The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  She had met Jim when she was twenty-one, at the girls’ college in Punaauia, on Tahiti. Her maiden name was Tshan-lo.

  “Jim said, ’Come with me,’ so I went. Yes, it was romantic,’’ Mimi said. “He had a boat. I had never been on a boat like that before. First we went to Pago, and I was sick, from the sea. Then we went to Fiji, Vava’u, Vila, Australia. We were in Vila for a couple of years, but when independence came there was trouble” – the Jimmy Stevens uprising – “and we left. In Vava’u the Tongans stole our laundry from the lines. But we liked it. Jim fished with the local people in the night.”

  “Do you still get seasick?”

  “No. Now I am a good sailor. I have done it for more than ten years,” Mimi said.

  Each phase of her life had been difficult, and she was one of those people who seemed to have been strengthened and made confident by the sudden changes. It seemed to me Chinese tenacity, but in this Polynesian setting – in the beauty of Paopao – it had no edge to it. She had traveled from Moorea to Tahiti; she had gone off and married this impulsive American; and they had sailed the seas together. In Australia, Jim sold his boat and then, hearing that Alan Bond’s twelve-meter yacht Southern Cross was for sale, they flew to Perth and bought it. It was a wonderful boat but it was empty. They rigged it and sailed it across the top of Australia, through the Torres Strait and past Cape York to Cairns. That took a year, because they had spent all their money buying and refitting the boat.

  “We stopped in many places – to work and make money. But they were interesting places,” Mimi said. “In Darwin we stopped for months. I worked as a waitress and Jim was a gardener. We didn’t mind. It was an adventure.”

  Moea was still running around the room with her little friend. The room was large and breezy, with a few pictures – Jim’s yacht was one – and some calendars and plain furniture. It was clean and more pleasant for being mostly bare.

  “Moea is very pretty,” I said.

  “Soon she will be a Theroux,” Mimi said.

  Seeing the impish face of this little islander and hearing my own name made me glad.

  “Her mother is a Marquesan,” Mimi said. “My sister knew her mother when she was pregnant, and she knew that I could not have a child myself and that I wanted to adopt one. The woman already had two children and no husband. You know how it is here. Anyway, as soon as she had the baby she gave it to me. She told me the father is French, but look at her – that baby is Marquesan – very black hair and dark eyes and skin.”

  Mimi turned to the child with admiration. Moea was a very sweet, very strong and upright two-year-old; and happy, her laughter ringing in the room, as she played.

  “The father went afterwards to the woman and asked, ’Where is the baby?’” Mimi went on. “But the woman said, ’You didn’t come the whole time I was pregnant. I gave the baby away.”

  “Where had the man been?”

  “The man just left her and ran after a young girl when the baby was in the stomach,” Mimi said. “That was two years ago. I have been happy. But now I am getting worried. In the past weeks the mother has been calling me. I know that if she sees Moea she will take her. She signed the document for adoption but it does not become final until two months more. I have to hide. The woman does not know where I am, but somehow she knows my telesrs phone number. I would never give Moea away. She was such a lot of work when she was small, but she is so intelligent and she understands everything I say.”

  We were seated at a table, looking past Paopao to the bay.

  “It is so lovely here,” I said.

  “It is a picture postcard view,” Mimi said. “You should have seen the sunset last night. The sky was all pink – no sun, just clouds and sky. I sat here and watched it with Moea.”

  I was touched by the thought that after seeing twelve and a half thousand sunsets in the Pacific she still marveled at one.

  Suddenly she said, “How did you find me?”

  “I asked at the Bali Hai. You know you were nominated for a Mauruuru Award?”

  “No,” she said without much interest. And then she called out to her mother. Was she conveying this news?

  Her elderly mother, Madame Madeleine Tshan-lo, was seated silently on the porch, looking off to sea. Mimi did not know the old woman’s age – she said it was impolite to ask. Madame Tshan-lo had had nine children, of whom Mimi was the youngest (“I am the runt”). All the rest were married – to French, American, Tahitian, Chinese – and they lived all over, in many countries.

  The old woman smiled at me and spoke in Cantonese to her daughter.

  “Give that man some food,” she said.

  Mimi went to the kitchen and brought me a plate of vegetable stew – carrots from New Zealand, potatoes from France, rice from China. You needed a garden in order to live, Mimi said. There was no work, she said, but many people got by on breadfruit and taro and mangoes. Talking about food, Mimi remarked on the high cost of living.

  “We have the most expensive electricity in the world,” she said. “Every month I can’t believe the bill. It costs me fifteen thousand francs a month, for just a TV, a freezer, a fridge and lights.”

  That was $160.

  “They want to give us income tax, but everything is taxed! That is why it costs so much to live here.”

  The reason there was no income tax was because people were taxed on the things they bought. Tax had been reduced on alcohol in order to encourage tourism, but that had not done the trick.

  “Three weeks ago there was a roadblock in Tahiti, because they raised the petrol ten cents and the diesel twenty cents.”

  This was a few days before I had arrived but people were still talking about it and marveling at the disruption it had caused. The roadblock of bulldozers and trucks had been put up just outside of Papeete, between the town and the airport, so that in order to get to the airport it was necessary to take a ninety-mile (117 kilometer) detour around the island. No one was arrested. There were negotiations, and at last the government reduced the price. What was clear in most people’s mind was that if it happened again, if the government passed an unpopular measure, roadblocks were the answer – though in the past (as recently as 1987) the government had used riot police against protesters.

  “What about the French?” I asked. “Do you think they’ll hang on here?”

  “Good question,” Mimi said. “Eventually we will be independent, I suppose.”

  I left Mimi, admiring her strength and her filial piety, and I mounted my motorcycle and went the rest of the way around the island. It was a stormy month – three or four times I was caught in a downpour, either in my boat or on the motorcycle – and so I was not sorry to be denied the chance to live in my tent. The raindrops pelted so hard they stung my skin. And after the rain there was always a lovely aroma of tiare and oleander, and enormous complete rainbows, every color in a whole archway.

  One day I paddled to Maatea. Melville had lived for a while here in 1842, and he mentions it a number of times in Omoo (“Fair dawned, over the hills of Martair, the jocund morning”). It had been a long trip for me, because I had stopped at a little island called Motu Ahi. And when I was caught in the rain on the way back I headed for the shelter of a little beach, where – sheltering with me under a tree – was a cyclist, Dominic Taemu, who was in his twenties and pedalling around the island.

  We talked about Bastille Day and the Heiva Tahiti. He laughed.

  “Bastille Day. That is a French festival. That is historical.

  It is not our day.”

  “Do you want Polynesia to be independent?”

  “How can we be independent? We have no resources,” he said. “The Japanese have taken all our big fish – they come in their big ships and use drift nets. We had lots of fish before, but now they are small and few. The coconuts and the copra are nothing. We have nothing.”

  “What about other work?”

  “There is no work, because there are too few tourists,” he said. And he thou
ght awhile. “We know other places are cheaper. For us this is a big problem. We don’t know what to do.”

  It was the fear of destitution; the fear of losing French protection and aid. But it was perhaps like a woman anxious about divorcing, fearing to be alone, without support – even though the husband is an opportunist and an exploiter.

  “Independence – yes, certain people want it. It might come. But what will we do then?” And it dramatized the paradox of French Polynesia that Taemu, a native of what has been called the most beautiful place on earth, then said, “We have no means to live.”

  19

  A Voyage to the Marquesas

  It was very hard for me to board a ship for the Marquesas Islands, where Paul Gauguin lay buried, and not squint at the passengers and recall the title of the painter’s enigmatic picture, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

  Perhaps it was premature to size them up, but I couldn’t help attempting to spot the smokers, the drinkers, the boasters, the fanatics, the Germans. This looked like a honeymoon couple and surely that one was an escapee and why was that skinny old man – Gandhi to his fingertips – wearing such a skimpy bathing-suit and nothing else? The two butch women looked rather fearsome in their iron pants and their tattoos. The mother and her middle-aged son seemed rather touching, sharing a cigarette by the rail. But those big beefy Australians with the flowers behind their ears were certainly a bit worrying. The more nervous among us reverted: it became an assertion of national characteristics, the French pushing, the Germans snatching, the Australians drinking, the Americans trying to make friends, the Venezuelan couple holding hands.

  How wrong I was about most of them. The “honeymoon couple” had been married for three years, the “escapee” was simply a dentist, “Gandhi” was an elderly fresh-air fiend, the butch women were mother and daughter, the “mother and son” were a married couple – Americans; and the fellows from Melbourne lovably challenged me with their tolerance. I would say something critical of a passenger and when I was through they’d disagree, saying, “We think she’s fabulous!”

  But that was later. In the meantime we were settling in for a longish voyage of eighteen days in the Marquesas. True, Herman Melville was in the islands for about ten days longer, but he wrote an entire book about it – his first, and by far his most successful, Typee.

  Named after a valley on the island of Nuku Hiva where Melville claimed to have lived (the exaggerated subtitle of the book is, “A Four Months’ Residence”), Typee appeared in 1846 and was an instant hit. It had everything – sex, nakedness, fresh fruit, warfare and cannibalism. It was the ultimate South Sea Island adventure and further confirmation that Polynesia was paradise. Melville, thinly disguised as the narrator Tommo, flees a brutal captain by jumping ship at the Marquesan island of Nuku Hiva. He first travels among the friendly Happar people, but soon finds himself among the cannibalistic Typees, and being pursued. The book combines anthropology, travel and adventure, and even today it is not merely enjoyable but informative. Melville practiced a little cannibalism himself in writing the book, by hacking out and serving raw and still bleeding many passages and incidents from other writers who had published eye-witness accounts of the Marquesas.

  The most compelling feature for most of its readers was that it was also a love story, Melville’s passion for the dusky, delectable Fayaway. The book was frankly physical, particularly in the unexpurgated first edition – scenes of Tommo swimming and frolicking with island girls, smoking and eating with Fayaway who sometimes wore a piece of bark cloth, but was usually clothed in the “garb of Eden” – starkers. The incident that whipped up the blood of most readers was the one in which Tommo takes Fayaway on an idyllic canoe trip across a lake in the Typee valley. Feeling impish, Fayaway stands erect in the canoe, unknots her tapa cloth robe and unfurls it until it fills with wind and becomes a sail. And there she stands, this “child of nature,” her naked body a “little mast,” and holding the sail with her arms upraised, making the canoe glide along, and “the long brown tresses of Fayaway streamed in the air.”

  I did not know much more about the Marquesas than this, and the fact that Gauguin had more or less chosen another island in the group, Hiva Oa, as a place to die.

  The Marquesas were far and few: way beyond the Tuamotu chain, three days’ sailing from Tahiti, a dozen high islands, six of them populated, and only 7,000 people on them altogether. These details don’t make a picture, but I heard better arguments for going there. With greater justification than Tahiti and Moorea, it was said, the Marquesas had the reputation for being the most beautiful islands on the face of the earth. Because of their steep cliffs and poor anchorages and few good harbors, only a handful of yachts called there. The islands were filled with the same so-called “tabu-groves” that Melville had described: they had never been excavated and so the islands were an archeological treasure house. Distant, and difficult to traverse, the Marquesas were seldom visited. That did it. The fact that few people go there is one of the most persuasive reasons for traveling to a place.

  The Aranui was one of several ships that made the interisland trip; there were two other cargo ships that carried some passengers, there was a luxury vessel, the Wind Song – very chic, very expensive, nice boutiques, no cargo. The Aranui had a hold full of cargo, forty-odd passengers amidships in cabins, and an indefinite number – it varied according to the run – sleeping on mats on the stern decks and sharing a rudimentary head. But nothing is cheap in French Polynesia – the fellows from Melbourne were paying almost $1,400 apiece to sleep on the bridge deck and although this included meals their nights were noisy with humming ventilators, winds in the ratlines, the sloshing sea – and one said to me, “Earplugs are a must.” I was paying about $2,000 to share a tiny cabin, near the plimsoll line, with Señor Pillitz, a young man from Argentina. On rougher days when the porthole was awash with the sudsy ocean it was like being in a laundromat.

  I had so little space in my cabin that I was told that I could not bring my collapsible boat, but it was emphasized that this was a handsome favor to me, because it removed a fatal temptation: if I tried to paddle anywhere around these islands, with their notoriously bad anchorages and rough seas, I would probably drown.

  The lights were twinkling on the slopes of Orohena as we left Papeete harbor and headed northeast through Matavai Bay. A few miles farther on, we rounded Point Venus. Captain Cook camped here in 1769 in order to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, and this was also the spot where Captain Bligh collected the breadfruit trees he stowed on the Bounty. As soon as we were at sea I went below and raided the ship’s library. By this time the South Equatorial Current rose against the hull of the Aranui, and the wind picked up, and my stomach rose and fell.

  The movement of the ship convinced me to eat sparingly, and after dinner I went back to the library and read An Angel at My Table, the second volume of the autobiography of the New Zealand novelist, Janet Frame. The central part of the book concerns her committal to an asylum, and I was held by her story, which was written entirely without bitterness or self-pity. As I read on about her suicide attempt, her treatment, her matter-of-fact madness – she uses the word “loony” to describe her condition – the ship pitched and rolled. Some other passengers discovered the seclusion of the library, and when one of them gulped, went glassy-eyed, and then noisily and messily puked onto the floor, I went on deck for air.

  We had sailed straight into a gale, and all night the ship rolled in a figure eight. In the morning there was a certain amount of hopeless hilarity.

  “Whoops! There we go again!” “I spilled my tea.”

  “I’ll be spilling more than that if this keeps up!”

  “That woman’s laugh is diabolical,” I muttered.

  “We think she’s fabulous!”

  Bad weather and heavy seas inspire facetiousness and intensify the confinement: passengers stay below and giggle insincerely. That day and most of the next, people kept sta
ggering and falling; and they talked disgustingly about being sick. Most wore – uselessly – seasickness bandages behind their ears. The folk wisdom is probably true: “The only cure for seasickness is to sit on the shady side of an old brick church in the country.”

  Señor Pillitz said that he had suffered badly in the night, that he had felt desperate, as they said in Argentina, “between the sword and the wall” (entre la espada y la pared). He was full of robust wisdom and pithy sayings. Later, at a dismal place in the Tuomotus, he glanced around and said, “All you would ever find here is three crazy cats” (tres gatos locos).

  I did not feel so wimpy when Señor Pillitz added that he had worked his way on a ship, chopping vegetables, from Buenos Aires to Rotterdam; so he knew a thing or two about sea conditions.

  During breakfast, dishes slid to the floor, bottles fell and smashed, Mr Werfel tripped and fell at the feet of Dennis and Bev, from Vancouver. Later in the morning, a man who had been full of complaints (“How do I get my faucet to work?” “Suppose I want to shut off my hot water?” “What’s the story with my fan?”) fell off his chair in the library and moaned. He lay on his side. He said he could not get up.

  “I musta cracked a rib or somesing.”

  He was Middle European, with American in his Teutonic accent.

  “Breathe deeply,” I suggested.

  He did so, and winced. “Does it hurt?”

  “Sorta.”

  It was my distinct impression that he was faking, and when people began to ignore him he crept to his feet and went away. He was happier after the captain gave him a tour of the britch and on most days he was the first to examine what he called the vezza shart to see whether we were in for another gale.

  That second day, as the sea moderated, a succession of green stripes appeared on the horizon. These were the outer islands of the Tuomotus, a chain of flat coral atolls of which Mururoa is one. Since 1966, the French have been using Mururoa as a testing site for their nuclear devices and they have just about succeeded in making that atoll unsafe for human habitation for generations to come. More than 160 nuclear devices have been detonated, atomic and hydrogen bombs as well as neutron bombs; and there have been atmospheric tests – fastening nuclear devices to French balloons and exploding them over the atolls. Recently the explosions – averaging eight a year – have taken place in the core of the coral reef, or underwater, and the more France has been criticized for the danger and contamination, the less willing the French government has been to allow any sort of inspection to take place. There have been leakages of plutonium and radioactive debris, notably in 1979 and 1981. But the French did not abandon testing at Mururoa when they saw how they had damaged the atoll; they simply detonated fewer bombs there and switched their heavy testing to the neighboring atoll of Fangataufa.