The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “I am an American. And you?”

  “I am a Marquesan.”

  Dolphins riding our bow wave preceded us the next day as we plowed into Traitors Bay, to enter Atuona Harbor, on Hiva Oa. Tahuata was clearly visible beyond the bay, in a nameless channel, and to the southeast was the tiny Marquesan island of Mohotani.

  An old red Citroen was swung out of the hold of the Aranui and driven away. Then the crates were unloaded – sacks of farina, cases of beer, gasoline, building blocks, snack food. A Hiva Oa nun picked up a parcel that had been shipped to her and then drove off in her Toyota.

  Three Mormons, two of them islanders, watched the unloading, and surveyed the disembarking passengers as though looking for possible candidates for conversion.

  I asked them whether they had saved any souls.

  “In a year and a half I have not converted too many people,” Elder Wright (from Seattle) said. “Two families. But we also help in other ways. We teach games. We play basketball.’’

  “I saw you talking to those Mormons,” Ross said, sidling up to me as I was walking into town. “They’re supposed to be so holy, but some of them are unbelievable root rats.”

  “Do you have any scars to prove it?”

  “Isn’t he fabulous!” Ross called out, but he was soon confiding his proof. “A couple of Mormon chaps came to the door of a gay friend of mine in Melbourne. They had some cold drinks – non-alcoholic – and about ten minutes later they were all in bed together!”

  Hiva Oa was Gauguin’s last island.

  Gauguin is often represented as a bourgeois stockbroker who suddenly upped and left, abandoning his job and his wife and five children and recklessly fleeing to Tahiti, where his artistic genius flowered. But he had always been reckless, and he began painting only a few years after his marriage. And he knew something of the wide world: he had spent part of his childhood in Peru (his mother was half Peruvian Creole); he had gone to sea at the age of seventeen and sailed as an ordinary seaman for six years. His marriage was unhappy, and it was not he who quit the stock market but rather the other way around, for when it went bust he began painting full-time – there was a stock market crash in 1883. By then he was already accepted as an Impressionist.

  Rejecting Europe, he tried Martinique, in the West Indies, and when that didn’t work for him he went to Tahiti, thinking it to be Cytherean. It was the opposite: Papeete was bourgeois and westernized, full of puzzling colonial snobberies and irritating bureaucrats, sanctimonious missionaries and corrupt townies; and people were generally as unsympathetic towards him there as anyone might have been, seeing a long-haired Impressionist, in metropolitan France. His hair was long – shoulder length – and he wore a velvet cowboy hat. They loathed him for his repulsive manners and his mode of dress. The Tahitians were more tolerant but still they called him taata-vahine, “man-woman,” because of his hair. He moved to a seaside village, painted madly and wrote letters home grumbling about the colonials and about life in general. After two years he packed his things and went back to Paris, where the exhibition of his paintings was a critical and financial disaster.

  In Noa-Noa, he celebrates island life and the beauty of the people, but Noa-Noa was written by a man who was eager to convince himself, and others, that he had been resident in paradise. It is vastly at odds with his letters. But the love affair in Noa-Noa had a basis in fact, for Gauguin had met his Fayaway in Tahiti. Her name was Tehaamana and she was thirteen (“this was an age Gauguin was greatly drawn to in females,” the Pacific historian, Gavan Daws, has observed); and Gauguin painted her over and over until she became the embodiment of his South Seas fantasy.

  In his two-year interval in Europe he was miserable. “Literally I can only live on sunshine,” he said and returned to Polynesia, and although he intended to head straight for the Marquesas he procrastinated. He still hated the colonial life in Tahiti, the bureaucracy, the tyranny of the Church – hated these aspects of Tahitian life so deeply that they never appear on his canvases. You look in vain in a Gauguin painting for anything resembling details of the colonial life he must have seen most days in Tahiti: no ships, no sailors, no traders, no officials – nor their wives or children; no roads or wagons, or mechanical contraptions; no books or lamps or shoes; no faranis at all – and the place was full of white folks, and not only whites but Chinese. The islands had endured sixty years of colonial rule, and yet in Gauguin’s paintings – in the fragrant vision he created for himself – Polynesia is inviolate. The only indication we have of foreign influence is the bedstead in several of the paintings. Tahitians slept on mats, not on beds.

  “In Gauguin, a need to persuade always went hand in hand with a desire to offend,” one of his biographers has written. Living in the bush with yet another Tahitian teenager, Pauura, he quarreled constantly with the authorities (his starting a little newspaper did not endear him to them either), and eventually – still seeking savagery – he set sail for the Marquesas, leaving Pauura and their son, Emil, who was destined to become a tourist attraction.

  He arrived in Hiva Oa in 1901 and died less than two years later, having spent ten years altogether in Polynesia – two extended visits, during which he fathered numerous children between painting masterpieces. Here in the little village of Atuona, under the great green Matterhorn of Temetiu he had built a fine two-storey house, which he called The House of Pleasure, and having carved on the wooden frames his favorite maxims, “Soyez mystérieuses” (“Be mysterious”) was one, and “Soyez amoureuses et vous serez heureuses” (“Be in love and you will be happy”) was another, he took a fourteen-year-old girl, Vaeloho, as his mistress. He had come to some sort of arrangement with her parents. Gauguin was in his mid-fifties, and Vaeloho was soon pregnant. Their child, who had become an old woman, was still living in the valley in the 1980s.

  It is surprising, given the heat, the disorder, the difficulties of living, all his enemies and the simple necessities of stretching and preparing canvases – never mind buying materials – that Gauguin painted at all; yet his output was large, and he was a steady worker, sometimes turning from his painting to wood-carving or pottery. Gauguin was also plagued by bad health – he drank, he took drugs, he had syphilis and stress and a fractured leg. The Church authorities in Atuona hated him, and he had protracted legal problems there, too – a libel action against him. He suffered; and one day a Marquesan neighbor, Tioka, ventured into his house and found the farani stretched out and apparently lifeless. Following Marquesan custom, Tioka bit Gauguin’s head. The man did not stir.

  Gauguin lies buried high on a slope in the cemetery above the village. Near him are the graves of Thérèse Tetua, David Le Cadre, Jean Vohi, Josephine Tauafitiata, Anne Marie Kahao and Elizabeth Mohuho, who were alive at the turn of the century and died in Atuona and must have known the strange wild painter. Gauguin’s grave is simple, made of pockmarked volcanic rocks and shaded by a large white-blossomed frangipani. Garlands of flowers were strewn over the grave. The grave marker was his own statue of a wild woman, lettered “Oviri.”

  Some children were playing nearby. I spoke to them in French, and then asked them, “What does oviri mean?”

  They said they didn’t know. I had to look it up. It is a little ambiguous but appropriate. The word means “savage.” Gauguin applied the word to himself in his bronze self-portrait of 1895-6, his face in profile. He wrote in 1903 to Charles Morice (who had collaborated with him on Noa-Noa), “You were wrong that day when you said I was wrong to say I was a savage. It’s true enough. I am a savage. And civilized people sense the fact … I am a savage in spite of myself.” But the goddess Oviri-moeaihere is not only a savage; it is she who presides over death and mourning.

  As with his paintings, the grave was a colourful mixture of truth, imagination, suggestion and rough brilliance. The faces in the paintings can be encountered all over Tahiti and the Marquesas, but the backgrounds and landscapes are idealized and dream-like. Gauguin needed to believe he was a savage – and perhap
s he was, but of a different kind entirely from the gentle islanders he had wished himself upon.

  Gavan Daws tells a lovely story about Gauguin in A Dream of Islands, his wonderful account of the numerous men who came to Oceania to revisit and verify their fantasies.

  “One night at sunset [Daws writes] Gauguin was sitting on a rock outside his house on Hivaoa, naked except for his pareu, smoking, thinking about not very much, when out of the gathering darkness came a blind old Marquesan woman, tapping along with a stick, completely naked, tattooed all over, hunched, tottering, dry-skinned, mummy-like. She became aware of Gauguin’s presence and felt her way toward him. He sat in inexplicable fear, his breath held in. Without a word the old woman took his hand in hers, dust-dry, cold, reptile-cold. Gauguin felt repulsion. Then in silence she ran her hand over his body, down to the navel, beyond. She pushed aside his pareu and reached for his penis. Marquesan men – savages – were all supercised, and the raised scarred flesh was one of their great prides as makers of love. Gauguin had no savage mark on his maleness. He was uncovered for what he was. The blind searching hand withdrew, and the eyeless tattooed mummy figure disappeared into the darkness with a single word. ’Pupa,’ she croaked – White man.”

  The ship was anchored for the night, so I walked with Señor Pillitz over the ridge to the next wide bay, Taaoa, about four miles up and two down, but by the time we came to the archeological dig the day had grown too dark for us to see anything. Walking back in the dusk to Atuona we passed two parked cars. There were half a dozen people in them, Tahitians and Marquesans and French, having a wonderful time. Footsore, we asked for a lift.

  They said no. It was inconvenient.

  “We want to look at the airport,” one of them explained. Señor Pillitz said, “You are visiting Hiva Oa?”

  “We are officers with the Department of Tourism,” one of the women said.

  “What a coincidence. We are tourists,” Señor Pillitz said, “and we need a ride back to our ship.”

  Someone muttered in the back seat. They laughed and drove away.

  “He eats it doubled up,” Señor Pillitz said. It was an Argentine term of abuse: Se la comio doblada.

  We saw them later in the bar of the Aranui.

  “You say you’re a writer,”– one of the Tourism officials said. “What do you write about?”

  “Everything I see.”

  We sailed to the north coast of Hiva Oa, and anchored and went ashore. There at Puamau, at a marae at the end of a muddy path in the jungle, was a vast ruin. Finding such a place unmarked in the jungle behind a remote village was one of the singular pleasures of cruising the Marquesas. This one was a jumble of overgrown and scattered stones, and many carvings, some beheaded and castrated by souvenir-hunters or missionaries. Others were fiercely intact, one of which is the largest tiki in Polynesia – a seven-foot monster, grimacing and clutching its belly – and another the strangest and most beautiful frog-faced creature, horizontal on a pedestal. It had a jack-o’-lantern mouth and donut eyes and fat extended legs, and it was apparently flying.

  “It is a tiki woman,” a Marquesan told me.

  The giants [ tikis] of the cliff-girt Puamau Valley displayed such a contrast to the lazy people on the beach, Thor Heyerdahl writes in Fatu-Hiva, that the question inevitably came to mind: Who put these red stone colossi there, and how?

  His answer, refuted by every archeologist of any reputation, was: People from South America.

  Farther west on Hiva Oa the Aranui provisioned the village of Hanaiapa, and I hurried up another muddy path in a light mist until heavy rain began to fall – so heavy I had to shelter in a deserted building. It was a rickety wooden church, with vines reaching through the windows and a crude pulpit, and a quotation painted high on one wall: Betheremu (Bethlehem) and Miku 5.5, a gnomic reference to the text from Micah, in which the prophet mentioned Bethlehem and foretold the coming of the Lord, “For now shall he be great unto the ends of the earth. And this man shall be the peace, when the Assyrian shall come into the land –”

  Through the tilted door-jamb I could see coconut palms and breadfruit trees, mangoes, papayas, grapefruit, avocados – and the wet straggling village next to the gurgling stream.

  Walking back to the beach (muddy gray water washing muddy gray sand), I passed a house where three young Marquesans were listening to music from a boom box.

  “Who is singing?” I asked.

  “Prince.”

  And farther on I met a woman walking hand in hand with a young girl. The woman was attractive, in a green blouse and wearing a flower-patterned pareu. She smiled at me and stood with her feet apart, blocking the path.

  “Hello. My name is Mau,” the woman said in English, and she showed me her name tattooed on her wrist.

  “Where did you learn English?”

  “From the boats.” And she pinched the little girl’s cheek. “This is my daughter Miriam.”

  The woman was wearing a lei – a Marquesan one, with mint and other fragrant herbs entwined with flowers.

  “That’s very pretty.”

  She immediately took it off and put it around my neck and kissed me on each cheek, more like a French formality than a Marquesan custom.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to the ship.”

  “Too bad.”

  She smiled a little ruefully, but the ship would be back, and perhaps next time it would stay a bit longer, and she would meet someone else, someone more willing.

  She was as near as I came to finding Fayaway. But she was much like the other people I had met, who seemed decent and hard-working and happy. She was the one who seemed to possess just a flicker of coquettishness, and none were flirts. Most of the people were tough and down to earth, a little gloomy and very religious. Where was the romance? I had no idea. Even the islands, so dramatic at a distance, were quite another story close up – muddy and jungly and priest-ridden, and the beaches teaming with no-see-ums they called nonos.

  Instead of painting the great rocks, the black cliffs, the crashing waves, the deep Marquesan valleys, the sea-washed crags, the cataracts and mountainsides, the hypocrites and colonials – instead of dealing with this reality, Gauguin decided to test his own theories of color and perspective. He painted pink beaches, yellow fields, Buddhist images, Javanese statues. He created a tropical horse culture in which France did not figure. He invented Polynesia. So people came. They don’t find his Polynesia, but what they do find is just as magical, though undoubtedly forbidding, and just as full of luxe, calme et volupte, as Baudelaire wrote in L’Invitation au voyage, one of Gauguin’s favorite poems.

  But some of the islands were anything but voluptuous. Ua Huka was one of these. The harbor at Hane was so narrow, no more than a pair of granite jaws, and the Aranui lay tethered between them, on short lines, and bouncing in the swell. The island was bereft of trees, and in the interior wild goats and horses and wild donkeys were desperately foraging. The island, the smallest in the Marquesas, looked nibbled to death. There were only 500 people on Ua Huka. Some were carvers, and they came forward, trying to sell expensive tikis, and war clubs, and bowls that cost $350.

  After looking at the ruins – muddy path, boulders, the shattered buttocks of a tiki – I found a place to eat and had a feast: breadfruit, and miti hue (river shrimp in fermented coconut milk), poe (sweet starchy pudding flavored with papaya), poisson cru made with tuna, and sweet potato, umara.

  I walked until the hard driving wind-blown rain forced me inside. The post office in Hane was a small bare room – about the size of the average bathroom. The postmistress, Marie-Thérèse, a hibiscus flower in her hair, sat at a trestle table with a telephone and a cash box. Here, while Marie-Thérèse read a French magazine, La Nouvelle Intimite, I called Honolulu again, collect. The connection was clear, and the only problem was the driving rain and the banging door.

  I sat beside Marie-Thérèse, who was reading a section called Dossier, which was headed, Le Plaisir au femi
nin – Pour une sexualite sans tabous. What a coincidence, that word that had found its way back to Polynesia in an article about uninhibited women’s pleasures. It spoke of orgasms, sexual response, diseases, and sexual variations (mille et un), and Marie-Thérèse was so engrossed she hardly noticed when I hung up the phone.

  Waiting for the whaleboat to take me back to the ship, I fell into conversation with some youngsters who were seated near the beach for this monthly event, the visit of the Aranui.

  “Are there any tupapaus here?” I asked one of them,

  Stella, who had been listening to the lambada on her brother’s Walkman.

  “Not here, but beyond the restaurant.”

  “At the marae?”

  “Yes. And in the forest.”

  “Are you afraid of the tupapaus?”

  “Yes.”

  And then the whaleboats came, and the older passengers were carried in the arms of the Marquesans. It was accomplished quickly, but I was struck by these arrivals and departures through the surf: most of them were exactly like rescues, just as wet and urgent and precarious.

  There were more stone terraces and house-platforms on pretty Fatu-Hiva (population 500), the smallest, the prettiest and most vertical island in this group. Thor Heyerdahl’s account in Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature – how he got away from it all by coming here – resulted in an influx of people to Fatu-Hiva similarly trying to get away from it all. There were so few habitable valleys that these foreigners were concentrated in only a couple of places and produced a rash of thieving and conflict: a period of intense xenophobia among Marquesans, and disappointment among the foreigners. Everyone had been misled. Characteristically, Heyerdahl’s book was fanciful and inaccurate and self-promoting, with many narrow escapes and improbable incidents (in one, the ponderous Norwegian buys Gauguin’s rifle, and it is obvious to even the most casual reader that he is being bamboozled), and long misleading chapters about cannibalism as well as tendentious detail – Heyerdahl’s hobbyhorse – about the peopling of Polynesia by South Americans.