Tiare in Bloom

by Célestine Vaite

  “I didn’t know you were waiting for me,” Pito says.

  “I told you that I was going to wait for you.”

  “Well, I didn’t know you were serious.”

  “Pito, you knew I was crazy about you,” Materena says.

  “I didn’t know you were serious,” Pito repeats. “I thought to myself, Ah, she’s with someone else now, she’s not going to wait for me for two years without playing around, she’s a pretty girl.”

  “I didn’t look at any boys. The only boy in my head was you.” Materena puts her quilt down for a few seconds to sigh with nostalgia, and confesses that she knew, she just knew in her heart, that it was her destiny to be with that boy Pito Tehana, it was her destiny to have his children.

  “I’m still the only boy in your head now?” Pito asks, taken by surprise by his wife’s confession. He knew she liked the things he did to her under the frangipani tree behind the bank, but he had no idea that she was fantasizing about having his children.

  Materena gives him a long look, a look that says, You ask a silly question. Ah, Pito loves those big brown eyes, especially when they’re not cranky. Pito looks down to Tiare, staring at him with her big, beautiful brown eyes, the eyes of her grandmother.

  “Tiare has your beautiful eyes,” he says.

  “Beautiful eyes?” Materena smiles. “You’ve never told me that my eyes were beautiful.”

  Ah, and when she smiles, she has that cute dimple on her left cheek. Pito looks down to Tiare again, still staring at him. He smiles and she automatically smiles back. “And she’s got your cute dimple too.”

  “Cute dimple? You’ve never told me that my dimple was cute.”

  “Bon ben, today must be your day for compliments.”

  “I accept them, Maururu roa.”

  Pito waits for Materena to say something nice about him too, but she’s busy stitching. “What about me? You’re going to give me some compliments too?” he asks. “That way we’re equal.”

  Materena scrutinizes Pito. He’s now doing his not-bad-for-my-age-eh? expression. And-plus-I’m-exercising-these-days. Half a minute passes and Materena is still scrutinizing Pito.

  “Allo?” Pito says, half serious, sucking his belly in. “You’re sure taking your time with my compliments.”

  “Pito . . . when I look at you I see . . .” It seems Materena isn’t sure if she should tell her husband what she sees or not.

  “What do you see?” Pito is now worried. He knows that he’s not as handsome as he used to be, like his mother has been so fond of telling him. Oui, the gut is a bit tautau, and the hair a bit gray, well, what do you want? People can’t look like they’re eighteen years old all their life. “Alors? What do you see?”

  “I see a friend.” There, Materena has spoken.

  “A friend!” Pito was hoping for a compliment. “Is that all you see? What about my body, hum? You think I need to walk further?”

  “You’re fine as you are in my eyes.”

  “Ah bon? You don’t want a man with more muscles?”

  Materena informs her husband that she’s never been interested in muscles, so why should she be now? When she met him he didn’t have any muscles. Pito informs his wife that, excuse-moi, he did have muscles when they met. Non, Materena insists, he was skinny like a nail when he used to come for his sandwich at the snack where she worked. Pito denies this, and why on earth did she like him anyway if he was skinny like a nail?

  “There was something about you . . . And then when you kissed me, I was gone.”

  Pito smirks. “How did I kiss you?”

  “Like you kiss me now.”

  “And —” Pito is really enjoying this conversation.

  “Well you kiss me good, your lips are very soft.”

  “My lips are soft, eh?” Pito is really, really enjoying this conversation. “What else did you like about me?”

  “The same things I like now.”

  “And . . . tell me —”

  “Well, I like the way you —”

  “You . . . come on . . . spill the bucket.”

  Materena cackles her sexy mama cackle and shakes her head. “I don’t need to do you a drawing Pito, you know what I mean. But you’re becoming like a friend to me because —”

  “So my lips are very soft,” Pito interrupts. He’s not interested in the friend story. He doesn’t want to be his wife’s friend. He has enough friends as it is. He wants Materena to talk about his lips and everything.

  “I don’t think I loved you before like I love you now, Pito.”

  “Eh?” Pito is suddenly confused.

  “Well, oui, I loved you, but not like I love you now, you know what I mean?”

  Non, Pito has no idea what Materena is going on about!

  She explains what she’s going on about, and it’s fairly simple. Before, when their children were little, she was adamant about not letting the father of her children escape, she wanted a father at the kitchen table, a father in her children’s lives, she was prepared to keep him no matter what. No matter how insensitive he was, if he forgot her birthday, preferred his copains to her; but now the children are big and —

  “You can chuck me out,” Pito cackles. “And go with your Chinese boyfriend.”

  “What Chinese boyfriend?”

  “The boyfriend you met at Kikiriri.”

  “Pito.” Materena bursts out laughing. “I was with Cousin Lily.”

  “The whole night?”

  “Oui, the whole night, we slept at the hotel.” Materena is still laughing.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that you were with your cousin instead of lying about that girlfriend?”

  Materena puts the quilt down to look Pito in the eye. “Pito . . . do you know how angry with you I was? I was so angry I wanted to divorce you.”

  “Eh?” The room becomes black for a quick second, and baby Tiare, sensing her grandfather’s shock, begins to cry. “Non, non,” Pito hurries to say, lovingly tapping the baby’s bottom. “Don’t cry, chérie —” And giving Materena the questioning look, he says, “Divorce me?”

  “Divorce you,” Materena confirms. “Pack your bags, send you back to your mama, and never speak to you again.”

  “Why? What did I do?”

  “It’s not what you did, it’s what you said.”

  Pito is even more confused now. “What did I say?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  Pito searches his memory. He remembers Materena not talking to him for six days because, so he concluded, she was just fiu of seeing his face, as it happens with couples. And then she acted like she hated him for all that time but . . .

  “What did I say?”

  “When I told you that I wanted to look for my father, you said —”

  “You want to look for your father?” This is the first time Pito hears about it.

  “You said,” Materena continues, “‘you think he’s going to want to know you?’”

  Pito widens his eyes with stupefaction and again baby Tiare starts to cry. Pito sits up and holds baby on his knees. He needs some fresh air. His head is spinning a little. Non, he did not tell Materena these words, no way. “Did I really —”

  Materena sadly nods.

  “I was taero?” Pito asks, although he already knows the answer.

  Another sad nod.

  Pito is flushed with shame. “Forgive me, chérie, I was —”

  “I have already forgiven you,” Materena smiles. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here today, you’d be at your mother’s house going taravana.”

  “But . . . Materena, your father is going to be so proud to know you!” Pito exclaims, dumbfounded at how close he came to being ejected — and over something he had no idea about. “He’s going to think you are amazing!”

  Materena shyly lowers her eyes and cackles. “I think you’ve given me enough compliments for today.”

  “It’s not compliments, it’s the truth. I can help you look for your father.”

&nbs
p; Materena picks up her quilt and shrugs. “I’ve got too much in my head at the moment. Work, the children . . . Our mootua who doesn’t have her mother and her father.”

  “Chérie, as soon as Tamatoa is home,” Pito says, thinking, That boy will be coming home, “we can start the search for your father together.”

  Smiling, Materena continues stitching. “Eh, Pito . . . one thing at a time.”

  She’d like to enjoy her new man for a while first.

  The Golden Boy

  After Tiare arrived, Pito was the man in Materena’s eyes for two blissful years. But there’s a new man in the house now — Materena’s golden boy, her firstborn, her adored eldest son, Tamatoa.

  Since he’s been home, thanks to his father paying the fare on his carte bleu, Tamatoa goes out dancing and drinking with his copains and cousins, and then he comes home and expects a feed waiting for him at the kitchen table. He does the clown and makes his mother and daughter laugh with those stupid dance moves he’s learned God knows where. Here, his last trick is to dance, pull out his comb from the back pocket of his jeans, and comb his hair — still dancing.

  After eating, he lies on the sofa in front of the TV like a corpse . . . for hours! Either that or he goes out for the whole night to the nightclub to dance his stupid disco moves, comes home in the early hours of the morning, and doesn’t get out of bed until the afternoon.

  This situation is making Pito lose his screws. He had a word about this to Materena tonight before she went to work, and she said, “Aue, Pito, our son has just come home. Don’t worry, he’s going to be all right, at least he’s home every night to eat. He doesn’t go to other people’s houses, and he doesn’t drink on the road. Give Tamatoa time to play a little.”

  Time to play? He’s been playing all over Europe for months since his military service ended. And anyway, Pito didn’t have time to play when he became a father. He walked straight from the delivery room into a job, so to speak. Ah, true, the day his precious son came into the world, Pito became serious. He wasn’t dancing in nightclubs. He was slaving away at the factory for eight hours a day!

  Pito should have known better than complain to Materena about Tamatoa. As far as she’s concerned, he’s a very good son, bless the day he was born, et cetera. After two years of listening to her tell him off on the phone (and to his photo in the living room, the one of him in his military clothes) for taking so long to come home to meet his daughter, Tamatoa has turned into a saint in his mother’s eyes because he’s here now. What’s more, he came home before Mother’s Day.

  If only Materena could see her golden boy now, Pito thinks. They are in Papeete with Ati and his son to buy Mother’s Day gifts.

  Pito glances to his two-year-old granddaughter fifteen feet away, wearing her brand-new red tennis shoes that match her red dress and the red ribbons in her pigtails. Presently, she’s standing still next to her father, who came into her life less than a week ago, her father who is too busy checking out the girls walking past to notice her brand-new shoes.

  Her little voice says, “Eh, Papi, look at my shoes.” But the young man hears nothing, being now fascinated by a pack of schoolgirls strolling by, firmly holding on to their precious textbooks. He whistles and calls out sweet words. “Eh, bella! Bellissima!” The schoolgirls turn around and giggle, and next thing, the fit and handsome twenty-three-year-old young man wearing nothing but a pair of faded jeans rolled at the bottom follows them, doing his robot walk. The schoolgirls turn around to look at him and giggle some more.

  “Tamatoa!” Pito calls out, thinking, Great, you send your son to military service so that he becomes a man, and they send you back a clown. “Be careful of bébé!”

  The father (too young to know better) walks back to his daughter, dragging his feet along, and doing his long face. For a moment, he looks like he’s about to call something out to his father, something like what he told him last night and the night before and the night before, and on the telephone many times.

  “I didn’t ask for a child. Children should be with their mother. Miri is a bitch for abandoning her daughter like that. It’s not enough to send toys and photos of herself with her Godzilla French boyfriend . . . He really doesn’t look Catholic, that one. She should take her daughter to live with her in France. You and Mamie shouldn’t have legally adopted Tiare. Now Miri thinks she doesn’t have responsibilities.” But one look at his father grinding his teeth and Tamatoa understands that it’s not the time to make a scene.

  “Merde!” Ati is losing his cool. Right in front of a pizzeria, and plus, it’s so hot today! Sweat is pouring off his forehead.

  “Copain, haere maru, haere papu; go slow, go right.” This is Pito talking with his calm voice. How hard can it be to put a carriage together? But we’re not talking about a cheap carriage that unfolds easily here, we’re talking about a science-fiction gadget, the top-of-the-line carriage, imported from the USA. It cost Ati the eyes in his head. And today, one day before Mother’s Day, Ati will be getting the mother of his child, Lily, something even better. As soon as he gets that putain carriage up.

  Ati’s beautiful baby boy was conceived the very night his parents were guests at Materena and Pito’s table (where Ati greatly impressed Lily with his historical knowledge) and made his entrance into the world eight months ago at the private clinic.

  On that day, which Ati solemnly proclaimed to be the best day of his entire life, he had a serious talk with Lily. “Look,” he said, “even if it didn’t work between us two, let’s agree to do the best by our son. He needs to grow up with both his parents.”

  She replied, “Okay, good. You can have your son three days a week, and I’ll have him for four.”

  “What?” Ati had expected something a bit more full-time. “Are you serious?”

  “Better not to complain,” Lily said sweetly. “Maybe you will only be having my son for two days.”

  Pito told Ati not to worry too much, it’s not the best time to negotiate with a woman when she’s just given birth — of course, Lily would soon realize that it is much more practical to raise a child when both parents are living under the same roof. But Pito underestimated Lily’s top organizational skills. Within a week of Rautini’s birth, his mother’s very unusual arrangement with his father was proving to be quite successful.

  “Merde!” The carriage is tipped over, and two pairs of mystified eyes scan the bolts and the knobs, purée de bonsoir, who invented this stupid thing?

  “Look at my shoes,” a little voice says again, trying to attract her papa’s attention.

  But Tamatoa doesn’t care about that little girl’s shoes. He cares more about the brown girls walking by. Ah, he missed those brown girls. French girls are beautiful but Tahitian girls are better. He’d forgotten. Tahitian girls don’t get cranky if you mess up their hair. When he met Miri Makemo, he was in all honesty very taken by her, but it was the costume she was wearing — the traditional grass skirt and the bra made out of coconut shells. She was like a fantasy in that gloomy street of Paris. He was walking by, and she was in the street, smoking a cigarette after the show. And she called out, “Eh? You’re Tahitian?”

  If she had been wearing normal clothes, jeans and a shirt, for example, Tamatoa wouldn’t have looked at her twice. But he did, and now he’s getting punished for it. After the wild and passionate night they had together, she asked him where he was from, and he, stupido, gave her his address in Tahiti.

  When Pito looks up, there’s no sign of his son, and Tiare is showing off her new shoes to an old French man smoking a pipe, shirt unbuttoned, and looking extremely interested in this little girl and her brand-new shoes.

  “Tiare!” Pito’s booming voice is enough to wake up the dead.

  The little girl immediately looks up at her grandfather. He gives her a nod his way, meaning, haere mai, come here right now, and the little girl, not one to disobey her grandfather when he’s cranky, hurries over to him.

  “Go and wait in the car,” he say
s, giving the old Frenchman the look that fires bullets straight to the heart. The Frenchman takes on a defensive expression as if to say, “But Monsieur, my intentions were honorable.” But you don’t argue with an overprotective grandfather.

  Now: back to that STUPID carriage.

  “Why not just carry bébé?” Pito asks Ati.

  “Lily wants —”

  “Okay,” Pito interrupts. He’s not in the mood to hear about Lily’s instructions. These days whenever Ati expresses an opinion, it is linked to Lily’s instructions. Let’s just say that becoming a father has done something to Ati’s head. He will do everything the mother of his son says. Her wish is his command. She says, “When you take bébé out, make sure he’s in the carriage, you might carry him the wrong way and damage his spinal cord,” then so be it.

  OUI! Finally! The carriage unfolds, and a burst of applause congratulates the two men, who did not realize they had been entertaining pizza eaters. “Bravo!” the crowd cheers.

  All right, let’s go shopping for the mamas. Ati pushing the carriage with his son still sound asleep, his precious head and tiny body protected from the sun by a net, Pito holding his granddaughter’s hand. A little voice says, “Grandpère, look at my shoes.” And Pito says, “They’re very beautiful shoes.”

  They walk into a shop that sells very reasonably priced gifts, cheap, actually. Pito’s Mother’s Day gift for his mama is a pandanus bag. Ati’s choice is also a pandanus bag, but he hasn’t found Lily’s gift yet, he says.

  “Lily isn’t your mother,” Pito reminds Ati.

  “I just want to get Lily something small,” Ati says, walking towards a jewelry shop. “Something to show my gratitude for having given me a son.”

  “What if she had given you a daughter?” Pito asks, remembering how he felt when his first child was born and it was a boy. Ah, he was so proud. Perhaps Ati feels the same way.

  But Ati informs his best friend that had Lily given him a daughter instead of this beautiful healthy golden baby boy he so adores, he would still be — forever, he insists — grateful, because a child is a child. Lily had to carry it, and push it out, ruining her body. That’s a big sacrifice, Ati explains, for a woman to ruin her body like that. Ah oui, many men who have known Lily in her pre-baby days are mourning her statuesque body. It’s gone, they say . . . for eternity.