The Sex Lives of Cannibals (5 page)

The policeman, however, didn’t seem much bothered by the fact that I was not legally entitled to drive anywhere on Earth. He opened up a dusty logbook that looked to predate the twentieth century. He entered our names with a careful scrawl and then went to a typewriter that would probably fetch a good price at an auction for collectible antiques. Slowly he hammered out our licenses on pink paper. Our licenses read Mrs. Sylvia and Mr. Maarten, respectively.

The police are incompetent
.

Easygoing.

Onward to the power station, which was a diesel generator in a small tin warehouse capable of meeting the electricity needs of, optimistically, three average Americans, provided that they didn’t use a refrigerator and a hair dryer concurrently. We waited patiently for the clerk, who was lying prone atop the counter, to arise from his slumber. He lay there like an offering until a chorus of throat clearing elicited unembarrassed consciousness.

Kate rolled her eyes.
You see what it’s like here
.

Relaxed.

Kate wanted to change the electricity bill for the house that FSP had rented into our name. This proved impossible. The bill was filed under
M
for Mary. Only Mary could change the name on the bill. Kate explained that Mary, who was a former director of FSP, had left the country four years ago.

“Well, she can change the bill when she comes back,” said the clerk, very patiently, I thought.

And so it went. We continued madly driving up and down the atoll, swerving perilously around children, pigs, and dogs on an epic quest of errand fulfillment. I understood Kate. She was Washington, D.C., personified: a humorless bureaucrat, a taskmaster, a results-oriented person with long experience at the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose functionaries are best known for roving from one embassy cocktail party to another in deluxe SUVs, liberally sprinkling million-dollar checks on pliable dictators. Kate was accustomed to long, fruitful days spent writing memos and executive summaries, followed by a G and T or two on the verandah at the Club. On Tarawa, however, she had found an unrefined, crude little hellhole, an island that wanted little and strove for nothing, and this drove her well beyond exasperation and just shy of madness. I was not blind. I could see that Tarawa was a raw place. There was, for instance, no coffee on the island. Kurtz, let it be said, adapted. While it is true that he didn’t adapt very well, at least he tried. Kate, it seemed to me, refused to adjust, and I took note of this. I resolved to start drinking tea.

Eventually, we pulled into a dirt road with cavernous potholes that led toward the ocean. We stopped in front of a “permanent house,” as such houses are called to distinguish them from “local” houses, which have a life span of about five years, unless it gets windy. This would be our house. Painted lime green, it looked like one of those single-story structures one might see in rural Oklahoma with car parts in the front yard, the sort of house that would be considered a step up, just, from a trailer. On Tarawa, though, this was one of the better homes on the island, a B-class house according to the government, which owned the majority of permanent houses on the island and classified them on a scale of A to F. It had a tin roof that allowed rain water to pour into gutters and then down into two large cement water tanks that stood like mute, massive sentries in front of the house. A water pump, bolted into a cement block, brought the water through the pipes. Instead of glass windows there were plastic horizontal louvers, plus security wire. Someone had once taken the trouble to plant flowers and maintain a garden, but this had long gone untended, and so there was a pleasant lushness to the front yard as the bush crept in and leaves were left unswept. There were tall coconut palm trees, stately casuarina trees, and slender papaya trees and also ferns and a squat tree-bush that looked to produce dimpled potatoes. Inside the house, the floor was gray linoleum and there was simple cane furniture, but what was most striking was the view out back. Our backyard was the Pacific Ocean, which is regarded by many as a very large ocean and believed by many more to be misnamed, and I found its presence in our backyard intimidating. We were just a foot or so above sea level, and it wasn’t even high tide. From the house, the reef extended about a hundred yards, where it met the deep water, the swells that had traveled thousands of miles so that they could rise up into steep vertical masses and blast into our fragile little atoll. These were breakers, as apt and succinct a description as can be. A steady roar came into the house, as did a fine salt mist from the fracturing waves. In each room, the walls were ringed with spittles of rust sent hurtling by corroding ceiling fans.

Kate had left several bottles of boiled water and a few cans of lemonade for us and as I satisfied my thirst I regretted every bad thought I’d had of her. She told us that we should boil our drinking water for twenty minutes on account of the rats in the gutter and god-knows-what parasites in the water tanks. There was a shower, but it had only cold water, and while normally I would find the lack of hot water immensely distressing, climatic circumstances were such that I was not troubled in the least. More worrisome was Kate’s claim that it hadn’t rained at all during the year she had lived on Tarawa and that, therefore, there was not likely to be much water in the tanks and that we should consider carefully every drop we might use.

She also suggested we continue to employ her “housegirl.” I had a vision of a lithe, undulating young woman, possibly wearing a grass skirt, swaying about the house casting come-hither glances my way, and I became amenable to the idea for a few fleeting seconds until the absurdity of the prospect set in. We were in our mid-twenties, barely solvent, here to do good deeds, or at least one of us was here to do good deeds, and having a housegirl would only stoke our inner guilt. I smoothly expressed our reservations.

“Bah,” I said. “We don’t need servants.”

Kate went straight for the jugular. “All right then. I hope you don’t have a problem spending your days washing Sylvia’s clothes, by hand, and mopping the dust and sea spray that coats this house each day. Sylvia certainly won’t have any time.”

Sylvia looked as if she was not entirely displeased by this possibility. “Make sure you separate the colors from the whites,” she grinned.

Kate, thankfully, went on. “And I’m sure you won’t mind if yet another girl is pulled out of school because her mother can no longer afford the school fees.”

Who was I to deny a child’s education? “So will she be coming once or twice a week?” I asked, silently noting that as the mother of schoolchildren, the housegirl was unlikely to be young and lithe, and she probably wouldn’t undulate either.

Sylvia and Kate departed for the FSP office and I was left alone to ponder the immensity of the ocean and the giant sharks that were undoubtedly lingering behind the house waiting for some stupid foreigner to go for a swim. Probably tiger sharks. And black and white–tipped reef sharks, of course. Maybe hammerheads and blue sharks and bull sharks too, though it’s really the tiger sharks one needs to worry about. I wondered if sharks would swim over the reef. I scanned the water closely. I began to imagine things. Terrible things.

But that water looked outrageously appealing. It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot. Staggeringly hot. The heat blasted from a contemptible sun; it came unbidden from the white coral sand; it floated in on humid waves. A faint breeze brought nothing but the stench of decomposition and the slight, acrid smell of burning leaves somewhere not too distant. As I stepped outside, little moved save for the flies that gathered around my legs, my sopping shirt, my face, seeking to feed off the salt I was steadily expelling. I yearned for Canada. I imagined tundra. I thought of boyhood winter days when I would return from excavations in the snow, hands so frozen that only with deft elbow movements could I turn the faucet and reclaim feeling in my fingers with cold streaming water. But it was pointless. The powers of the mind could not overcome the reality of the equatorial sun. A choice, therefore, had to be made. I could either melt into an oozing puddle, drop by drop—a slow, torturous death, for certain—or I could ease my suffering with a swim in the world’s largest backyard pool, thereby risking life and limb to the schools of sharks that were, and I sensed this strongly, circling at reef’s edge, awaiting a meal featuring the other-other white meat.

I chose to go for a swim. Death, if it came, would be swift, with the added benefit of it being preceded by relief from the heat. I stripped to my shorts and approached the water. Sweet Moses, it was hot under the sun. I could feel my back swiftly turning into one enormous crackling blister. I put my T-shirt back on and decided that from here on, I would simply cultivate the world’s greatest farmer’s tan.

The reef near the shore had three water-carved steps, and at the base of each crabs scurried in the froth of small collapsing waves. The water was sun-warmed, uncomfortably hot in the shallows, but pleasant, if not refreshing, farther out. Waves, some cresting, some not, the remnants of breakers, rolled in as the tide began to draw water back toward the reef’s edge. I swam farther out, half propelled by the tide’s pull. I felt like I was inside a rainbow. Ahead, the ocean was tinted the blue of great depth, reflected as a metallic sheen by singular cotton-ball clouds. Around me, the blue was sun-dappled like a sharp, morning sky. Near shore, it turned turquoise and a limpid, pale green. A mass of coconut palm trees followed the serpentine curves of the atoll. Green-bottomed clouds drifted over the lagoon. I realized that this was the genuine blue, the pure green, the essential yellow, and until this moment I had never seen anything but dull approximations of color.

At the reef’s edge, the water boiled into swirling liquid chaos. The breakers seemed colossal, looming well above me, and in their precipitous faces they reflected protruding ridges of coral and the translucent shadows of fish. There was an agitated roar, and as each swell rose and gathered height, becoming an incontestable force, there followed a crash like thunder and torrents of broken water. Where I was, twenty yards from the break zone, I could feel the tide and the suction created by breaking waves compelling me ever closer to the edge and the mile-deep abyss. The water was chest-deep and shallowing and I leaned back and began pushing with my feet as if I were walking backward into a heavy gale.

Between the crests of approaching waves I watched an old man resting in his canoe. It was a small canoe, about nine feet long, and it had a single outrigger. As he rose with the swell he seemed to be a part of the sky. When he found a set of waves to his liking, he paddled hard, caught the crest of a six-foot wave and surfed it in for a long moment. Just as the wave began to hollow and sputter, he eased back into the trough, and then he paddled with furious dexterity through the breakwater. The canoe leapt forward. Behind him, another wave rolled in like a shadow, a heaving mound of water. It rose into a steep wall of water, crested, and broke. White water rushed forward, and this sun-baked man, shirtless with sinuous muscles, wearing a ridiculous hat that looked not unlike a fibrous, conical wizard’s cap, shot ahead, riding the white water as it again gathered form and became a rolling wave propelling his canoe to shore.

I followed him in, trudging through the torrent, bodysurfing when I could. As I neared the beach, where white sand and hard, gray coral intermingled, I could see him unloading his day’s catch of fish. He passed the fish to the children that gathered in the shallows. And then he lifted his canoe, balanced it on his shoulder, and disappeared through a narrow trail that cleaved the bush tangle alongside our house.

Now this was the South Pacific of my dreams. Stunning natural beauty. Challenges to test my mettle as a manly man. Sharks! Extreme heat! The pounding surf! Noble natives going about their daily lives with a quiet heroism. I would thrive here, I felt.

And then I saw what confronted me. It rested directly between myself and shore. It was massive. I had never seen anything like it. I sensed its power. I became very, very frightened.

It was an enormous brown bottom.

The possessor, a giant of a man, was squatting in the shallows, holding on to a ledge of coral rock. He emitted. He emitted some more. He was like a stricken oil tanker, oozing brown sludge. When he was done, he wiped himself with sticks. Not leaves. Sticks. Small branches. Twigs.

And they were coming my way. Riding the ebbing tide, the sticks homed in on me. I became the North Star for shit-encrusted sticks. Whichever way I moved, and I was moving very quickly, these sticks seemed to follow. They were closing in. I began to curse. In Dutch. This only happens when something primal is stirred.

“Podverdomme!”

I ran parallel to the shore. Swimming would have been quicker, but I dared not dive in. Not here. Not with an outgoing tide. When I thought I had moved a sufficient distance from the shit floating my way, I waded back toward the beach. Two small boys squatted directly between me and land. I calculated angles, the exact direction and speed of the tide, the location of the moon, whether it was waxing or waning. I plotted a course and walked in, diagonal to the shore, between the two streams, making no eye contact with those going potty.

There was a lesson here, I felt. I had no idea what that lesson might be, but clearly, adjustments would have to be made. Expectations would have to be altered. Perceptions changed. We were not in Washington anymore. There is bullshit in Washington, but no shit. Not so on Tarawa. It could be that Kate was right in her critique. Perhaps Tarawa was a disaster. But it felt like Paradise too. It was one or the other, sublime or wretched, never neither. Survival on Tarawa, I decided, would depend on one’s reaction to the absurd, and so I resolved to ignore the shit. Just pretend it’s not there, and focus on the poetic, the humorous, on the Technicolor sunsets and the like. Because the shit on Tarawa could drive you mad. Really.