FOURTEEN
TAHITI
BACK IN TAHITI to do more research on the life and times of Paul Gauguin, I’m assigned to meet a man called Jules. I know nothing about him; I don’t know where he lives or what he looks like. Waiting somewhat anxiously as various vehicles draw up outside my Papeete hotel, I scan them all for a Jules who’s looking for a Graeme. Then, a few minutes after the appointed time, a silver Peugeot 307 draws up on the forecourt and a middle-aged man heaves himself out from behind the wheel. He wears shorts, a ming-blue tropical shirt and baggy navy-blue shorts.
‘M’sieur Graeme?’
‘Oui. Jules?’
‘Yes.’
‘Enchantez, M’sieur.’
‘Pleased to meet you, too.’
Jules is a large man. A very large man. Not in height – he’s shorter than I am – but in girth. He has the build of a Bulgarian wrestler. He also has large ears, a scrubby little moustache, and a head as big, round and hairless as a Moeraki boulder. As we drive out of Papeete towards the east coast of Tahiti, he provides me with the condensed version of his life. Jules has been many things: a translator, a union delegate, an industrial mediator, a teacher and an installer of tinted windows in automobiles. At the moment he drives the school bus on Moorea and guides people like me around Tahiti.
Jules also tells me he was brought up a Mormon but has abandoned that faith, although he still does not drink or smoke. His accent retains traces of his early years in New Mexico with his parents, so that as well as speaking English fluently – his conversation is sprinkled with words like ‘paradoxically’, ‘discerning’ and ‘sophisticated’– he does so with a Speedy Gonzales accent. He speaks French and Tahitian with equal facility, along with a little German, as befits a man whose bloodlines are European and Polynesian. His English grandfather emigrated to the Marquesas in the 1890s and became a trader on the island of Hiva Oa, where he married a local woman and got to know Paul Gauguin.
Jules is a fountain of knowledge about French Polynesia. I’ve never met anyone who knows so much about the history of the place, and about who’s currently doing what to whom and for how big a rake-off. It’s a reminder that Tahiti is really one big village where everyone monitors everyone else’s fortunes extremely closely. But there’s nothing malicious about Jules: all the gossip he passes on to me is harmless enough – and undeniably interesting. Married for more than thirty years to a Chinese woman with whom he has three adult children, Jules has recently divorced her in favour of a twenty-two-year-old woman ‘younger than my daughter’. ‘My honey’, as he refers to her, was one of his students in Papeete. Jules sighs contentedly. ‘And now,’ he muses dreamily, ‘life is very good again.’
Jules drives us down the wild east coast of Tahiti, where the sea is rough and driven hard on to the rocky shore by south-easterly trade winds, then turns off the coast road and up a valley. ‘You been here before?’ he inquires.
I peer around. ‘No, never.’
‘This is the Faarumai valley,’ Jules announces. He slows the car to a crawl along the narrow road. ‘A very lovely place.’
Enclosed by walls of volcanic rock, the valley floor is covered with plantation crops: taro, bananas, breadfruit, beans and tomatoes. It is a real-life Garden of Eden. Spread among the trees are small bungalows and lean-tos surrounded by fruit trees and vegetable gardens which seem to burst from the rich, dark soil. About five kilometres long, it tapers to its end at a parapet of sheer rock hundreds of metres high, down which three separate waterfalls cascade into a large shiny pool. Through the waterfalls’ gossamer mist a rainbow appears, its colours shimmering in the still air. Surrounding the pool is dense forest, through which a walkway and a viewing platform have been built. Standing on the platform, I peer up into the mist. High above the valley head, the river which feeds the waterfalls spills over a cleft in the rock.
‘Beautiful place, uh?’
‘It’s lovely, yes.’
‘I’m glad you like it.’ Jules rubs his great belly. ‘Now, I’ll tell you a story about the people who live here …’
When, a few years ago, the territorial government of French Polynesia commissioned a population survey of the region, they found that the birth rate – previously so high it was thought to be well-nigh unsustainable – was at last beginning to decline throughout the islands. There was only one exception – the Faarumai valley. In this secluded place couples were still having seven, eight or nine children per family. At first the demographers were mystified. However, closer investigation revealed that the valley, being narrow and enclosed by perpendicular cliffs, was the only area in French Polynesia which could not receive the region’s otherwise comprehensive television service.
‘There was nothing else for the people to do in the evenings except fuck,’ Jules explains. ‘They were careless about contraception, so the women were always pregnant. So, to get the birth rate down, the government arranged for a TV transmitter to be brought in by helicopter and placed right up there.’ He points to the lip of the cliff, high above us, where the waterfalls originate. ‘Then, a year after TV came to the valley, they did another population survey.’
‘And the birth rate had gone down?’
‘Uh-uh. The birth rate in the valley had gone up even more.’ At my perplexed look, he explains. ‘The people were watching the French porn channel on TV every night, getting aroused, then fucking each other even more. So the population grew even faster.’ Jules scratches his bald dome vigorously. ‘So the Catholic Church entered the picture. Disgusted by all the porn the people were watching, the bishop in Papeete insisted that a special coder be put on the Faarumai TV signal, so the porn channel was blocked out.’
‘And that did the trick, right?’
Jules winces. ‘Wrong. The kids – you know, the teenagers – they easily worked out how to decode the TV signal. So, while their parents were still working in the plantations, they came home from school, went to each other’s houses, watched the porn channel, got the hots and started fucking like crazy. So the teenage birth rate rocketed up.’ Jules turns away and chuckles. ‘Human nature’s funny sometimes, eh?’
‘It certainly is.’ Looking around at the abundant gardens, and the little houses, all now with a TV dish atop their roofs, and imagining the indoor lives of the valley’s horny inhabitants, I ask Jules, ‘So, what’s the latest on the birth rate here?’
Jules chuckles. ‘The new figures are due from the Statistics Department next month. The whole of Tahiti is waiting to see.’
We’re both still laughing when Jules reaches the beginning of the valley and turns the car back on to the coast road. I have never seen the northern coast of Tahiti Iti, so I ask him to drive me across the Taravao isthmus to the end of the road, to the last village, Tautira. As he does so, Jules tells me that there are government plans to build a second port for the territory out here, because Papeete harbour is now so congested. ‘It’ll be huge, one that’ll take big container ships. And big port facilities, cranes, breakwaters, the works.’
Looking around at the tranquil coast, where there are now just a few fishing boats moored in a tiny harbour, I say, ‘But that’ll ruin the whole area. And cost a fortune.’
Jules nods sadly. ‘Sure. Already the locals are gearing up to fight it. And it’s going to mean raising billions of francs.’
‘Where’s that sort of money going to come from?’
‘From Paris. From Gaston Flosse’s buddy. Jacques Chirac.’ Gaston Flosse was until recently the head of the French Polynesian Territorial Assembly.
Tautira’s an attractive settlement, built right across a level coastal plain, with many new houses on the edge of the lagoon. Although it’s tranquil now, it’s been blasted by cyclones in recent years, with many houses demolished by wind and waves. The only building that survived the cyclones was the sturdy Catholic church, standing inland near the centre of the plain.
We drive through the village and out the other side, still following the coast closely. Gradually the road gets narrower as it shadows the lagoon edge. Jules keeps up his nonchalant socio-political commentary. ‘That guy there’ – he points to a tall man dressed only in shorts, who’s tinkering with an outboard motor – ‘just got out of prison. He was a contractor for the first harbour development. Turns out he embezzled millions of government francs. They gave him four years. He served three, and while he was in there his two sons did exactly the same. Put most of the harbour development money into their own bank accounts. How dumb. You’d think they’d think of something more original, wouldn’t you?’
‘You would. So what happened to them?’
‘They’re in prison too. They each got eight years.’
Now the road stops, although there’s a track which leads around the island and eventually to Teahupoo. Although we can’t go any further, I get out, stand at the mouth of the Vaitepiha River and stare out across the shot-silk sea. It was out there in Vaitepiha Bay, on 8 August 1773, that James Cook anchored his sloop Resolution inside the reef. The place is still marked on most local maps of Tahiti as ‘Mouillage de Cook’, Cook’s Anchorage. Cook dropped anchor because he was in a hurry. Scurvy had broken out aboard Resolution’s sister ship, Adventure, on the way from New Zealand; the crew was in desperate need of fresh fruit and vegetables and he couldn’t expend more time getting to Matavai Bay, his favourite anchorage, on Tahiti Nui’s north coast. But during the night Resolution’s anchor dragged and she almost went on to the reef – she was eventually pulled clear by the longboats of both sloops. While this crisis was occupying the ships’ crews, the Tahitians swarmed aboard in a frenzy to trade anything the Europeans wanted for western goods.
‘Especially nails?’ I remark to Jules.
‘Yes, yes. Those Tahitian girls would do anything for a nail.’ He grins. ‘When I was a young man and read that, I went down to the waterfront with some nails and waved them about. It didn’t work. The girls were only interested in dollars.’
Cook sailed away from Vaitepiha Bay shortly afterwards, to his accustomed anchorage at Matavai Bay, but he was here long enough to give this district historical provenance. Driving back along the road, Jules says, ‘The Spanish were here too, you know.’
‘In Tautira?’
‘Yes.’
Sure enough, on the door of the church in Tautira there’s a plaque commemorating the 1774 visit of two Spanish ships, a reminder that the Spaniards were among the first European explorers to penetrate the South Pacific. At Tautira the Spaniards built a fort, erected a cross and claimed Tahiti for the King of Spain. Two priests from Lima were left behind. They lived in a house from which they hardly emerged and went home as soon as another Spanish ship called. When Cook returned to the district on his third voyage, in August 1777, again to obtain much-needed fresh food and water, he was affronted by the news that the Spanish had put in a claim for Tahiti. By now regarding both Tahiti Nui and Tahiti Iti as integral parts of Britain, Cook insisted that the Spaniards’ cross be removed and replaced with his own. On it he had one of his carpenters carve the subtle rejoinder, ‘Georgius Tertius Rex, Annis 1767, 1769, 1773, 1774 – 1777’.