The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest

by Graeme Lay

  I thought I was the only one to notice these performances until I met Mario and Gina, from Italy, who joined me on a trip around Huahine in Armand’s outrigger. They are honeymooners too. Mario is small and athletic; Gina is tall and powerfully built. He is a telecommunications technician and a soccer player; she is a physiotherapist and a top softballer. Gina, Amazonian in her bikini, swims a lot; Mario, swift and nimble, plays football on the beach with the Tahitian guys who work at the hotel. They all want Mario, whom they call Ronaldo, on their side.

  The difference between Lance and Carol and Mario and Gina is marked. The Italians are perfectly natural – they don’t act out honeymoon roles. But you can tell they are a well-matched pair who enjoy each other’s company. I suspect they’ve probably lived together for some time.

  Mario, Gina and I are sitting at the bar talking rugby – the presence of John Kirwan as coach of the Italian side, Kirwan’s Italian family and his team’s modest performance at the World Cup have popularised rugby in sports-crazed Italy – when Gina nudges Mario: ‘Look, therra she goes again …’

  It is Carol, striding through the hotel lounge bearing a tray holding two garish cocktails with straws sticking out of the tall glasses. Other heads turn at the sight of her long, slim legs, tiny shorts and golden hair. The eyes of three elderly Frenchmen sitting by the bar grow bulbous as they track her movements. Carol walks majestically across the bridge, then disappears into the bungalow.

  Gina laughs. ‘I theenk she does thees all day, working for heem.’

  ‘It’s what they call room service,’ I suggest. ‘Usually it’s the hotel staff who provide it, though.’

  ‘I wonder,’ muses Mario, ‘for how long she will do thees.’

  ‘Never once have I seen heem take her anytheeng,’ adds Gina. ‘I think he ees very … uh …’ She gropes for the right word.

  ‘Spoilt?’

  ‘Si, spoilt. He is very spoilt.’

  They go off to see the eels being fed and I go off to borrow a bike to ride around the island to Fare. Cycling is my favourite way to enjoy a tropical island. You go fast enough to cover the ground but slow enough to absorb the sights and scents. I pedal through Maeva village, past the store, church, volleyball court and newish museum – Huahine’s lagoon, Lac Fauna Nui, is an enormously important archaeological site – and along the narrow plain that lies at the foot of the pyramid-shaped mountain, Maua Tapu.

  The plain is a tangle of banana and coconut palms, bougainvillea, frangipani, breadfruit trees and a smothering creeper called pohue. Every few hundred metres there is a house set among the foliage, with an outrigger tied up on the shore of the lagoon. Interspersed with the rampant vegetation there are small plots of vanilla plants; roadside stalls sell packets of the fragrant orchid pod, along with mangoes, pineapples and bananas. It’s hot and there is a soft head wind, but the going is flat and easy. In forty minutes I’m in Fare.

  Both Captain Cook and Bligh of the Bounty knew Fare’s sheltered bay well. It afforded them deep anchorage, and its level, fertile hinterland provided much-needed food crops. But Cook’s relationship with Fare and Huahine was much more personal than Bligh’s. It seems that Cook came to regard Omai almost as a foster son. Returning from England with him in 1777, Cook left him here, in a substantial house filled with provisions, including arms and ammunition. Omai’s worldliness and European possessions, especially his firearms, made him a popular figure. He died of a fever several years after Cook’s departure.

  Today Fare is an attractive waterfront town with many trees in its main street and a long line of two-storey shops, cafes and pensions. There is a supermarket and a yacht club beside the marina, and children dive from the concrete wharf into the harbour’s deep, beautifully clear water. I park my bike against a tree and watch the activities. Trucks filled with plantation produce are backed up on the wharf and crowds of people of all ages are sitting about, leaning against their vehicles. Staring out to sea, I recognise the reason for the bustle and crowds. Out in the bay, heading for the passage, is a small orange cargo ship.

  The Taporo IV plies the waters between Tahiti, Raiatea, Bora Bora and Huahine, carrying cargo and deck passengers. I watch her swing with surprising speed against the wharf. Everything turns to organised chaos: mooring lines are tossed ashore and, even before they’re made secure, a gangway is down, passengers are descending and cranes are swinging into action. A cargo door crashes open, a ramp is hastily lowered, and a new model Renault drives down it and speeds away. A container is connected to cables and hauled on deck; jandal-wearing Tahitian passengers clutching bags and rolled-up sleeping mats climb aboard; and in only about twenty minutes Taporo IV is on her way again, bound for neighbouring Raiatea.

  Before the airlines came and runways were built beside the lagoons, all South Pacific travel must have been like this. Almost every year another island gets a much-needed runway and regular air connection with Tahiti. As I pick up my bike and ride away from the wharf, I can’t help feeling some regret that the days of scheduled inter-island passenger transport by sea are passing into history. It’s hard to get romantic over a squat inter-island plane called an ATR 42. Islands are meant to be approached by sea.

  My short flight to Raiatea leaves early next morning. Before dawn I sit in the hotel lobby waiting for my transfer to Huahine’s airport. There was a young, heavily pregnant Tahitian woman behind the desk in the lobby when I arrived, but she went outside a couple of minutes ago and now I’m sitting alone in the semi-darkness, staring at the high, woven pandanus ceiling, the shell chandelier and another mural of Omai.

  Suddenly a man bursts in through the entrance and looks about wildly. It is Lance. He is chainless, shoeless and wearing only red shorts,. He is unshaven and his hair is unbrushed. Seeing me, he demands, ‘You speak English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is there anyone official here?’

  ‘There was a woman here a minute ago, but she went outside.’

  At that moment, the woman reappears in the hotel entrance. Lance turns to her and asks urgently, ‘Have you got any medicine?’

  She points to a closed door. ‘Medicine in there. But it is locked. Not open till seven.’

  Lance simulates strangulation, clicks his tongue, stares about apoplectically, swallows to try and gain self-control. Then, inhaling deeply, he fixes the woman with his gaze and says, slowly but still breathlessly, ‘I need toilet paper, lots and lots of toilet paper. And I need water. Lots and lots of fresh water. Toilet paper and water, you understand?’

  The woman frowns, nods nervously. ‘In the toilet, there is paper.’ She points across the lobby to another door. ‘In there. I will get you water from the kitchen.’

  Lance nods. His tanned, usually handsome face is ashen, his hands are trembling. He sprints over to the toilet to gather up paper. The woman slips off in the direction of the hotel kitchen. Outside, in the growing light, the airport van draws up. I pick up my suitcase. Time to go.

  ELEVEN

  THE GRAVE OF GAUGUIN

  TAHITI – THE MARQUESAS

  THE NEWS WHIRLED through the Marquesan village of Atuona like a cyclone. Le peintre est mort: the painter is dead. The French artist, recently sentenced to imprisonment for libelling a local gendarme, had died in bed at his house, Maison du Jouir. Everyone knew how ill the fifty-five-year-old had been: half-blind, suffering from tertiary syphilis, his legs covered with suppurating ulcers, his mind addled with alcohol and the pain-killing drugs he injected himself with. But the news of his death from heart failure still shocked the villagers. And what now, his friends wondered, would become of the artist’s house, his paintings, books, erotic carvings and pornographic photographs?

  The date was 8 May 1903, and the painter, Paul Gauguin, would come to be recognised as one of the greatest artists the world has known.

  By dawn the following morning, in the steaming heat of Atuona, Gauguin’s body was already in an advanced state of decomposition. With what must have been considerable
relish, the Catholic bishop, who had been an implacable enemy of Gauguin’s, decided that the artist would be buried immediately at Calvary, the town’s Catholic cemetery. The interment proceeded. Months later, Gauguin’s goods were auctioned in Atuona. Among the bidders were the Catholic authorities and the town’s gendarmerie.

  Paul Gauguin had arrived in Atuona, on the island of Hiva Oa, in 1901, but his turbulent life in the South Pacific had begun a decade before. Rebellion and a love of exotica were in his blood. The child of a radically minded Parisian journalist father and a Peruvian Creole mother, the infant Gauguin was taken with his family to Peru after the unsuccessful 1848 Paris revolution. His father died before they arrived, leaving Aline, Gauguin’s mother, to raise her two children in Lima. After six years they returned to France, because of the family’s straitened financial circumstances. At the age of seventeen Gauguin went to sea as a merchant mariner, travelling the world for several years, stimulating his eclectic taste in art. Andean ceramics, Japanese prints, Javanese carvings, Egyptian frescos – his growing fascination with these exotic arts prefigured the characteristics that his own art would develop.

  At the age of twenty-five Gauguin married Mette Gad, a Danish woman. He worked successfully as a stockbroker, the couple had five children and the family lived comfortably for ten years. But gradually the impulse to create his own works of art grew stronger. Largely self-taught, Gauguin was at first influenced by the French Impressionists, especially Camille Pissarro. Increasingly restless, yearning for the simple life, Gauguin found it first among the Breton people. ‘I like Brittany,’ he wrote in 1888. ‘It is savage and primitive.’ He produced landscapes and ceramics, but the critics were unimpressed. One dismissed his work as ‘Synthetist’.

  By the late 1880s, Impressionism’s preoccupation with visual effects no longer satisfied Gauguin. Now he was driven to depict interior states rather than surface appearances. A visit to Panama and Martinique in 1887 furthered his enthusiasm for the tropics. The brightness of the sky, the darkness of the people, the lush colours of the flora captivated him. From now on only the truly exotic would liberate his artistic spirit. What he desired was remoteness, a life among a people whose primitive art had its origins in antiquity – and to do so it was necessary for him to turn his back on his family and France and seek artistic fulfilment somewhere far from European civilisation. It was a dream that many artists have had, before and since, but one that was to assume its most extravagant manifestation in the life and death of Paul Gauguin.

  As for a destination, there was no shortage of choice. In 1890 French imperialism was at its height, in West Africa, Madagascar, Indo-China and the South Pacific. The Society Islands, including Tahiti, had been ceded to France in 1880. Influenced by a book he had recently read, Gauguin rejected his initial choice, Madagascar, in favour of the fabled, beautiful island of Tahiti. The book was The Marriage of Loti, by popular French author Pierre Loti. Loti’s idealised story was based on his relationship with a fourteen-year-old Tahitian girl. Both theme and setting appealed to Gauguin. Tahiti’s laissez-faire morality evidently offered sexual as well as artistic possibilities for a man for whom the exotic and the erotic seemed synonymous. It is likely too that Gauguin was influenced in his choice of destination by photographs of Tahiti by Charles Spitz, who had visited the island in the 1880s and exhibited his work in Paris. At least two of Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings – ‘Pape Moe’ (Mysterious Water) and ‘Mere et Fille’ (Mother and Daughter) – derive unmistakably from Spitz photographs, but the paintings exude a much greater power. Poor Spitz. With a few brushstrokes, Gauguin eclipsed the photographer’s art.

  In 1891 Gauguin set sail for Tahiti, arriving in Papeete harbour on 8 June.

  Almost immediately, things threatened to fall apart. With his hair worn shoulder-length, like a French Buffalo Bill, and sporting a cowboy-style hat, Gauguin found himself the object of derision. The Tahitians taunted him with cries of ‘taata vahine’ – man-woman – and his compatriots were no better. Colonial Papeete was highly Frenchified, snobbish and racist. Gauguin had come right around the world only to find another version of what he had run from.

  He quickly fell out with the authorities. He openly took a young Tahitian mistress, and constantly criticised French rule. Also, he found that there was almost no indigenous art in Tahiti. Instead, the people expressed their cultural beliefs in song, dance, ceremony and sex, sometimes simultaneously. There was the type of art he admired in French Polynesia – marvellous carvings in wood and stone – but, as he was to learn, this lay in the Marquesas Islands, 1,400 kilometres away.

  To escape the constraints of Papeete, Gauguin moved to the far side of Tahiti, where he hoped he would become closer to the indigenous people. He did so, literally. While exploring the Faaone district he met a local family and, as part of Tahitian hospitality, was offered their thirteen-year-old daughter, Tehamana, for a common-law wife. He accepted the offer gratefully, and the couple settled at Mataiea, on Tahiti’s south coast.

  Tehamana subsequently became the subject of many of Gauguin’s paintings, an Eve-like figure whom he portrayed both clothed, in mission dress, and naked. At last Gauguin was realising his ambition. In flesh and spirit, he was now at one with the Tahitians, his fin de siècle yearning for the simple, natural life partly fulfilled, and he was creating paintings which embodied his beliefs. The paintings from this first Tahitian period are mostly of heavy-limbed, brooding Polynesian women, in settings incorporating mythological Eastern symbols. What strikes the eye is the vibrancy of the colours, the depth of melancholia in his subjects’ expressions, the languor of their poses and the presence of his enigmatic symbolism. For example, in ‘Arearea no Varua Ino’ (Words of the Devil, 1894), a large, dog-like creature skulks in the foreground before two seated, pensive Tahitian women. Does this canine creature symbolise the evil spirit? And if so, why? In the same painting, three small female figures in the background appear to be worshipping a stone god, striking poses similar to those in ancient Javanese temple carvings. And in the painting ‘Mana’o Tupapa’u’ (The Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892), a naked, prone young Tahitian woman is being observed on her bed by a sinister, hooded crone, probably symbolising a Polynesian death spirit. ‘One of those legendary demons and spectres,’ wrote Gauguin, ‘the tupapa’us that filled the sleepless nights of her people.’ The young woman is Tehamana, but what do the strange bursts of brilliant light in the background represent?

  In spite of his artistic output, Gauguin was unable to make ends meet, and in 1893 he decided to return to France to exhibit his Tahitian paintings. He expected they would fetch high prices, establish his artistic reputation and solve his financial problems. The return was disastrous. Of the forty-four paintings shown in Paris, only eleven sold, and there was cutting criticism of his work. Even his former mentor, Pissarro, was unimpressed. Of Gauguin’s paintings, he wrote, ‘He is always poaching on someone’s ground; now he is pillaging the savages of Oceania.’ There were other problems too. Gauguin’s marriage was in tatters. He took up with Annah, a Javanese girl he picked up on the streets of Paris, and took her to Concarneau. There he got into a fight over her and his ankle was broken. The break never healed properly and caused him great pain for the rest of his life.

  Rejected by the Paris art world, his personal life in chaos, there was only one place Gauguin could seek refuge. A small inheritance from an uncle and the sale of a few of his paintings provided him with some funds, and in July 1895 he sailed again for Tahiti. On the way he had an enforced ten-day stopover in Auckland because the ship he was to catch to Papeete had broken down. He stayed in the Albert Hotel in Queen Street, and visited the city’s Art Gallery and Museum, where for the first time he saw true Polynesian carving – work of the New Zealand Maori. Art historians see this exposure as having an influence on Gauguin’s later work, which includes traces of the Maori art he had observed.

  Gauguin’s second period in French Polynesia was marked by extreme physical and m
ental hardship. With his health deteriorating, and devastated by the news of the death of his only daughter, Aline, from pneumonia in 1898, he tried to kill himself by going into the mountains (where his corpse would be eaten by ants) and taking arsenic. The poison induced severe vomiting, and this saved his life.

  But the paintings were still coming, and he now had a dealer in Paris, Ambroise Vollard, to advance him money for his work. He was painting on coarse copra sacking, which gave added texture, and this second period in Tahiti saw the creation of his 1897–98 masterpiece, ‘D’où Venons-Nous, Que Sommes-Nous, Où Allons-Nous?’ (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?). The painting is an allegory, blending Polynesian female figures with Oriental symbols in a magical landscape. Gauguin himself wrote of it: ‘I have finished a philosophical work on a theme comparable to that of the gospel.’ Today beyond price, the painting hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

  Personally, however, Gauguin had reached the depths of despair on Tahiti, and his long-held yearning to escape to the Marquesas had become irresistible. In a letter to a friend in July 1901, he wrote: The ‘savage surroundings … will revive in me, before I die, a last spark of enthusiasm which will kindle my imagination and form the culminating point of my talent.’ Leaving his pregnant vahine, Pau’ura, behind in Punaauia, he set sail for Atuona, on the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa, arriving there on 16 September 1901.

  There is no place on Earth quite like the Marquesas Islands. Remote and wild, with mountains, plateaus, ravines and cataracts of dark grandeur and breathtaking beauty, the Marquesan landscape is so massive that it shrinks the human presence to Lilliputian size. Waves smash against cliffs and headlands, and torrential rains swell the rivers which pour down from the mountains, turning the sea the colour of onion soup.