Memoirs of a Worldly Guy
I was given my old room when I checked back into the Moorea Hotel in Papeete. Kavan had just returned from a week-long trip to the Leeward Islands and had rented a Volkswagen. He, Stewart Kean and John Manly were all staying out at Les Tropiques, a bungalow hotel about two miles west of town. We had nearly a week to wait before the Tasman Empire Airways flying boat arrived on its round trip from New Zealand. We filled in the time by lunching, with our toes in the sand, at the bamboo bar at Chez Rivnac on a beautiful lagoon ten miles south of Papeete. Other days we visited the Loti baths and the spectacular falls in the Fautaua Valley and the tomb of King Pomare V. One day we visited the Marae of Arahurahu in Paea, which is easier to find than it is to pronounce. In the evenings we languished; local; lounges; liquor.
Once I had become established in the hotel again, Louise lost no time in making it her headquarters. It served as a meeting place, bathhouse, change room, sleeping quarters and general all-around utility pad for her and two or three of her chums. Tahitians have a fetish about cleanliness and the girls showered on the average of three times a day. Although their usual dress consisted only of sandals, nylon panties and a cotton dress, no brassiere, they would never think of appearing in the bars in the evening in the same dress they had worn in the afternoon. Or the same one in the afternoon they had worn in the morning. Consequently I would return to my room to find a litter of dresses and underpants sprinkled around the room. Since the doors had no locks there was not much I could do to stop it (even if I'd wanted to!). It gave the place a homey, lived-in atmosphere.
The bars in Papeete usually started closing down around midnight and by one o'clock in the morning the last of the revellers had been ushered out to the street and the doors locked and bolted. It was the custom, particularly on weekends, for those who craved further action, to crowd aboard the buses available and ride seven or eight miles out to the Lido, a large dance hall and bar outside the town. Those who could not crowd into the buses followed on motor bikes or in private cars. One night we went along to the Lido with a group that included Vladja Kavan and Stewart Kean, together with some of the young people from the American yacht 'Nordlys'. I was reminded of the barn dances I had attended as a child, for the Lido had a barn-like appearance and as we parked among the rows of cars and buses in front of the club, we could hear the music and shouting from inside pouring out through the large front doors. The building stood by itself in a large clearing surrounded by dark tropical trees and undergrowth.
We entered and went to the bar which ran along the wall to our right. The dancing was quite uninhibited at this point in the evening, and the floor was filled with couples twisting and stamping in an unbridled fashion. Marie Terangi was singing 'Puaatoro Hellaby' and most of the audience had joined in. The song concerns a young island girl's comparison of her lover with a can of Hellaby's Corned Beef, a New Zealand product imported by the hundreds of tons to form the staple meat of the islands. The words are a pleasing mixture of French, Tahitian and English and the music has rhythm and bounce that is all Polynesian.
It was very crowded at the bar so after a few minute we took our drinks and went to one of the large corner booths in the back of the dance floor. There was room for about eight of us to sit comfortably. There were a few large tables between us and the dance floor and these were also jammed with customers. Before long someone said, 'Hey Ron, there's Louise!' She was seated at one of the tables with a big coloured soldier, presumably an Algerian, wearing the uniform of the French Army. His deep, blue-black skin seemed dark even beside the dark brown of the Tahitians at his table. When Louise turned and saw me looking at her, she stuck out her tongue and giggled, just as I had expected she would.
Marie Terangi came to our table for a drink between songs. She was young, cute and sassy, but I thought she showed signs of social wear and tear. Before long Louise was over at the table too, trying to find out my exact status. As it happened, I was with no one in particular, but I told her she had better go back to her own party and stick with the soldier 'what had brung her' and who had obviously been paying for her drinks all night. She didn't think this was a very good idea, but nevertheless returned grudgingly to her table. I was enjoying myself and was on the floor frequently by this time, dancing with warm, wild, sweet-scented creatures I had never seen before. Around three o'clock the orchestra broke up and we went back to our booth to finish our drinks.
I noticed that Louise was arguing with her soldier boy and finished by pouring out a stream of Tahitian oaths and stalking over to our table. He was not going to be put off so easily though, and meant to protect his investment. He followed her to the table and grabbed her roughly by the wrist. For some obscure reason I decided to be chivalrous at this point so I stood up and gave him a brisk shove in the chest. Louise pulled her wrist free and jumped up on the bench behind me.
The enraged soldier began muttering oaths which I could not readily interpret. Their meaning was quite clear, however. He intended to dismember me, or at least rearrange my anatomy to a considerable degree. His eyes rolled in his head and I perceived, with ill-timed attention to detail, the red veins that crisscrossed the whites of his distended orbs as I stood there bravely awaiting the tattoo of blows that would drub me slowly but irresistibly floorward. Since the days when Joe Louis reigned supreme I had automatically assumed that all blacks were superb boxers with jackhammer right hands.
Instead, this fearsome individual reached over to the table for a drinking glass and, cupping it in his hand, smashed it back against the table, shattering it to bits. This had an instant and explosive effect on the other members of the table. Those who didn't shoot out onto the dance floor either ducked under the table or shrank back against the wall. Kavan and Kean dove out the window.
My first impulse was to get the hell out of there. My second impulse, since I was trapped, was to grab for the soldier's wrists, which I did, holding fast with the supernatural strength of a drowning sailor.
'Pas comme ca!' I said, which to me meant, 'Don't do that!' but which apparently meant absolutely nothing to my opponent. A grim, silent struggle then ensued; we stood nose to nose, straining and cursing. I could feel rather than see his right hand scrabbling amongst the broken glass for a piece big enough to use as a weapon. I had no alternative but to hang on and hope for the best. If I raised either hand to strike him I knew he would swing with the glass and I would either be blinded or marked with a 'barmaid's kiss' for the rest of my days. I was prepared to hang on indefinitely.
Louise finally decided to get into the act. Concluding that the situation had become emergent she started to tug at my shoulders and pull my arms in an effort to get me to break away.
'Jeezuz, woman, leave me be for God's sake!' I gasped, 'you're not helping!' I was hardly in a position to make a decision. The backs of my legs were jammed against the bench along the wall, and my left hip against the table. The only other possible exit was blocked by the representative from the French Army.
Kavan told me later he thought I was quite courageous to stand my ground.
'Courageous, hell!' I replied. 'I had no alternative; the sonofabitch had me jammed in there like a wad in a Chickahominy musket. Otherwise I'd have been long gone outta there!'
By this time a crowd had started to gather and in a few more moments the spectators were two or three deep. Meanwhile. Louise was jumping up and down maintaining a gratuitous commentary, whilst my opponent and I strained and swore and breathed alcoholic fumes into each other's flaring nostrils.
Then the struggle ended as quickly as it had begun; from the corner of my eye I saw a great brown fist the size of a coconut arc out from the second row of bystanders and descend with a paralyzing 'splat' on the back of my attacker's neck. His eyes then rolled slowly up until only the whites were visible and he toppled back into the arms of the men behind him. I recall the heels of his brightly polished boots bouncing along the floor as he was dragged from the scene of action.
Fortunately he had not broken the glass with my drink in it, so I downed the contents in one gulp and sat down rather unsteadily.
'Auwe!' shouted Louise, who had enjoyed the whole spectacle immensely. I proceeded to upbraid her at great length for instigating the whole messy business but she was too excited to pay much attention. When we started for town a short while later there was a bus pulling out of the parking lot. The black soldier was sitting in one of the rear seats with his head in his hands, still not fully recovered from the vicious blow he had received. In another vehicle, Louise was seated happily on my knee, the event all but forgotten.
'Was that enough excitement for you in one night, men?' I asked.
'Enough for a bloody week, and then some,' said Stewart. 'I thought you'd had it that time!'
'I don't like these types who start breaking glass,' I said, 'it makes me real nervous. I wonder who it was who bailed me out?'
'Could have been anyone!' Stewart said. 'Funny as it may seem, most of these islanders are more colour conscious than we are. The Tahitians have no time whatever for blacks, even though some of them are just as dark themselves.' Not with their clothes off, I thought, perversely.
'Whatever the reason, whoever it was saved me from a facelifting job, and that's a fact.'
'Could have been a good thing!' said Vladja.
'And God bless you too, Quasimodo!' I replied.
Following my return from Moorea my interest in Louise's cousin Georgine, or 'Bendix', if you wish, evolved from a casual admiration of her splendid physical assets to a monomaniacal obsession to get between her and her gaily flowered pareu. Each time she came churning across the floor at Quinn's with her grass skirt slung low on her sensuous hips, a similar but less apparent churning was sympathetically engendered in the general environs of my hips.
'Gotta get me next to that groin,' I said tersely to Kavan.
'If she behaves in bed like she behaves on the dance floor you'll spend the rest of your life in a wheel chair on a diet of eggs and raw liver.' he replied.
'I'm prepared to make the sacrifice,' I said.
Georgine was not too interested, it seemed, when I first started to circulate around Papeete. After a month or so, however, my native charm and ugliness seemed to fascinate her and she indicated that she would not be averse to extending our relationship beyond the handshake stage. But Louise was constantly alert to prevent the flowering of such little amorous essays and was particularly outspoken about any relationship I might be planning with Georgine.
'C'est ma cousine!' she would protest, with a look of outraged disbelief. She apparently intended to infer that my cohabiting with her cousin could be tantamount to incest or some equally vicious behaviour. I couldn't see what that had to do with it, but was quite willing to humour her, pretend that I respected her tabus, and bide my lascivious time.
One night when things broke up at Quinn's a group of us went back to the 'Nordlys' for a nightcap. I hadn't seen Louise all evening but when we went on board I was surprised to see Georgine sitting with a small group in the cabin. She was by herself too. My ears suddenly felt like they were getting all pointy. After we had finished our nightcaps I suggested to Georgine that we should leave. She agreed enthusiastically and we said good night to the others and went up on deck and started to cross the gangplank. Just then I heard a raucous cry of 'Auwe!' and looked ashore to see Louise coming down the street.
'Damn it!' I said, 'the woman must have radar!' But I had the bit in my teeth and was determined to follow through. I took Georgine's hand and started to cross the street to the Moorea Hotel.
'Ron, haere mai! Come here!'
'Oh, Hi Louise, bonne nuit, n'est ce pas! Nice night, isn't it! Well, goodbye now!' I kept on walking.
'Ron, c'est ma cousine!' she trotted along beside Georgine who merely laughed and held my hand more tightly. Finally, Louise stopped in the middle of the street and let out a long cry of rage and frustration, then sat down on the spot and started to swear at us in Tahitian---very rude! We kept right on walking. We went down the side lane and through the door and up two flights of stairs to my room. As soon as I had closed the door Georgine undid a couple of buttons at the back of her dress and shrugged her shoulders and her dress fell down to her waist where it was held by a belt. She wore no brassiere. Her marvellous, firm golden breasts and an expanse of flat, muscular abdomen were exposed but she showed no sign of modesty. Instead, she stood with her shoulders thrown back, her feet spread apart and her hands on her hips. Then she laughed a long low seductive chuckle that did significant things to my blood pressure.
Now the thing I want to tell you about Georgine that I think was most remarkable was that the funicular curves and conformations that made her mammary appurtenances so spectacular when she was standing remained almost completely unaltered when she lay down. This heroic bosom may have been carved from solid mahogany so magnificently was it trussed and suspended by the smooth muscles of her pectoral regions. I was about to say that I had never beheld such a phenomenon before but I now recall an Australian lass I met one New Year's Eve in London. She was a champion swimmer and a 'champion' girl and I recall with fondness the sight of her snowy white bosoms rising like twin Fujiyamas before my admiring gaze. But I digress.
As I was saying, Georgine's behaviour was coquettish to say the least and it seemed like no time at all before I was acting in a most irresponsible manner. In fact, I could still hear Louise shouting imprecations from the street below at a time when she might well have been saving her breath.
It is almost with a feeling of regret that I must disclose that I have never required the use of a wheelchair nor an exclusive diet of eggs and raw liver as predicted by my friend Kavan. However, I could not be so transparent as to sugest that the evening was unrewarding. I must wonder, though, if I might not have been better advised to forgo the actual experience and spend the rest of my life indulging in Babylonian speculations. Not really!
The day we were to leave finally arrived. I had left word to be called early and it was barely light out when a rap on the door woke me.
'Yeah!' I said, 'Okay,' and rolled out of bed. This required a little more effort than usual due to the sharp list in the bed from a little accident of the night before. A few of us had broken one of the bed's legs during a friendly roughhouse. I had attributed it to shoddy furniture workmanship. The low side was toward the wall and Louise was snoring peacefully, wedged tightly into the sharp angle between the bed and the wall. I took a hitch in my pareu and went out to the shower. When I had washed and shaved I dressed and packed my things into the rucksack. Most of my stuff had gone on to Fiji aboard the Thorshall so I had just the one piece of luggage remaining.
I left the room as quietly as possible and walked down the stairs and onto the street. It was not yet six o'clock but the shoppers from the outer islands who had spent the night sleeping on the sidewalks had already rolled up their mats and headed off to the market. I walked past Donald's and Quinn's and the Bar Zizou and as I turned the corner I found that a fair-sized crowd had already gathered at the rear of the customs shed. Passengers were lined up waiting to check their baggage through the officials and taxis were arriving to unload more people as I approached.
The flower sellers were set up for business in front of Oscar Nordman's pool hall and the perfume from the mountains of gorgeous leis filled the square. Kavan arrived with Stewart Kean and John Manly a moment after I joined the queue. When we had all checked in and received our baggage checks we went over to the Zizou for coffee. I felt like I had been in Tahiti for a very long time--had it been only two months? I was not bored with the place but I was glad to be leaving. I wondered if one could really settle in Tahiti and remain happy. This was the time to leave. When you quit worrying about the fact that you were doing nothing you were 'malua' and risked joining the legions of wanderers who had visited the islands and remained there for the rest of their lives. As the girls would say, I was 'fiu' and glad to be on my way.
After a while I excused myself and walked back to the hotel. When I went into the room Louise was still jammed against the wall in the same position she had been in when I left more than an hour before. I walked out onto the porch and found Georgine on the cot there, snoring softly. She hadn't bothered to undress and had probably not moved since she flopped down about four hours previously. She looked pretty good. I decided that if I stood there much longer I might get some more irresponsible ideas. I gave her shoulder a shake but she never stirred so I went back into the room and rattled the bed until Louise groaned and opened her eyes. She muttered something and giggled when she saw me fully dressed.
'Louise,' I said in a low voice, 'je vais maintenant! I'm going now!' She shook her head and turned down her mouth.
'Non, ce n'est pas vrai! It's not true!' I had been telling her for the past two weeks, ever since my ticket had been confirmed, that I was going to leave Tahiti. She had refused to consider it at all, however, and insisted that I was merely saying it to tease her.
'Oui, c'est vrai! It's true, all right! L'avion depart a sept heures. The plane leaves at seven o'clock. I have already put my things aboard.' I believe that she knew from the outset that I was leaving and hoped in some superstitious way that by refusing to admit it she could prevent it from happening. The fact that my baggage was gone seemed to remove from her mind the last chance of its not being true and a cloud seemed to come over her face. She looked at me for a moment with her great brown eyes, then they slowly filled with tears, and as they spilled out and began to trickle down her cheeks she whispered in a voice I could hardly hear.
'Tu n'est-ce pas gentille!' You are not nice!'
A long time seemed to pass as I tried to think of something suitable to say; all of the possibilities were trite and pointless. She knew, as I did, that there was little chance we would ever meet again. I finally bent over and put my hand on the side of her face and kissed her on the forehead. Then I walked out quickly and went down the steps to the street. I was beginning to find things getting slightly blurry around the edges myself.
The launch that carried passengers out to the flying boat was already pulling away with its first load when I arrived back at the dock. To my surprise and pleasure I saw Jean Guyonnet and his wife in the crowd of well-wishers clustered around the departing passengers. When they saw me they came over and each placed a gorgeous lei of Tiara Tahiti around my neck and kissed me soundly on each cheek. Vladja Kavan earned my undying regard by craftily suggesting that Rose repeat her part of the performance so he could record it on film.
The launch returned and the remainder of the passengers clambered aboard. As it pulled away from the dockside and picked up speed, we went through the traditional ceremony of throwing our leis in the water, and when I think back to that morning departure I confess I am overcome by the most vivid of reminiscences. The brilliant colours of the flower garlands bending to the ripples of the launch's wake as they floated upon the smooth blue-black surface of the harbour waters, and beyond, the varicoloured figures of our friends clustered along the dockside, seemed to sum up the bitter-sweet nostalgia of a thousand departures from a thousand distant ports.
Once we were securely stowed aboard, the captain lost no time in taxiing to the end of the harbour, where he turned, then took the plane off the water in a long, smooth gradient accompanied by a splendid shower of spray. He circled Papeete once then set his course for Aitutaki in the Cook Group. At my request, he generously changed course to take us over Maiao-iti and I was able to take an excellent picture of the island from the air. We were too high to make out "The Wren".
My friends had arranged two sets of seats to face each other and had started a game of poker. The flight attendant arrived with gin and tonic doubles which John Manly touched up with gin from a bottle he produced from his flight bag. It was 9:00 a.m. when I sat back to enjoy my 'first of the day'. According to our schedule we would arrive at Aitutaki around noon. After refuelling both our plane and ourselves we would be off again and arrive at Apia, Samoa, late in the afternoon for an overnight stay. Onto Fiji the following day where I planned to wait ten days for the Orient liner Orcades and a trip north to Hawaii and Vancouver.
I leaned back and as the gin started to establish itself I felt the fretful, skin-itching depression of our departure begin to fade slowly, to be replaced by an introspective euphoria that afforded infinite indulgence to the misadventures of the past and gave short shrift to trepidations about the future. It occurred to me that the situation almost demanded sentimentality; but in truth, I felt no mawkish sentiment or regret as I thought of the persons and places I'd encountered in the sometimes unbelievable, rarely boring, always unexpected twelve-month past.
I'd met rare types and rascals, women who were wonderfully witty, bewitchingly beautiful and even beautifully bitchy.
I'd dined on the best linen New Zealand could provide and shared bully beef with the dogs in the stench and filth of an Urewera camp, sipped Ballantine's for a shilling a glass and gagged on Maori rotgut for a pound a bottle, refused to stagger at the whiff of a long-dead boar, but at the right time and place had gone happily weak at the knees from the faint scent of frangipani; seen tough New Zealand bush men joke about a mate's compound fracture but weep bitter tears at the death of a favourite pig dog.
I'd laughed myself when I should have been weeping, but choked up over situations that most would find laughable, picked fights with my friends and overlooked the faults of strangers; ignored the obvious and taken for granted the obscure.
I'd learned that men who go to sea in small boats long enough eventually learn to pray and that men who love their dogs can usually be trusted; that Tahitian girls are amorous but not necessarily promiscuous and that hospitality and generosity are not necessarily direct functions of the size of a man's bankroll.
I'd experienced 'cabin fever', when a man will brood for days when his mate didn't make the cocoa before coming on tiller watch, or builds an ulcer because the crumbs aren't cleared from the galley after a sandwich session, and I'd nearly made Joe blow his top because I used the toilet paper to blow my nose and he feared we'd run out before we made port.
I'd faced the Pacific in its meanest mood, and shared the langour of its most serene, and I remembered crawling into my bunk, sodden wet and stupid with fatigue, with the clanking of the galley on one side and the surging roar of the passing sea on the other, while in between, three-quarters of an inch of pine planking separated me and my thoughts from eternity.
I remembered the sweet softness of Kiri's kisses at Raro and the vicious flesh-devouring embrace of the living reef at Maiao-iti; the wild, jungle-flower perfume of Quinn's Tahitian Hut on a Saturday night, and the dry, sour-metal taste of fear at sea on a stormy night.
One behind another the scenes in this spectral caravanserai drifted through my thoughts, wondrous wraiths, which, like languid curls of cigarette smoke drifting to a lamp shade, moved slowly from the shadow of my mind into the bright circle of recall, then, smothly speeding, writhed and shot upward and away, vanishing like phantoms into the soot-stained ceilings of the past.
'C'm' on, Ron! You look too serious!' cried Stewart, 'get in the game, we need your money!' I blinked my eyes and my reverie dissolved. The flight attendant handed me another drink--it was 'today' again.
'Funny you'd mention that, Stewart!' I said, moving across the aisle. 'I was just thinking I could use a bit of extra cash!'
Then, as the bright, clean cards slipped across the plastic table top, I lifted my glass and drank a silent, private toast to the special persons and favourite places I was leaving behind as we droned westward across the distant, far-flung southern ranges of this greatest of oceans....this divine Pacific...this sea of my adoption.
— The End —