This is Me, Jack Vance

by Jack Vance

  The following day we returned to Casablanca, where we took a ship to the Canary Islands. We landed in Tenerife and spent the night in a hotel, regarding which I remember little other than the supper we were served there. This was a liver stew, which turned out to be quite palatable. The next day we ferried to Gran Canaria. Here, after a certain amount of investigation, we discovered La Solana, a house about fifteen miles south of Las Palmas. La Solana was notable because the previous tenants, Americans, had written a book about the place. We read this book, and everything they had written about their surroundings we could apply to ourselves.

  We spent a pleasant two months at La Solana. I wrote and practiced my cornet; we dined upon the meals provided by Carmela, the cook we had hired.

  In the museum of Las Palmas, to my great surprise, I came upon a set of paintings produced by the artist-in-residence entitled Poem of Atlantis. By coincidence I had previously discovered these pictures reproduced in an art book and had pasted them into my scrapbook.

  In due course we left the Canaries, returned to Casablanca and flew to Dakkar, where we boarded the train which was to take us to Timbuktu.

  Along the way we encountered a plague of locusts which flew into the window and permeated the car, giving Norma a great fright; ever after she became squeamish at the word “locust”. We arrived at a town called Bamako, and as we spent the night in the hotel I took stock of our finances. We had $1,800, which at the time was enough to get us to Timbuktu and across to the east coast of Africa one way or another…but then what? On the other hand, it was enough to get us back home. And since I had not received any money in the mail, and had no immediate prospects of receiving any, I began envisioning Norma and I stranded at Timbuktu, sitting in the market square, singing and dancing and holding out alms bowls. We cowered, turned around the next day, Timbuktu at our backs, a dream-place we would never visit. We returned to Dakkar, boarded an airplane to Lisbon and another back to our safe, snug home in California where again we kissed the ground and gave thanks to the spirits which inhabited eucalyptus trees.

  The next situation of any consequence, aside from our activities working on the house, making improvements, throwing what remained of the old shack out the window, was the birth of our son John, which of course was the preeminent event of our lives so far. It was 1961.

  John was a nice baby. He never yelled, or at least never to excess. When he was four years old he would dry the dishes while I washed, and I taught him multiplication tables while we did the dishes. Being an awfully smart kid, he learned them instantly.

  During these times I did a lot of writing—besides working on the house, as always—and we had parties. Many of these were musical parties. I took Tony Boucher to a jam session one night; he was much impressed, never having been to any such occasion before. I saw a great deal of Poul Anderson. He and I used to go out once a week or so to have lunch, and these occasions were always pleasant. I met Al Hall the guitarist. There have been two Al Halls in my life: one played piano and trombone, and the other guitar. This latter is still alive and lives in Mendocino and we are still in touch.

  Eventually, the little wander-bug began biting again, and at a point when I had sold something to make a little money, and when there seemed to be more money in the offing, Norma and I decided to take a trip in a different direction: namely, to the west. This time it was Tahiti that beckoned.

  Preparations were made; and one day in 1965 we set off.

  Chapter 7

  “I teie nie mahana

  Ne tere no oe e Hati

  Na te Moana!”

  “Let us sing and make merry,

  For we journey over the sea!”

  Tahitian festal song

  We arrived at the Faaa’s International Airport, three miles southwest of Papeete, and for the first day or so put up in a rather run-down hotel. A few days later we came upon a house for rent in the district known as Paea, near the beach about twelve miles east of Papeete. The house itself was plain but nicely furnished, and the setting was almost too perfect to be true. Next door was a Chinese grocery, where beautiful loaves of French bread sold for 10¢ apiece, and the beach was fifty yards away. We also had access to a dugout canoe.

  We settled in, set up housekeeping, and began to churn out fiction. These were absolutely idyllic circumstances. Along the driveway were pineapple bushes, although I don’t think we ever harvested any pineapple. In the back yard was a lime tree full of fruit, in the front a custard apple tree, which dropped custard apples on the roof of our house, which always made a thunderous bang. For supplies unavailable at the Chinese grocery, Norma rode the bus into Papeete and then back, which was no great ordeal. The Tahitian ladies doted upon Johnny. Our beach fronted on the lagoon, and I usually went swimming every day. I tried to teach Johnny to swim; he wasn’t quite ready for it, but he liked to dabble around in the water. Norma found a place where the tides left shells, and she formed a daily habit of going out and combing the shore for beautiful shells.

  We received news of an unfortunate occurrence back in New York. One of Scott Meredith’s associates sold one of my stories to Frederick Pohl, who was currently editor of Galaxy magazine, but then unwittingly sold the same story to another publication. This meant that Fred Pohl could not use the story and there was all hell to pay. Scott Meredith fired the guilty associate, but no one made any move to reimburse me, so I simply gritted my teeth and sat down to write another story for Fred. This became The Last Castle, which turned out to be a pretty good story.

  Cannibalism was never practiced on Tahiti—at least so I am told, although it was once common practice among the Marquesas. At one time Tahiti was divided into a dozen or so districts, each inhabited by a tribe, often at war with its neighbor. When a member of one tribe ventured into the center of the island in order to hunt wild pig, and came upon a warrior from another tribe, he had to make a choice: they could either fight, or one of them could hold up his hands in a sort of salute, and say: “Iorana!” which means, “I give you your life.” The other would shout back the same phrase, then the two would perhaps bow to each other and continue hunting for wild pig.

  One day I joined Norma on a shopping trip into Papeete. When the shopping was accomplished we had lunch in a Chinese restaurant, which was much like Chinese restaurants everywhere else in the world. Norma visited the restroom, and when she returned she reported that a sign hung in the stall saying: “YOU ARE BEING WATCHED! THROW NOTHING IN THE TOILET!”

  As we rode back to Paea, aboard the bus I thought to refresh myself and pulled the top off a can of beer. A middle-aged man was sitting on the bench across from us. He looked nervously toward the driver, then shook his head at me. He said, “Stow that beer—if the cops see you, they’ll throw you in jail.”

  As I recall, I continued to drink the beer, but surreptitiously, with guilty looks in all directions, and I got talking to the gentleman who had warned us. So I found out later, he was no gentleman; he was a scalawag and a beach-comber named Alf Kinander. He got off the bus in Paea as we did, and I invited him into the house, and there we had some beer legitimately. Alf lived in a house not far inland. He was married to a Tahitian lady and they had five daughters, two of whom were married to American lawyers.

  During our stay in Tahiti, Alf Kinander and I saw much of each other, and I became attached to him. He had wonderful tales to tell, some of them not altogether credible, but always entertaining. His daughters, so he reported, had joined the Mormon church. I asked why on earth the Mormons. He said because the Mormons will walk the girls home; if they walk home by themselves, someone will rape them. I thought, well, that seemed as good a reason as any to be a Mormon.

  Kinander told me of haunted places and of witches, and of one witch in particular who had placed a curse upon him and who, he claimed, was causing him many small misfortunes. Alf at last confronted the witch and, threatening severe consequences, induced her to lay off her mischief. That brought and end to the witchery, according to Kinander.


  Kinander’s youngest daughter, Bernice, was at this time was three years old. Every year in July the Tahitians celebrate a French holiday and for a week there are all manner of festivities and dances and contests and great to-do. Many years after we had left Tahiti, I chanced upon an account of the year’s celebration in Tahiti, where it was announced that the beauty queen of Tahiti was Bernice Kinander.

  Several cottages away there lived a Cliff Katz. He was caretaker for a big barkentine anchored in the lagoon. I went out with him one day and looked over this barkentine; very impressive it was.

  We had several parties during our stay in Tahiti. At one of them, Cliff Katz and his sixteen-year-old daughter Hinano were on hand. As always, Hinano looked extremely cute, and her looks were enhanced by a little black hat she wore with a feather in it*. As Al Hall, who was visiting us, played the guitar, Cliff and Hinano danced, and it must be said that the Tahitian dance is a rather grotesque one, with the males performing one sort of antic and the females another.

  We had become friendly with our landlord, a middle-aged Tahitian with a large family, and one day we invited him to one our parties. At the appointed hour on the appointed day, a bus pulled into the driveway loaded with our landlord’s relatives, many playing guitars and singing, and with a big barrelful of ice and beer in the center of the bus. In my long checkered career I have participated in many parties of many sorts, but this was the most remarkable of my lifetime. There has never been anything like it.

  In Papeete there was a dance hall and saloon known as Quinn’s. It dated back to 1860 and was originally Quinn’s Ice Cream Parlor, and was known far and wide across the Pacific. In fact, Quinn’s was legendary. At one point it stopped being an ice cream parlor and became a cabaret. While Al Hall was in Tahiti, we visited Quinn’s twice. The second time we were there, we were sitting at a table and talking to two or three French legionnaires. The room was crowded with dancing people. While we were talking to these two we looked away for a moment; when we looked back one of them was missing. We looked around and saw that he was down on the floor. Somebody had knocked him off his feet. He got back up, looked around the dance floor, but could not determine who had performed this quiet deed. He stood there a while, shrugged, turned back and we continued our discussion. At some point we chanced to look away again, and once more the soldier fell to the floor, clouted by the same unseen assailant. He again picked himself up and looked around, but as before could not identify the perpetrator. We never did learn anything further; this particular soldier moved around the other side of the table, so that he was safe from further attacks.

  Al Hall returned to the States, and the house in Paea became rather lonely. One day Johnny wandered down the beach to play with his friends, and after an hour or so came wandering back. Some unknown individual had given him a fine haircut, pomaded his hair and combed it. It was as if this person, seeing this kid with the straggly hair, couldn’t bear the sight, and threw him into a barber’s chair.

  I finished writing whatever I was working on, and Norma and I decided that it was time to move on. It was hard to do so, since we had formed attachments to our friends Kinander and Katz, and to our landlord, and some Tahitians who lived across the street and with whom we had become acquainted. There was also a little girl named Fairo, who played every day with Johnny, and we had to say goodbye to her as well. The bus took us to the Faaa Airport, where we boarded a plane and set off to Australia.

  Twenty or thirty years later, Johnny and I had visited Australia to attend a science-fiction convention at which I was guest of honor. On our way home we stopped off in Tahiti to visit our friend Hayford Peirce, who lived there. We discovered to our consternation that Quinn’s, the legendary bar, had been torn down and replaced with a boutique or something equally frivolous. All right-thinking men regard this act as sacrilege. As far as I was concerned Quinn’s was the only landmark in the whole south Pacific of any significance, not counting perhaps Easter Island.

  Upon sober reflection, I feel that I must amend the above remark. There is another landmark in the South Pacific. It is on the island Mangareva, where a mad priest dragooned the population of the island to build an enormous cathedral, at the cost of how many lives I don’t know. The cathedral stands today on this forlorn island out to the east of Tahiti.

  Allow me to be discursive for a moment or two, because Mangareva is an interesting place. A few years back it was visited by a young anthropologist who wished to perform research upon the nature of the inhabitants. On a small nearby island he discovered that the ancient indigenes had dug tunnels into the mountainside, for what purpose he could not divine, but he proposed to find out. It appears that he was a man of good physique, about five-foot-ten inches tall, broad-shouldered, but the tunnels had been built by a race of people who in general were considerably smaller than himself. As I contemplate his activity, which occurred many years ago and many thousands of miles away, I can’t help to marvel at his audacity. I shudder when I think of the claustrophobia. In any event, he made his way along these tunnels down into the mountains, finding nothing, and finally came to a place where the tunnel curved sharply upward. He found himself unable to move forward and that the tunnel was too narrow to allow him to turn around. I forget now how he contrived to save himself, but he did by one means or another. I don’t want to be an anthropologist if it means exploring ancient tunnels.

  One more word about Mangareva. I have a book here by a man who went to live on Mangareva for a time. He inhabited a cottage beside a waterway. It seemed a pleasant place under the palm trees, but for some reason he found himself uncomfortable in this cottage. He was uneasy, could not sleep well, had bad dreams, was constantly nervous and looking over his shoulder. One day he mentioned his disquietude to a friend, who laughed and said, “Your disquiet is easily explained: you are living beside the area where the war canoes would return with captives and take them out and kill them, right beside your front door.” The gentleman moved to a new cottage, and immediately his fears and discomforts came to an end, and the bad dreams were a thing of the past.

  Upon leaving Tahiti we flew to Australia, but I am not going to dwell too long on this particular trip. We met Bertram Chandler, the writer, and we moved into an apartment on Bondi Beach close to the water. Bondi Beach is protected from sharks by a net a hundred yards out to sea. John was happy to play out in the sand, where he buried and lost the toy truck he had been given for his fourth birthday. Norma became ill; she went to the hospital and was diagnosed with hepatitis.

  In due course we all returned to California and life resumed. That first venture into Australia was not a success, but there would be others far more satisfactory.

  At home, life proceeded along familiar patterns. I worked on the house; Norma and I produced fiction. John and I dug in the hillside, thereby widening our back yard. When I think about it now, I am amazed by the amount of dirt John and I moved.

  At this time I embarked on a new project: I decided to build a houseboat. With great care I drew up the plans. The houseboat would float on two pontoons, each 32 feet long. There would be a forward deck about four feet wide, a control cabin, a main room, a bathroom and a back porch.

  Frank Herbert had moved down from Seattle and was now working on a newspaper in San Francisco. Frank and Poul Anderson decided to become partners in the houseboat venture. I build the pontoons in our front yard out of plywood, and I fiberglassed them carefully. When they were completed, we transported them by truck out to a marina around the bay at Point Molate, where they were to be launched into the water.

  Now I committed an egregious blunder. If I had thought about it, I could have very easily launched these pontoons single-handedly, by laying out planks and rollers and pushing the pontoons into the water. Instead I had to make a party of it, inviting many of my friends out to this beach, where I thought we would simply lift the pontoons and carry them into the water. For a time I had been deliberating as to how this should best be done, then so
meone—I forget who it was—became bored with my apparent indecision, and said, “Come on, let’s get these things in the water!” He and some others ran down, took the pontoons and dragged them—without lifting them—across the gravel-strewn beach and into the water. In the process they tore the fiberglass off the bottom of one of the pontoons. The other escaped unharmed.

  In any event, there were the two pontoons floating in the water. We floated them out around the piers to the berth where the construction of the house would proceed. There the day ended.

  Over the weeks that followed, Poul, Frank and I built the house. Most of the work fell on my shoulders, naturally, since Frank was forced to come over from San Francisco, and Poul was not a carpenter.

  The project had reached its final stages, and then one night disaster struck down from the sky. First a big storm blew in, and sent big waves crashing. At the same time the worms finally broke through the pontoon where the fiberglass had been scraped off, the pontoon filled with water, and the houseboat sank. I received a telephone call to the effect that the houseboat had gone under. When we arrived, we saw one corner of the houseboat sticking up out of the water and were, needless to say, dismayed.

  When the storm ended we surveyed the damage. Frank had had enough. He exited the program; he wanted nothing to do with a sunken houseboat. Poul and I were left to raise it ourselves. Poul could not enter the water because of ear problems, therefore it fell to me, Bill the Lizard.

  My nephew Steve assisted us in the operation. We took an air compressor out and eight fifty-gallon drums. I climbed into a wet suit and jumped into the water, and there, by careful manipulation—first filling the drums with water and guiding them under the houseboat, fixing them at the proper places, then pumping air into them from the compressor—the houseboat rose to the surface. We were thrilled by our victory over the elements! By now, if for no other reason, I gained a full and total respect for Poul Anderson, who had shown himself a truly staunch human being. I won’t say any more about Poul, except that to this day I think of him often.