Hawaii (146 page)

The inspecting team lingered at Bora Bora for nine days, and every night during that time the entire community held an all-night celebration. From the nearby island of Raiatea, which in the old days had been known as Havaiki, the holy island of the Polynesians, a young French government official came over with a barrel of red wine which the general insisted on buying, although the gracious young man had intended it as a gift, and at dusk each day this barrel was cocked, and anyone who wished a drink could have one. The orchestra never stopped playing. In exhaustion men would drop their drums and others would pick them up. The seven girls who were tending the guests of honor rarely left them, so that in the end even at formal meetings of the inspection staff, the Polynesian girls would be there, not understanding a word that was being spoken, but

each one proud whenever her man spoke forcefully on some point or other.

During the nine days no mention was made of sex, except once when the general remarked thoughtfully, "I am amazed at what a man of forty-nine can do." But he was taking a two-hour nap morning, afternoon, and evening.

Hoxworth preferred not even to think of Tehani as a real person. She was something that happened, a dream whose confines would never be appropriately known. Having experienced a normal Punahou and Yale education, he had been roughly aware of what sex was, but never accurately, and his marriage had been a family affair, which for a while had been formally proper, like going on an endless picnic with one's fully clothed sister, but soon even that had ended, and when at odd moments in the last few years he had thought about sex he had supposed that for him, at least, it had ended in his mid-thirties. Tehani Vahine, for that was her whole name, Miss Tehani of Bora Bora, had quite other intentions. She had been taught that men of Colonel Hale's age were those who enjoyed sex most, and who were often most proficient in it; and whereas she had been wrong in both guesses about Hale, for he was both afraid and unskilled, she had never known a man who could learn so fast.

They were days of listless, idle joy. He loved her best wheni she wore her sarong draped carelessly about her hips, her breasts bare and her long hair sparkling with flowers. He would lie endlessly upon the rope bed and watch her movements, as if he had never seen a girl before, and sometimes with a cry of joy he would leap up, catch her in his arms and carry her to the bed in a blizzard of kisses. Once he asked her, "Is it always like this in Bora Bora?" and she replied, "Usually we don't have so much good wine." And he thought: "In other parts of the world there is a war, and in Hawaii nervous men are arguing with each other, and in New York girls are calculating, 'Should I let him tonight?' But in Bora Bora there's Tehani." Like the general, he was amazed at what a man of forty-four could do ... if he had the right encouragement.

On the next-to-the-last day Tehani whispered, "Tell the others rou won't be there tomorrow," and at dawn she sprinkled water on ;is face and cried, "You must get up and see the fish!"

She led him sleepily to a spot away from her house where she had a fresh tuna staked out and cleaned. "This is going to be the best dish you ever ate in your life," she assured him, "because it will be Bora Bora poisson cru. Watch me how I do it, so that when you are far away and went to remember me, you can make some and taste me in it."

She cut the fresh tuna into small fillets of about two inches in length and a quarter inch thick. These she placed in a large calabash, which she carried to the lagoon where no people came, and from the cold waters she dipped a few coconut shells full of fresh salt water which she tossed on the fillets. Then she took a club and

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knocked down three limes, which she cut in< half and squeezed into the calabash. Carefully seeking a place where the sun shone brightest, she put the fish there to steam through the long, hot morning, cooking itself in the lime juice and sea water.

"Now comes the part where you must help mel" she cried merrily as she pointed to a sloping palm that bent over the water, holding in its crest a bundle of ripe nuts. "I shall climb up there, but you must catch the nuts for me," and before he could stop her, she had tied her sarong about her hips, had caught hold of the tree with her hands and feet, and had bent-walked right up the tree to where the nuts clustered. Holding on with her left hand, she used her right to twist free a choice nut. Then, with a wide side-arm movement, she tossed it inland, where Hoxworth caught it. "Hooray!" she cried in, glee and pitched another.

When she returned to earth she found a stout stick, jammed it in the earth, and showed her partner how to husk a coconut, and when he had done so, she knocked the two nuts together until they cracked open and their juices ran into a second calabash. Then she jammed into the ground a second stick, this time at an angle, and against its blunt edge she began scraping the coconut slowly and 'rhythmically, until white meat, dripping with nectar, began shredding down onto taro leaves placed on the ground. As her golden shoulders swayed back and forth in the sunlight, she sang:

"Grating the coconut for my beloved, Shredding the sweet meat for him, Salting the fish,

Under the swaying breadfruit tree, Under the rainless sky, I shred the sweet meat for my beloved."

When she finished grating she ignored Hoxworth, as if he were not there, and carefully gathered the shredded coconut, placing half in the calabash to join the captured coconut water, half in a tangle of brown fiber from the coconut husks, which she now caught in her slim hands and squeezed over a third calabash. As she twisted the coarse fibers, a fine rich liquor was forced out, and this was the sweet coconut milk that would complete the dish she was preparing.

Again and again Tehani squeezed the grated coconut, softly chanting her song, though now she spoke of twisting the meat for her beloved instead of grating it, and as the palms along the shore dipped toward the lagoon, Hoxworth Hale had a strikingly clear intuition: "From now on whenever I think of a woman, in the abstract ... of womanliness, that is ... I'll see this brown-skinned Bora Bora girl, her sarong loosely about her hips, working coconut and humming softly in the shadowy sunlight. Has she been here, under these breadfruit trees, all these last empty years?" And he had a second intuition: that during the forthcoming even emptier years, she would still be there, a haunting vision of the other half of life,

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the womanliness, the caretaking symbol, the majestic, lovely, receptive

other half.

Overcome by his vision of past and future, he desired to revel in the accidental now, and reached out from the shaded area where she had placed him, trying to catch her leg again, but she deftly evaded him and went to a pit where yams and taro had been baking, and she now proceeded to break the latter into small purplish pieces, rich in starch, while the yams she held in her hands for a moment, showing them to her lover. "These are what our sailors call the Little Eyes of Heaven," she laughed, pointing to the eyes of the yam, which clustered like the constellation whose rising in the east heralds the Polynesian New Year.

Finally, Tehani chopped the onions and then mixed all the vegetables in with the thick, rich coconut milk, and after she had washed her hands in the lagoon, she came back and sat cross-legged before Hale, her sarong pulled far up to expose soft brown thighs, and her breasts free in the sunlight. "It's a game we play," she explained, and with him in the shadows and she in the sunlight, she started slapping his shoulders, and as she hummed her coconut song, she indicated that he was to slap hers, and in this way she passed from his shoulders to his forearms, to his flanks, to his hips and finally to his thighs, and as the game grew more intense the slaps grew gentler and her song slower, until with a culminating gesture that started out to be a slap but which ended as an embrace, Hale caught her sarong and started pulling it away, but she cried softly in her own language, "Not in the sunlight, Hale-tane," and he understood, and swept her up in his arms and carried her into the grass house, where the game reached its intended conclusion.

Toward noon she asked him in French, "Do you like the way we make our poisson era in Bora Bora?" And she brought in the fish, well saturated in sun and lime juice, and Hale saw that the tuna was no longer red but an inviting gray-white. Into it she mixed the prepared coconut milk with its burden of taro and onions and yams. Next she tossed in a few shellfish for flavor, and over the whole she sprinkled the freshly grated, juicy coconut. With her bare right hand she stirred the ingredients and finally offered her guest three fingers full of Bora Bora raw fish.

"This is how we feed our men on this island," she teased. "Can your girls do as well?" When Hale laughed, she pushed the dripping fish into his mouth and chuckled when the white milk ran down his chin and across his naked chest. "You are so sloppy!" she chided. "But you are such an adorable man, Hale-tane. You can laugh. You are tender. You dance like an angel. And you are strong in bed. You are a man any girl could love. Tell me," she begged, "do your girls at home love you?"

"Yes," he said truthfully, "they do."

"Do they sometimes play games like the slapping game with you, and then chase you around the house just for the fun of being with you?"

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"No," he replied.

"I am sorry, Hale-tane," she said. "The years go by very fast and soon . . ." She pointed to an old woman searching for shellfish along the shore: "Then we play no more games." It was with the sadness of the world turning in space, or of the universe drifting madly through the darkness, that she said these words in island French: "Et bientot c'est tout fini et nous ne jouons plus."

"Is that why your father builds you a house of your own when, you're fifteen?" Hale asked. "So you can learn the proper games?"

"Yes," she explained. "No sensible man would want to marry me unless he knew that I understood how to make love properly. Men are happiest when a girl has proved she can have a baby, and do you know what I hope, Hale-tane? I hope that when you fly away tomorrow you leave in here a baby for me." She patted her flat brown stomach which looked as if it could never contain a child. "That is my wish."

And so they lazed the day away, and ate poisson era, the best dish that any island ever invented, and played the silly games of love that Bora Borans had been teaching their daughters for nearly two thousand years, and in. due time shadows crept across the lagoon, and night fell, and after the drams had been beating at the village dancing ground for some hours, Tehani wrapped herself in a sarong and said, "Come, Hale-tane, I should like the people of Bora Bora to see me dancing with you one more time. Then, if I do have your baby, they will remember that among all the Americans, you were the best dancer."

In the morning, as the inspection team piled into the PBY for take-off and the return to Hawaii, no one spoke of the long-haired girls of Bora Bora, or of their flashing teeth, or of the games they knew how to play, for if anyone had spoken, all would have wanted to remain, on the island for another day, another week; but when the plane had torn its bulk free from the waters of the lagoon and stood perched on what the aviators called "the step," the small after-portion on which the huge boat rode on the waves until it finally soared into the air, Hale again felt the aesthetic moment when men are half of the ocean, and half of the air, and in this attitude the speeding PBY whipped across the lagoon until it finally soared aloft, and all were wholly of the sky.

It was then, as Bora Bora disappeared in the brilliance of morning sunlight, that the major observed bitterly, "To think! We're going to draft decent young American boys, tear them from their mothers' arms, slam them into uniform and send them down to Bora Bora. God, it's inhuman." And for the rest of the war, and for many years thereafter, there would be a confraternity of men who met casually in bars, or at cocktail parties, or at business luncheons, and one would say to the other, "They write mostly crap about the Pacific, but there's one island . . ."

"Are you speaking of Bora Bora?" the other would interrupt.

"Yes. Did you serve there?"

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"Yep." Usually, nothing more was said, because if a man had served his hitch on Bora Bora nothing more was required to be said, but whenever Hoxworth Hale met such men he invariably went one step further: "Did you ever know a slim, long-haired girl of fifteen or sixteen? Lived by the mountain. Named Tehani."

Once he met a lieutenant-commander from a destroyer-escort who had known Tehani, and the destroyer man said, "Wonderful girl. Danced like an angel. She was the first one on the island to have an American baby."

"Was it a boy?" Hale asked.

"Yes, but she gave it to a family on Maupiti. Girls there had no chance to produce American babies, and the island wanted one."

And suddenly, in the smoke-filled bar, Hoxworth Hale saw a young girl dancing beside a lagoon, and he saw on the blue waters an ancient double-hulled canoe and he thought: "I am forever a part of Bora Bora, and my son lives on in the islands." Then the memory vanished and he heard a girl's voice lamenting: "The years go by very fast, and soon we pky no more games."

In time, Hale's visit to the South Seas produced other fruit than his memory of Tehani Vahine, for in addition to her lilting song of the coconut-grater, he constantly recalled his conversation with Sir Ratu Salaka in Fiji, and he began to compare all aspects of Hawaii with similar conditions in Fiji and Tahiti, and he came to this unshakable conclusion: "In every respect but one we Americans have done a better job in Hawaii than the English have in Fiji or the French in Tahiti. Health, education, building and the creation of new wealth ... we are really far ahead. And in the way we've integrated our Orientals into the very heart of our society, we're so far ahead that no comparisons are even permissible. But in the way we have allowed our Hawaiians to lose their land, their language, and their culture, we have been terribly remiss. We could have accomplished all our good 'and at the same time protected the Hawaiians." But whenever he reached this conclusion he would think of Joe Tom Char, who now presided as president of the senate, and he was half-Hawaiian, half-Chinese; or of the year's beauty queen, Helen Fukuda, half-Hawaiian, half-Japanese; or of the innumerable Kees who seemed to be running Pearl Harbor, many of whom were half-Hawaiian, halfXDhinese. "Perhaps we're building something in Hawaii that will be infinitely better than anything Fiji or Tahiti ever produces." At any rate, Hale returned from his trip no longer apologetic for what the missionaries had accomplished.