Breadfruit (22 page)

That is the whole story, and now Rita is waiting for Materena to comment.

Materena is thinking.

She’s thinking about how Rita gets upset when Coco looks at another woman. Even when the woman is in a movie, Rita gets upset.
She turns the TV off and tells Coco that the next time he wants to do the sexy loving, he can go to Hollywood and find that
woman to take him to the seventh sky, because Rita sure isn’t going to be available. Coco can’t look at another woman in a
magazine either.

So, Coco looking at an ex-girlfriend . . .

And Materena is thinking about her cousins Lily and Loma. When Lily broke up with her fireman boyfriend because she got bored
with his body and his fits of jealousy, he went out with Loma. Well, every time Loma bumped into Lily, Loma would give Lily
dirty looks or pretend she didn’t know her. But then the fireman broke up with Loma because she would only do the kissing
and he was so on fire after all the things Lily used to do to him that he was desperate to do more than tender kissing.

And Loma is still giving Lily bad looks.

“Rita”—Materena is carefully weighing her words—“just you be thankful Sylvie isn’t a cousin and you don’t have to bump into
her every time you go to the shop or to Mass.”

There’s a silence.

“Ah, true,” Rita finally agrees. “Coco’s with me and that’s all I need to know, eh, Cousin?”

“That’s all you need to know,” Materena confirms.

“
Merci,
Cousin,” Rita says, sounding close to tears. “You’re such a good friend, I feel so much better after talking to you.”

“It’s okay, Rita,” Materena says, “you make me feel better too when I’m down.”

After a few more words of friendship, the cousins bid each other good-bye, say see you soon, I love you, etc., etc.

And Materena, walking home, is feeling much better too. Well, it’s a beautiful morning, after all, a perfect day to take the
kids to that beach that used to belong to the Mahi people, dig mussels (Materena loves mussels), and forget about the whole
marriage nonsense. All of this is in the past.

I
t’s twenty past one in the morning and Materena is sitting at the kitchen table.

She can’t sleep.

At six o’clock she’s going to get the bread at the bakery and then she’s going to make the coffee. Materena yawns. She’s tired
but she can’t sleep, and there’s no point lying in bed with the eyes open.

She could go scrub the bathroom for an hour, only she’s too tired to scrub but not tired enough to sleep a deep sleep—the
kind of sleep when you think of nothing. Materena sighs a long, heavy sigh.

She’s worried. Today at eleven o’clock, she’s going to court, and God knows what can happen to you when you go to court. Eh,
you can go to prison. Many of her cousins have been to court and proceeded straight into the gendarmes’ van. Direction—Nuutania
Prison. Her cousin Mori, for instance, he borrowed a canoe, and the owner of the canoe sued him, and Mori spent two days in
prison.

Materena is going to court because the gendarme caught her on private property.

Here’s the story.

Behind the airport there’s some land next to the sea. That land behind the airport used to belong to the Mahi tribe, but an
ancestor exchanged it for a few quarts of red wine. The exchange was carried out under private seal, so nobody knows the name
of the
popa’a
who got the land for cheap. It’s not for certain that he was a
popa’a,
but back then (when the Mahi people lost the land behind the airport) the
popa’a
people did a lot of exchanging with the Polynesian people—under private seal.

Materena loves that place behind the airport. She’s been there six times. There’s
aito
trees for shade, there’s white sand, and there’s the calm sea that is safe for the kids to swim in. Above all, there are
lots of mussels, and Materena loves mussels. Mussels fried with garlic and onions or raw mussels with a squeeze of lime juice.

Whenever she feels like eating mussels, Materena packs bread, limes, cordial, cans of corned beef, a bucket, a can opener,
and a knife and heads off with her kids to that special place. It takes them about twenty minutes to walk from the house.
When they get to the landing strip, Materena makes sure the traffic light is green and there are no planes in the sky, then
she gives the children the run signal. They always race across the landing strip. Materena stays behind the kids and yells,
“Hurry, kids!”

As soon as they get to that place, the kids go for a swim (they’re not allowed to go past the rock where the warm, shallow
water ends and turns into dark blue water) and Materena gets busy digging mussels. She sits in the knee-deep water and digs
her fingers into the sand. She always gets a mussel, but she only takes enough to fill up the bucket.

And it happens that Materena feels the presence of the people who used to dig mussels there, the people way before her time—her
ancestors and their friends. They’re sitting in a circle and they talk and they laugh, all the while digging mussels.

Since discovering it, Materena had hoped to be digging mussels at that special place for years to come.

But a gendarme paid her a visit in his police car.

Moana spotted the police car first. He hid behind his sister and shrieked, “Mamie, the gendarme!” And Leilani covered her
flat chest with her hands, as she wasn’t wearing a T-shirt.

Materena stopped digging and hurried to the shore, where the gendarme was waiting for her.

“
Iaorana.
” Materena smiled at the gendarme.

The gendarme just looked at her.

“Bonjour, monsieur.” Materena thought that maybe the gendarme didn’t appreciate the other greeting.

Again, the gendarme just looked at her, so Materena looked at him. There and then she figured out that the gendarme was in
a bad mood. His eyes were angry—maybe he’d had a fight with his woman.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, in a bad mood.

“My kids, they swim.” Materena showed the gendarme her kids. “And I look for a couple of mussels.”

The gendarme was more interested in what was inside the bucket Materena was still holding than in her kids’ swimming. “Are
you aware this is private property?”

“Private property?” Materena asked, as if she didn’t know what the gendarme was going on about.

The gendarme took a black booklet out of his pocket.

“Name?” The gendarme clicked his black pen.

“Materena Loana Imelda Mahi.”

“Address?”

“Faa’a PK 5, behind the petrol station.”

The gendarme furiously wrote the information down. “Occupation?”

“I’m a professional cleaner.” Materena’s voice was louder.

The gendarme looked at Materena and wrote
cleaner.
“Marital status?”

Materena grimaced. Talk about digging the knife in the wound!

“Marital status?” The gendarme sounded impatient.

“Monsieur,” Materena replied, “I’m not married today because —”

The gendarme interrupted. “Either you’re married or you’re not. Marital status?”

“I’m not married.”

“Are you a single mother?” The gendarme glanced at the children, who were still in the water.

“
Non!
” Materena didn’t know why she had to shout. “
Non,
” she repeated, this time in a lower voice. “I’m still with the father of all my children.”

“So you’re in a de facto relationship,” the gendarme said.

“Yes, monsieur.”

“Couldn’t you just tell me this earlier?” The gendarme looked so annoyed. “I haven’t got all day to play guessing games.”

He scribbled the words
de facto
and then ordered Materena to vacate the property—immediately.

“And this is private property,” he said as he was leaving. “Do you know what
private property
means?”

Materena hesitated. “You can’t go on the property.”

“It is against the law to trespass on private property,” he said. “Just you remember this. Vacate the property immediately.”

He tipped his hat and left.

As soon as the gendarme’s blue car was out of sight, the children got out of the water and raced to their mother. Materena
explained the sad situation to them and immediately began to pack.

“That gendarme!” Tamatoa shouted. “Who does he think he is! If Papi was here . . .”

“You don’t tell the gendarmes what to do,” Materena said. “They tell you what to do. If you tell them what to do, you get
a court summons in return.” And very seriously, she added, “The gendarmes are the law.”

“But we weren’t doing anything against the law,” Leilani said. “The sea doesn’t belong to one person. It belongs to everybody.”

“God owns the sea.” Moana waved to the sea.

“We walked on the private property before we got to the sea,” Materena explained.

“But,” Leilani continued to argue, “when the gendarme came, we weren’t on the private property.”

Materena, already on edge, snapped. “Leilani, it’s not the moment to show off, okay? We’re going home.”

That evening Materena told Pito what had happened behind the airport.

“Why did you give your name to the gendarme?” Pito was angry. “You never give your name to the gendarmes. You make up a name.
And why did you give your address?”

In Pito’s opinion, and he was speaking from personal experience, if you don’t give your name to the gendarme, the gendarme
can’t do anything. He can try to find you, but nobody is going to give him information, because, Tahitians, they don’t talk
to the gendarmes. They only talk to the
mutoi.

“And what are you doing crossing the landing strip, anyway?”

“We only cross when the light is green,” Materena said.

“Eh, sometimes the traffic lights don’t work properly.”

Materena also told Loana what happened behind the airport.

“What are you doing digging mussels there?” Loana was angry too. “I told you the mussels there are poisoned, cursed, and no
good to eat.”

Once Loana ate mussels from the airport and she nearly had to have an emergency operation.

“That gendarme,” Loana continued. “I’m sure his woman gave him trouble in the morning and he had to take out his bad mood
on you. Eh, maybe his woman left him for a younger man—a Tahitian.”

Three days after the encounter with that bad-mood gendarme, Materena received a court summons.

She showed it to Pito.

“Ah, it’s nothing,” he said.

But Materena was in shock. “I can go to prison for this?”

“Nobody goes to prison over a bucket of mussels.” Pito laughed and carried on reading his Akim comic.

Materena showed the court summons to Loana.

“Don’t you worry about it, girl,” she said.

“I can go to prison for this?”

“Let them try a little. They don’t know my name. We’re going to see Maeva and she’s going to fix the situation pronto.”

Maeva was definitely the woman to see—she knew about the law. Maeva is a distant cousin of Loana, from her mother’s side.
Maeva is a secretary of the boss of this big company, but she should have been a lawyer. She took the government to court
a few months ago over Crown land in Rangiroa and she won the case. The story was in the newspaper. There was a picture of
Maeva, barefoot and carrying her pandanus bag, on the front page with the thirty witnesses she got to speak at the tribunal
of Rangiroa. One by one, these witnesses told the judge—who had flown from Tahiti for the case—a story about their land.

Loana and Materena went to see Maeva at her office. Maeva listened to the story as she typed a letter. She was very busy that
day. “This is what I think,” she said, typing her fast typing still. “There was a private-property sign and Materena ignored
it.”

Loana was about to explain that Materena ignored the private-property sign because the land used to belong to the Mahi family
but an ancestor sold it for a few quarts of red wine, but Maeva held up her hand—meaning, I haven’t finished.

“I know about the quarts of wine,” she said. “We all lost land over quarts of wine, and the land we lost over quarts of wine
is not the issue here. The issue here is that there was a private-property sign and Materena ignored it. Is the sign really
visible?”

“Well, it’s nailed to a tree,” Materena replied.

“How high?”

Materena wasn’t sure what Maeva was asking her.

“Is the sign nailed at eye level?”

“
Non,
it’s higher.”

“Do you have to lift your head to read the sign?”

“
Ah oui.
”

“Do you always lift your head when you see a tree?”

“
Oui,
to see if there’s anything ripe in that tree.”

“We’re talking about an
aito
tree here,
oui?
”

“
Oui.
”

“And there’s nothing ripe in an
aito
tree.”

“Well, the
aito
doesn’t have fruit.”

Materena was getting more and more confused.

“So when a tree doesn’t have fruit, you don’t look up—

correct?”

“True.”

Loana made an interruption. “Why are we talking about trees?”

“We’re talking about trees because the sign, which is the core of this story, is nailed to a tree.” Maeva looked at Materena.
“Describe the sign to me.”

“Well… there’s a black board and the writing is in white.”

“How big is the board?”

Materena shows Maeva with her hands.

“Okay,” Maeva said. “It’s not a big sign. And the letters—are they capital letters?”

“
Non
—normal.”

“Is the sign only written in French?”

“
Oui.
”

Maeva nodded. “Did you see the sign the first time you went there?”

“
Non.
”

“How come?”

“You can’t see that sign if you don’t look for it.”

“Why is it that you can’t see the sign?”

“It’s a bit hidden by the branches.”

“Did the gendarme ever point out the sign to you?”

“
Non.
”