Breadfruit
Page 17
Coco has a code too. A few people have a code, like Lily and Georgette, but Rita’s mama and Rita’s boss, they don’t have a code.
Materena calls Rita using the code and Rita answers her telephone.
“’Allo, Materena.” Rita sounds a bit sad.
“Rita, is everything okay with you?” All kinds of ideas come into Materena’s mind. Rita’s got cancer. Rita lost her job.
“I’m not fine, Cousin. We bumped into Coco’s ex last week,” Rita says.
“Okay, Cousin.” Materena puts more coins in. “Tell me the story.”
Last week, Rita and Coco stopped in town to look for Coco’s mama’s birthday gift, and they were supposed to just go to the Chinese store for a little bit of shopping. Rita and Coco were walking hand in hand when a woman marching past called out, “Eh, Coco! It’s you?” And Coco exclaimed, “Eh, Sylvie! Are you fine?” And Rita got all tense because she knows about that Sylvie.
Sylvie opened her arms to Coco and gave him two big sloppy kisses on the cheeks. And to Rita she gave a cold “how are you,” all the while looking at Rita up and down. Rita was really annoyed that she was only wearing a pareu and an oversize T-shirt. She wished she was wearing her best clothes.
Rita gave Sylvie a cold “how are you” back and looked at her up and down too. She was really annoyed to see that Sylvie was wearing her best clothes and makeup, and nice shoes. That show-off bitch, she thought. If she was wearing an old pareu like me, she would have zoomed past—no stopping.
Sylvie was an ex-girlfriend of Coco, but not just any kind of ex-girlfriend. Coco and that woman had intended to get married, or so Coco’s mama told Rita one day.
Sylvie lived with Coco for six months, and, according to Coco’s mama, Coco and Sylvie were very good together. They never had arguments, they laughed, they joked around, and Coco’s mama was happy because Sylvie made her son happy. And, plus, Sylvie was a good girl.
Yes, there was talk about marriage at the church.
But one morning, Sylvie packed her bags and disappeared, no good-bye, no nothing. When Coco’s mama left the house to go to the Chinese store, Sylvie and Coco were talking in the living room, and by the time she came back, which was several hours later, as she bumped into three cousins on the way home, there was no more Sylvie.
Coco’s mama thought Sylvie had gone to visit her mama. And when Coco told her the news, it was a real disappointment for her.
She tried to get an explanation from Coco because, to her mind, people didn’t separate just like that. There had to be some fighting, some arguing, some tears, before the end. But every time she interrogated Coco, he would snap at her, “Ask me again and I swear I’m going to pack my bags too.”
Coco was devastated. He lost his appetite for two whole weeks. He watched the TV, and when the movie was funny he didn’t laugh, and when the movie was sad, he sobbed.
Now here was that Sylvie in the flesh, chatting with Coco while Rita stood still like a coconut tree, smiling and not smiling.
Sylvie briefed Coco about her life since their separation. She’d been a dancer touring the world, married a wealthy American, divorced the wealthy American, moved to France and lived there for two years, then decided to get back to the fenua for a little while before heading off to Honolulu.
Coco nodded and smiled, and Rita felt like smacking him for that nod, that smile, and these big eyes staring at Sylvie’s breasts, popping out of her décolleté.
Then Sylvie had to show off to Rita that she knew Coco very well.
“And you’re still sleeping on the left side of the bed?” “And you’re still trying to count the stars at night?” “You still like having your hair braided?” At each of Coco’s affirmative answers, Sylvie exclaimed, “You’re still sleeping on the left side of the bed!” “You’re still trying to count the stars at night!” “You still like having your hair braided!”
Rita’s ears were ringing and she clicked her tongue. And when Rita clicks her tongue, it means someone is getting on her system, and if that someone doesn’t disappear real soon, Rita is going to do something irrational. So Coco said, “All right, then, Sylvie. We’ve got to go now.”
Again Sylvie gave Coco two sloppy kisses and held on to him like he was her man, like the past was the present. She closed her eyes and dreamed, so Rita concluded, about the time when she was Coco’s woman. Then she hurried away and soon disappeared.
Of course Rita wasn’t in the mood to keep searching for Coco’s mama’s birthday gift (she wasn’t in the mood in the first place, but after Coco’s chitchat with Sylvie, she was even less in the mood). What Rita wanted to do was go home, shampoo her hair, massage her body with oil, and put on her best dress and a bit of rouge on her cheeks and lots of rouge on her lips.
Rita realizes that the past is the past and some part of the past is allowed to remain secret, but she really wanted to know why Sylvie left Coco. He mustn’t have done anything bad to her, because if he had, Sylvie would have walked straight past him, her head held up high like she’d never known him in her entire life. But she jumped on him, she looked at him with . . . with loving eyes.
Rita wanted to make inquiries about Coco’s separation from Sylvie. Why did Sylvie pack her bags? Why did she leave him?
But Rita waited for after dinner to dare inquire, because after dinner Coco is relaxed, he’s willing to answer any questions.
So right after dinner, as Coco was enjoying his vanilla ice cream, she inquired.
And Coco said, “We just left each other.”
And Rita wondered if there was any regret in Coco’s heart. She wanted to ask him, “And do you regret?” But it’s best to avoid asking such questions. Rita had to bite her tongue and concentrate on the ice cream on her plate.
That is the whole story, and now Rita is waiting for Materena to comment.
Materena is thinking.
She’s thinking about how Rita gets upset when Coco looks at another woman. Even when the woman is in a movie, Rita gets upset. She turns the TV off and tells Coco that the next time he wants to do the sexy loving, he can go to Hollywood and find that woman to take him to the seventh sky, because Rita sure isn’t going to be available. Coco can’t look at another woman in a magazine either.
So, Coco looking at an ex-girlfriend . . .
And Materena is thinking about her cousins Lily and Loma. When Lily broke up with her fireman boyfriend because she got bored with his body and his fits of jealousy, he went out with Loma. Well, every time Loma bumped into Lily, Loma would give Lily dirty looks or pretend she didn’t know her. But then the fireman broke up with Loma because she would only do the kissing and he was so on fire after all the things Lily used to do to him that he was desperate to do more than tender kissing.
And Loma is still giving Lily bad looks.
“Rita”—Materena is carefully weighing her words—“just you be thankful Sylvie isn’t a cousin and you don’t have to bump into her every time you go to the shop or to Mass.”
There’s a silence.
“Ah, true,” Rita finally agrees. “Coco’s with me and that’s all I need to know, eh, Cousin?”
“That’s all you need to know,” Materena confirms.
“Merci, Cousin,” Rita says, sounding close to tears. “You’re such a good friend, I feel so much better after talking to you.”
“It’s okay, Rita,” Materena says, “you make me feel better too when I’m down.”
After a few more words of friendship, the cousins bid each other good-bye, say see you soon, I love you, etc., etc.
And Materena, walking home, is feeling much better too. Well, it’s a beautiful morning, after all, a perfect day to take the kids to that beach that used to belong to the Mahi people, dig mussels (Materena loves mussels), and forget about the whole marriage nonsense. All of this is in the past.
Mussels
It’s twenty past one in the morning and Materena is sitting at the kitchen table.
She can’t sleep.
She could go scrub the bathroom for an hour, only she’s too tired to scrub but not tired enough to sleep a deep sleep—the kind of sleep when you think of nothing. Materena sighs a long, heavy sigh.
She’s worried. Today at eleven o’clock, she’s going to court, and God knows what can happen to you when you go to court. Eh, you can go to prison. Many of her cousins have been to court and proceeded straight into the gendarmes’ van. Direction—Nuutania Prison. Her cousin Mori, for instance, he borrowed a canoe, and the owner of the canoe sued him, and Mori spent two days in prison.
Materena is going to court because the gendarme caught her on private property.
Here’s the story.
Behind the airport there’s some land next to the sea. That land behind the airport used to belong to the Mahi tribe, but an ancestor exchanged it for a few quarts of red wine. The exchange was carried out under private seal, so nobody knows the name of the popa’a who got the land for cheap. It’s not for certain that he was a popa’a, but back then (when the Mahi people lost the land behind the airport) the popa’a people did a lot of exchanging with the Polynesian people—under private seal.
Materena loves that place behind the airport. She’s been there six times. There’s aito trees for shade, there’s white sand, and there’s the calm sea that is safe for the kids to swim in. Above all, there are lots of mussels, and Materena loves mussels. Mussels fried with garlic and onions or raw mussels with a squeeze of lime juice.
Whenever she feels like eating mussels, Materena packs bread, limes, cordial, cans of corned beef, a bucket, a can opener, and a knife and heads off with her kids to that special place. It takes them about twenty minutes to walk from the house. When they get to the landing strip, Materena makes sure the traffic light is green and there are no planes in the sky, then she gives the children the run signal. They always race across the landing strip. Materena stays behind the kids and yells, “Hurry, kids!”
As soon as they get to that place, the kids go for a swim (they’re not allowed to go past the rock where the warm, shallow water ends and turns into dark blue water) and Materena gets busy digging mussels. She sits in the knee-deep water and digs her fingers into the sand. She always gets a mussel, but she only takes enough to fill up the bucket.
And it happens that Materena feels the presence of the people who used to dig mussels there, the people way before her time—her ancestors and their friends. They’re sitting in a circle and they talk and they laugh, all the while digging mussels.
Since discovering it, Materena had hoped to be digging mussels at that special place for years to come.
But a gendarme paid her a visit in his police car.
Moana spotted the police car first. He hid behind his sister and shrieked, “Mamie, the gendarme!” And Leilani covered her flat chest with her hands, as she wasn’t wearing a T-shirt.
Materena stopped digging and hurried to the shore, where the gendarme was waiting for her.
“Iaorana.” Materena smiled at the gendarme.
The gendarme just looked at her.
“Bonjour, monsieur.” Materena thought that maybe the gendarme didn’t appreciate the other greeting.
Again, the gendarme just looked at her, so Materena looked at him. There and then she figured out that the gendarme was in a bad mood. His eyes were angry—maybe he’d had a fight with his woman.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, in a bad mood.
“My kids, they swim.” Materena showed the gendarme her kids. “And I look for a couple of mussels.”
The gendarme was more interested in what was inside the bucket Materena was still holding than in her kids’ swimming. “Are you aware this is private property?”
“Private property?” Materena asked, as if she didn’t know what the gendarme was going on about.
The gendarme took a black booklet out of his pocket.
“Name?” The gendarme clicked his black pen.
“Materena Loana Imelda Mahi.”
“Address?”
“Faa’a PK 5, behind the petrol station.”
The gendarme furiously wrote the information down. “Occupation?”
“I’m a professional cleaner.” Materena’s voice was louder.
The gendarme looked at Materena and wrote cleaner. “Marital status?”
Materena grimaced. Talk about digging the knife in the wound!
“Marital status?” The gendarme sounded impatient.
“Monsieur,” Materena replied, “I’m not married today because —”
The gendarme interrupted. “Either you’re married or you’re not. Marital status?”
“I’m not married.”
“Are you a single mother?” The gendarme glanced at the children, who were still in the water.
“Non!” Materena didn’t know why she had to shout. “Non,” she repeated, this time in a lower voice. “I’m still with the father of all my children.”
“So you’re in a de facto relationship,” the gendarme said.
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Couldn’t you just tell me this earlier?” The gendarme looked so annoyed. “I haven’t got all day to play guessing games.”
He scribbled the words de facto and then ordered Materena to vacate the property—immediately.
“And this is private property,” he said as he was leaving. “Do you know what private property means?”
Materena hesitated. “You can’t go on the property.”
“It is against the law to trespass on private property,” he said. “Just you remember this. Vacate the property immediately.”
He tipped his hat and left.
As soon as the gendarme’s blue car was out of sight, the children got out of the water and raced to their mother. Materena explained the sad situation to them and immediately began to pack.
“That gendarme!” Tamatoa shouted. “Who does he think he is! If Papi was here . . .”
“You don’t tell the gendarmes what to do,” Materena said. “They tell you what to do. If you tell them what to do, you get a court summons in return.” And very seriously, she added, “The gendarmes are the law.”
“But we weren’t doing anything against the law,” Leilani said. “The sea doesn’t belong to one person. It belongs to everybody.”
“God owns the sea.” Moana waved to the sea.
“We walked on the private property before we got to the sea,” Materena explained.
“But,” Leilani continued to argue, “when the gendarme came, we weren’t on the private property.”
Materena, already on edge, snapped. “Leilani, it’s not the moment to show off, okay? We’re going home.”
That evening Materena told Pito what had happened behind the airport.
“Why did you give your name to the gendarme?” Pito was angry. “You never give your name to the gendarmes. You make up a name. And why did you give your address?”
In Pito’s opinion, and he was speaking from personal experience, if you don’t give your name to the gendarme, the gendarme can’t do anything. He can try to find you, but nobody is going to give him information, because, Tahitians, they don’t talk to the gendarmes. They only talk to the mutoi.
“And what are you doing crossing the landing strip, anyway?”
“We only cross when the light is green,” Materena said.
“Eh, sometimes the traffic lights don’t work properly.”
Materena also told Loana what happened behind the airport.
“What are you doing digging mussels there?” Loana was angry too. “I told you the mussels there are poisoned, cursed, and no good to eat.”
Once Loana ate mussels from the airport and she nearly had to have an emergency operation.
“That gendarme,” Loana continued. “I�
��m sure his woman gave him trouble in the morning and he had to take out his bad mood on you. Eh, maybe his woman left him for a younger man—a Tahitian.”
Three days after the encounter with that bad-mood gendarme, Materena received a court summons.
She showed it to Pito.
“Ah, it’s nothing,” he said.
But Materena was in shock. “I can go to prison for this?”
“Nobody goes to prison over a bucket of mussels.” Pito laughed and carried on reading his Akim comic.
Materena showed the court summons to Loana.
“Don’t you worry about it, girl,” she said.
“I can go to prison for this?”
“Let them try a little. They don’t know my name. We’re going to see Maeva and she’s going to fix the situation pronto.”
Maeva was definitely the woman to see—she knew about the law. Maeva is a distant cousin of Loana, from her mother’s side. Maeva is a secretary of the boss of this big company, but she should have been a lawyer. She took the government to court a few months ago over Crown land in Rangiroa and she won the case. The story was in the newspaper. There was a picture of Maeva, barefoot and carrying her pandanus bag, on the front page with the thirty witnesses she got to speak at the tribunal of Rangiroa. One by one, these witnesses told the judge—who had flown from Tahiti for the case—a story about their land.
Loana and Materena went to see Maeva at her office. Maeva listened to the story as she typed a letter. She was very busy that day. “This is what I think,” she said, typing her fast typing still. “There was a private-property sign and Materena ignored it.”
Loana was about to explain that Materena ignored the private-property sign because the land used to belong to the Mahi family but an ancestor sold it for a few quarts of red wine, but Maeva held up her hand—meaning, I haven’t finished.