The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  Mimi Theroux is extremely friendly and helpful, and we would like to show our gratitude by nominating her for a Mauruuru A ward. She works very hard and this is to show our appreciation.

  Seeing your own strange, hard-to-spell name correctly printed on the pages of a Tahitian newspaper can give you a powerful sense of belonging to the islands. And it is a belief in my family that every person with that surname is a relation – a descendant of Peter Theroux (1839-1915) of Yamaska, Quebec, who had nine prolific sons, Henri, Louis, Ovide, Leon, Dorel, Joseph, Peter, Alexandre, and my grandfather, Eugene. I immediately called the Hotel Bali Hai and asked to speak to my cousin.

  “Mimi Theroux doesn’t work here anymore,” the manager told me.

  He thought I might find her somewhere in Moorea, but he wasn’t sure. He promised to find her address for me.

  I planned to paddle around Moorea sometime soon, and I vowed that I would seek out Mademoiselle – or was it Madame? – Theroux, when I got to that island.

  Two things kept me in Tahiti for the moment – the arrangements I was making to go to the distant Marquesas on a freighter, and the prospect of watching the Bastille Day parade. I also wondered whether I ought to get a tattoo in this the homeland of tattoos – even the word was Polynesian (tatu means “puncture”). The idea of a tattoo on my ankle seemed an inoffensive way of satisfying my curiosity, but the sight of the only tattooist in Papeete, an excitable Belgian in a bloodstained room, made me change my mind.

  Papeete is rather an ugly, plundered-looking town. Its buildings are scruffy, and flimsy and ill-assorted, and they clutter the lower slopes of the extinct volcanoes, Aorai and Orohena, that rise six or seven thousand feet behind it. Tahiti’s road – there is only one narrow one, inevitably a speedway, that encircles the island – is quite famously bad and dangerous. To complete this unromantic picture, Tahiti I found to be one of the most expensive places I have ever visited – a pack of cigarettes is $5, a liter of petrol $4, the simplest cotton shirt $50, and a meal in a good restaurant almost prohibitive, but as there are few good restaurants this is academic; and yet if you decide to have a pizza instead you will be paying about twice what you would at the Pizza Hut in Boston. There is no income tax in French Polynesia, yet indirect taxation can be just as brutal. You may congratulate yourself that you don’t smoke or drink alcohol, yet even the most frugal vegetarian is in for a shock when he sees the Tahitian cabbages (grown in California) priced at $8 in Papeete’s central market.

  But for the Tahitians themselves the price of cabbage was academic. The islanders, who were always tidy and clean – impressively so, in a place where fresh water was scarce – managed to survive, and even to flourish, by cultivating small vegetable gardens and applying for welfare and using the extended family. They were a chunky breed, and I felt that there was perhaps something assertive in their obesity. They seemed to revel in being a different size and shape from their colonial masters or mistresses – apart from enthusiastic teenagers, who were imitative, there was almost no emulation among Tahitians of French physical types or styles – no joggers, no fashion casualties, no snobs or socialites. Few of them were even smokers.

  The Tahitian’s most obvious indulgence was a kind of relentless snacking – they were forever munching and manipulating Planter’s Cocktail Nuts, potato sticks, Porky Snaks (Pore Frites), Rashuns (frites au bacon), Kellogg’s Corn Pops, Figolu Fig Newtons, Champagne Crispy Sponge Fingers, Cadbury’s Crunchies, Pinkys, Moros and Double Fudge Chocolate Biscuits, Toscas, Millefeuilles and Tiki crousti-legers, and Cheez Balls at five bucks a five-ounce can. To pay for this they spent their welfare checks or else got jobs catering to the dwindling number of tourists, few of whom were big spenders. But even the poorest, scrounging Tahitian did not solicit tips and regarded tipping as one of the more insulting of foreign habits.

  Tahiti was typical of Oceania generally in the frugality of its long-term expatriates – it seemed through a kind of caution, not to say fear, that these people saved their money. Because people were so vulnerable, they made a point of not appearing to be well-off – it was altogether too easy for anyone to be burgled. There were retirees here, but they had gone to ground – they hid in bungalows deep in the valleys of Tahiti and Moorea. There were always yachties in Papeete harbor, but yacht people the world over are notoriously careful with their money – circumstances force them to be self-sufficient.

  Elsewhere on the island, the villages were fenced off and seemed contented, and the most conspicuous people in Papeete – apart from Japanese tourists and French soldiers – were the two sorts of folk who had been there since Bougainville described it as paradise: the adventurers and the missionaries; the drunks and the God-botherers. At any time of day in downtown Papeete it was possible to see a sanctimonious clergyman passing a bar where a wreckedlooking Frenchman was sitting glumly over a bottle of Hinano beer. It was still possible to go to pieces here, and any number of Frenchmen had married teenaged Tahitians, given them six kids, and turned them into twenty-year-old hags, thus keeping alive the South Sea Island myth.

  I had longed to be in Tahiti for Bastille Day and I made a point of lingering on the island to witness the parade. Rather disingenuously the French authorities on the island had converted Bastille Day into a gala they called Heiva Tahiti, the Tahiti Festival – they hadn’t the guts to come clean and celebrate their independence day in full view of people who had yet to gain their freedom. I expected it to be a wonderful example of colonial comedy and hypocrisy and it was, “Sponsored by Toyota.”

  To make matters even more puzzling, the posters announced in French The 109th Tahiti Annual July Festival, and to work this out you had to go to a history book and establish that it was in 1880 that Ariane (Pomare V), the son of the intransigent Queen Pomare (IV), was pressured by the French into abdicating and handed his entire administration over to France, who proclaimed the island a French colony. With an astounding insensitivity the French had conflated the dates, and the Tahitians were being persuaded to celebrate the anniversary of their subjection on the very day the French celebrated their own freedom.

  At eight o’clock on Bastille Day morning I joined the crowd of impassive Tahitians and frisky French people on the Boulevard Pomare, wondering what I would see, and fifteen minutes later I heard the first distant syncopation of the parade, a French army band playing the First World War song Aupres de ma blonde (il fait beau blah-blah …) – strange in almost any circumstances, but especially bizarre on an island of dusky dark-haired people.

  There followed a regiment of Marine Fusiliers carrying a French flag lettered Honneur et Patrie and about fifty men from the Special Forces holding hi-tech weapons. The “Regiment du Tonkin” band seemed harmless enough, but the oncoming ranks grew increasingly menacing – three units of legionnaires with fixed bayonets, and one with a French flag down the muzzle of his rifle; a black-beret regiment with fierce dogs in personnel carriers and more infantrymen, followed by men from the Foreign Legion, all of them bearded and wearing white leather aprons and white gauntlets, and each man shouldering – because this was the symbol of this unit of sappers – a wicked axe.

  The word Camarone was inscribed on the flag of these marching men, commemorating a battle in Mexico in 1863 in which a detachment of sixty-five legionnaires with their backs to the wall faced an army of 2,000 Mexicans and, refusing to surrender, were wiped out by the admiring yet remorseless enemy. This was the battle in which the famous Captain Danjou lost not only his life but his wooden hand (it was later retrieved and became a sort of Foreign Legion relic and talisman). “Life – not courage – abandoned these French soldiers,” was the official summing-up, and the event entered the language in the form of a colloquialism – “faire Camarone” means to fight to the end.

  I had the feeling that these parading regiments had been chosen for their ferocity. Anyone watching them pass by would think twice about mounting a revolt or starting an uprising, and so the Bastille Day parade, the so-called Festival
of Tahiti – this part of it, at least – was unambiguously intimidating to the Polynesians, who watched in complete silence, even when the wives and children of the French soldiers were applauding.

  The French Foreign Legionnaires are very thick on the ground in Polynesia. Their toughness and intransigence are needed in such a sensitive place, and the romantic pose suits their swashbuckling image. I was told that they often take Tahitian mistresses. Owing to an indifferent diet and their love of snacks and sweet drinks, Tahitians frequently have bad teeth. The legionnaires’ first – or perhaps second – demonstration of their love is to buy their Tahitian girlfriend a set of false teeth. You can often spot these spoken-for girls on the public trucks, sitting and smiling a lovely white smile.

  When the legionnaire goes back to France (and it might well be to revisit the wife and children he left behind) he takes his girlfriend’s teeth with him, so as to leave her less attractive to men.

  “Sometimes the girl does not want to give her teeth back,” a legionnaire told me in Papeete. “Then we turn her upside down and shake them out of her.”

  The second part of the parade was much friendlier and less deadly-looking. It began with fire trucks and local school bands, and continued with majorettes and kids in cowboy hats, and Miss Tahiti, who was carried in an outrigger canoe by six muscular men.

  “Smile, woman,” the islander in front of me called out in French to Miss Tahiti.

  Twenty-eight women in white muumuus, twelve in purple, a gang of drummers, dancers wearing feather headdresses and coconut-shell brassieres, trick cyclists, the fat and wicked-looking men on motorcycles flying a skulland-crossbones flag reading “Le Club Harley-Davidson du Tahiti,” and local kids doing handstands on skateboards – and now the Tahitians cheered, yelling from balconies and clinging to tree branches beside the boulevard, and I kept imagining a painting – full of Oceanic color and tropical light, and packed with chubby islanders and children and large laughing families, and severe and authoritarian-looking French soldiers, called “Bastille Day in Papeete,” illustrating the paradoxes of French colonialism.

  This happy back half of the parade put me in a better mood and I followed a sniggering group of Tahitians through the side-streets and into the fenced-in garden of the French High Commission, where a garden party was in progress under a huge Polynesian tree. Half of us had clearly crashed the party, and the rest – the VIPs, the beefy-faced faranis and colons in tight suits and the threadbare old soldiers wearing heroic clusters of medals and battle ribbons, and one conspicuously decorated with the Legion of Honor – were too drunk to notice us. “This France Libre was given to me by General de Gaulle,” one elderly man told me, and other old soldiers – some were African and some Vietnamese – had seen action in IndoChina in the 1950s. The Tahitians especially were having a grand time: they ignored the waitresses with drinks and made a beeline for the hors-d’ceuvres, which they managed with wonderful dexterity, scooping up three or four at a time, squeezing them between two fingers, and cramming them into their mouths.

  A French army band set up their music stands in the shade of the tree and perspired and played rousing songs, Sang et Or, and Tenth Festival, and Adios Amigos, and the stirring Marche des Mousquetaires Noirs, while the bandleader conducted them without a baton, using only his hands, the slapping gestures of a man making a sandcastle.

  For the people watching the parade or in this festival garden, Bastille Day in Tahiti was an excuse for a party, to play games at the funfair in the park, and buy balloons and amuse the kids. But walking back to the wharf along the rue du General de Gaulle I saw a wall urgently spraypainted with the word INDEPENDENCE.

  The next day I went to Moorea, in search of Mimi Theroux. The ferry left from a wharf on Papeete harbor – and as it entered the Sea of the Moon I looked back and saw the great greeny-black crags of Tahiti’s volcanoes. They weren’t rounded and plump and undulant, but like a starved sierra, like the corpses of mountains, with bony protruding ridges and hard sharp hips and shoulders, narrow valleys with hollow sides, knobs and angles on the escarpments and an intense steepness all over them, as though in their ancient years of vulcanism they had hurled out their life and left themselves exhausted.

  The peaks and slopes of Tahiti – and of volcanic islands all over Oceania – are so steep and dark and so thoroughly wicked-looking that the coasts by contrast are gentle, and their pale pretty lagoons seem unutterably sweet. There is always a scrap of mist around the peaks, and sometimes a great torn pillow of black cloud hovering. The vertical roughness is visible on these islands, but so is the mildness of their fringes. “Seen from the sea, the prospect is magnificent,” Melville wrote of this same view of Tahiti. His words are still true. “Such enchantment, too, breathes over the whole, that it seems a fairy world, all fresh and blooming from the hand of the Creator.”

  It cost seven dollars each way for the one-hour trip, and no charge for my collapsible boat. Most of the passengers were Polynesian, either full-blooded or else part-French, the people known locally as demi or afa. There were Chinese, too, and a smattering of faranis, the French who have attached themselves to the islands. The Polynesians were of two distinct physical types – either slender and nimble (the children and teenagers), or else (the overtwenties) fat and rather shapeless. Girls and boys were equally winsome, and men and women were precisely the same shape and almost indistinguishable.

  It ought to have been possible to paddle my own boat from Papeete to Moorea, but the wind discouraged me, a strong current ran between the islands, and apart from the ferry landing at Vaiare there was only one break in the reef, Avarapa Pass, on the northwest side of the island. The reefs of these islands were a great disincentive to any sort of casual boating, and as I intended to sail for the Marquesas within a week I could not mount the sort of expedition that had gotten me safely around the archipelago of Vava’u in Tonga. I planned to make camp on Moorea, to paddle within the reef, and to seek out Mimi Theroux.

  There is no town near the ferry landing, there is hardly a village, and after the trucks had taken the ferry passengers away Vaiare seemed deserted.

  “I’m looking for a place on the shore to camp,” I said to a Moorean at the roadside.

  “Not possible,” he said – and he was sympathetic.

  It was a Polynesian problem: all the land was spoken for. I did not argue. I rented a motorcycle and went in search of a hotel with a beach, but this was an easy matter. Moorea had many hotels, and business was so terrible I could take my pick. When I had settled this, I went back to the rental place for my boat. But I kept my motorcycle.

  I rode to the Hotel Bali Hai and found the manager, who seemed to be American. Yes, he said, Mimi Theroux had worked here not long ago, but she had left.

  “She lives with her mother at Paopao.” That was Cook’s Bay, not far off.

  “Is she married?”

  “I never saw any husband,” the man said, and he described her house so that I could find it.

  It was a white building, but it was not a house. Large and square, two storeys, with verandas above and a restaurant below, and with a flat roof, it had the geometric look of a commercial structure. But it was in good condition, freshly painted, gleaming in the sunshine, and facing directly onto the bay.

  I parked my motorcycle and walked around. A Tahitian was tinkering behind the building, but as it was high noon and very hot there were few other people in sight.

  “Mimi Theroux?” I asked the Tahitian.

  He pointed upstairs, to the porch where laundry was hung. I knocked on the door at the foot of the stairway, but there was no response. I knocked again, and excited a dog in the next yard. I called out, and a young woman appeared at the top of the stairs.

  This was Mimi. She was Chinese. I told her my name and she invited me up the stairs where, at the top, a small dark child was playing with an older girl.

  “This is Moea,” Mimi said, hoisting the smaller child.

  “Your daughter?” />
  “Soon she will be.” She spoke English with a slight American accent.

  We were walking through the cool interior of the upper floor where, at the far end on the front of the building, I could see the blaze of the sea and the glarey sky of Cook’s Bay – one of the most beautiful spots in the whole of Oceania, lovely, secluded, dramatic and rather empty. But this was French Polynesia. Because it was secluded it was neglected; the beach was no good, the shore was littered, and if you didn’t have a motorcycle how would you get there?

  It seemed to me that Mimi had a tincture of Polynesian blood. She said that this might have been so – she vaguely remembered seeing an elderly Tahitian relative, but she was not sure whether this was a blood relation. I rather liked her for not being sure and for not caring much about it.

  “I’m sorry to drop in on you like this,” I said.

  “It’s okay. Jim has spoken about you.”

  She explained that she was married to James Theroux, who was a distant cousin of mine and, as he had spent years sailing back and forth across the Pacific, from Samoa to Fiji and Tonga, to Port Vila and Australia, Jim was well known in Oceania. He was an expert surfer and experienced sailor and navigator. His name had been mentioned to me and sometimes, introducing myself to a yacht-owner, I was mistaken for him. People knew his boat in the way they knew my books: just names that had become familiar.

  “He is in Australia, at the moment, in the Whitsundays, taking charters,” Mimi said. “I saw him seven months ago. Maybe I will see him again in a few months. He is like you, always traveling.”

  “Does he look like me?” I asked.

  “No. He is more handsome,” Mimi said, and went to chase Moea, who was throwing toys at the wall.

  Mimi was relaxed, she seemed capable, she was slender and barefoot, wearing a pareu on her hips; a loyal and energetic Chinese who did not make a fuss about a seven-month separation. She was small, quick and attractive. After she told me a few details of her life I figured her age to be thirty-four.