The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “But the mother is gone,” Juan said. ”She went to Santiago.”

  “To work?”

  “I don’t know. I never hear from her. She drank – she drank everything, whisky, pisco, beer, wine, anything. Then she just left.”

  “Do you cook the food?”

  “Yes. And I clean the house. I do the laundry, too.” He laughed. “At first I didn’t know anything about looking after a house. But after a while I learned.”

  He was a small, rather sad figure, in his early thirties, and I felt sorry for him, for his having been abandoned. He had a badly paid job, and three young children, and a long walk to work. But he was honest and forthright.

  We talked about politics. He volunteered that he hated Pinochet, who had come to power in a military coup that of course had been welcomed by the United States – Pinochet being the sort of bullying right-winger the CIA had found easy to work with.

  “Why do you hate Pinochet?”

  “Because he’s bad. Because he’s corrupt. Because he was tough on this island,” Juan said. ”I liked Allende. I hate militarists.”

  I spent another night and day at Tonganki, still wondering what the real relationships of my neighbors were. Nor could I understand their reserve. They were tolerant but inhospitable, and without any curiosity. Now and then one of them had said, “Come fishing with us some time.” I said, “Fine,” but the invitation was never more explicit than that. Their indifference forced me to look after myself, which was what I wanted; but I was not sure whether I could ask anything of them.

  That was one of the trickier aspects of camping on a Polynesian island. Anyone who is not a member of a family is in an awkward position and somewhat suspect. There are only two categories – Family Member and Other. “Other” includes guest, and the responsibilities, though they are never apparent, are complex. For one thing, because a guest was an outsider he or she was never totally trusted. This ambiguity alone was like proof that Easter Islanders were Polynesians.

  I also left Tongariki because after four nights camping by the sea I needed a bath. My hair was salty, I felt grubby. What did these people do? They did not take many baths. There are no rivers at all on Easter Island, and there is a serious shortage of fresh water.

  Carlos said to me, “Come back some time.”

  After this vague salutation, the whole fishing camp of fathers and daughters went back to their own affairs.

  The rest of the time I spent in Hanga-Roa. The wind changed and blowing now from the south, from Antarctica, it was much colder, and I was glad that I had done my paddling in the fairer winds.

  I wanted to buy carvings – some were very well done, indeed, so well done that people said they had slipped them to Thor Heyerdahl and fobbed these copies off to him as ancient artifacts. The carvings were expensive. Two hundred dollars, a person would say, and when I walked on, How much will you offer? I hated haggling, so I kept walking. I wanted a rubbing of the Bird-Man petroglyphs, of the god Makemake or one of the more winsome and presentable vulvas. I wished I had brought the simple materials with me that would have allowed me to make rubbings (and I suggest that anyone who goes to Easter Island, or to the Marquesas, do this). Some of the shops had cloth printed with the Bird-Man motif, and this pattern had originally been a rubbing. I saw the same cloth in four shops (Hanga-Roa had a whole street of curio shops, identical souvenirs, no customers), and prices ranged from $65 to $150 for the same simple item. Each person who offered the cloth claimed that he or she had actually painted it. I did this with my own hand!

  Nothing had a price. It was all haggling – what the market would bear. This was Chilean influence; in the rest of Oceania haggling was regarded as insulting.

  Then I was offered one of those cloths for $45. The woman who was selling it said that she had painted it, but this time the claim was true. Her name was Patrizia Saavedra, she was Chilean, and she had come to the island nineteen years before, “because I am an artist and this is an island of artists.”

  After nineteen years she had to know the place well.

  “It doesn’t suit everyone, but it suits me,” she said. “The main problem is social conflict. Yet the people are not violent. They might shout at you one day, but the next day they will be kind.”

  “How do you explain that?” I asked.

  “They have a habit of forgetting quarrels. They don’t store up their grievances. There is little fighting.”

  I said that I had an intimation of anarchy and mistrust on the island. Had she felt that?

  She thought a moment and then said, “You know, dictatorship is bad in many ways – some that you don’t expect. It changes people’s minds. It affects their thinking. It affected the people here.” She intimated that the people had become rebellious and selfish. Pinochet had put his friends and flunkies into positions of power on Easter Island. The local people resented it, and as a result – yes – they were mistrustful. The young people didn’t study.

  “Now that democracy has come and the military rule has ended, everyone wants to be king of the island.” She smiled a pretty, toothy smile and added, “Yes, that is not a bad thing, but everyone wants to run for office.” She began pointing. “This man. That man. That woman. Him. Her. Everyone wants to be governor, or alcalde [mayor], or whatever. Elections are coming soon. They will be funny, with everyone’s name on the ballot – a big long ballot!”

  Some months before, elsewhere in Oceania, I had heard on Radio Australia’s reliable program “Pacific News” that there had been a large demonstration on Easter Island. For reasons I could not remember, people had gathered at the airport and, holding an airplane hostage, had prevented it from taking off.

  “It was last March,” Patrizia said. ”The whole island was united, the islanders and the Chileans together. There was a radical group behind it – the Society of the Old Chiefs, Mata Nui o Hotu Matua. But everyone supported them, two thousand people, in rotation. They went to the airport after the plane landed – the governor was in Santiago – and they claimed it. They would not let the plane take off. It was not violent – no guns. But the people were very determined.”

  I asked her why they had done it.

  “The cause was a two hundred percent increase in prices – fuel, water, electricity.”

  “And so the islanders united?”

  “Yes. And they won. The increase was dropped. The plane took off.”

  The important detail was that the core of the rebellion had been a Rapa Nui cultural group. Asserting their Polynesian identity was a way of giving their cause legitimacy. ‘All along; the Chilean government had encouraged the people to be colorful, to dance and sing, to recall their past. The effect of this cultural submersion had been similar to that of Tahitians and Marquesans, who had been urged to dance and sing and who had done so, faced with pervasive Frenchness. The Rapu Nui dance troupe dressed up, the girls in grass skirts, the boys in loincloths. They found that they were welcomed in Tahiti, in Hawaii and New Zealand. They realized that they were part of the great Polynesian diaspora. And dancing and singing was inimitable and became their way of resisting Chilean influence. It had also led to more overt political acts.

  For a while in Hanga-Roa I fell in with the drinkers. Their objective each evening was to drink themselves into a state of paralysis, and I was fascinated by their methods. They drank anything alcoholic – beer, wine, whisky. And they combined the drinks.

  Martin and Hernando, who were Chilean, made Carlos and his brothers seem positively abstemious by comparison. Martin had been on the island for twelve years, Hernando only four. Both were from farms in the Chilean hinterland, and they had an old leathery and weatherbeaten look, though Martin, the elder of the two, was only forty-one. They drank every day, from the moment they got out of work – they were in the Forestry Department. Given the small number of trees on the island, this did not seem an exacting occupation.

  They sat at a table in a small bar overlooking Hanga-Roa harbor. They bought cans of be
er and cartons of wine. They drank some beer and then poured some wine from the carton into the beer can, and mixed it, and swigged. They staggered, they shouted, they became absurdly affectionate, then they quarreled and went stiff.

  There were two discothèques in Hanga-Roa. Paralysis was the objective in those places too. The Tokoroko was the more notorious of the two. “That is Sodom and Gomorrah,” a woman told me. That made me hopeful, but I was disappointed. I visited and saw only youths stumblingly dancing. Their drinking was done with more seriousness. When they were truly rigid, like Martin and Hernando, they went home.

  Life in Hanga-Roa made me miss my camp near the canoe ramp at Tongariki, but my time on Easter Island was coming to an end. I was headed for another corner of the Polynesian triangle – Hawaii.

  “You will have to get up early tomorrow,” the owner of my guest-house said the night before I left. “We leave for the airport at six in the morning.”

  Afraid that I might not get up in time, I hardly slept. I dozed, dreamed of missing the plane, and then woke up in a panic. I was fully awake at five. I was loitering in the driveway at five-thirty. At six, no one appeared. At ten past I began knocking on doors. It was another cold, black, Easter Island morning. I went on waiting. Where was everyone?

  I dragged my collapsible boat, my camping gear, and my bag of clothes out to the dirt thoroughfare, the Navel of the World Street, and I prayed to the great god Makemake for assistance.

  A small truck trundled down the road, waking the dogs. I flagged him down.

  “Are you going to the airport?”

  He could only have been, at that hour. He said he was from the post office. This heavy-set Rapa Nui man in his beat-up truck continued down the bumpy dirt road. It struck me that this was the only island in Oceania I had been where people wore lots of clothes, old filthy clothes, and boots, and torn sweaty hats. Their mode of dress gave them a downtrodden, hopeless look. The man asked me where I was going.

  “Tahiti, then Honolulu.”

  “I would like to go there,” he said.

  PART FOUR

  PARADISE

  23

  Oahu: Open Espionage in Honolulu

  The two most obvious facts of Hawaii are the huge sluttish pleasures of its Nipponized beachfront hotels and, in great contrast, its rugged landscape of craggy volcanoes and its coastal headlands, where lava has been pounded by heavy surf into black spikes. Hawaii is smooth, but it can also be rough. I went intending to sample this fearful beauty. On my first swim in Hawaii, on the north shore of Oahu, off a gorgeous beach, I was yanked by the undertow, carried past the surf zone, and swept into a strong current almost a mile from my towel. I swam hard upstream for an hour and finally struggled ashore on sharp rocks, where I was lacerated and shaken. Was this outing a mistake? I wondered whether I should leave because of that, but people said this happened to newcomers all the time.

  Soon after, I was introduced to a dignified old man at a party. He began to tell me about a book he had written, and then he asked me my name and what I did for a living.

  “I’m a writer.”

  “What restaurant do you work in?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Where are you working as a waiter?”

  He was not hard of hearing, simply logical – there were so many waiters and so few writers. Never mind. As time passed, I felt I might stay there for the rest of my life.

  “There’s Arthur Murray,” someone said, in a restaurant.

  It was he, in the flesh, ninety-three years old. Decades ago he had sold the dance-lesson business. He had a collection of French Impressionist paintings and lived in a luxury penthouse overlooking the beach at Waikiki.

  “She slipped on a shrimp,” I heard an anguished person say at another party. “Hurt her leg real bad. Plus she’s real stressed,” giving it the slushy Hawaiian pronunciation, shtressed. People also said shtrength, and shtreet.

  You expected someone to ask, What happened to the shrimp? but no one did.

  I procrastinated about paddling my boat, because I wanted to get the hang of this complicated city.

  Probably the best view of Honolulu is from the top of the city’s mountainous backdrop, Aiea Heights. We have Takeo Yoshikawa’s word on that. He was one of the spookiest and most important of history’s phantoms and was part of the plot to destroy Hawaii. It was in Aiea, in what were the cane fields (now mostly bungalows), that Yoshikawa, a Japanese spy, watched the movements of ships in Pearl Harbor and, in general, gaped at the life of the friendly city.

  No one suspected this man of engaging in open espionage – Honolulu was, and is, a city where Japanese are in the majority. Yoshikawa was twenty-nine. Some days he disguised himself in cane-cutter’s clothes. On other days he wore a suit and worked under a false name at the Japanese Consulate – as prettily housed today on the Pali Highway as it was in 1941, looking just as it did when the impostors inside supplied information for Admiral Yamamoto’s master plan of bombardment. “If you want the tiger’s cubs,” the admiral was fond of saying, “you must go into the tiger’s lair.”

  Yoshikawa arrived from Japan in March 1941, and prowling Aiea spied assiduously on the city and harbor for eight months. He was still on the job the day the planes were strafing and the bombs were falling and ships sinking, and the first of the 2,403 people were dying from Japanese bombs.

  When he had scoped out the strategic locations, Yoshikawa had noted that the ships were generally moored in Pearl Harbor on the weekends, and the planes were parked at Hickam Field then too. From his tootling around the north shore of the island in a borrowed 1937 Ford, Yoshikawa was pleased to see that North Oahu was very lightly defended – a safe direction for the kamikazes. Admiral Yamamoto had worried about balloons – barrage balloons that would impede attacks by fighter planes. No balloons, Yoshikawa reported, and less than a day before the Sunday morning bombing of Pearl Harbor, Yoshikawa cabled from the Consulate: There are limits to the balloon defense of Pearl Harbor. I imagine that in all probability there is considerable opportunity left to take advantage for a surprise attack …

  Fifty years later, I went to the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor to pay my respects. This area of Pearl is a national park. Everyone watches the short documentary beforehand, which describes the events of the morning of 7 December 1941. It is not a flag-waving film and is the more moving for its cruel factuality. After that sobering experience, the visitors are ferried into the harbor to the memorial itself, which is a white shrine-like structure built over the rusty hulk of the sunken battleship in which 1,200 Americans lost their lives when a Japanese bomb scored a direct hit on the Arizona’s number two turret. Research is so detailed on the attack that the bombardier’s name is known. It was Noboru Kanai, who, like the others in the attack force, wore a white cloth around his head reading Hissho, “Certain Victory.”

  “Do Japanese tourists come here?” I asked the park service guide.

  “Not many,” he said. “And the ones who do sometimes laugh and snap pictures of each other. I don’t think they realize how important this place is to us.”

  Looking out from the spymaster’s vantage point, the heights of Aiea, after arriving in Honolulu from the Western Pacific – from the far corners of the Polynesian triangle, from travel in small simple islands – I was overwhelmed by the city’s prosperity and its modern face. It is the most visible city in the Pacific.

  You can take in the whole busy panorama of Honolulu by glancing from right to left, beginning at Waianae and Pearl Harbor – the cranes and ships, Hickam’s planes painted in green camouflage, Downtown with its banks and skyscrapers, and Chinatown’s meaner streets, where the less-motivated prostitutes tend to linger; the scarcity of open space, its heavy traffic, the Bishop Museum, the suburbs on the slopes of its volcanoes, bungalows magnetized to old lava flows and in green drenched valleys; the high-rise hotels like goofy dentures and the surf breaking on the reef at Waikiki, the streets of Korean bars and strip clubs, Punchbowl volcano
, and the pretty parks, the green cliffs and peaks that enclose the city, a prospect of the sea, and at last Diamond Head which, a vast and Sphinx-like sentinel, can be seen from almost anywhere in the city. After Diamond Head, your eye is traveling to windward, towards the far side of the island.

  Where are the pedestrians? Outside of the seaside hanky-tonk of Waikiki (less than a mile long), few people walk. Honolulu, a city of drivers, is dense with private cars, and with two- and three-car families. Even the poorest in Honolulu, the recently arrived Pacific islanders – Samoans, Tongans, people from Christmas Island and Yap – have at least one vehicle, usually a new four-wheel-drive pick-up truck. In fact, the pick-up truck seems part of the personality of these islanders, just as an expensive, usually European car is an aspect of the personality of Honolulu’s affluent families. It is a point of pride among Filipinos to buy a truck as soon as the down-payment can be scraped together. The middle class drives Japanese cars, the military buys American. No one walks.

  One of the paradoxes of Hawaii, yet one of its most American features, is that it quickly – recently – became a car culture. Why is this a paradox? Because, apart from the beaches and shopping mall, all within a small radius, there is nowhere to drive – no hinterland, no open road. A car is regarded as a necessity not simply because a bus passenger is stigmatized as one of the sadder and more poverty-stricken citizens but, more than that, a car in Honolulu is the badge of one’s class. I think the car is the key thing. In such a hot city, where nearly everyone, rich and poor, dresses identically, clothes cannot possibly be a status symbol.

  The semiotics of Honolulu, its signs and symbols, are complex and highly colored; the city in particular and Hawaii in general has more class divisions and more subtle aspects of social difference than I have ever seen before. The local idiom is crammed with who’s-who designations and signifiers: malihini (newcomer), kama’aina (old-timer), pake (Chinese), katonk (mainland Japanese: it is an onomatopoeic word, the sound a Japanese head makes when it is struck by a hard object), kachink (mainland Chinese, same definition), buk-buk (Filipino; also “Flip” and monong), “make” or blalah (young tough), tita (“sister,” moke’s girlfriend), popolo (black person – sometimes the word is playfully inverted as olopop), and all the gradations of haole (Caucasian) – new haole, old haole, hapahaole (half-haole). The Portuguese (of whom there are many in Hawaii) are not regarded as haoles, but rather are universally known as “Portugees.” A Latin or a Jew in this society of fine racial distinctions is not seen as Caucasian. There is no colloquialism for a Hawaiian person, though “part-Hawaiian” or variations of hapa are the usual descriptions since so few are full-blooded. There are peasants, and there are aristocrats and royals – that they were overthrown and pensioned-off is a meaningless quibble, for the fact is that Hawaiian ex-royalty, some of it hapahaole, are still among the wealthiest people in the islands.