Headhunters on My Doorstep

by J. Maarten Troost

  I was captivated. I didn’t know what was coming over me. Tattoos. Sharks. And I wanted more. Well, that part was familiar. I have a head for more, of course. The following day I borrowed a bicycle from Shark Boy, put my flippers and mask in a backpack, and peddled toward the Garuae Pass, a few miles past the airport, where I followed a dirt and coral track to the headland. What will I see there, I’d asked him. “Sharks,” he’d said beatifically, and I was beginning to understand. Encountering a shark in its element is both strangely serene and extraordinarily bracing, and your mind doesn’t quite know what to do, how to react, whether with a burst of adrenaline or a flood of calmness, so it gives you both. But as I beheld the Garuae Pass, I felt something else. It was far wider than the South Pass, at least a few miles, and the water was turbulent. The tide was going out and I could see different currents swirling and ripping. There was no beach available to enter the water, just mounds of dead coral, sun-bleached white. I felt some trepidation as I made my way to the water, walking barefoot over the rocks, searching for a good entry point but finding none. I gingerly headed into the water anyway, trying not to cut my feet on the sharp coral, put my flippers and mask on, and was immediately swept by a strong current. I took a last glance at land to see how fast it was moving, and figuring I could swim through it, put my mask on and saw . . . almost nothing. The visibility was not more than ten or twelve feet, the current and tides having stirred the sediment, and all I observed was what was right there in front of me, branches of coral and numerous fish swaying and gyrating in the chaotic flow. Elsewhere, there was just a milky darkness, and I swam onward.

  The shark emerged like a bullet. I knew immediately that it was bigger than I was, but I can’t tell you much else because I swigged down a chest full of water and was busy dying of a panic attack. I surfaced, coughed, and broke speed records as I swam with all my might back to shore, where I staggered onto dry land and collapsed, gulping air, enjoying the feel of shards of dead coral beneath me, content, very simply, to be out of the water.

  Approximate length of swim: three and a half minutes.

  Desire to swim with sharks again: lifted.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Is Tahiti really that bad?

  This was the question I was determined to settle. Perhaps no place has suffered a greater rise and fall in the imagination than Tahiti. There was a certain inevitability to this precipitous decline, of course. Think of De Bougainville and Captain Cook and their lush prose, their quills shivering as they describe the scenes they encountered—the lovemaking, the churning of the dancers, the fragrant smell of blossoms. Think of Mutiny on the Bounty, casting an island so alluring that both Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson—er, for you younger people, there was a time when Mel Gibson was thought of as sexy, and not as, well, a bloated, wild-eyed, narcissistic, creepy dude who leaves scary messages—felt the need to commit treason, to risk the hangman’s noose, in order to quench their ardor for the life they’d tasted in Ole Tahiti. With that kind of press, Tahiti was doomed to be proven an illusion, a fabrication, a chimera summoned from a storyteller’s febrile mind. It could only be so. There are no other narrative possibilities. If something can end, then it will do so.

  What I found surprising, however, was how little love there was for Tahiti among the French Polynesians themselves. On Fakarava, I met a Polynesian woman named Nani who spoke a near-flawless American-accented English.

  “My mother sent me to the Cook Islands when I was twelve,” she explained. “She felt it was important to learn English.”

  “But the Cooks aren’t American,” I noted. “They speak English with a New Zealand accent.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t like it there. I spent all my time watching American television.” Score one for cultural imperialism. “I like it here. Life is simple. You can live . . . I don’t know how to say it in English. La vie sauvage.”

  “Close to nature,” I offered.

  “Yes. Unlike Tahiti, with its pollution, its crowds, its noise, its traffic.”

  “Well, naturally, this is where you are from so . . .”

  “No,” Nani said. “I am from Tahiti. I came to Fakarava to escape Tahiti.”

  Robert Louis Stevenson left for Tahiti to escape Fakarava, and so I dutifully followed with dimmed expectations and heightened curiosity. My journey, by prop plane, was far easier than Stevenson’s, however. He’d caught a cold on the atoll, which soon worsened into the Bluidy Jack. Fearing for her husband’s life, Fanny insisted on sailing onward to Papeete, where, after a stint in a hotel as doctors tended to him, they settled into a small cottage with a garden of mango trees. Stevenson didn’t get out much. Indeed, it was expected he should die here as he was convulsed by hemorrhages. He was stoic about this turn of events, and continued to smoke as others made plans for his funeral. It was left to his mother to observe: “I don’t much like Tahiti. It seems to me a sort of halfway house between savage life and civilization, with the drawbacks of both and the advantages of neither.”

  I settled into a small guesthouse, where a couple of nurses from Lausanne were lodging, determined to find jobs here, in paradise, but no one would hire them. I suggested they try the outer islands, or perhaps New Caledonia or Vanuatu, where medical professionals such as themselves were needed, but they wanted to stay here, in Tahiti, where the action is, and as I went to bed, they went off to the nightclubs. I liked their pluck, but they’d be home in a month or two. They lived in a dream and it didn’t take long to figure that in Papeete, at least, the roosters had long ago stirred and put an end to fanciful slumbers.

  Papeete is an administrative city. And it is French. So it is like that. Of course, there are Polynesians here, many with distinctive tattoos, but much more common are mixed-race people, and you look into their eyes and see Macau and Honolulu and all the other ports where history swirled and danced and romanced. French is the lingua franca, and I heard one man say: “He wants independence? Alors, who will pay for his bread? Who will pay for his home? Independence? It is like kicking your mother in the head.”

  At exactly 5:00 P.M. the shutters came down and people retreated to the suburbs, to the Tahiti Pas Cher for groceries, to the Mobil station with the Stop and Shop to fill up their Renault, to the McDonald’s with the jungle gym to pick up dinner, and the city center was left for the players, who at 5:15 are all magically dressed in their I-think-I-might-like-to-get-laid-tonight clothing, the women alluring in strappy dresses and heels, revealing a great expanse of legs, which I spent an inappropriate amount of time gandering because they offered the telltale clue as to whether the gams I was gandering belonged to a woman or a man, since this was Polynesia and these things are not always self-evident. The mahu are physically male but, since time immemorial, have been raised as females. Often it was the eldest boy, who was groomed to help with the household chores, including cooking and tending to the younger siblings. Some eventually grew out of being the designated mahu and eventually married and had children of their own. Many, however, whether due to nature or nuture, embraced the designation. Polynesians, notoriously, have a very elastic sense of sexuality and if a man hooked up with the village mahu, it wasn’t a gay thing or a straight thing, but just kind of an island thing. In other cultures, of course, effeminate boys are bullied and jeered, but not so in Tahiti, which, like elsewhere in Polynesia, long ago acknowledged that some are men or women and some are neither and both. Today, the mahu are mahu by choice and many have breast implants and wear dresses and sashay and are so over the top in their femininity that they could only be really campy men. Try as she might, however, Ms. Coco cannot hide that she has the legs of a manly man.

  Many mahu are servers in the town’s cafés, which by 5:30 are full of people smoking and drinking and listening to sentimental Tahitian pop music. The fifty-plus crowd is strangely absent. I wasn’t sure why. The atmosphere is not aggressively young, just people smoking and drinking. But no fifty-plussers. Maybe
they’re dead or something. Since this was France, you can’t get dinner before 7:30. It’s. Just. Not. Done. So I spent the interlude running on a seaside promenade, next to the Boulevard Pomare, where I was pleasantly startled to discover that I was hardly the only runner in Papeete. I wasn’t sure what to make of this. I never see runners elsewhere in the South Pacific, and yet here in Papeete, there must be, I don’t know, maybe upward of dozens of people exercising. Was this a good sign? Or was this indicative of our forthcoming global homogeneity, when we are all exactly alike, with the same habits and the same aspirations as those on the other side of the planet? And then, in the evenings, I would find a food truck and have me some poisson cru, a tuna ceviche with coconut milk and lime, a perfect culinary commingling of France with Polynesia, and I thought maybe this could work, this blending of cultures.

  “We are destined to be the same. It cannot be resisted. It cannot be stopped. It is inevitable,” said the Lithuanian sitting across from me one evening at the guesthouse. He had dropped everything—job, family—to spend a couple of months traveling around the world. Why, I had asked him? “Because it was cold,” he said.

  His name was Tomas and he was about my age, thickset and balding, and we talked about what Eastern Europe was like in the early nineties. While I was in Prague, he was traveling to Yerevan and Moscow, “to buy yo-yos,” which he then sold on the streets of Vilnius. Now, he ran a software company. “You cannot defy corporate capitalism. No one can,” he said. “It is too alluring. It knows what you want. It knows what everyone wants. Americans, Germans, Chinese, Indians, Tahitians, they all want Nike. Or Pizza Hut. Or a BMW. Everyone wants a flat-screen television and a MacBook. The difference between now and twenty years ago is that now everyone can buy a flat-screen television and a MacBook. Everyone,” he said, stabbing his finger in the darkness, “wants the same thing. They want to consume.”

  “Well,” I said. “I can think of some places that will hold out to the bitter end, that will always be different.”

  “Name one,” he said.

  “Kiribati,” I said.

  “I have not heard of this place.”

  “Exactly. No one has.”

  So there, Mr. Smarty Pants. And now I was feeling triumphant. I told him about the remote atolls, and how the I-Kiribati will never become consumers, not least because there is nothing to consume, and there will never be anything to consume, because capitalists like yourself have never even heard of Kiribati. No one knows diddly about Kiribati.

  “Excuse me,” said a gentleman from the next table, an American (yay, Americans in French Polynesia). “I heard you mention Kiribati. We’ve spent some time there, and . . .”

  And poof went my argument, to the great amusement of Tomas. I was now speaking with John and Melinda, a friendly couple from Oregon. They were sailors who had once built their own boat and sailed it across the Pacific, stopping in Kiribati and numerous other islands. They’d since sold the boat, but from time to time, they headed back to the South Seas and chartered a sailboat, which they were now in the midst of doing. We spoke about Kiribati, and after a while John asked: “So what brought you there?”

  “Well,” I said. “My girlfriend at the time got this job and . . .”

  “You’re J. Maarten Troost, aren’t you?”

  I allowed that I might be.

  “So what are doing in Papeete?”

  And now I thought for a moment. “I have no idea.”

  The suburbs of Papeete extend all the way out to Venus Point, toppling over hills and covering the expanse of land that lies between the ocean and the towering, seven-thousand-foot range of barbed pinnacles that anchor the island. I rented a car, a little put-put manual Peugeot, the cheapest vehicle I could find, and drove along the coastal road. Those mountains, and the exuberantly ambrosial valleys they concealed, shrouded in mist, must be where the real beauty of Tahiti now lay, I figured, because it sure was ugly out here on the seashore, a cascade of minimarts, light industry, and graffiti-strewn apartment blocks and bungalows that goes on and on and on.

  I set out with restless diligence early that morning, following the trail of Robert Louis Stevenson like a bloodhound on the case, and drove happily onward, content to leave Papeete in the rearview mirror. Everybody shits on Papeete, of course. It was once the fabled paradise, but now yadda yadda yadda. But ask most of the locals, and they’ll shrug their shoulders, offer a few obligatory complaints about the traffic and the prices, and then they’ll mention their job and how it’s okay, it pays the bills, and their kids are doing well in school, perhaps they’ll become doctors or lawyers, though, of course, they’ll need to complete their studies in France, but in the meantime we have our vin. Have you tried this Vin de Tahiti? It’s pas mal. Travelers don’t like Papeete, I thought, because it reminds them of home, and who wants to spend a gazillion francs when they could have the very same experience by simply heading out to a strip mall followed by an evening downtown at the drag fashion show?

  Fortunately, Robert Louis Stevenson did not stay long, which meant that I didn’t have to either. He wasn’t well yet when he left Papeete, but seeking to find more tolerable surroundings, the Casco sailed around the island to Taravao, near the isthmus with Tahiti Iti, which juts out like a spherical appendage to the main island. The captain soon discovered that the mast was rotting and eventually headed back to Papeete to be refit, leaving Fanny to hire a wagon and horses to carry Stevenson farther south, to the village of Tautira, when the mosquitoes proved unbearable. It was here that he convalesced and exchanged names with the local chief, Ori a Ori, who took care of all his needs, because Stevenson, like everyone who goes to Tahiti, soon ran out of money as work on the Casco dragged on from one month to the next. “You are my brother,” Chief Ori a Ori told him. “All that I have is yours.”

  In a letter from Tautira, Stevenson wrote: “You are to conceive us, therefore, in strange circumstances and very pleasing; in a strange land and climate, the most beautiful on earth; surrounded by a foreign race that travelers have agreed to be the most engaging.” Tautira was, he said, heaven, the garden of the world, a place that he would whimsically call Hans Christian Andersen–ville. I found it on the map and was pleased to note that it was located at the very end of the road, some forty miles distant from Papeete, at the tip of Tahiti Iti, which even today is said to contain the last remaining vestiges of Old Tahiti.

  But first, I wanted to have a look at Venus Point. It was here, on Matavai Bay, that Western dreams of Tahiti were made, the beach where both Captain Cook and Captain Bligh strode ashore, mighty emissaries of the Royal Navy, whose words and deeds became the embers of fantasy. Of course, this place should be called Venus Point. It is only right. Cook observed the transit of the planet Venus in 1769, when he alighted upon Tahiti as captain of the Endeavour, during his First Voyage Round the World. There is a small white obelisk near the black sand beach, next to a glorious nineteenth-century lighthouse, that commemorates the occasion.

  But it is Captain Bligh’s landing and all that followed that casts Venus Point in soft, radiant hues. Venus, of course, is the Roman goddess of luv and sexy times, and She cast Her spell on all who landed upon Her shores. William Bligh was a master on board the Resolution during Cook’s Third Voyage, but will forever be memorialized as the captain of the Bounty, the despot who, obsessed with order and the well-being of his breadfruit seedlings, lost his ship to Fletcher Christian and a mutinous crew. They too have a memorial here, with bas-relief portraits of our main characters, foisted upon a volcanic rock ringed by pebbles. I studied their images; the mean, stern-faced taskmaster, balding, with a sneering mouth, next to the Golden Boy, long-haired with heavy-lidded eyes and pouty lips. We have always been conditioned to root for Fletcher Christian, the romantic lead, who, casting off the shackles of tyranny, led his men to freedom, eventually landing upon the shores of lonely Pitcairn Island with the women they loved, distant now from the las
h of the wicked Bligh.

  Me, I think Captain Bligh was the hero. Perhaps it is my destiny to become a grumpy, old man, or maybe it’s because Anthony Hopkins is sober and Mel Gibson is . . . well, not my place to say, but now, whenever I see or encounter the tale of Mutiny on the Bounty, I cheer for the man in blue. Think of their respective legacies. Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, having abandoned Bligh and the remaining loyalists, the shipmates for whom he was responsible, to the mercy of the seas and near-certain death, returned to Tahiti. Some of the mutineers remained there, but Christian, together with eight other shipmates, eleven Tahitian women, six local men, and one child, sailed onward to Pitcairn, where they burned the ship to avoid detection, and lived happily ever after. But the story doesn’t end there, of course. Within four years, all the Tahitian men were murdered. The mutineers turned on each other, including Fletcher Christian, and soon there were just four left, together with ten women and a few children. One of the crewmen, William McCoy, learned how to distill alcohol from the ti plant, and now they were perpetually drunk. The women fled for their lives and erected a fort. McCoy, in a drunken stupor, hurled himself off a cliff. Another went insane and had to be hacked to death. Finally, one of the two remaining mutineers destroyed the liquor still, and, after enduring a prolonged withdrawal, an unsettled peace reigned over the island. Today, some of their descendants are imprisoned on the island, locked up for abusing children, but since Pitcairn now falls under E.U. jurisdiction, their prison, conforming to European norms, is said to be the loveliest building on the island. There are plans to turn it into a hotel once the last prisoner is released.

  And Bligh? He and eighteen loyalists were set adrift on a twenty-three-foot launch without a map or a chronometer. He sailed at once for nearby Tofua to obtain supplies, where one of the men was killed in an attack by the locals, and then proceeded to sail for forty-seven days across 3,618 nautical miles to the relative safety of Timor, losing not a single soul during this jaw-dropping feat of seamanship. Bligh was exonerated of all culpability in the Bounty affair, and went on to become a vice admiral. There are seventeen family trees who owe their existence to Captain Bligh. Hero or monster? You decide.