The road ran black and straight and shining between tall plantations of coconut palms, through which was sometimes visible, a few hundred yards away, the black sand of the shore. Beyond that, a mile or more out to sea, great jagged white waves burst on the coral reef, tossed into air like waves of gigantic horses rearing in the sun.
‘Probably a good thing you didn’t bring your wife,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s bound to stink a bit down there.’
The doctor, an American, had a long face of loose indiarubber flesh, with shaggy brown eyebrows and a kindliness of demeanour that was also preoccupied. Our friendship sprang from the fact that I had helped him to look after a parcel of bugs as we came to Tahiti, across the Pacific, by seaplane. These bugs were larvae of a very large mosquito, an African species of cannibalistic habits that preyed on other mosquitoes, and it was the doctor’s hope that presently they would also begin to prey on the mosquitoes of Tahiti.
‘And will that help the elephantiasis?’ I said.
‘It might do. It’s a chance,’ he said. ‘I believe in taking all the chances.’
When we got out of the car, some time later, the road had narrowed to a track of hot grey dust in the sun. Under the palms lay many fallen coconuts, each a green football with a hole in it, neatly bored.
‘It is an interesting cycle,’ the doctor said. We paused in the scalding sun and looked at the many punctured coconuts. ‘The rat climbs the coconut palm and eats a hole in the coconut. The coconut falls and rain fills the hole with water. Mosquitoes breed in the water and fly off and bite an elephantiasis subject. Then they fly off again and bite someone who is not an elephantiasis subject but who, thanks to the mosquito, very soon will be.’
We began walking along a narrow path bordered on both sides by hedges of orange and crimson hibiscus, overlaid here and there with allamanda creepers bearing the softest yellow bells. At one place the flowers grew high enough to flash with brilliance against the far tossing white waves of the coral reef and suddenly sea, palms and flowers looked enchanting in the sun.
‘The island is really very beautiful,’ I said.
‘An absolute lotus land.’
Presently there were no flowers: only occasional ragged banana trees and dusty bronze and yellow crotons with panting dogs lying in the dust beneath them.
‘There are so many damned paths down here,’ the doctor said, ‘I’m never sure of the right one.’
Wooden shacks roofed mostly with palm frond but occasionally with pink corrugated iron began to appear everywhere under the coconut palms.
‘This is it,’ the doctor said. ‘I always remember because of the bridge.’
The bridge was a single plank leading over an oozing grey-brown sewage gutter.
I followed the doctor across it and called: ‘Who are you going to see here, doctor? Tahitians or Chinese?’
‘Chinese,’ he said. ‘I’m going to try to get a man to take his pills.’
We were sitting, presently, in the compound of a wooden house in which there were several shallow water tanks. In the tanks three Chinese, two men and a woman, were washing vegetables. The woman was trimming spinach. When she had trimmed the spinach she dropped it into the tank and then paddled her bare feet in the water. The men paddled their feet in other tanks, one filled with watercress, the other with lettuces.
‘I’ve always heard the Chinese were good at vegetables,’ I began to say.
‘Institut Filariasis,’ the doctor said.
He said this loudly, several times, addressing the Chinaman who was paddling his feet in watercress. The man wore a pair of shorts the colour of an oil-rag from a garage but was otherwise naked except for a flat straw hat.
He grinned several times and nodded, showing the remains of three yellow teeth in a mouth that was so thin and so fleshless that it looked almost skeletonised.
‘Institut Filariasis,’ the doctor said.
He said it several times in French, and then in English, in a strong American accent, as if he hoped that this would serve him better.
The Chinaman nodded impassively, paddling in watercress.
‘Pills,’ the doctor said. He said that too in French and then, more emphatically, in English.
The Chinaman paddled water and stared.
‘He’s promised to take the pills fifteen times already,’ the doctor said to me. ‘Last week he promised to take them today.’
The doctor took out of his trouser pocket a bottle of white capsules and began to unscrew the stopper. Seeing the capsule, the Chinaman, in a sort of pidgin French, began speaking very quickly. He stopped paddling his feet and made several gestures with skinny hands towards the sea. All the time the doctor sat watching him with a sort of ponderous sadness.
‘What does he say?’ I said.
‘He is afraid to take the pills because he is fishing tonight. He says the pills will make him sick and he will faint and fall overboard.’ He raised his voice and spoke in French to the Chinaman. ‘The pills will not make you sick!’
The Chinaman let his mouth fall open, scratching his ribs at the same time.
‘It is impossible for the pills to make you sick so that you will fall overboard,’ the doctor said.
From out of the spinach tank the woman padded across the dust and hen-droppings of the compound to fetch, from under a tree, another basket of leaves. As she came back, tipped the spinach into the tank and paddled her feet in it once more I had a sudden impression, deep in my throat, that the steaming air had sickened.
‘Look,’ the doctor said. He poured two capsules into the palm of his hand and held them up to the Chinaman. ‘Take them now. They will not make you sick. Let me see you take them now.’
The Chinaman stood up to his calves in watercress, staring, and did not move. By the tap above the tank stood a cup. The doctor picked it up, turned on the tap and filled the cup with water. Then he held out the capsules in one hand and the cup in the other.
‘It is very important,’ he said in French. ‘It is impossible for me to go until you take them.’
The Chinaman said something very quickly again.
‘What does he say?’
‘He says the big chief over at Bora-Bora wouldn’t take them and if the chief is not obliged to take them why should he?’
‘Is that right?’
‘Unfortunately.’
His face was sweating now. His pouched indiarubber skin had flagged a little under the scalding sun. His air of slightly sad and preoccupied patience had left him for a moment and now he snapped at the Chinaman with a dozen cryptic words.
A moment later the Chinaman had the capsules in his hands. Then before putting them into his mouth he took the cup of water, drank it quickly and then filled it up again. The tortured skeleton of his face sucked at the water greedily and then suddenly he threw back his head and took the pills.
From the spinach tank the woman, in the high-pitched Chinese way, began laughing. The other man began laughing too, splashing water over his arms and calves at the same time. The Chinaman with the pills in his mouth stood for a moment impassively watching and then, filling and re-filling the cup, began swilling his mouth with water.
The woman with her high-pitched voice began giggling again and then took up, from beside the tank, a tin kettle, speaking for the first time to the doctor, who turned to me.
‘They wish us to have tea,’ he said. ‘Would you care to have tea?’
‘Would you?’
‘I have to get out,’ the doctor said.
The air was full of a smell of thickening hot decay. We shook hands with the three Chinese and said goodbye several times, first in French and then in English. The man and the woman who had not taken the pills stood respectively in lettuce and spinach, grinning. The man who had taken the pills looked at us with implacid downcast eyes.
At the top of the path, where air moved more freely among the talls palms, the hibiscus and the yellow creeper bells, I said to the doctor:
‘Well, that was a win for you. You triumphed there.’
‘He was holding them under his tongue all the time,’ he said, ‘the way they always do.’
Two minutes later we were driving along the black shining road beneath the palms. By the roadside there were many hedges of hibiscus and sometimes in the gardens tall forests of ginger-lily, like stiff gigantic ears of crimson corn.
As we drove along the doctor put his head out of the window and drank in deep draughts of cooler, rushing air.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘This is Tahiti.’ He drew in his head at last and waved one arm expressively, with slight sadness, towards the palms. ‘What will you tell them when you get back?’
I looked beyond the palms and the black sand of the shore to where, far out, waves were bursting on the reef like the gigantic manes of thundering snow-white horses.
‘I shall tell them,’ I said, ‘about the lotus land.’