesan, followed by hoots of laughter, and I stood quietly alongside, until Celine explained that they were mocking my gold-craving neighbor. “There’s no gold here,” she said with a delighted cackle. “Look at us. We are a simple people, and this man, he comes to our houses thinking we have treasure chests buried in the sand. Il est fou.”

  Pretty much my feelings exactly.

  “But come. Let us to go to my horses. They are my love.”

  We stopped first at her brother’s home, the like of which I have never seen before or since. It was painted a cheery turquoise with simple window slats and a tin roof and walls bedecked with the skulls of horned boars, cows, the long sun-bleached snouts of horses, and satanic-looking goats. It was like stumbling across some backwoods shack straight out of Deliverance and I kept a wary eye out for banjo players.

  Celine picked up a couple of saddles and as we drove off we were happily chased by a couple of dogs. She stopped and let them hop into the bed of the truck as we drove higher into the hills of Nuku Hiva. This, easily, was the most mountainous of the Marquesas, with a high alpine plateau where cattle grazed among evergr
eens, surrounded by a formidable range of four-thousand-foot peaks. Here too, every corner of the island was like its own microenvironment. The north coast was dry and rocky, the south wet and verdant, and the middle felt like Switzerland with its pine forests and cows. The Marquesas were unique, unlike any island group I’d ever seen, a dream landscape for both poets and scientists.

  Celine unlocked a gate, and we soon found ourselves next to her horses. “You know how to ride, oui?”

  Yeah, I was born on the saddle, a veritable cowboy, a gaucho of the high plains. The last time I rode a horse was in the Dominican Republic where I’d let my stallion wander too close to the mare in front, which irritated her, whereupon she kicked out her hind leg, hard and fast, missing the stallion but shattering my kneecap, causing me to limp painfully for weeks thereafter. But since then, I figured, I’d ridden camels and elephants, and I assumed that if my seven-year-old son could ride a horse, well, how hard could it be?

  “Bon,” she said. “You take this one,” she said, saddling an agitated, neighing horse that stood approximately eighteen feet tall. “Non, monsieur. Comme ça,” she said. Apparently you’re supposed to use stirrups when climbing upon a horse. Just leaping upon the beast and crawling over its back is just not done. Okay, I thought, settling in as Celine directed my flip-flops into the stirrups. Giddy up.

  Fortunately, my horse was a follower, not a leader, and taking after Celine’s confident horsemanship, we spent a few hours following a narrow trail, the dogs trailing underfoot, happy and frisky, as we ambled into an ever-shifting landscape, heading higher, from shadow to sunlight, as Celine explained and expounded upon every tree or bush we encountered. She was at home here, at peace with her island and her place therein, and proud. We plucked guavas from the trees and fed them to both the horses and to ourselves. It is the only place I have ever seen an apple tree grow next to a flowering banana tree. The view changed with each corner, with every rise in elevation, and the panorama was striking to behold. Below us was the Taipivai Valley, where Herman Melville gathered the material for his popular novel Typee—and a novel it was, not the autobiography many assume. He spent three weeks there, after escaping from a whaling ship, though his story takes place over four months, wherein he recounts the usual clichés of the Polynesian sexpot. He wasn’t the first Westerner to find himself agog by the women of the Marquesas, of course. Here is Charles Porter, an American naval commander who visited in 1813, who was taken not only by the women’s easy delights but by the reaction of their male relatives: “It was astonishing to us to see with what indifference fathers, husbands, and brothers would see their daughters, wives, and sisters fly from the embrace of one lover to that of another, and change from man to man as they could find purchasers. Far from seeming to consider it an offense against modesty, they seemed to view it only as an accommodation to strangers who had claims on their hospitality.”