Tiare in Bloom

by Célestine Vaite

  And to refresh Pito’s memory, Materena takes her husband’s hand in hers and talks about the day their eldest son found out the truth about prisons.

  A gendarme parks his car in front of the house and Materena, hanging clothes on the line, asks herself, “What is this gendarme doing at my house?” When Tamatoa gets out of the car, Materena shouts in her head, “But! What is my son doing in a gendarme’s car!” She forgets all about the clothes and rushes to the gendarme holding her son by the arm.

  “Good morning, Monsieur.” Materena looks at her son staring at his feet. The gendarme eyes the pegs clipped to Materena’s oversize T-shirt.

  “Are you the mother of this young boy?” he asks.

  “Oui, Monsieur.” Materena is full of respect and anxiety. Gendarmes don’t give lifts because they feel sorry for you walking. You must do something for a gendarme to give you a lift, something against the law. The thought that comes into Materena’s mind is that Tamatoa has been shoplifting. She hopes it wasn’t at the Chinese store where she does her shopping.

  “Your son was caught stealing,” the gendarme says, looking into Materena’s eyes with that air of superiority.

  “What did he steal?” Materena’s voice is shaking a little. “Lollies?”

  The gendarme gives Materena that cold stare gendarmes give when they think people are playing smart, and Tamatoa’s giggle only makes it worse. He yells, “Do not make me regret my leniency, Madame!”

  Materena jumps with fright and profusely apologizes and thanks the gendarme for his leniency, although she’s not quite sure what that word means. The gendarme calms down a little and informs the mother why this young thief is here today.

  It seems Tamatoa and another friend were having a little promenade at the airport, next to the jetty where people park their speedboats. And their canoes. Most canoes are chained to a pole, but one wasn’t, so what did Tamatoa and his friend do? They pushed the canoe into the water. And since there were paddles in this particular canoe, they started to paddle away. So here were the young boys paddling, and meanwhile, the owner of that canoe arrived to go fishing and found out that his canoe had been stolen. He contacted the gendarmerie, and this gendarme was sent out to write a full report. But on his way to the airport, he spotted two young boys pushing a canoe into the sand.

  The gendarme ordered the two young boys to carry the canoe back to where they had found it and introduced them to the owner of the canoe, who fortunately did not press charges.

  Materena glances at her son, still staring at his feet, and she really wants to smack him on the head, but she’ll do this later. Until then, she just gives him a very cranky look.

  To Leilani and Moana, peeping from behind the curtains, she gives a very cranky look too.

  The gendarme, now addressing himself solely to Tamatoa, says, “I will not be lenient next time, young boy. Do you understand me?”

  Tamatoa nods and Materena wishes he would look up.

  “Next time,” the gendarme continues, “there will be fingerprints.”

  And with this, he excuses himself and leaves.

  Materena waits until the car is fully out of sight to start giving Tamatoa his punishment, but he’s disappeared.

  “Tamatoa!” She’s even crankier now. “Come here right now!”

  “I wasn’t going to steal that old rotten canoe anyway!” Tamatoa’s voice is coming from inside the house. “It was only to borrow!”

  “When you borrow from people you don’t know, it’s called stealing!” Materena marches to the house. “Tamatoa?”

  “Ouais, what?” He’s in the kitchen, spreading butter on a piece of bread. He looks at his mother like, Can’t you see I’m busy?

  Ouh . . . Materena is going to get the wooden spoon and give that boy a lesson! But she can’t find that wooden spoon, and she wants that wooden spoon. The frying pan goes flying, plates are smashed, where is that spoon!

  Tamatoa is now spreading a thick layer of peanut butter on his bread. Materena picks up her frying pan, and the light flickering in her eyes cannot be mistaken for a light of joy. Tamatoa, firmly holding on to his sandwich, rushes out of the kitchen in a flash. His mother chases him, brandishing that frying pan, and threatening to hit him with it.

  The chase continues through the living room. Materena now has two helpers, the treacherous brother and sister, but Tamatoa moves here, moves there, jumps over the sofa, under the table. Three times Leilani nearly catches him. Materena wants to laugh now because it is so funny, all of them running around in the living room, but she reminds herself of the serious situation. She just won’t have any of her children coming home in the gendarme’s car!

  Moana gets hold of his brother’s leg. “I’ve got him, Mamie!” But Tamatoa shakes his leg and thumps Moana on the shoulders and now Moana is crying. Tamatoa bends over to see if his brother is okay but here comes Mamie with that frying pan.

  He flies out the shutter, he’s now climbing up the breadfruit tree like a monkey. Materena can’t believe Tamatoa’s audacity . . . and what agility! She didn’t know he was such a good climber. She throws the frying pan away and climbs up the tree too, muttering, “You wait until I get you!”

  But she’s getting a bit worried now. Tamatoa is still climbing, and what if he falls?

  “Tamatoa!” she calls out with her normal voice, not wanting to frighten him more. “When I tell Papi, he’s going to get his belt and give you some.”

  She doesn’t have to say more than that. Tamatoa stops and turns to his mother. “Are you going to tell Papi?”

  “Well, I’m going to have to,” Materena replies.

  “Non, please don’t tell Papi.” Tamatoa is pleading with all his heart and soul.

  Ah . . . Materena wished she had the power Pito has over the kids. All Pito ever needs to do to get some respect and obedience is cough. Or yell for one second. She can yell for hours and still nothing will happen. Especially when she’s yelling at Tamatoa.

  “Did you get him, Mamie?” Leilani and Moana call out from the shutter.

  “Oui,” Materena calls back. “You two go eat some chocolate cookies.”

  “Chocolate cookies?” the children say with delight.

  To Tamatoa, Materena says that he doesn’t deserve the chocolate cookies and to her other children she reveals the hiding place.

  “Now,” Materena says to Tamatoa. “We talk a little.” She makes herself comfortable on a branch, checking first that it is thick enough to support her weight.

  Speaking very seriously, Materena tells her son that when the police have your fingerprints, it means you have a police record, and when you have a police record, it means you are a criminal, and when you are a criminal, it means you can go to prison.

  She goes on about the inconvenience of having a police rec-ord: whenever there’s a break-and-enter or a fight, the first people the gendarmes suspect are people with a police record, and this has happened to her cousin Mori quite a few times. That’s why Mori always has to make sure that he’s never alone, so that he always has witnesses to testify to his whereabouts, and when he’s alone drinking, for instance, he can only drink under a tree by the side of the road for everybody to see.

  “Your uncle Mori,” Materena says, looking up to her son, sitting two branches higher, “is condemned to live in the public eye.”

  Another inconvenience of having a police record, Materena continues, is that you can’t get a job, because no boss wants an employee who has a police record working in the company. You can do a super interview and the boss can tell you, “You’ve got the job, welcome aboard!” but when he finds out about your police record, he’ll send you a letter instead to tell you that you didn’t get the job. This has happened to Mori. Mori has tried to get a job seventeen times (Materena exaggerates here a little), and seventeen times a boss has said to him, “Welcome aboard!” but three days later he’s gotten a rejection letter because of his police record and his visits to Nuutania Prison.

  Tamatoa e
agerly nods and Materena knows he’s only doing this so that she won’t tell his father about the canoe story. But perhaps he’s listening too.

  Materena goes on with her talk about prisons and how, according to her cousin Mori, who’s been there quite a few times, it is a horrible place to be. The food is horrible, the toilets are horrible, and the beds are not comfortable at all. The beds in prisons are special beds, made for discomfort to punish the prisoners. The prison, even if we Tahitians call it a five-star hotel, is definitely not a hotel.

  “But Mamie,” Tamatoa says. “It was only a canoe, and it was rotten. We nearly sank, that’s why we stopped paddling.”

  Ah hia hia, Materena is so annoyed. Her son didn’t get the message at all. “Eh,” she says angrily. “Have you heard of that saying, Qui vole un oeuf vole un boeuf?”

  “Qui vole un oeuf vole un boeuf?” Tamatoa obviously hasn’t.

  “You understand that wise saying?”

  Tamatoa shakes his head. No, that saying means nothing to him at all.

  “Today you steal an egg,” Materena says. “And tomorrow you steal a cow. Today you steal a canoe, tomorrow you steal a hi-fi system.”

  “But I didn’t steal anything!”

  Ouh, Materena is beginning to lose her patience and she’s about to growl something, when out of nowhere, Pito appears. He’s standing by the tree, eating a Delta Cream cookie and looking up to Tamatoa. “The whole neighborhood is talking about how you came home in a gendarme’s car,” he says. “What’s the story?”

  “Pito,” Materena hurries to say, cursing her big-mouth relatives. “I already smacked Tamatoa with the frying pan and I’m just —”

  “I’m talking to my boy, Materena. What’s the story?”

  Tamatoa tells his father the story, and by the end of it he sounds like he’s going to burst into tears.

  “You got caught!” Pito says. “That was pretty stupid.”

  “Luckily for Tamatoa, the gendarme didn’t take his fingerprints.” Materena is a bit put off by Pito’s slack comment. Let’s not move away from the seriousness of the situation. “When there’s fingerprints, there’s a police record, and then there’s the prison.”

  “You know what happens in prison?” Pito asks Tamatoa.

  “You eat horrible food?” Tamatoa replies.

  “Food!” Pito exclaims, stuffing the last piece of cookie in his mouth. “Prisoners don’t care about food. You know what they really care about?”

  “Non, Papi, I don’t know.”

  Pito swallows his Delta Cream and informs his son that what prisoners really care about the most is to keep their virginity, because in prison there are no women, and when there are no women, some men have to become the women. Sometimes willingly, more often not. Nonchalantly, Pito speaks of young men caught stealing TVs by the gendarmes, sent to prison, and ending up at the prison hospital to have their bum stitched up. “You understand what I’m saying, Tamatoa?”

  Tamatoa nods; he is very pale and so is Materena.

  Later, she asks Pito if he thinks this has happened to her cousin Mori. But all Pito will say is how gendarmes must have nothing else to do if they have to start the siren because a rotten canoe has been borrowed. What about catching the real criminals for a change?

  Well anyway, this is the story that Materena felt like telling Pito to reassure him and show him what a great father he was. Pito is reassured a little, but he cares more about the thought that has just popped into his mind.

  “Materena?”

  “Pito . . . I’m trying to sleep now.” To prove her point, Materena yawns a very tired yawn.

  “Was it hard for you without a father around?” Pito respects other people’s desire for sleep, but he’d like to know.

  “Oh, I had my uncles and my godfather too.”

  “I really think you should look for your father.”

  “I’m not ready yet.”

  “You’re never going to be ready.”

  A long silence.

  “Materena?”

  Either she’s fast asleep or she doesn’t want to talk about that subject tonight. Pito takes his wife into his arms and starts to think about two of his cousins, born from unknown fathers. They’ve never felt that they were less than the children who knew their fathers. It’s not a big thing in Tahiti to have Father Unknown written on your birth certificate; you’re not pushed aside. Some children know who their father is and others don’t, it’s simple. Sometimes the father is truly unknown, as is the case with one of the cousins, and other times the father is known but he can’t recognize the child because he’s married, as is the case with Pito’s other cousin.

  Both cousins are fine today, they have husbands, children, jobs — no problems. But it’s also true, Pito thinks, that when they get together and have a bit too much to drink, they talk about their fathers and how those men abandoned them.

  At the post office the next afternoon, Pito has a notebook in his pocket, a pen behind his ear, and six thick telephone books from France sprawled across the floor.

  “D-a,” he mutters, under his breath so that nobody can hear him, as he flicks the thin white pages. “D-a-c . . . D-a-d . . . D-a-v . . . D-e-b . . . Delors!”

  Old Story Disturbed

  How strange, thinks Materena, that she dreamed about her father last night. Actually, it was this morning, because when Materena opened her eyes, it was light. In the dream, she was about nine years old and standing by the rail on a ferry, holding the hand of a very tall man. Perhaps she was nine in the dream because she was nine when she first read her birth certificate with the phrase Father Unknown written on it.

  Materena, presently ironing one of her darling husband’s good shirts he wears at mass and other important events like baptisms, thinks back to that day she read her birth certificate for the first time. She remembers telling her mother, “You don’t know who my father is?”

  Loana got cranky. “Eh! What? Do you think I’d open my legs for men I don’t know? Of course I know the man who planted you inside me.”

  “Who is he?” Materena asked.

  But all her mother was prepared to reveal was the man’s nationality. “He’s French, that’s all you need to know for the moment.”

  Why should Materena dream about her father this morning? She’s never dreamed about him before, although she’s thought about him, quite a lot. What could this mean, Materena asks herself, lovingly hanging up the crisply ironed shirt. Is it a sign?

  In the dream, her father was wearing a long coat and he looked really sad. “Eh, Papa, eh,” Materena whispers, tears in her eyes. “I hope you’re fine.” She starts thinking that she should really search for her father as soon as possible. If she waits any longer, he might be dead by the time she finds him. Eh hia . . . the regrets will haunt her until she dies. Materena visualizes herself at her father’s grave. She’s on her knees, reading the writing on the cross. Tom Delors . . . Born . . . Died. Materena unplugs the iron and chases the negative image out of her head. It’s not wise, negative thoughts; they might come true. Materena hurries to picture her father playing golf.

  Later, on the way to the Chinese store to get a few bits and pieces, Materena stops as usual by the mango tree next to the petrol station for a quick hello to Cousin Mori with his eternal accordion (presently resting on the ground; Mori must be having a musical break).

  “Iaorana, Cousin.”

  The cousins proceed to kiss each other on the cheeks, and Materena immediately senses that something is bothering Cousin Mori today. He looks a bit bizarre. “Cousin? You’re fine?”

  Mori shakes his dreadlocks. “Can we talk a little?” He gets up and shows the rock he’s been sitting on, meaning, please take a seat. Materena sits on the rock, and Mori sits on the concrete, his legs crossed, facing his cousin.

  “I want to find my father,” he says at last.

  “Really!” Materena exclaims, thinking, What’s going on in the universe today?

  With a sad voice, Mori expla
ins that his life would have been different today had he known his father. He wouldn’t be a good-for-nothing for a start.

  “Mori . . .” Materena takes her cousin’s hand to squeeze it a little. “You’re not a good-for-nothing. You’re my nicest cousin, and you’re always helping people out. That doesn’t sound like being a good-for-nothing to me.”

  “Maururu, Cousin. I can always count on you to say nice words about me.”

  “I’m only saying the truth, Cousin.”

  “I really want to find my father,” Mori continues, “but Mama refuses to tell me his name and you can’t look for somebody who hasn’t got a name.”

  Materena confirms the fact.

  “When I ask Mama for the name of my father, she tells me, ‘Ah, leave me alone with this old story. I don’t know the name of your father’ and ‘Your father is me.’” Mori looks into Materena’s eyes. “Cousin, you know how I’m very good with playing the accordion?”

  “You’re wonderful with that accordion, Mori, you play like a professional.”

  Mori giggles and does his I’m-shy expression. “I don’t mean to show off to you but you know about my musical ear —”

  “You have a wonderful musical ear,” Materena agrees. “You only have to hear a song once to play it right. Pito used to say how he wished he had a musical ear like yours.”

  “Ah oui.” Mori nods several times. “You can still play without a musical ear but it’s better to have a musical ear and —” Mori pauses for a moment. “You know I’ve never had music lessons. No one has ever taught me to play the accordion. One day I found the accordion and the next day I was playing like I’d had an accordion for years. You don’t think it’s bizarre?”

  “Oui,” Materena admits. “It is a little bit bizarre.”

  “It’s bizarre because I was born with a musical ear.”

  “Oui, it could be.”

  “And I was born an accordionist.”

  Materena looks at Mori, then at his accordion, and says nothing.

  “I was born an accordionist,” continues Mori, “because my father, he is an accordionist, and I think he’s from Jamaica.”