Chapter Eight

I wasn’t feeling particularly happy with this smoking business, however. I knew, of course, that there is a strong correlation between nicotine addiction and alcoholism. Almost no one in the developed world smokes anymore except for the lushes. Eighty percent of all alkies smoke. As for the other 20 percent—the health-conscious drunks and pill poppers who only eat organic foods and manage to stay the onset of the inevitable booze gut through a rigorous devotion to Pilates and daily runs as they shovel fistfuls of Vicodin down their gullets followed by three bottles of red wine (red because it’s heart smart)? They pick up smoking once they get to rehab.

It’s true. At my particular institution of choice, we were allowed just one phone call a week. No Internet. No e-mail. Just one call. The first words out of my mouth were Send a carton of smokes now. They say that for the alcoholic giving up the drink, a yawning void suddenly opens up and it needs to be filled pronto. In rehab, it’s filled with nicotine. This is a dumb thing to do, of course, but people going through withdrawal aren’t exactly feeling like the sharpest tools in the shed. Conventional wisdom says that you should only deal with one addiction at a time. This, of course, is the equivalent of telling an alcoholic that now would be a good time to take up a two-pack-a-day habit, maybe hit the casinos in Atlantic City, and develop a nice little sugar addiction. Science, however, tells us that it’s best to dispense with all the vices at the same time. If you’re going to suffer, might as well be efficient about it. Neurological tests done six months after treatment show that alcoholics who also refrained from smoking demonstrated far higher rates of brain repair than those who continued to smoke. So I’d quit again not long after I was discharged and assumed a health-conscious lifestyle. If life was going to suck for a while, best to get it done and over with.

And so I felt guilty as I danced with the nicotine devil again. I was the worst kind of smoker now—the moocher, the sort of person that refused to buy a pack of their own, thinking that it didn’t really count as long as I refrained from purchasing smokes myself. But smoking here satisfied some primal impulse. It was illicit, which in my way of thinking equated something good. It felt foolish and reckless—also a plus in my book. And it replicated what drinking did for me at the end—a brief rush, followed by dizziness, nausea, a skull-shattering headache, and waves of remorse. It was a perfect substitute. And, I reasoned, of the two addictions nicotine was far preferable to alcohol. Both will kill you, but only alcohol will turn you into a self-absorbed asshole.

If there is one island where we can do a little compare-and-contrast of the two addictions it is Hiva Oa. There are two celebrities buried in the Calvary Cemetery in Atuona, a surprisingly substantial town of 1,500 (a lot for the Marquesas) that lies in the shadow of a 4,000-foot eminence called Mount Temetiu, a striking prominence with a steep, verdant crest around which, on an otherwise sunny day, a swirl of puffy white clouds elicited a dramatic windswept plume, as if God’s hair dryer was now focused on its slopes. It was here that Jacques Brel lived his remaining years.

You know, of course, who Jacques Brel is, right? Neither did I. But he is, apparently, a legend in the francophone world. If I were to summarize, I’d call him the male Edith Piaf, a singer of chansons about loss, obsession, death, and all sorts of other cheery subjects. He was Belgian, so maybe that explains it. Have you ever met a happy Belgian? Exactly. But Brel was wildly successful, selling a gazillion albums and appearing in more than ten films in the fifties and sixties. And then he learned that he had a tumor on his lung. So what did he do? He bought a sixty-foot ketch and sailed off to the South Pacific.

I liked him immediately. When confronted with death, do you look it in the eye? No, you run away. He had planned on a three-month circumnavigation of the world, but perhaps summoning the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson, he elected to stay in the South Seas, and after a fifty-nine-day sail across the Pacific he found himself on Hiva Oa, which he would come to know as home. But why this island?

Legend has it that upon arrival, Brel encountered a few teenage boys strumming a guitar. Casually mentioning that from time to time he liked to carry a tune as well, the boys lent him their instrument, whereupon he sang a couple of his hits in his deep, lugubrious voice. When he finished, the boys regarded him silently, and then informed him that he can’t sing worth merde, and proceeded to demonstrate what a good Marquesan song sounded like. Brel enjoyed the response so much, and the implied promise of anonymity, that he elected to stay.

He took to a modest cottage in the hills above town and proceeded to pursue all sorts of ennobling endeavors. He built the first cinema in the Marquesas. He took up flying, soon buying a plane of his own, which he called Jojo, and used it as an air ambulance, ferrying the sick and the wounded to distant Papeete. Today, you can find Jacques Brel’s plane, a Beechcraft D50C Twin Bonanza, in a small museum in Atuona, a lovingly crafted space devoted to his memory. It reminded me of one of those small-town museums that display an assortment of curios and artifacts, all gathered by townsfolk with a great affection for the place and a determination that no one forget their little corner of earth. Jacques Brel was not long for this world, alas. He died of lung cancer at the age of forty-nine, and now lies in a simple, well-tended grave, surrounded by flowers and ferns, and stacks of stones where visitors deposit their prayers and remembrances. He was a smoker, obviously, but more importantly he was a good, noble, altruistic person, so score one for the smokers.

Now let’s consider the active alcoholic/addict. A few yards from Brel’s final resting place lies another grave. It’s unusual in that above it, on the hillside, are acres of white crosses, the tombs of priests and nuns and devoted Catholics, whereas this one is made of red volcanic rocks, and instead of a cross or headstone, it is lorded over by a statue of a wild man, a paean to La Vie Sauvage. At its base is a simple, white, hand-painted inscription—PAUL GAUGUIN 1903.

As I stood before it, I found myself next to Mareile. Many of the passengers had elected to board a bus for the short journey from the pier to the cemetery, and we had walked together, stopping first at a black sand beach, and departing moments later after we were enveloped in a blizzard of no-nos, which are the planet’s most irritating insects, and reason enough to bring back DDT (I jest. Mostly). As we’d walked, we’d discussed Gauguin. Yes, he made nice pictures, and, yes, his impact upon the art world was enormously influential, but I was more interested in the man himself. As we approached his grave, I asked Mareile about what was known about Gauguin’s vices—what did he consume and how much? This was the sort of minutia I was interested in.

“In 2003,” she said, “we excavated a pit next to his home, where we found bottles of wine, absinthe, and morphine. Matching it to store records, we estimated that on a typical day, Gauguin drank a bottle of wine, a few draughts of absinthe, followed by some morphine. So you see, it wasn’t so much.”

So scratch moving back to Europe. Obviously, I can’t live there again. In much of Europe you’re not considered an alcoholic until you wake up underneath a highway overpass and begin your morning with a shot of antifreeze and a gulp of perfume, followed by a lunch of vanilla extract and a pint of mouthwash, and then you tumble through the remainder of your day, waving at your neighbors who merely regard you as a devilish bon vivant. Knowing a little something about how an alcoholic operates and the extraordinary acts of subterfuge involved in covering one’s tracks, I suspected that Gauguin imbibed a trifle more than that—you need only read his writing to realize that he was a seriously fucked-up individual—but let’s say for the sake of argument that a bottle of wine, an unknown amount of absinthe, and a few shots of morphine constituted his daily intake. It would kill a normal man.

Let’s ignore the wine altogether. Thomas Jefferson drank a bottle a day. Lots of people do. If I’d been able to maintain that level of drinking, it’s unlikely that I would have ever given it up. But absinthe? The old-school 150-proof green nectar, the spirit known for its hallucinogenic qualities, the firewater that by 1915 was banned throughout Europe and the United States? Mixed with morphine, the most powerful opiate ever created? That shit will mess you up. In fact, the two sedatives will conspire with your brain and tell it, hey, let’s not bother with this breathing business. Let’s just . . . drift off. Did you get that, kids? Do not mix opiates with alcohol. You’ll pass out and the next thing you know you’re face-to-face with Ganesh.

Obviously, it takes years to acquire that kind of tolerance. If you do a trajectory of Gauguin’s life, you can match the progression of the disease with the ever-flourishing degree of asshole-dom that he exhibited. Born in Paris in 1848, Gauguin moved to Peru as a wee lad, getting an early jump on the itinerant life that he would pursue until his death. He returned to France, spent some time in the navy and the merchant marine, and began a career as a stockbroker. He’d married and soon found himself the proud papa of five children. Paul Gauguin, at this moment in time, is Mr. Bourgeois himself. And then he took up painting.

It is here where your opinion of him all comes down to your perception, your disposition, your values. For many, this is all that matters: A gifted man found his calling and in the years to come filled canvas after canvas with brilliant, inspired strokes, enriching the cultural heritage of the world. Let the art speak for itself, most will say. The foibles and personal failures of the artist have no relevance. Art for art’s sake.

Then there are the romanticists, the ones who see in Gauguin a noble, burning vision, a brave willingness to unshackle himself from the pedestrian, suffocating mores of the day, the savage aflame with the pursuit of art. Gauguin abandoned his family in Denmark, where he’d gone to pursue a business that went sour. No matter, the dream beckoned and he wandered first to Brittany and then Provence, where he spent his time painting, carousing, acquiring syphilis, and hanging out with Vincent van Gogh, who had two ears at the start of their friendship, but just one at the end. Make of that what you will. But here Gauguin acquired his extraordinary palette of colors, the breakthrough style that somehow took the best of impressionism, symbolism, and naturalism, and created a new visual language, one that spoke to Cézanne and Matisse and Picasso and generations of artists to follow. He yearned for simplicity, the primal, the savage, and in its pursuit he moved onward to Martinique, to Tahiti, and finally to the Marquesas, to Hiva Oa, where he died in penury, because our silly, narrow-minded world could not fathom his brilliance. He was dazzling, misunderstood, and an inspiration for those willing to sacrifice everything for the immortality of beauty.

Or you could put on your schoolmarm’s glasses and simply regard Paul Gauguin as an alcoholic/addict doing what is called the geographic, the ceaseless moving to escape his own asshole self. I know: Pot meet kettle. I have considerable expertise in asshole-dom, it’s true. I know of what I speak. Leave the kids at home alone late at night as I go out and search for one more bottle. Passing out midday and forgetting to pick up these very same children from school. The endless lies. The going off on weekends so I could quote work unquote and drink myself into oblivion. And these are the people I love more dearly than life itself, and yet, in the throes of addiction, that was what I was reduced to—an asshole. It’s why in meetings, I think we need to change our standard greeting. It should be: Hi, I’m Maarten. And I’m an assoholic. The recent advances in the neuroscience of addiction are all well and good, but for the afflicted, in order to move on, it’s best to acknowledge what, exactly, we truly are when we imbibe—incorrigible assholes.

Which is why Paul Gauguin interests me so much. It’s not his paintings, wood carvings, and sculptures, though I do admire them and think they rightfully belong in the pantheon of the greats. No, what rings my bell is the sheer depravity of his asshole-ness. We don’t even need to look to outside sources for confirmation of his loathsomeness. Just pick up Noa Noa, his little book about his time in Tahiti. Right there on page fourteen, after encountering “young women and young girls, tranquil of eye, pure Tahitians,” he goes on to describe their inner lives: “All, indeed, wish to be taken, literally, brutally taken without a single word. All have the secret desire for violence.” In this way, he continues, “she has not given her consent for the beginning of a permanent love . . . it has a savage sort of charm.”

Now, I grant you, I never read Fifty Shades of Grey, so what do I know? But I’m going to guess that being mauled by a goateed, pot-bellied Frenchman with a Pinocchio nose, reeking of liquor and with the dead-eyed stare of the morphine-addict, probably doesn’t figure very prominently in the fantasy lives of women, young or old, islander or continental. But Gauguin wasn’t really interested in grown women. He was a pedophile, a syphilitic sexual tourist who in between painting and getting plastered abused girls and young women by the score, leaving a trail of infections and unwanted children in his wake. He claimed to yearn for freedom from civilization and artifice, to live unmoored by rules and custom, so that he could pursue a higher, truer existence, the life of the savage, a term he fetishized. It was his reasoning, his justification for the life that he led, which was sordid and unhappy. Reading Noa Noa is like reading the mawkish notes of the criminal rationalizing the crime. Tahiti left him “brutally disappointed.” It was too civilized for him, and he departed for farther shores, to Hiva Oa. He too has a museum here, and you could tell right away that it was an official, government-sanctioned kind of Cultural Center with sterile videologues, sanctimonious descriptions about his life and work, and a re-creation of his Maison du Jouir, or House of Pleasure, complete with a fishing pole dangling from the second-story open window, which Gauguin used to fetch his bottles from his well. This, I think, was meant to convey something charming and rascally about Gauguin. Of course, what I saw was the ingenious solution to that most intractable of problems confronting the addict/alcoholic—stairs. They are a fucking nightmare when you’re fucked-up. You think it’s a coincidence that most of us end up in a double-wide trailer instead of a fifth-floor walk-up? No, that’s what passes for forethought among junkies and drunks.

There is no original art remaining in the museum, just desultory reproductions. His years on Hiva Oa must have been miserable ones. He did not have long to live as his body was ravaged by advanced alcoholism and syphilis. Or perhaps it was a fatal dose of morphine that finally did him in. More telling, is the stunning absence of friends or companions during his last days on Hiva Oa.

Standing before his tomb, which, I noted, carried far fewer prayer stones than Jacques Brel’s plot, I turned to Mareile.

“He’s not really there, is he?” I said, pointing to the grave.

“Probably not,” she acknowledged.

“So, we’re just standing here looking at a pile of rocks.”

“Most likely.”

“And, any idea where his bones might lie?”

“Well, they could be in a mass grave in the old, overgrown cemetery. More likely, he was buried in the bush somewhere. He was just regarded as another poor, dissolute foreigner on the island. He wasn’t the only one. And when they died they just disposed of the bodies as they saw fit.”

See, alcoholism/drug addiction bad. Smoking okay. No one misses Paul Gauguin. We’re not even sure where he is. Sure, we like his work, though knowing a little more about him, I can’t quite figure out why his paintings command the big bucks. They seem so idyllic, so natural, so innocent, and yet, if you know anything about their creator, you realize that they are morally fraudulent. These are no celebrations of the primitive, the pure, the uncorrupted. They now seem cloying and sentimental to me, except for his self-portraits, which are unsparing and painted with a gimlet eye chronicling the wreckage of the passing years.

As I walked through the town—there really isn’t much to see, frankly—I found a tourist office, which surprised me, because as far as I could tell there weren’t any tourists, save for ourselves, and we’d just be lingering for a couple of hours, perusing the lives of a couple of dead men. I walked in, met a friendly young Marquesan woman, and asked in French whether she happened to have a lot of visitors to Hiva Oa these days. “Non.” She smiled, shrugging her shoulders. And then she thought about it for a moment. “Quelques Chinois.”

I swear you cannot go anywhere in this world without running into the Chinese. Which is good, and bodes well for the future. Travel is the great mediator between cultures. Also, I lived in hope that mainland Chinese tourists would descend en masse on the world’s so-called Chinese restaurants and give the owners a stern talking-to. What is this Won Ton Soup? And Sweet and Sour Chicken? And who the hell is General Tso? How about some real Chinese food? The people, they are a-yearning.

But I digress. I asked if she happened to know whether any of Gauguin’s descendants could still be found on Hiva Oa. Yes, she said. They lived on the north coast, in the village of Puama’u. Excellent, I thought. And did they take after their illustrious ancestor?

They have his nose, she informed me with a giggle. And a few are artists working with paint or charcoal.

And by chance might they be known for their fondness for drink.

“Ah oui, monsieur. Ils boivent beaucoup.”

Twelve cases of Heineken. Thirty-six cases of Hinano. Three cases of Orangina. One case each of Sprite and Fanta. Three cases of water. And one refrigerator.

Yes, I counted. This was what was off-loaded from the Aranui as we anchored off Puama’u. It’s a strange sort of village for the South Pacific. Elsewhere, people tend to live in a fairly compact area. The homes are near to each other and you’d rarely need to raise your voice to speak to a neighbor. Not so in Puama’u, which was an elongated sliver of a village, a mere three hundred people living as far away from each other as they could while remaining in the same jurisdiction.

We had come not for the town, however, but for the nearby Me’ae Lipona, perhaps the most important archeological site in the Marquesas, and home to an impressive eight-foot tiki, the largest outside of Easter Island. It is located in the shadow of a steep cliff, which back in the day was used as a defensive fortification and as an excellent place to bury skulls. It seemed like such a lofty and grand place, safe and sound, surrounded by the comforting skulls of your ancestors. As long as you weren’t squeamish about bones, it looked like a fine hangout, a place of contemplation, like a monastery on a hill. Heyerdahl had come here too, and of course, in his eyes every stone-gray statue was further evidence yet of the Marquesans’ Incan origins. There is, for instance, the “Flying Tiki,” which appears to be of a woman giving birth to a god, but has a kind of bas-relief upon which many see the image of a llama, which would be most unusual because there aren’t any llamas in the South Pacific. But where do we find llamas? In South America, of course. Some say that it’s actually an image of a dog, though many, speaking in a dark whisper, say that Heyerdahl intentionally defaced the tiki to make it appear that right here in the middle of the Marquesan jungle there just happens to be a South American llama. And over there, that stone tiki with the bulbous eyes? That could only be a Peruvian frog. It’s like beer goggles for archeologists. Put them on and you can see anything you want.

The entire site was well tended and cleared of brush, and as a consequence it made it more difficult to see, to feel the pulse of the place. I much preferred the glimpses of old settlements that I’d seen in the jungle, half buried under a new growth of trees and ferns, where you have to listen, to be still, to open your imagination to what once was. The Me’ae Lipona, in contrast, had been scrubbed and polished and now, for me, felt as lifeless as a museum exhibition. I like a building with soot on it. I prefer my medieval paintings stained with the smoke of incense and a thousand candles. And I like my tikis mossy and hidden amidst a tangle of banyan trees and ferns. Sometimes you need to see less to see more.

I walked back down to the village, which was fronted by a golden-sand beach, a rarity in the Marquesas. I took note of the waves, which were big and frothy, and dove in for a swim. Soon I was joined by the rest of the contingent of Aranui passengers and now the real carnage began. You could tell right away who was a coastal dweller and who lived far inland, where waves and oceans were about as familiar as unicorns and leprechauns. The former always beheld the water, its movements, the sudden onset of a particularly gnarly set of dumpers, and dove and bobbed accordingly. The landlubbers waded in waist-high, right into the break zone, turned to look at the shore, perhaps to smile for a picture, as a wall of water rose above them, peaked, curled, and broke upon them, smashing them underwater, the poor souls emerging with bathing suits askew and startled faces and battered bodies. And no matter how often you yelled Attendez it would happen over and over again, causing me to doubt in the healing powers of neuroplasticity, because here, very clearly, was some novel stimuli that demanded a swift adaptation in behavior, and yet it never came. Again and again it happened to the very same people. Just turn the fuck around, I felt like yelling, as I cringed every time they were smashed and held under and swept forth in the collapsing froth. Man, I thought, how is it that some of you are still in the gene pool?

And just when the impeding catastrophes could not get any worse, they did. Three local boys had now joined us, mounted on steeds, and proceeded to run their horses through the clumps of visitors, whether in the shallows of the sea or on the beach itself. They’d wait until they could sneak up on them and then send their horses into a gallop, missing the pensioners by inches. I could only endure this for so long before I yelled, Arrêtez. C’est dangereux, you dim-witted punk-ass sons of bitches. But then I noticed their big noses and figured that here were a bunch of little Gauguins. These apples, clearly, didn’t fall far from the tree.

Finally, I gave up and just watched the mayhem unfold from a log in the shade, where I was soon joined by Marc, a Frenchman, who spent his time between the Marquesas and Patagonia in Chile. He’d lived between the two for twenty years now. Clearly, this was a man ready for the apocalypse. To which he readily agreed, beginning a long exposition on the grim madness of our global economic system, its glorification of consumption as the end-all-be-all measurement of human progress, the surge of inequality, the perfidy of the bankers, the utter insanity of polluting our atmosphere to the point of irreversible climate change, the instability and suffering that will be unleashed for the generations to come, the tragic shortsightedness of inflicting such pain on our planet for the sake of a few dollars more for a very few, the inability of our political systems to address the globe’s problems, the prevailing sense that we were on the cusp of some catastrophic, unstoppable change that would alter the face of the earth and all who reside upon it.

Wow, I thought. I always figured I was bad at small talk. But I found myself nodding, uh-huh, exactly, as he articulated my own inchoate sense of the world. But this was why I loved these serendipitous encounters on the road. Sometimes you need to travel far to see your own thoughts articulated into words. Marc had lived in the Marquesas long enough to have known Gauguin’s daughter, who had died at the age of eighty-one. “She was a slim Polynesian woman with long gray hair and Gauguin’s nose. Her mother had her at the age of thirteen, the same year Gauguin died. The family didn’t think much of Gauguin. If anything, they harbor a sense of shame. They felt that he was a drunken pervert, no different really from so many other foreigners who washed up here during that time. Their perspective is very much framed by the Catholic Church. The Church despised Gauguin. He was always trying to prevent people from working on roads or schools or churches. He wanted his vie sauvage.”

We watched the men unload the cases of Heineken and Hinano, as the boys on their horses continued to terrorize the pensioners, while still others continued with their ocean battering. And I thought, it’s funny how after a while, a skull-strewn redoubt on a quiet clifftop deep in the jungle can seem like the most placid spot on the planet. Sometimes, when searching for serenity, it’s best to be among the dead. They don’t drink; they no longer abuse the living; their sense of humor has presumably evolved (and no longer consists of terrorizing the old with charging horses); they are wise to nature and unlikely to get battered by a wave; they just lie there, body-less, with empty sockets staring into the void. Sure, their craniums may have been bashed in by a war club, but they seem to have accepted it now, and moved on, staring blankly at infinity—and God knows what resides there—and I resolved to find a skull or two when I got home. Nothing quite preaches perspective like the wide-eyed stare of another’s scalp. So I was grateful to be here in the Marquesas. I’d found something else to look into. Next time I’m in a flea market and I see a skull, that thing is mine.