In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333) (18 page)

The natives told Nicolai: There are four kinds of people who visit us—the administrator, the trader, the missionary, the ethnographer; but we never met a man like you that walks into our house and behaves like one of us. You are able to eat our food, sleep on the ground, to behave just as we do. We feel you must be one of us.

When Nicolai takes me on a tour of the island, I find that this is true. The natives build their huts inland, quite a distance from the road. You might not see them if you do not know where to look. Nicolai knows and suddenly darts into the woods, then beckons to me. As I approach, there is a complete Melanesian family sitting around a wood fire, which is cooking their meal. He purchases and gives me a basket which has been hanging in their hut over the smoke. It is black and smells of many foods.

He knows their songs: “Air me no save.”

He knows how they describe a brassiere: “Basket belong titi.”

He knows what they call the white man’s saw: “Something belong white man you push em I go you pull em I come I save kai kai wood.”

He knows the definition of a piano in pidgin English: “Something belong white man em I got white tooth em I got black tooth you kill em I cry.”

He knows of the rousette, called a flying fox by natives but really a bat. It feeds on fruit at night and is delicious to eat when it has fed on certain fruits.

We meet natives from other islands, Toara and Tongariki. We meet a Polynesian couple with children, the most beautiful of all. The man tall and proud, the woman with delicate Oriental features. He carries a machete and a basket of woven banana leaves. They are picking fruit and taro.

We see coconut trees with red bark, orange butterflies in droves, tropical trees in flamboyant orange, ironwood, and the tobacco tree, which contains an antidote for fish poisoning.

Most delightful are the tiny, untended roadside stands. Little thatch-roofed sheds offering melons, bananas, papaya, breadfruit, taro, fresh eggs, with the price of each item marked. You put the money in a box. In the old days they had a sign: “Don’t cheat as God is watching you.”

The ease with which Nicolai walks into their shacks, jokes and laughs with them in their own language, makes me understand why they relinquish their most sacred crafts to him.

One morning at 6:30
AM
Nicolai comes to fetch me; there is something I must see. Outside his museum garden, industrious spiders have woven yards of the most delicate webs covering all the bushes, and the dew has turned them into fine threads of diamonds glittering in the early sunlight. The webs are intricate, spanning from branch to branch, creating inner rooms of jewelled castles, labyrinths, cellular interweavings as carefully patterned as lace, forming necklaces, pendants, trailing brides’ veils which will soon vanish with the warmth of the sun. Nicolai does not want me to miss any of the wonders of Port Vila.

Every time I see the great drum statues, the hollow tree trunks ending in carved and painted faces of gods, I am reminded of Jerome Robbins’ ballet “The Age of Anxiety,” when the parents appear on incredible stilts and walk on stage just like these ancient gods, to frighten and intimidate. Here they seem more like guardians, with their hooked noses and immense popping eyes looking down on us as we pose for photographs. We photograph Pilioko and his tapestry; Nicolai and his painting of the heart of a jungle; an incredible bird carved of wood by a native, which has not only the swift cutting edge of flight but carries the head of a man half sculptured out of his belly; another bird with a man’s face.

Nicolai, the artist and world traveller, effaces himself to present Port Vila with a tenderness for the place which is more contagious than any of the descriptions made by journalists, by art critics, by literary visitors. He is never detached from what he is showing me. One morning he takes me to the market early, before the sun is too hot. Here under the trees beside the main road, the native women have come to lay out their wares. The most intricate and beautiful sea shells lie on mats. Coconut shells carved into cups. Fruits and flowers arranged as if they were colors for a painting, composed, layered, with a sense of design. Flowers are arranged with the art of a Matisse or of a Japanese flower arranger. Crabs are tied and are foaming at their plight. The women wear short mumus of bright flower patterns, the colors fusing with the colors of flowers and vegetables and fruit. Their muscles are relaxed like those of dancers about to sway; they move lightly even when fat. They sit under umbrellas. They wear bands around their foreheads similar to those worn by American Indians. The very old women do not disintegrate, they age like wood carvings, veined and wrinkled but their features intact, set in a mould of dignity. Many are stringing shells for the necklaces they sell, necklaces which, as in Tahiti and Hawaii, are tokens of greeting, welcome, friendship. Nicolai is shopping; he carries a basket made of soft green palm leaves neatly plaited and with a handle of coconut fiber braided for strength.

Once more, to give me the flavor of the island, Nicolai takes me to the best sea food restaurant, the Houstalet. The choicest sea food is served on a large platter. One of the specialties is a pâté of coconut crab liver, as delicate as pâté de fois gras. The meal ends with a special drink, apple calvados and mint, invented by Michoutouchkine.

I listen to his plans for the Museum of Oceanic Art. I leave wishing the museum might be built soon, so that one might visit Port Vila as a charming, modern, uncrowded city on a tropical island, and as a voyage into the past of Oceania.

The most fortunate event in travelling is to meet someone immersed in the life of a place, who loves it and lives in close communion with its inhabitants. Nicolai offered me the secret island of Efate, where shy and withdrawn natives would not otherwise have smiled.
Kousurata
in the native language means to travel, to roam. It is a tribute that, after all his wanderings, he should choose to rest and take root in Port Vila.

From
Westways,
January 1976.

From the plane you first notice soft, contoured, small islands, which seem to float along the coast of New Caledonia, and you remember the nostalgia of your youth for desert islands. Then some of the islands are no longer green, but become blue atolls, part of the barrier reef which creates the lagoons and protects undersea life; but these coral reefs can only live near the surface, so what lies below your plane is a carpet of opals, lapis lazuli, turquoise, of such beauty that an artist is said to have given up painting after seeing them. They are like artfully spilled pots of paint in all the colors of sea and sky plus the scintillating transparencies of jewels.

The nostalgia for desert islands is to be fulfilled by an abundance of empty beaches accessible only by boat, where those who love fishing can stop, cook their catch, and eat it with the freedom of a Robinson Crusoe.

Driving from the airport you notice new and strange species of trees, groves of niaouli (a eucalyptus whose bark is used for native huts) appearing like grotesque, gray giants, and Cook’s pines, which Captain Cook loved, and whose straight trunks, often one hundred feet tall, he used to replace his ship’s masts. New Caledonia was Captain Cook’s discovery. It reminded him of his native country, Scotland, so he named it New Scotland; but in the landscape I see only a softness of outline, undulating mountains, which the Melanesian name of Noumea, the capital city, suits so well.

Arriving at the modern Hotel Château Royal, the paradox which sharpens one’s senses begins. In the lobby of the hotel are exhibitions of Oceanic art belonging to the collection of Nicolai Michoutouchkine. Dark, fearsome, towering figures carved out of tree trunks, sometimes out of banyan tree roots. Primitive gods, ten feet tall, dominating the lobby, asserting the presence of indigenous art Surrounding this is a gay, sun-filled, athletic vacation land resembling an uncrowded Riviera. We are in French territory thousands of miles from France, but here is France’s sophisticated cuisine, perfumes, chic clothes, French books. In the hotel, with the gods looking on, you can lead a Riviera life by the sea.

The entire island is surrounded by a great coral barrier reef, so snorkeling and skin diving are full of surprises and treasures. There are short trips on a glass-bottomed boat for those who like to do their snorkeling above the surface. There is a boat trip with a charming French captain past floating islands (reminding you of childhood desserts, îles flottantes) to a tiny desert island at the harbor entrance featuring a French “pique-nique” lunch with barbecued fish. On the island is an impressive lighthouse sent by Napoleon (some say by mistake to Port de France in Noumea instead of Fort de France on the other side of the world in Martinique).

Noumea is a contrast of old and new. Modern buildings and homes stand next to vestiges of early French colonial architecture, from diminutive workmen’s houses of sandcolored wood and peaked ied tin roofs, ending in the French lightning rod, to classical colonial mansions.

It is a satisfying cycle to emerge from a modern city—in which the air is crystal clear, the freshness exhilarating, the hills dotted with well-tended white villas built by the exploitation of nickel, which also filled the many small harbors with boats of all kinds and shapes—from this to the amazing life at the bottom of the sea. One can walk from the Hotel Château Royal to the aquarium.

The aquarium is unique in the world today. It was constructed seventeen years ago by two marine biologists (using their own funds), Dr. Catala and his wife, Dr. Catala-Stucki. They were attracted to Noumea by the abundance and variety of tropical fish and corals in the lagoons protected by the great barrier reef. Here the fish and corals and other sea life are kept in the same water they came from, in a totally natural environment (nothing in the tanks is inanimate), and nourished as they nourished themselves in the sea. The sea life lives longer in this environment (some fish have lived in the aquarium seventeen years), which has enabled the Catalas to do long-term studies. In one of these studies, they discovered the fluorescence of deepwater corals, revealing an unknown world, a world which shames the jewellers. Under ultraviolet light, corals, which ordinarily open to feed only at night, can be observed in their mysterious fluorescence, when they unfold and stretch their tentacles seeking nourishment. To see marine life in its natural environment was once only the privilege of deep-sea divers. Now scientists can make extended studies of corals, even watch one coral devour another when crowded, or observe the corals which move from place to place. This was first doubted by scientists, and Dr. Catala invited them to come and see. No one had known that corals have less weight in the sea because of their spongeous, air-filled sacs. Some corals are like flowers never seen before, only they palpitate. Some are set with tiny pearls and diamonds. Some are like curled white feathers or like snow-white petals set with opals and amethysts, while others are spiked round balls with five silver eyes and one red eye. The staghorn coral is chalk-white with black tips, the mushroom coral is lined with pale green. All eat plankton with constant, graceful dance motions, almost invisible undulations.

These are the treasures the courageous Catalas have brought to the surface for us. There were many obstacles to overcome. As the divers search for corals in the depths of the sea it is so dark and murky they often cannot find the basket used for transporting specimens, or the corals die in the process of moving, or the divers are stung by venomous polyps. “All these reefs,” Dr. Catala writes, “are the site of luxuriant and diverse animal and plant life. This is where the enchantment of coral gardens is revealed . . . In the coral world everything is life and motion, light and color.”

Back into a luminousness of perpetual spring—the swallows never leave Noumea—with lagoons and harbors filled with dancing boats, as Venetian canals are filled with dancing gondolas, to sinuous roads encircling the bays, tree-lined, uncrowded. The trees reach down to the beach. Four old men are playing boules, as they do in the south of France. A few plumes of orange smoke from the nickel factory appear but are carried away by the trade winds.

Long ago traders came here seeking sandalwood, then came whalers, then the missionaries. Finally France sent its political prisoners. One taxi driver remembers from his childhood the men wrapped in blankets, roaming the island looking for work, but more essential, for a family they could attach themselves to, work for, live with, to obtain the warmth lost by exile, the families and children lost by exile. He remembers being pampered by the prisoners, how they built him a playhouse. They also built the cathedral and other public buildings.

Just as one receives three distinct smells from the open sea, the lagoons, and the harbors, three different forms of life offer themselves in Noumea: the sunlit physical life, swimming, boating and other sports; the marine life, endlessly fascinating; and the Oceanic art visible in the museum. Here one becomes aware that New Caledonia is a mysterious land, much of it unexplored. Its carved petroglyphs have not yet been deciphered.

It is through the indigenous art that one becomes aware of a people who have not lost their sense of beauty as Western culture has. Our protective lightning rods are always plain and resemble antennae. For the Melanesians, the carved slender wooden tips at the top of their huts become extraordinary symbols of protective figures, stylized old men of wisdom, suggestive of compassion and benediction. Masks of wood and feathers represent the spiritual chief; tools, axes, money, clubs, spears, pirogues, dishes, spoons, knives, are all objects to be decorated, painted, sculptured, sometimes inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There is a case filled with magic stones selected for their suggestive shapes: phallic stones for aphrodisiacs, womblike stones for fertility, stones capable of bringing sun or rain or helping navigation, others demonic, dangerous, bringing cyclones, illness, death. Some large stones are tied to the end of a club to make a casse-tête. The Melanesians have a genius for dressing themselves in natural products such as skirts of jute or tapa cloth made from banyan tree roots or the bark of the mulberry tree. The tips of war spears are carved of human bones. Wooden dishes are carved in the shape of fish or turtles—all these made without the help of the tools we know. Jade is sharpened to serve as a hatchet.