The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest

by Graeme Lay

  Atuona lies at the head of the Bay of Traitors, overlooked by a towering mountain, Temetiu, which rises abruptly from the coast. A sultry, sweltering place, Atuona is dank with humidity and the rich smell of tropical vegetation. Here Gauguin bought a block of land from the Catholic bishop and arranged for a house to be built on it. However, he quickly realised that Atuona provided no real escape from civilisation. If anything, colonial conflicts were concentrated even more fiercely in this isolated enclave of French rule, where the gendarmerie was corrupt and the Catholic authorities repressed the indigenous people. Hypocrisy was rife, with the local priest openly having an affair with two sisters.

  Inevitably, Gauguin incurred the wrath of the authorities. He took a local girl as a lover, and provocatively named the house he built Maison du Jouir – the House of (Sexual) Pleasure. In it he placed one of his wooden sculptures, Father Lechery, which depicted the local priest as a giant phallus. He produced a subversive broadsheet, entitled Le Sourire (The Smile), and illustrated it with his engravings. He also encouraged the Marquesans to withdraw their children from French-run boarding-schools and to refuse to pay taxes.

  Meanwhile, his artistic energy remained undiminished. The best-known work of this last period is his haunting ‘Riders on the Beach’ (1902), a depiction of Marquesans on horseback at the beach at Atuona, a place which provided a forum for the airing of grievances, away from the prying eyes and ears of the town’s French authorities. Not long after this painting was finished, Gauguin’s final physical decline began, culminating in his wretched death.

  Today in Atuona there is a bank, a post office, an Air Tahiti office, a few pensions, snack bars and Chinese-run stores. In the sticky heat, the Tricoleur hangs limply above the gendarmerie. There is still a Catholic mission and a boarding-school.

  The day after I arrive, I climb a path at the eastern end of the town that leads to Calvary cemetery. Here, under a frangipani tree, lies Paul Gauguin’s grave, made of pitted red volcanic rock and scattered with soft white blossoms. A fellow tenant of the graveyard is Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel, who also went to Hiva Oa to seek inspiration and died there in 1978.

  A granite plaque has recently been installed on the Gauguin grave to mark the centenary of the painter’s death. At the same time Atuona held a three-day celebration of his life and works. A graveside ceremony was led by two of his grandchildren, Marcel Tai Gauguin of Tahiti, who designed the plaque for the grave, and Maria Gauguin of Denmark, the daughter of one of the painter’s sons from his European family. The ceremony was followed by the opening of the Paul Gauguin Cultural Centre, built on the land bought by the artist in 1901. The centre includes an artist’s residency and studio, and a reconstruction of Maison du Jouir, whose upper floor is to be used as an exhibition room to display works by local and visiting artists. Next door is the excavated well which Gauguin used, at the bottom of which important artefacts, including many hypodermic needles from his self-medication, were found.

  One morning in Atuona I witness a contemporary example of what must have incensed Gauguin. A line of blue-uniformed teenage girls from the town’s Catholic boarding-school is returning from an outing. Open-faced and beautiful, they chatter happily as they amble down the main street. But at the main intersection of the town stands a stooped, elderly nun, whey-faced and wimpled. Reproaching them loudly in French, she shrieks at them to hurry. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

  In Tahiti I drive to a well-kept house up a side street in Faa’a, a suburb of Papeete. A slim man with coal-black hair greets me. This is Marcel Tai Gauguin, one of ten children fathered by Emile Gauguin, the son of Paul Gauguin by Pau’ura, the woman who is depicted in one of his most moving paintings, ‘Te Tamari No Atua’ (Nativity).

  Marcel takes me into a large room alongside his house. There, on all four walls, are scores of ‘Gauguin’ paintings from his Breton through to his Marquesan period – all produced by an Italian, Claude Farina, and his Czech wife, Vierka, who have devoted their lives to copying Gauguins. (Tahitian art experts are divided on the worth of the Farina reproductions. One told me vehemently how much he despised them; another said they’re useful simply because they demonstrate that only a true genius could have created the originals.) Marcel stands beside a painting of a recumbent Tahitian woman with a Christ-like child by her bed. ‘Te Tamari No Atua’.

  I point at the woman. ‘Votre grand-mère? La femme de Gauguin?’

  Marcel nods proudly, showing no bitterness towards the painter who had abandoned her. ‘Oui, Pau’ura. Ma grandmère.’

  Marcel then tells me the story of his father, Emile, who was born after Gauguin left for Atuona. An American woman, convinced that artistic genius must be hereditary, took Emile to Chicago and paid for him to go to art school there. When, after three years, he had produced nothing out of the ordinary, he returned to Tahiti, where he became a well-known figure on the Papeete waterfront, weaving beautiful fish-traps out of bamboo. Emile had many children by his Raiatean wife, among them Marcel, and lived to be over eighty.

  Marcel also tells me that he recently had a vision on the beach at Mataiea, where Gauguin lived. It was of something that would come to pass some time after the centenary of his grandfather’s death. Marcel will not divulge the details, but he says that he is now the same age as his grandfather was when he died.

  ‘Did the vision suggest that you would begin to paint after the centenary had passed?’ I ask.

  Marcel only smiles enigmatically. He also tells me that when, in 1901, Paul Gauguin was living with Pau’ura in Punaauia, on Tahiti, and suffering great pain from his various afflictions, he was told by a local shaman that the cause of the physical agony was his depiction of traditional Tahitian images in wood. A European should not have done this, the shaman concluded, and the gods were exacting their revenge. Desperate by now, the artist collected up all his carvings, took them down to the shore at Punaauia and threw them into the lagoon. In this way many of Gauguin’s most accomplished works – he was a brilliant carver – were lost forever.

  Paul Gauguin may have been dead for a century, his paintings dispersed to galleries in Paris, Moscow, Boston and Chicago, but he is far from forgotten in French Polynesia. Tahitians regard him with affection. ‘He was a good guy, he fought for us,’ one tells me. He has many descendants living in Papeete and Atuona. At Papeari, alongside one of the loveliest stretches of coastline on Tahiti, is the Gauguin Museum, with exhibits chronicling the artist’s life and work, and in Papeete there is the Lycée Paul Gauguin, Tahiti’s oldest secondary school. Reproductions of Gauguin’s images are everywhere, on souvenir place-mats, trays and chocolate-box lids, while the 360-passenger luxury cruise ship MV Paul Gauguin plies the waters of the Society Islands and makes an annual voyage to Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. The painter’s Polynesian images can also be seen in Papeete every day, especially in the broad faces of the Tahitian women who tend their produce stalls in the market.

  In recent years Gauguin the man has suffered at the hands of ideologically driven critics. It has become de rigueur to condemn his life in Polynesia. These detractors claim that the artist was a colonist, a cultural tourist, a drunkard, a mysogynist and a paedophile. Such retrospective judgements seem pointless. Gauguin certainly behaved badly, but the entire colonial history of the South Pacific is of European men behaving badly. And in this case, had it been otherwise, the world would have been denied Paul Gauguin’s marvellous art.

  And the Tahitians have forgiven him. In another commemoration of the centenary of his death, the Museum of Tahiti and Her Islands, a few kilometres west of Papeete, exhibited the largest collection of Gauguin originals ever shown in French Polynesia, on loan from Paris’s Musée D’Orsay. Ia Orana Gauguin featured five major paintings and the famous ceramic sculpture ‘Oviri’ (Wild), along with engravings, watercolours and drawings. These works – flown out from Paris on four separate flights – were insured at a cost of US$300 million, and a special secure wing built at the museum to
accommodate them. There were more visitors to the museum in that two-month period than there usually are in an entire year.

  As for Gauguin’s revolutionary use of colour, it remains a truism that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A French-Tahitian friend told me the story of her grandmother, who lives in Papeete. Cleaning out her storeroom recently, the grandmother made a bonfire of the rubbish she had accumulated there and burnt it enthusiastically in the backyard. Seeing the big pile of ashes, my friend asked her, ‘What have you been burning?’

  ‘Oh, sacks, papers, old clothes. A few old paintings.’

  ‘Paintings? What were the paintings?’

  ‘Of animals mostly. Dogs, horses. I think my father was given them. Many years ago.’

  ‘Who painted them, Mama?’

  ‘There was a name on them.’ The old lady screwed up her eyes. ‘The name was … Gauguin. Somebody Gauguin.’

  ‘You burnt some Gauguin paintings?’

  The old lady was unmoved. ‘Yes. They were foolish paintings.’ She shrugged. ‘Is a horse blue? Is a dog orange?’

  TWELVE

  FRENCH LESSONS

  TAHITI ITI

  TAHITI, OFTEN ASSUMED to be one island, is in fact two. Only an hour’s drive, but an entire world away from the sophisticated resort hotels and boutiques of Papeete, is Tahiti Nui’s smaller Siamese twin, Tahiti Iti. The two are joined at the waist by a causeway, over which the town of Taravao has been built. Tahiti Iti – Little Tahiti – is relatively undiscovered. It has no resorts, its inhabitants are mainly Tahitian rather than French or mixed race, and there is no road which completely encircles the island.

  Some years ago I drove around Tahiti Iti as far as Teahupoo on the southern coast. There the road stopped and a track began. Ever since, I had been nagged by an urge to follow that track, to see if it was possible to hike around the roadless coast. Yes, it was possible, I was informed, but it was tough going and a guide was essential. Inquiries were made, arrangements followed.

  ‘M’sieur Graeme?’

  ‘Oui?’

  ‘Je m’appelle Zena. Je suis votre guide.’

  The man’s appearance startles me. We are on the deck of the Fare Nana’o, a wonderfully eccentric hotel near the Taravao causeway and the starting point for Tahiti Iti hikes. But my guide is not Tahitian, nor French, nor a mixture of both. He’s African, small and slender, with perfectly even, very white teeth and a beard like a bird’s nest.

  Zena Angelien is an orphan of empire. Born in Madagascar fifty-five years ago, he was drafted into the French army in his teens and sent to Tahiti in the service of the mother country. After seventeen years as a gym instructor at a big army base at Taravao, he left the military, settled on Tahiti Iti and became an expert on the wild side of his adopted island. Zena is accompanied by his dog, a large, ginger, shaggy mongrel called Marcel. Not a dog lover, I eye Marcel warily, but after a couple of sniffs I’m accepted.

  Half an hour later, a utility truck calls at Fare Nana’o and collects me, Zena, the dog and the third member of our party, a sixtyish Frenchman called Emile. We’re driven along Tahiti Iti’s southern coast, through sleepy villages and plantations, and past beaches where Tahitian children frolic in the shallows and French women baste their breasts in the tropical sun. The coastal plain is narrow, crowded with palms, mango and breadfruit trees, and backed by towering mountains. Far out to the right, across the wide lagoon, surfers flash in and out of the reef waves – Tahiti Iti’s reef break at Teahupoo is French Polynesia’s most famous, and one of the locations for the annual world series surfing competition. Its great waves and tubes – on some occasions bigger even than those off Oahu, in Hawaii – have challenged some of the best board-riders in the world.

  Near where the road becomes a track there is a little harbour with an outrigger canoe moored beside a pebbly beach. As we load our packs into the pirogue, I pick up Zena’s. Or try to. It’s army issue, about a metre high, crammed full, and so heavy I can barely move it. It must weigh about forty kilos. Zena sees me struggling, smiles, comes over and hefts the pack into the boat as if it’s a bag of baguettes. Marcel leaps into the bow, then we’re off.

  The outboard-powered outrigger canoe skims over the silky lagoon water, giving us fine views of Tahiti Iti’s mountainous interior. The scale of the broken, bush-clad monoliths is astonishing. Sheer-sided, split into massive ravines, they taper skyward to needle peaks, and are covered in fine mist.

  The pirogue rounds a promontory and we pull in alongside a small concrete jetty. The Tahitian boatman lets us off with our gear, then motors off: ‘Au revoir, messieurs. Sunday, three o’clock!’ It’s now midday Friday.

  For the French – even French hikers – eating is a sacred activity. The first thing Emile and Zena do is have lunch: bread, cheese, tinned meat, bananas, and red wine from a five-litre cardboard cask. I’ve sworn off wine during the day, but my two companions have lots, swigging it down from plastic cups. And as Emile drinks, he becomes voluble and intermittently breaks into song.

  The Frenchman has a head which seems several sizes too large for his body, a deeply creased face, curly greying hair and a matching moustache, a spigot nose and prominent ears. But although his face is sixty-two, his body is twenty-five – lean, muscular, sinewy and tanned. He attributes this to swimming, kayaking and a vigorous love life. Married and divorced three times, he speaks good English, but frowns when he hears my French.

  ‘We will teach you to speak good French,’ he growls, making it sound like a threat. Zena smiles benignly and nods. He speaks no English, and his French is so soft and rapid that it’s hard for me to understand. But his actions are eloquent. Superbly organised – presumably as a consequence of his army training – he is also imperturbable, and immensely strong for one so slender. In his pack he carries food, drink and cooking equipment for three men for three days. By contrast, I am woefully under-prepared. I have boots, but only one small pack, no cooking equipment and no wet-weather gear except a plastic jacket and an umbrella. I put in a sleeping bag only as an afterthought. My umbrella provokes extreme derision from Emile: ‘Regardez, Zena. Il a un parapluie!’ Well, why not? I ask him. ‘It rains a lot in the tropics, n’est pas?’ Already he’s getting on my nerves, this overly energetic Frenchman, and I’m tempted to shove my parapluie down his throat. Instead, I pick up my primary school-size pack and the umbrella, and indicate that I’m ready to go.

  The walk begins, with Emile leading, me in the middle, Zena at the rear and Marcel roaming all over the place. The track follows the coast closely, at first through groves of coconut palms and breadfruit trees, then, after the plain tapers away, around steep hills covered in vines and the tangled roots of rain-forest trees. The weather is fine now, but recent heavy rain has left the ground sodden and muddy underfoot. We make our way slowly along the puggy track, with the sea still visible below to our right. Emile loves singing English nursery rhymes, and the strains of ‘Three Blind Mice’ – an insensitive choice in the circumstances – ring through the forest. La boue – the mud – and the steeply sloping, rocky ground make the going heavy and slow.

  Emile has his first fall about half an hour after lunch. In view of the amount of wine he’s had, it’s unsurprising. He goes over in slow motion, the weight of his pack tipping him sideways before he lands heavily on a rock. I go to assist but he’s already on his feet again, waving me away. Only his Gallic pride seems wounded. (He slips and falls many times over the next three days, and I quite like it when he does, not least because it stops him singing nursery rhymes for a while.)

  As the track rises across an escarpment, the forest becomes denser. The roots of the huge trees present both an obstacle and a hand-hold. Their fallen leaves – yellow and wet like outsized, soggy cornflakes – sometimes act as matting and sometimes slide away treacherously under our feet. Glossy skinks dart from the track at our approach, but there is no sign of bird life.

  Crossing the many streams that tumble down from the mountains makes d
ifferent demands. The black rocks are round, mossy and terribly slippery, while the stream banks rise so steeply that the going is strictly hand over hand. Slip-sliding away, we cross the streams, scale their banks and make our way slowly up and through the forest. Through the trees to our right, far below, is the sea, pale blue and translucent, its floor embroidered with pink coral formations.

  Three hours, one more stream and slope later, the ground levels out. ‘Our camp,’ declares Emile. It’s an area of bare brown earth, littered with leaves, interlaced with thick tree roots and overhung with the canopy of enormous buttressed trees. Zena unpacks and erects our ‘tent’, a blue plastic tarpaulin slung over a rope between two trees, but there is no groundsheet. From this primitive encampment it’s a quick, muddy slide down a steep bank to a coral sand cove, backed by lava cliffs and fronted by rock pools and the reef.

  Club Med it isn’t, but as the sun begins to sink in the sky Zena dismembers a supermarket duck with a small cleaver, and over an open fire in the clearing cooks a deliciously spicy meal of what he calls ‘canard Madagascar’, which the three of us eat by firelight, with red wine. We toss the bones to Marcel, who crunches them up and swallows them effortlessly. Emile is turning out to be lively, if opinionated, company, with original views on a variety of subjects and an impressive record of doomed relationships, which he recounts frankly but without apparent rancour. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘I think, underneath, all women are the same. Crazy. Now I get most pleasure from riding my bike.’ Zena makes no mention of wife or family, although he tells me he is building himself a house – ‘une grande maison’ – just out of Taravao. He makes a lot of jokes in French, most of which I cannot understand, and laughs at everything Emile says. A gentle, strong, amiable man, Zena would make a very good comrade in a war, it occurs to me.