Well, Lily still looks good because she’s been addicted to the gym for years and years, and has already gone back to training. It’s not the same, say the men, it’s not the same. But Pito would be the first to tell you that since giving birth, Lily has never looked better. There’s a bit more flesh, Pito approves; she doesn’t look like Mr. Muscles anymore. He follows Ati into the jeweler’s shop.
“Bonjour.” The middle-aged woman behind the glass counter immediately smells a buyer. “We have beautiful gold necklaces on special. A great Mother’s Day gift for less than fifty thousand francs.”
“It’s not for my mother,” says Ati. “It’s for my wife.”
Pito raises an eyebrow.
“Oh.” The saleswoman’s smile is even bigger now. “Well, we have some beautiful pearl necklaces over there —” She leads Ati to another section of the shop, to a locked cabinet, making sure to notice the sweet baby sleeping in the carriage he’s pushing, and completely ignoring Tiare and her brand-new shoes. “A girl? A boy?” she asks, like she really cares.
“A boy.”
“Oh, he’s very handsome, how old is he?”
“Eight months.”
“Oh, he looks very alert.”
Sleeping babies don’t look alert, Pito thinks. They just look like sleeping babies!
But Ati, grinning with pride, confirms the saleswoman’s statement. Oui, his son is very alert for his age, even his doctor says so.
“And what would your budget be?” the saleswoman lowers her voice.
“How much for that one?” Ati has already made up his mind. His eyes are set on a black pearl necklace.
The saleswoman hurries to open the cabinet. She’d like Ati to feel the pearls first, their smoothness. “It’s like touching silk,” she smiles.
Ati does what he’s told with Pito looking on and feeling a twinge of envy. Ha, he would have loved to give his wife (who is his wife) a necklace like that to . . . to thank her for having given him three children. A smart daughter studying medicine in Paris, a son destined to be the greatest chef Tahiti has ever produced, and a son Pito used to adore.
Tamatoa is so . . . what would the correct word to use here be? Yes — irresponsible. For Tamatoa, life is about being a clown. For Pito, it’s about getting a job and fulfilling his duties as a father.
Now Ati would like to get a card because a pearl necklace by itself means nothing. He wants to write a few words of gratitude to Lily for the golden boy she gave him. Pito nods, thinking, Maybe today your son is a golden boy, but let’s see in twenty-three years. And speaking of which, here’s Tamatoa appearing out of nowhere.
“Where were you all?” he shouts, waving his arms in the air. “I’ve been looking for you all over the place!”
They sit on the bench and wait for Ati.
“Papi?” Tamatoa asks with a sweet voice. “Can I have some money for ice cream? For me and Tiare?”
Pito looks down at Tiare. “You want ice cream?”
Tiare nods, her eyes twinkling with delight, and so Pito gets his wallet out. “And I want the change, you hear?” he tells his son.
“You want an ice cream too, Papi?” Tamatoa asks.
Pito shakes his head non, he doesn’t want an ice cream, but it’s nice of Tamatoa to ask, even if he’s not paying, that’s thoughtful.
Minutes later, waiting for Ati, who can’t make up his mind about that card, Pito hears his granddaughter giggle and looks down to see what’s going on. Here she is, rubbing her chin on her vanilla ice cream like her father is doing so that she can have a beard too, and those two are showing off their beards to each other, laughing their heads off. Pito cracks up laughing too.
“Eh, Papi,” Tamatoa asks, “you got Mamie something? For Mother’s Day?”
“Your mother is not my mother,” Pito snaps, “she’s your mother. Are you getting your mother something?”
“Of course!” Seconds later, “Papi, can I have some money? I’m going to get Mamie a cadeau.”
Nodding in agreement, Pito gets his wallet out, and, pulling out the last banknote he has, says, “Spend the whole lot on your mother.”
“The whole five thousand francs?” Tamatoa asks, just to make sure.
“Buy something nice.”
“And my maman?” a small voice says. “She doesn’t have a cadeau.”
“Your maman,” Tamatoa snaps, but one look from his father and he understands that he better shut it about Miri. “Come with Papa,” he says, giving his hand to the little one, but the obedient granddaughter looks to her grandfather first to see if it’s fine. With a smile, Pito gives Tiare his permission.
Discipline 1, 2, 3
For Mother’s Day, Tamatoa composed a special dance show for his mother, which she absolutely loved. He also bought her (but there was no mention about his using his father’s money) a child’s jewelry box, with a ballerina who starts dancing every time you open the lid. It is the same jewelry box, so Materena swore, that she used to have as a child, but one of her mother’s lovers’ children stole it. That jewelry box truly overshadowed the Mother’s Day gifts Materena received from her other two children: a journal from Leilani and a bouquet of flowers from Moana.
But the real reason why Materena burst into tears when she unwrapped the newspapers from Tamatoa’s gift was that she had told Tamatoa about that box when he was eight years old and he remembered. “Aue!” she cried, when she saw the gift. “You haven’t forgotten!” Next minute Materena was sobbing over her precious jewelry box and going on about how she couldn’t believe that Tamatoa remembered the story. Meanwhile, Tamatoa was standing straight, and looking very proud of himself. “Everything you tell me, Mamie,” he said, glancing at his father with triumph, “stays in my head.”
Even Pito was moved. But looking at his son now, on the sofa (where else?), sucking on his near-empty bottle of beer, is making Pito want to shake him. Pito takes another sip of Hinano to relax and keeps his eyes fixed on the TV screen instead. If he were alone, he would be enjoying tonight’s movie about the kung fu master Bruce Lee, the man himself. But Pito’s heart is too much in turmoil, and so he gets up.
“Papi,” Tamatoa says. “Can you get me another beer?”
“Get your own putain beer.” This is Pito’s answer in his head. But out loud he just grunts as he goes into the kitchen. Come on, Pito, he tells himself, don’t be like that, he’s your son, he’s your flesh and bones, he’s your blood. He’s only just come home, and he makes his daughter laugh. It’s better than nothing. Stop comparing yourself to him. Sighing, Pito opens the fridge and cracks open a beer for his son.
“Here.”
“Merci, Papi.”
“Hum.” Pito goes back to the kitchen. He sits at the kitchen table, thinking maybe he should go and see his copains. He hasn’t seen them for a long time. Tonight could be the perfect opportunity to say, “Eh, copains! Long time no see, so what’s the news?” But Pito doesn’t trust Tamatoa to stay home and look after Tiare. One of his drinking friends might come to the house and invite Tamatoa out for a few drinks; or one of his dancing friends might call to go out dancing and Tamatoa will be up in a flash, leaving his daughter behind because he’s a coconut head, and then the house might catch on fire and then . . .
Eh, Pito is going to listen to Materena’s program for something to do. He’s listened to it a few times before and got quickly bored or annoyed, but perhaps there’s something interesting tonight.
“Listen, Materena,” a woman is saying, “I hope you don’t mind me digressing from the subject, but I’d like to make a few points.”
“That’s all right, go ahead,” comes Materena’s warm, lovely voice.
“What I’d like to say is that in the old days, the very old days, men were the providers. They hunted fish to feed their women and children. They hunted wild pigs, they climbed up coconut trees, it was the survival of the fittest. Then things started to change. The bomb made an apparition in French Polynesia, I’m talking about the nuclear
testing in Moruroa. Legionnaires came by the thousands, it meant more shops, more restaurants, more hotels, more jobs, and women got out of their houses to work.” The woman draws in a quick breath. “I’m not saying that this was bad, non, it’s very important for women to be financially independent, but men lost their place in the society. They were no longer the providers. They lost their power, they lost their voice, and that is why men are so hopeless today. These days men are most likely to be the ones who are unemployed, so the statistics say. They sit by the side of road drinking beer with their so-called friends and wait for jobs to fall out of the sky.”
The caller, whom Pito is finding very interesting, goes on about how these men are draining their family’s resources because, unlike in France, there’s no chomage in Tahiti. There’s no money coming from the government for food, but these men have still got to eat and who is going to feed them? Their woman, their mother, their father, their sisters . . . Well, says the caller, this must stop. “Our society is going backwards.”
Pito rubs his chin, thinking, Hmm, very interesting. What is the next caller going to say?
“Aue, too much blah-blah!” That’s what the next caller has to say. “Discipline is the key, 1, 2, 3! Let’s get our boys into sports, because sports are the best way to learn discipline, discipline is the key, 1, 2, 3!” She insists that she doesn’t just mean sports like soccer or boxing, but all kinds of activities, you could even include playing music or dancing as long as there’s some training or practicing involved. But on the other hand, she says, having a job is really how we can get our boys to move forward and be responsible. “When you don’t work for too long, you become a slob.”
Pito agrees with this one hundred percent. It happened to him. When you do nothing for too long, you wake up later and later in the morning, and everything, getting out of bed included, becomes a chore.
Ah oui, Pito remembers those distant days when he’d sleep until midday because he had nothing to get up for. He had just come home from military service in France, where everything was organized, scheduled here, scheduled there, the adjutant yelling his head off for no reason. Then Pito came home to a mother who was so relieved to see him alive and in good health that she spoiled him rotten, cooking him his favorite dishes and slipping coins into his hand for beer. Pito was basking in this special treatment.
But it wasn’t long until his mother started to get agitated. “Get a job,” she’d say. “Get out of bed. Do something with your life, I beg you, Pito.” But Pito was quite comfortable doing nothing. The more he slept, the more he felt like sleeping. He had zéro energy. Even taking the garbage out for his mother was too much effort. When he was awake, it was to drink, and when he wasn’t drinking, he wanted to sleep. In between playing with that girl from Faa’a, Materena Mahi.
But then Pito became a father and things changed like that, from one day to the next. One of his uncles came by and told him that he was now a man. “A boy doesn’t become a man when he’s circumcised,” the uncle said. “A boy becomes a man when he becomes a father.” The uncle ordered Pito to get out of bed, have a shower, and get dressed as if he were off to work. Pito’s mother hurried to iron her son’s wedding-and-funeral suit, but the uncle said that he meant working clothes — clothes you don’t mind getting dirty.
By the following day, thanks to that uncle’s connections, Pito had a job. He’s still in that same job today.
“I must get my boy a job!” says Pito to himself. These aren’t just words in the wind. This is a committed Pito speaking.
The following morning, a job falls from the sky, and right where Pito works! Heifara quit, he’s gone walkabout with his new woman and her three children, back to her island, Huahine. The colleagues are shocked, considering all the crying Heifara has been doing lately.
His ex-wife has been found to have a lover, but Heifara cared more about his wife making it hard for him to see his daughters. He couldn’t keep up with her rules. “You can have the children this weekend but only if you promise not to feed them junk . . . You can have the children this weekend but only if you promise to take them swimming . . . You can have the children only if you promise not to let them watch TV all day.” Et cetera et cetera, and now Heifara is going off to be a full-time father to another man’s children. What a shock!
Well, Pito admits that it is sad for Heifara’s daughters, but what’s more on Pito’s mind right now is that there’s a job here ready to be taken by the first person who asks. Pito wonders if he should go straight to the boss instead of talking to the boss’s secretary — there’s a saying, if you want to ask something, go straight to God, don’t bother going through the angels — but sometimes it’s okay to see the receptionist.
So here is Pito in the front office, a smile on his face, and feeling quite nervous.
“Oui, Pito,” Josephine, the receptionist, says, looking surprised to see him. Today isn’t payday.
Pito wishes he had spoken to Josephine a bit more over the years instead of just the usual hello–good-bye he does when picking up his pay. He wishes he had asked her a little bit about her family and everything; that way, Josephine would be like a friend today and Pito would feel a bit more comfortable with his request. He knows nothing about Josephine, except that she has a husband, a son, and an answering machine.
“Pito?” Josephine asks again. “What is it? I’ve got work to do.”
Pito can’t ask her about her family today, it’s too late, so he throws himself into the water. “Are you going to put Heifara’s job in the newspapers?”
“At this stage, it hasn’t been decided.”
“Ah.”
“Why?”
“It’s just that my eldest son is — ”
“Tamatoa?”
“You know my son?” Pito is pleasantly surprised.
“When Materena used to pick up your pay, we always talked about our children.” Then sighing, she adds, “I wish she was still picking up your pay, I miss Materena . . . Enfin, you want the job for your son?”
“Well, if — ”
Josephine doesn’t let Pito finish his sentence about if it’s all right with the company, if she wouldn’t mind, if it’s possible she could do something . . . She’s telling him that she’ll see what she can do. “He’s got a CV?” she asks.
“A what?”
“A curriculum vitae.” Josephine explains that it’s the done thing these days for potential employees to drop off a curriculum vitae. “It’s like a story about the jobs a person has had, his experiences, his strengths, his knowledge . . . it’s a new thing.”
Pito doesn’t know if his son has one of these but he’ll make sure that he gets one, and Tamatoa will drop it off at the office, let’s say tomorrow?
“Okay, but it must be typed. The boss doesn’t like handwritten CVs.”
“Typed? Like on a typing machine?” asks Pito, slightly dumbfounded.
“Oui,” Josephine nods.
Pito doesn’t know anyone who has a typing machine. “I can’t just bring my son in for him to talk to the boss and see how he is and everything and — ”
“The boss wants a CV, I’m sorry, Pito.” Josephine grabs files from her desk. She’s terminating the conversation. “You need something else?” Something else like an advance.
“Non, it’s okay. Maururu for your help.”
What help? Pito asks himself once outside the office. How is Tamatoa going to get a typed CV by tomorrow? And what the hell is his son going to put on his CV? What experiences? What knowledge? There will only be two lines. One line: military service. One line: dancing stupid disco moves in nightclubs in Paris. Who is going to hire someone like that?
Pito could ask his brother Frank. Frank has a lot of connections. But Pito isn’t really enchanted by the idea of his son mixing with Frank’s connections.
Aue . . . eh, maybe Materena should be the one using her connections, she knows more people than Pito does. Or perhaps Pito is going to ask his friend Ati for help. At
i knows a lot of people too.
There, it’s decided. Pito takes his place back behind the cutting machine. One thing is for sure — his son will be in a job by the end of the month. Spit, swear, thank you, Jesus Christ.
Pito steps off the truck at the petrol station after a hard day at work and gives a slow nod to one of his relatives-in-law walking by to the Chinese store, meaning, Iaorana, how are you? The woman gives him a frantic friendly wave and a smile. He shakes Mori’s hand on his way past the mango tree, has a few words about this, that, the weather, and then keeps on walking.
And there is his beautiful little princess, sitting outside the house on a mat, waiting for her grandfather to come home from work.
“Grandpère!” Tiare runs out to her grandfather with open arms.
“Eh, princess, e aha te huru?”
“Maitai.”
A big hug, a big squeeze, and Tiare hops on her grandfather’s back.
“Papa is at the house?” he asks.
“Oui.”
“He’s sleeping?”
“Aita.”
“What is he doing?”
“He’s with Grandmère.”
“What are they doing?”
“Parau-parau.”
“E aha te parau-parau?”
“I don’t know.”
Pito walks into the house and heads straight to the kitchen. Here’s Tamatoa and here’s Materena, both sitting at the kitchen table, with an unopened bottle of champagne and four glasses, one already filled with water.
“Ah, you’re here!” Materena exclaims, kissing her husband on the cheeks. “Our son has some wonderful news for us,” she says, with her see-I-told-you-not-to-stress-about-this voice.
“What’s the wonderful news?” Pito asks.
“First, let me pop the champagne,” Tamatoa says.
“Come on, then, pop your champagne” — that your mother paid for, Pito adds in his head.
Tiare in Bloom Page 16