A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (23 page)

The bishop studied Damien’s carved warrior for several minutes. “Wonderful,” he said. “Brilliant, beautiful.”

N
uku Hiva is an island that bombards the sense, numbing the mind with its constant and unrelenting beauty. The mountains behind Taiohae rise through groves of coconut and mangoes. A cruel joke of a road threads through papaya, banana, and passion fruit trees. Semiwild goats challenge cars for the right-of-way. A sudden squall blows in from the sea, bringing ten minutes of heavy rain. When the sun breaks through the clouds, light and shadow race across the green slopes below.

Descending from the central plateau atop the mountains into the valley called Taipivai, our car passed two boys carrying a rooster with a long string attached to one leg. If the boys came upon a wild cock in the jungle, they’d set their rooster on it. Both birds would become entangled in the string, and the boys would have themselves another fighting cock.

There are wild horses in the jungle as well, horses originally brought to the island by the French. Marquesans use a mare in heat to draw wild stallions, and the horses are easily broken by riding them belly-deep through the surf. They are small horses, sturdy climbers perfectly suited to the steep, jungled slopes of the Marquesas.

Everyone, it seems, owns a few stallions. In the village of Taipivai, I watched a family of six ride up into the hills, followed by five riderless horses. In less than two hours they were back, and each of the five horses carried over one hundred pounds of ripe bananas on its back.

Just above Taipivai, near a wide pool in the clear river
that runs through the village, there is a small trail that winds a mile or so through the jungle to the largest of the ancient ceremonial sites in the valley. The great stone terrace, called a
me’ae
, was perfectly square, twenty-five by twenty-five feet. Off to one side was a one-hundred-foot-high banyan tree. Aerial roots had dropped from its branches and they had, in turn, become new trunks so that the tree covered perhaps half an acre. The banyan and the thick groves of coconut trees filtered the sunlight, breaking its power. The sacred site was cool and spectral, shadowed in gloom.

A
tiki
, one of the ancient gods of the valley, squatted before the platform. It was six feet high, but three times wider than any human being. Blue-green algae grew like leprosy across the idol’s immense head and obliterated one of the huge, round, empty eyes. The figure was clearly female, its genitals swollen as if in sensual excitement.

It was a simple matter, in the gloom, to imagine sacrifices committed by torchlight, to hear the screams and see the blood flowing over the holy stone. The people of Taipivai, the Typee, had been the most notorious cannibals of Nuku Hiva, the most feared tribe on the island. There had been skulls hanging from the branches of the sacred banyan tree; there had been human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism perhaps as late as 1900.

Later, I sat on a vista point overlooking the valley of Hatiheu and let the afternoon sun bake away the vague, sickly sad sense of dread that had descended on me at the
tiki
above Taipivai. Hatiheu was the valley where Robert Louis Stevenson had lived. The gentle beauty of the place suited my mood. The hills, alive with soft, calf-high ferns, spilled down toward the sea in waves of variegated green. The sound of the surf rose faintly from the bay below and mingled with the lazy hum of insects, the sigh of the breeze through the trees, the thunder of the waterfalls and the constant symphony of bird song that was punctuated at odd intervals by a single strangled prehistoric croak.

Below, a series of jagged black rock spires, too steep to carry vegetation, rose like sentinels just above the bay. They
might have been the parapets of some alien civilization, or so I thought, and then the idea of blood flowing under the lurid light of torches hit me again so that the contrast of beauty and terror, of life and death, seemed especially vivid.

The
tiki
had been female, but perhaps the swollen organs were not meant to indicate sexual excitement. Perhaps the god that stood over the place of death was in the process of giving birth.

O
n the island of Hiva Oa, I stayed for a time in Puamau, a village of some two hundred souls. As is the case almost everywhere in the Marquesas, there is no commercial hotel in the village. A visitor simply asks to see the mayor, who makes it his business to provide shelter. The mayor of Puamau decided that I could stay in his village, and I was given a comfortable room in his own house, a poured concrete dwelling with a working toilet and shower. Meals were provided along with the room for a cost of about thirty dollars a day. I ate well on roast pork, passion fruit, platters of raw tuna fillets marinated in coconut milk and lime, and French bread that was baked daily in a wood-fired oven.

I had come to Puamau to watch the single most important event in the economic life of the village. The copra schooner was about to make its monthly visit. Copra is dried coconut meat. The islanders collect coconuts, husk them, and leave the meat to dry in large wooden beds. The dried meat is stuffed into burlap sacks and taken to the beach for loading.

The copra is transported by ship to a factory in Tahiti, where the meat is cleaned and crushed. The coconut oil is used in soap, shampoo, synthetic rubber, glycerin, hydraulic brake fluid, margarine, and vegetable shortening.

Copra is the single source of income for most Marquesans, and the arrival of the copra schooner is cause for celebration. People who live up in the hills bring down strings of horses loaded with copra. Everyone gathers on the beach as the boat steams into Puamau Bay. Women play
a kind of bingo that may only otherwise be played on Sundays. Young boys strum guitars and sing. Children play in the surf. The able-bodied men hoist 150-pound sacks of copra on their shoulders and trudge out through the pounding surf to the schooner’s “whale boat,” a twenty-foot-long craft designed to carry heavy loads through the breakers and out to the anchored ship.

The schooner is Puamau’s link to the outside world. When the whale boat returns from the schooner, it is full of consumer goods ordered by the villagers and paid for with the thirty cents per pound they earn for their copra. I saw the men offload a few stoves, a refrigerator, and some furniture; but for the most part, the copra schooner delivered stereo systems, dirt bikes, motorcycles, and televisions. In the two days it took to load and unload the schooner, I saw at least half a dozen Sonys and as many VCRs invade Puamau.

The French Polynesian government installed television transmitters in Taiohae and Atuona in 1979. Relay stations on the mountaintops beam the signal down to smaller villages like Puamau. The programs are recorded in Tahiti and broadcast, commercial free, for two hours a day. In Puamau, at the mayor’s home, I saw
Towering Inferno
, an episode of “Shogun” and some kung fu epic out of Hong Kong.

A French official, who would rather not be quoted, told me that the government provides television because the people love it. They love it so much, according to this man, that many of them might move to Tahiti simply to watch “Dallas” once a week. In Tahiti, however, jobs are scarce and there is a growing problem of overpopulation. “The idea is,” the official said, “that if Marquesans have TV at home, we won’t have to provide food and homes for them in Tahiti.”

The fact that television exists in so remote a land, in a place littered with the artifacts of the old times and the old beliefs, sometimes staggers the imagination and presents the traveler with a number of truly remarkable culture crosscurrents. The day after the copra boat left, for instance,
the mayor led me on a short walk through the jungle to a
tiki
that stood above his house. There are more than twenty-five
tikis
in the Puamau valley, but this one was eight feet high: the largest
tiki
in all of French Polynesia.

Above the ceremonial site there was a steep, rocky spire that rose to a needlelike summit. We began climbing this spire, the mayor and I, using rope he’d brought along. After a stiff hour’s climb, we reached the summit. The mayor moved down a few feet among the ironwood trees and reached into a small cave about two feet in diameter. He pulled out a human skull and began telling a long, incredibly involved story about how a man—or more properly, a man’s head—came to be buried there.

It seems that some time ago—I later placed the date at about 1900—there was a queen in Puamau who lived in a house on the large stone terrace not far from the mayor’s house. In this time, said the mayor, a prolonged drought threatened the staple breadfruit crop, and there was danger of famine. The queen requested a human sacrifice to appease the gods, and three men took it upon themselves to perform this duty. They pulled all the hair out of their heads and hung their machetes around their necks, which was a dead giveaway to everyone else in the village that they were looking for someone expendable. The people of Puamau gathered together on the beach for mutual safety.

The three hairless men were forced to find a victim in another drainage. “It was over there,” the mayor said, pointing to a small ridge, “where they saw a man in a coconut tree.” The story became very detailed here. The mayor wanted me to know precisely how many shots were fired (three), how many times the man was hit (twice), and which was the fatal shot (the one that passed through the right kidney).

The dead man’s head and long bones were carried to the top of the spire, where they were placed in the cave. The rains came immediately, of course, and Puamau was saved. The French heard about the murder, however, and sent a gunboat to Puamau Bay. The queen was imprisoned on the ship until the village surrendered the killers. The three men
were taken out to the ship at gunpoint and were never seen again. The queen was released.

The mayor pointed down to a house in Puamau and said the name of the family that lived there. “That is this man’s family,” he said, holding up the skull. The mayor stared into the empty eye sockets, in the manner of a man who is mentally adding a set of figures. “This is the great grandfather,” he said at last.

“And the family knows he is up here?” I asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“And they don’t want to get this skull and bury it properly?”

“No,” the mayor said. He seemed to regard the question as both strange and mildly offensive. “Why would they?”

It was late in the afternoon—the mayor’s story had taken almost two hours to tell. He carefully placed the skull back in the cave and said we would have to hurry back down to the house. The television would be coming on soon, and he wanted to watch “Dynasty.”

I
am living in Atuona, in a bungalow near the black sand beach where Gauguin painted many of his most famous oils. The bungalow stands on the site of Gauguin’s house. In recent years, the place sometimes has been the home of travelers whose reconfirmations were not recorded. Perhaps these hapless visitors reacted as I did; perhaps they spent a day or two trying to figure out how to change their schedule or contact the people they were supposed to meet at home. Over the space of days, perhaps others also felt the sun burn away their anger, and maybe they settled into the gentle rhythm of life in the Marquesas.

These days I rise at six o’clock, just as the five or six roosters who seem to live under my window explode in paroxysms of ear-shattering bravado. The old man who lives next door is generally up already, sitting on his porch and playing taped Tahitian laments on his immense JVC boom box.

I pull on my shorts and step out onto my own porch. The old man and I nod to each other, but he expects me to ignore him for the rest of the day, just as I expect him to ignore me. Mind your own business, as the bishop said, is the motto here.

About seven-thirty, I walk five blocks to the bakery and buy a loaf of good French bread fresh from the oven. I keep forgetting to bring money, but the woman behind the counter recognizes me and runs a tab under the name of “M. Américain.”

The dog that has adopted me follows at my heels. He strolled into the bungalow several days ago and I shouted one of the few phrases I know in Marquesan: “Keer aw.” The words, generally addressed to invading dogs, chickens, horses, or pigs, mean “get out.” I had the misfortune of running into a dog who thought his name was Keer Aw. He gave me one of those open-mouthed looks of keen canine anticipation, the kind that seems to say: “Oh boy, wanna play, got something for me to eat?”

So Keer Aw lives on my porch. He sleeps at my feet while I type and tips over the garbage whenever he thinks I’m not looking.

About eleven-thirty, when it gets too hot to work, I walk down to the Gauguin beach for a swim. I am trying to improve my French with the aid of a French/English dictionary and a French comic book I found about the American cowboy, Stormy Joe, and his comical sidekick, Sardine. Already I have learned to say, “Drop your gun or I’ll kill you like a mad dog.”

Keer Aw lies in the sand while I read. After an hour or so, he gets up and slinks off down the beach, looking back over his shoulder in the most guilty fashion imaginable. “It’s not what you think,” he says. “I’m not really sneaking back to the bungalow to tip over your garbage.”

About two-thirty, I walk back home and clean up the garbage. Keer Aw, skulking under the picnic table on my porch, eyes me cautiously. I step into the bungalow, bleach myself down, take a cold shower, and lie down for a brief nap. Outside my window, chickens are lunching on some
ants that are feeding on spilled garbage. I find the pluck and cluck of contented poultry curiously soothing.

Some days, I borrow a stallion from a lady who lives nearby and ride over the ridge to a bay called Taaoa where there is a beach that seems devoid of nonos. There is something almost unbearably romantic about riding alone, galloping bareback across the sand as the breakers thunder into the shore.

Some evenings I go to a Chinese family’s home on a hill above Atuona’s hundred lights. The family runs an informal restaurant. I’m particularly fond of the river shrimp dinner.