Headhunters on My Doorstep

by J. Maarten Troost

  The Taipivai Valley is largely devoid of people now. All that is left is a small village. We could see its few tin roofs and the narrow curve of a dirt road and a large swath of coconut palms. Amorous adventure, alas, cost the Marquesans dearly, and the world described by Melville and Porter—its easy love and carnal hospitality—is now for the history books. What’s really interesting is reading the accounts written a mere fifty years later—how casually dismissive of death the letters now were, as if it were the natural order, God’s due, that Marquesans die. Irritating that, and we can only hope that these same letter writers were one day afflicted with leprosy and the pox.

  The path we followed was muddy and slippery, and from time to time my horse would lose its purchase and there’d be a brief moment when I could feel my heart lurch. This was but a foreshadowing of what was to come. The path steepened again, and now I stood high in my stirrups as the horse galloped up the inclines, slipping here and there, its hooves crumbling momentarily, saved only by the momentum of its movement. Every instinct told me to hold the reins fast, to slow the beast down, to take it easy. Nice and slow, I thought. Let’s just inch our way up. No way did I want to end up as a cushion for a collapsing twelve-hundred-pound horse.

  “Non!” Celine yelled. “Let him run. Otherwise he will fall.”

  Isn’t there a beginner’s course around here? A pony park? Did I misrepresent myself? Sure, I’ll wear a Stetson. I’ll drive a pickup truck. But I’m an urban cowboy, lady. If you want to line dance, I’m your guy. But barreling up muddy, rocky, slippery, steep slopes on massive horses, beasts that I sensed were ready to topple at any moment, well, let’s just say that it left me a trifle uncomfortable. But I did as suggested and gave the horse free rein, urging him on, as we surged up a vertiginous peak, and now, suddenly, I could see why the effort was entirely worth it.

  We dismounted and took a gander at the view. Below us was a plummeting precipice, a couple of thousand feet at least, cascading down into a valley so serene and lovely and breathtaking that if God ever made a cathedral of His own, it would be here, and this would be it. In the distance was a plunging thirteen-hundred-foot waterfall. The mountains were ornately lush, a green vertigo that began with the coconut palms in the valley, a few towering banyans, and then a rising crescendo of trees and brush, desperately holding on to the tenuous grip of rising cliffs.

  “This is a very special place,” Celine said, as she let the horses wander free. “You are the first foreigner to be here.”

  Take that, Herman Melville.

  “Look, do you see? Those blue birds. They are lorikeets. And there? The white bird with the long body. It only lives here in the mountains. And high in the mountains is a kind of eagle that lives off fruit. And there, do you see that bird with the long black wings? It also only lives here in those hills. But the problem is the rats. They climb into their nests.”

  Celine continued to speak of the beauty of her island as she hand-rolled a cigarette. “This place is not like Tahiti with its crowds and pollution. Tahiti is finished. Here, it is like it always was.”

  Minus the people, of course. There are about 2,500 people living on Nuka Hiva now, a small fraction of what once was. But I told her how much I admired how the culture was returning. She nodded and agreed, but when I mentioned the Marquesan Festival, a once-every-four-years gathering of dancers and artists from throughout the islands, she frowned and disagreed.

  “It’s not good,” she said. “The tourists come then. So people dance for money. That’s all they see, the money. Me, I am a dancer and I don’t dance for money. I dance for free.” And now she began to sway her hips and dance, finding a song in her own mind.

  “But there aren’t any tourists here,” I countered as she swayed and sashayed. “There can’t be more than forty rooms on this island.”

  “There are enough. They started to come in 1979 when they built the runway.”

  “But no one flies to the Marquesas,” I noted.

  “There is the Aranui.”

  Okay. Guilty. “But that only comes once a month.”

  “And the bateaux.”

  “There are twelve in the harbor.”

  “It is enough.”

  And she asked me to hold her cigarette as she danced on as the birds soared on updrafts and the horses ate contentedly on the tall grass. The dogs rested, watching her, attuned to her moods. I wasn’t sure what the German Legionnaire meant when he referred to her as a man-killer. Try to translate a thought through three languages and you never quite know what results. Was she quick with the knife or slow with the heartbreak? Eventually, her hips stopped swaying, and we walked the horses down the steepest part of the mountain, moving them in zigzags so that they’d keep their footing, and as we hopped back on to our mounts—I used the stirrups this time, like John Wayne—Celine rolled another cigarette.

  “Hey, Celine,” I said. “Tell me how good that cigarette is.”

  She laughed. “When people tell me not to smoke, you know what I tell them. I say shut up.” And without prompting she took out her pouch of tobacco and papers and rolled one for me.

  “Menthol,” I said. “I can’t ride a horse smoking a menthol.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  The weather had turned over the next couple of days. Wind swept the island. The bay was foaming with streaming froth. The sailboats bobbed and weaved as their sheets and rigging clanged against the masts. Rain swept the island in sudden squalls. Wet, misty clouds swirled around the mountains, shrouding them. A tropical island awash in rain, the coconut trees straining in the wind, is a depressing place, and I twiddled my thumbs waiting for brief bursts of sunshine, whereupon I laced my shoes and ran through sloppy, muddy puddles, killing time until I could explore the island further. Finally, sensing no break in the weather, I gave up and, seeing a path rising above the town and over a low ridge, I followed it in the drizzle, hiking around the headland and through an open gate, the trail bordered by a thick growth of trees, and I wandered through the bush, sopping wet now, for about a mile until I came to a lonely beach.

  Hey, I thought, looking around. This looks familiar. Wasn’t this . . . Yeah. It had to be—the beach used in Survivor: Marquesas, the reality television show that . . . Sorry, I used the word reality there. I’d found myself on a few Survivor locales by now and they’re never more than a mile or two from a town, a comfortable hotel, and a slew of bars and restaurants. The contestants might go hungry, but not the crew. I’d watched the very first Survivor years ago, when the conniving wickedness of contestants was still fresh and interesting, but it had been a long time since I’d tuned in to subsequent shows. But because I’m very diligent about researching the places I visit, I’d watched what I could of Survivor: Marquesas on YouTube, and felt very pleased to now be in the exact same spot where a contestant, who’d somehow managed to impale his hand on a sea urchin, had desperately pleaded for someone to urinate on his hand—for medicinal reasons, of course—and was soon obliged by a helpful female contestant. It really is the little things in life that make it worthwhile.

  Now, however, there was just the weathered remains of a homespun lean-to and a bleak desolation to the beach, and I did not linger long, hiking back to town in the driving rain, where I was soon met by a rolling red pickup truck, the windows down, as Celine yelled, Qu’est-ce que tu fais? as she invited me into the cab of her truck. I hopped in and told her I’d been to the beach on the other side of the hills, where Survivor had been filmed, and she just rolled her eyes. “It was like an invasion,” she said. “For two months, it was like we were an occupied island.”

  “But it’s all good,” I said. “The world learned a little something of the Marquesas, n’est-ce pas?”

  Here, I believe, I encountered a really expressive display of emphatic cussing. It’s sad, really, that I learned my French in Catholic school, because to this day I still don’t know how to swear cr
eatively in French, though if I’d chosen, at this moment, I’m sure I could have learned the schoolyard grammar I was so lacking.

  “But see,” I said. “On this show America was introduced to the tribal communities of the Marquesas, and how they were ruled by a stern yet benevolent chief named Jeff.”

  “^%F#@#F%&*%Fmerde.”

  Okay, I probably didn’t translate that accurately. Am putting learning all the naughty words in French on my list of things to do, right next to acquiring skulls.

  “Do you have some time?” Celine asked.

  Oh, I don’t know. I’m on an island in the middle of nowhere, without an ongoing ticket or a way off, amusing myself by going on desultory hikes to the set of Survivor: Marquesas in the drenching rain. Yeah, I think I’ve got a couple of minutes to spare.

  “Come,” she said. “I’ll show you the old Marquesas.”

  We took a high road that clung to the lofty side of Mount Muake, which looms above Taiohae, as the weather finally started to clear, offering grand views of the town and the turtle-shaped bay. Clearly, Celine was a proud Marquesan, so I asked her why on earth were the islands still French? Didn’t that seem kind of odd to her, to be a citizen of a country on the other side of the planet, one where she’d never set foot? Wouldn’t it be better to be independent?

  “Non,” she said. “The Marquesas are very expensive and we are poor. The French give us money.”

  Yes, I said. But French Polynesia is expensive because the French themselves have completely warped the local economy. The independent Pacific isn’t nearly so pricey.

  She agreed, and said things were simpler here in French Polynesia until they began with the nuclear testing. Then all this infrastructure was built, runways were constructed, and now there were hordes of French fonctionnaires gallivanting around the islands, their pockets flush with Western paychecks, which caused all the prices to rise.

  Well, just kick them out then, I said. Everyone eventually casts off their colonizers, non? Live free or die.

  She laughed at this. Vous, les Américains! But without France, she said, we would be ruled by Tahiti and that would be unacceptable. France gives us money; Tahiti wouldn’t give us a franc.

  And that settled it for her. Better to be ruled by a faraway, middling continental power that sends a check from time to time than the conniving Tahitians. Try as I did to ferment revolt, she would have nothing to do with it. “It is best the way it is,” she said. She would never vote for independence. You can’t trust a Tahitian, you know.

  We drove through the Taipivai Valley, a mix of wild forest growth and cultivated coconut palms, as Celine pointed toward the remnants of old stone platforms, the site of yet another abandoned village. “Here is where your Herman Melville stayed. They were very kind to him, but he writes about them like they were all cannibals.”

  Um, weren’t they?

  She smiled. “Well, okay, a little bit. But you’d think all we did was kill people and eat them every day. We eat fruit and fish too, you know. Eating people was for special occasions, like your holiday. What do you call it? Thanksgiving.”

  Oh, right. I could just envision that meal. Mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, and a roasted corpse with a nice black truffle butter and white wine gravy. The stuffing would be tricky, though. Welcome to Chez Hannibal Lecter. Would you like some fava beans and a nice Chianti?

  “Okay, here is your cannibal village,” she said, parking the truck near Kamuihei, an ancient settlement restored for the Marquesan Festival some years back. Throughout the islands of the Marquesas there are numerous stone paepaes, nearly all overgrown by the ever-encroaching forest. Most building material in the Marquesas, of course, was made of wood and thatch and has long since decomposed, leaving only the carefully arranged stones and boulders as the last remaining vestiges of what were once full and lively villages. In Kamuihei, however, a few dwellings, done in the manner of the Marquesas of bygone days, now occupied the paepaes, which together with the tikis and petroglyphs, allowed you to visualize how the islanders once lived. But what was really striking about the site was an enormous, six-hundred-year-old banyan tree that soared over the village and the surrounding forest. It made me think of Avatar for some reason, a giant tree of life and mystery.

  “Here’s where we killed the victims,” Celine said.

  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the tree of life.

  “We called this the knot of power. The victims would be hanged on hooks, see, like the long pig. They would be beaten by a war club. But we didn’t eat the whole man. Just a little bit.”

  “Just a little bit? Seems like such a waste, don’t you think?”

  She smirked at me. “The man was eaten for his mana, that is the invisible power that resides in the head.”

  “And who, exactly, were these unfortunate meals?”

  “Antisocial people.”

  Antisocial people? That sounds like every teenager I’ve ever known.

  “It was the people who broke the taboos. Or sometimes they would raid another tribe. There were five main tribes on Nuku Hiva then. But usually they would just take one or two people. It wasn’t like they went off to kill the whole village. It was for the ritual. And then they would throw the bones here, you see?” Celine said, pointing to a pit in the recesses of the banyan tree. “And in this pit,” she said, pointing to the one next to it, “is where they held the victims.”

  I couldn’t even begin to fathom what it must have been like to find yourself in the pit of doom, next to a pile of bones, as a crowd gathers like . . . Thanksgiving.

  “But then the white men came,” Celine continued. “And you know what happened to us, oui?”

  I nodded, feeling contrite and guilty. Bad white people.

  “Many ships used to come to the Marquesas. In 1813 alone, there were more than sixty bateaux here. And they brought the diseases. And now there was hunger. So instead of eating a little bit of the man for his mana, now people began to eat the whole body. It isn’t our culture to do that, but when a person is hungry . . .” She shrugged and wandered off. “Do not step on the red stones,” she said as I followed. “They are sacred. But look, the sun has come back. I will show you more of beautiful Nuku Hiva. You see how friendly we are?” And then she chomped her teeth and smiled, with malice or mischief I’m not sure.

  There is a prominent isthmus that divides Anaho Bay from Hatiheu, and we parked the truck and hiked between the two. Anaho Bay, of course, is where Stevenson first anchored, and it is no wonder that he so quickly felt the appeal of the Marquesas. It is the proverbial postcard image of the South Seas, a long curving sandy shore with a fringing reef, framed by coconut palms and embraced by “rude and bare hills,” as Stevenson described the scene, “enclosed to the landward by a bulk of shattered mountains,” where he soon beheld “the scent of the land and of a hundred fruits or flowers.” Sounds intriguing, no? And it is. It’s the kind of place where you can imagine lingering for a good long while. There is the reef, for instance, a rarity in the Marquesas, and a warm, inviting turquoise sea alive with fishy critters, little Nemos and longnose emperors. But that beach is hell on earth, a place where the no-nos, blizzards of them, will feast upon you until all that remains is the sun-baked carcass of your bones. “It is for this reason that very few people live here anymore,” Celine noted, as we hightailed it back up into the hills, hiking onward to Hatiheu.

  “Still beautiful,” Celine observed. “And no more no-nos,” as we wandered through a sleepy village toward a black-sand beach with smooth, water-sculpted stones, surrounded by steep and eroded basalt cliffs. It was more lush here, primeval, and alive. The clouds and rain had completely dissipated now. I spent a few minutes just standing, still and alert, and when no insects bothered me I figured I could live here, contentedly, happily, tending to a garden and doing a little fishing. This too was one of Stevenson’s favorite lo
cales in the Marquesas, though he was irritated to no end by the Catholic school that once lay here, educating what remained of the island’s youthful boys, who had been plucked by the government and sent here to a boarding school, learning little more than the tedium of Scripture, separated by the width of the island from the girls’ school in Taiohae. “Prayers, and reading and writing, prayers again and arithmetic, and more prayers to conclude: such appeared to be the dreary nature of the course.” And the boys? “They sit and yawn.” Perhaps Stevenson would be pleased to know that nothing remains of the school. It was destroyed by a tsunami on April Fool’s Day, 1946.