I stood watching the kite-boarders and the beachgoers, taking in the verdant panoply of green rising above, following the ridges of soaring mountains, and its startling contrast to the black sand where it meets an aquamarine sea gently cascading upon its shores. Squint and you can see everything. Listen and you can hear the noon bell and the creaking of masts. Breathe and you can smell the . . . sunscreen of French vacationers.
Moving on, I entered the world of SILENCE CULTE. This is what the road signs now said. I believe it means WORSHIP SILENCE. So I did. I did not toot the horn. I did not grind the gears. I turned the radio off. I was as quiet and stealthy as I could be, rolling over speed bumps in villages that suddenly, shockingly, were quiet hamlets with perhaps a few tin-roofed bungalows, a general store, maybe a school or a church, and gardens with banana and papaya trees, enclosed within walls of trimmed hedges and flowering blossoms. Elsewhere all was wild and beautiful, where primeval mountains tumble as if a green torrent into a glimmering ocean. I made my way to Taravao, on the isthmus, thinking that I might stop here, but forged onward the moment I saw three tour buses pulled up in front of a McDonald’s, and continued on to Tahiti Iti, little Tahiti, where I saw a sign pointing toward the Taravao Plateau. I followed it and soon discovered myself on a rugged, meandering single-lane road, tree-lined and shaded, climbing from the tropics to a pasture in the Alps, with cool, crisp air, farmhouses, and bovine herds, missing only the clinging of cowbells and the echo of Heidi yodeling in the mountains. I whistled, The hills are alive with the sound of music, until I came across a lookout, some 1,800 feet above the sea, where I could see all of Tahiti, its breathtaking beauty, and wondered what I would have done during that searing, mutinous moment on board the Bounty, when you have beheld this, and now were confronted with nothing more than the harsh tedium of naval life. Which vessel would you choose? Which life?
It was getting late and I had yet to find a place to stay. I followed the coastal road, nary a vehicle to be seen, passed a few slumbering villages, until I ran out of road. This must be it, I thought, Tautira, Hans Christian Andersen–ville, the garden of the world, heaven. The road looped through the village, and I rolled with it, once, twice, three times, seeing nothing but unkempt homes, a lovely stone church, people who gave me hard, unfriendly stares, and packs of mangy dogs that roved through the village like gangsters in heat. Nowhere did I see a sign promising a room or fare. I stopped in front of the general store, walked in, and noted the smell. It is the same odor one finds in nearly every village emporium in the Pacific, musty and damp, a suggestion that something dead herein lies, an aroma that immediately causes your brain to signal: Might be a good idea to avoid the meat. I asked the Chinese shopkeeper if there was a pensionne or fare in the village. He assured me there was not, and that there wasn’t a room available within twenty kilometers of here, whereupon I hung my head, returned to my sputtering Peugeot, and drove back from whence I came, thinking it’s the beach for me tonight, until some miles away I saw a precious little handwritten sign taped onto the stem of a coconut tree, announcing the availability of a fare.
It was a French-Tahitian family with an extra bungalow. Oui, I could stay. Here was the fare. Here was the outdoor kitchen. Supplies could be had just down the road, so I picked up some eggs, salad, a baguette, and some cheese for fifty smackeroos and cooked an omelet as the surf ebbed and flowed, the shoosh and roar of the sea accompanying a setting sun, the crashing waves lending a faint haze, distributing glimmers of radiant light as if refracted through a diamond.
I was joined by Jean-Michel, who lived here with his Tahitian clan, and we spent some time talking about the Pacific navigators of yore, agreeing that Western schoolchildren are inadequately served by this fixation on Magellan, Columbus, and Cook, and that the early explorers of Oceania are their equivalent and more. He noted the similarities of traditional sailing canoes with those found in Southeast Asia, of which he seemed to have some knowledge. He had been a social welfare officer, he said, arriving more than thirty years ago from his home in France.
“What I like about Tahiti is that you can have the best of both worlds—la vie sauvage and civilization.”
How differently he sees that glass from Ma Stevenson. He sees the best; she the worst. It is the difference between a Latin temperament and a Scot’s. I mentioned that I have seen mostly the French world and not much of the Polynesian in Tahiti. He acknowledged that this was increasingly true. “The percentage of people speaking French at home is increasing, while those speaking Tahitian is decreasing. In the end, most people speak neither language well.”
In the morning, I hastened back to Tautira. It was a Sunday, a day for church. I figured services would begin bright and early like elsewhere in the Pacific, and so I arrived before 8:00 A.M. only to find a village still snoozing. I did, however, see a woman dressed immaculately in white—definitely a churchgoer—who informed me that Mass wouldn’t begin until 10:00, so I had a couple of hours to kill. I headed to the black sand beach, at the mouth of the Vaitepiha River, which led into a deep valley tightly confined by mountains that reared up like a series of perfect, interlocking triangles. Stevenson spent much time here, noting the children and the games they played, as Princess Moe, a relation of Chief Ori a Ori, prepared him dishes of raw fish in lime juice and coconut. I felt so very happy for Stevenson, envious even, that he was able to enjoy such fine company. No such luck for me, however. I met the Village Psycho.
There were garbage cans on the beach, though not nearly enough of them, judging by the bottles of beer and rum that tumbled over their rims. The man who appeared to have consumed it all staggered over to me and pronounced himself the Angel of Mercy. His eyes were wild and bleary and when he said that he was crazy, I had no reason to doubt it. To prove the point, he did the crazy-man cackle, and proceeded with a long discourse about his attributes as the Angel of Mercy, which I am not even going to attempt to translate, since it would force me to try to make rhyme or reason of his words, and really, there wasn’t any. He proceeded to put his hand on my shoulder, which I didn’t like, since, at least on my end, we were not yet buddy-buddy. So I asked him the perennial conversation-killer—what do you do? What’s your job? I love that question for its somnolent power. It’s the blanket you can throw on any verbal fire. And here it worked, because whatever runaway train of thought he had been on now crashed, and he blinked a number of times and scratched his matted hair and after a good long while concluded that he didn’t actually have a job. To keep this train derailed, I asked him, So what do other men do around here? Well, let’s see, he said. There’s the gas station. And the store. And the school. And, hey wait a minute, buster, are you some kind of policeman? You are, aren’t you? Why, you . . .
And I walked back to the car. Fucking alcoholics.
Church was a tasteful affair, with a cheery priest whose sermon reminded us that it’s best not to worry, to be heureux, to remind ourselves of our blessings and to celebrate all that is joyful in life. The congregation skewed old, with just a few families attending, as in France. Afterward, people were very polite, and I shook hands with everyone, including the mahu who led the choir, and then they wandered onward, back to their lives, and I spent a desultory hour walking around the village, mindful of nasty-looking dogs and noting the flip-flops and shorts garb of the vast majority of Tautira’s inhabitants, suggesting that Sunday church was not on the day’s itinerary for them.
Concluding that I had pretty much exhausted the village’s entertainment options, I headed back and joined Jean-Michel and his family for their Sunday repast. We sat outdoors, in the kitchen fare, as he introduced me to everyone, a dozen or so family members, Tahitians all. It was a birthday party for a three-year-old boy, who sat happily singing as the ocean shimmered behind him. There was a long rigmarole about wine, and the superiority of light California wines for the noontime meal. French wines are too heavy for the afternoon, don’t you think? Well, I’m not real parti
cular anymore. We could just dispense with the wine altogether and go straight to the vodka and then I could join my friend, the Angel of Mercy, but I thought that would be impolite to say, so I said that I was bon with just water.
I felt relaxed and happy here, grateful to have been invited to the family meal. There were grilled meats and fish and salad and the conversation flowed easily.
“When I am in France,” Jean-Michel said, “my battery dies. Everyone is so depressed, always complaining about politics or the economy. They are always talking about the past. Here, it is about the present. My battery doesn’t die here. No one complains or speaks of the past.”
We were interrupted by a little boy who wanted to know if I spoke Tahitian. I said that, alas, I did not. He told me that this was very sad and I agreed with him. And then we watched the three-year-old open his gifts—a puzzle and a tot xylophone. Parents might regret that xylophone, I thought, as he began to hammer away.
“But I also like Asia,” Jean-Michel said. “Europe lives in the past, Tahiti in the present, but Asia lives for tomorrow. I love the energy there.”
The woman across from him snorted with laughter. Her name was Camille and she was radiantly beautiful, a young Tahitian woman seven months pregnant with her first child. “Tell him why you love Asia,” she said to Jean-Michel.
“There’s a woman.” He shrugged.
“With lots of energy,” finished Camille, to her great delight. And then she turned to me. “Are you married?” Yes, I said. She nodded and turned the conversation to where one might find a good woman these days, and I watched this table of French-Tahitians debate the relative merits of the globe’s female population. If you want to find love, the table concurred, you should head to Southeast Asia, and somewhere above, I noted the sparkling gleam of Venus transiting from one orbit to another.
Chapter Fifteen
In a world of ceaseless change, it can be gratifying to know that some things remain forever the same. Take the simple act of getting oneself to Tarawa, a sliver of coral on the equator that functions as the capital of the Republic of Kiribati. I’d worried that in the years since I’d lived there that the world had somehow caught up to Kiribati, enveloping it in its familiar arms, quickly transforming this peculiar, isolated country into just another facsimile of our homogenous global culture. I feared that instead of traditional I-Kiribati dancing, of which even Stevenson had said: “Gilbertese dance appeals to the soul: it makes one thrill to the soul; it makes one thrill with emotion; it uplifts one, it conquers one: it has the essence of all great art,” I’d now find a nation doing a Gangnam Style horsey dance. Instead of a staple diet of fish and breadfruit, I worried that the I-Kiribati may now have discovered chicken tenders and onion rings—of which, I’ll concede, I would have trampled over the maimed elderly to consume, such was the meagerness of the local diet that I had come to know and abhor. And what of the island’s youth? Back in my day, they’d discovered La Macarena. What would it be now? If I heard a peep of Justin Bieber, I’d know that the end was nigh.
Fortunately, it’s still a pain in the ass to get to Tarawa, so this boded well. From Tahiti, I flew to New Zealand and then onward to Nadi, Fiji, where I hoped to find a plane to Kiribati. You’d think there’d be a direct flight between Papeete and Nadi, the two busiest airports in the South Pacific, but this turns out not to be the case. The Pacific is essentially divided into three concentric circles and they have nothing to do with each other. There is the French Pacific, of course, where the people, by and large, look like Pacific Islanders. And yet the moment someone speaks, or you turn on a television, or read the local newspaper, or otherwise engage in some form of communication, it is apparent that you are in France, which may seem self-evident, it being called French Polynesia and all, but still, even after all this time, was something that struck me as so discordant that I didn’t quite know what to make of it, just that it felt odd, like it was some kind of affront to the natural order of things.
To the north lay the American Pacific, a sphere of influence that stretched from Hawaii to Guam, composed of chains of islands all dependent on the largesse of the US government, which in turn uses these remote locales to conduct its really spooky, supersecret activities. Biological weapons? Chemical weapons? Check and check. Nuclear weapons? Of course. Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, proud home of the Reagan Test Site, is where the US military conducts its ballistic missile testing and what it calls “near-earth and deep-space surveillance,” as well as . . .
Okay, I’m just speculating here, but I happened to be on Kwajalein in 2006 (why can’t I shake the feeling that right at this very moment the NSA has locked on to my laptop) and I noticed that right there on the runway (some kind of Code Red Alert is presently pinging through the ECHELON Inter-Service Counterintelligence Communication System) was a Royal Thai Navy plane (Joint Special Operations Command has been alerted to possible real-time threat) as well as an unmarked Gulfstream V (Delta Force operators are being deployed), which the CIA has been known to use for its rendition operations (did I just see shadows pass outside the window?), wherein terrorism suspects are kidnapped and taken to third-party nations for enhanced interrogation (multiple red laser sight tags are presently dancing on my forehead) . . .
. . . So in conclusion, the US presence in the Pacific has been overwhelmingly benign and devoted entirely to the well-being and happiness of the islanders themselves, and it is for this reason that the northern Pacific—Hawaii, the Marshalls, the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Palau, the Marianas—has essentially zero contact with their southern brethren. They are content, filled with joy, their bellies full and their hearts bursting with mirth.
Then there is the independent Pacific, and it is vast and disparate. There are Melanesians and Micronesians and Polynesians, but this doesn’t even begin to describe all the fissures and complexities of these itsy-bitsy, tiny little countries. You can be in a village in Papua New Guinea, walk five miles to the next village, and you have essentially traveled from one nation to another, each with its own language and customs. Ditto for Vanuatu. And the Solomon Islands. In Tonga, you have a feudal society. You’re either a noble or a commoner and this determines whether you can vote or afford a moped. In the more remote islands, like those of Tuvalu, you can spend an entire life—forty or fifty years even—without having left the twelve square miles of your sun-drenched atoll. Fiji, of course, is ever combustible with its chiefly rivalries and military coups and the mostly poor, unhappy Indians that comprise 40 percent of its population. There are islands in the Pacific so peaceful as to be nearly Edenic and others so violent and crime-ridden that you wouldn’t dare lay your head to sleep until you were safely tucked behind walls laced with shards of glass and patrolled by night watchmen and vicious mongrel dogs loyal only to the hand that feeds them. It is true that in each of these countries you will find coconut palm trees, sandy beaches, and warm translucent water—every single one of them a postcard advertisement of the same dream—and yet, despite commonalities in geography and ancestry, perhaps no region on earth is as unneighborly as the independent South Pacific.
Nowhere does this lack of, let’s call it, esprit de corps manifest itself more clearly than in the simple act of trying to get from one island nation to another. And thus the hopscotching around the Pacific. In Fiji, I showed up at the airport early one morning to catch a scheduled flight to Tarawa only to be informed that the plane had already left.
“Um,” I said. “It says here on my ticket that the plane was scheduled to depart at eight thirty.” I looked at my watch. “It’s presently six A.M.”
“They decided to leave at five thirty,” said the counterperson.
This left me baffled. It wasn’t so much the discrepancy between the plane’s scheduled time of departure and its actual departure, but rather that someone had been in a hurry to get to Kiribati at all. Looking around, I saw half a planeload worth of passengers similar
ly perplexed. Something actually left early? For Kiribati? It was like an affront to the space-time continuum. I asked the Fijian woman at the counter when the next flight to Tarawa would be.
“Maybe next week,” she said.
Excellent, I thought. That was more like it. Maybe next week was the official motto of the Kiribati I had come to know.
It took a month for Stevenson and his party to sail from Tahiti to Hawaii, a difficult journey full of “calms, squalls, head sea, waterspouts of rain, hurricane weather all about.” They sent the Casco back to San Francisco and spent another six months in a cottage on Waikiki Beach, then inhabited by a mere twenty souls. Even this proved too much for Stevenson, who, catching up on work and correspondence, complained bitterly to Charles Baxter that “the care of my family keeps me in vile Honolulu, where I am always out of sorts, amidst heat and cold and cesspools and beastly HAOLES. What is a haole? You are one; and so, I am sorry to say, am I.” Clearly, this was a man not yet ready to return to continental life, and so when the opportunity arose to obtain passage on a pygmy trading schooner to Kiribati and Samoa, Stevenson seized the moment and, together with Fanny; Lloyd Osbourne; his son-in-law, Joe Strong; and his “China boy,” Ah Fu, departed Hawaii in June 1889. The Honolulu Advertiser wryly observed: “It is hoped that Mr. Stevenson will not fall victim to native spears; but in his present state of bodily health, perhaps the temptation to kill him may not be very strong.”
The night before my departure I essentially camped out at the airport. No way was I going to let some eager-beaver pilot leave without me again, and in the predawn darkness, we took off, heading toward the end of the world. There was another foreigner sitting next to me, and curious, I asked what drew him to Kiribati.
Headhunters on My Doorstep Page 20