Coconut Chaos Diana Souhami (classic books to read txt) 📖

39

The Mangarevan policeman wore tight shorts and flip-flops. He stamped our passports and changed three hundred US dollars into French Pacific francs for both Lady Myre and me. She commended him on the cuteness of his bottom and I supposed that was why her wadge of received notes looked thicker than mine. Kurt told him the story of how we were all friends from Basle. I thought of Christian’s fabrication to the Tahitians after he’d shoved Bligh into a boat at knifepoint. His rehearsed mendacious saga about meeting up with Captain Cook and forming a settlement on Whytootackee. And my mother’s lies about her vandalised possessions. And the grand lies – about God controlling the world, and the goal of paradise, golden stories always created by someone more remote than the ordinary next-door lunatic, tall embroidered stories, because it was unconsoling to confront a bizarre molecular dance of configurations, puzzles and disintegration, where none of us, or it, was more significant than anything else.

The policeman was uninterested in why we’d arrived but said we must sleep on the boat at night. The islanders didn’t want us lodging in their houses. They suspected the yachties of dealing in people, drugs and guns.

In a sad bar by the jetty Kurt introduced us to Stefan, an erstwhile Brussels accountant, with Rastafarian dreadlocks, a limp and no front teeth or money. For twelve years he’d lived on a tired-looking monohull. He caught fish, foraged for fruit and coconuts, and at night stole chickens and occasional drums of fuel for his boat. The limp followed a fall from a tree he’d climbed for breadfruit. He damaged his back, had no medical insurance, was flown to Tahiti and nursed by nuns in a convent. They fed him on soup made from fishheads. It occurred to me that such soup was nutritious and that for days I’d had nothing much to eat.

Four yachts were in the bay. The fourth was captained by a dour-looking Spaniard with black curly whiskers all over his face. He had overhanging eyebrows and only his nose seemed to find its way through the foliage. Kurt said he was on the run but was vague as to what he was fleeing from, or who was in pursuit. Two women sailed with him but two women were sailing with Kurt. I thought how worse than strange the Bounty crew must have seemed to the Tahitians: unreadable, distinguishable only by peculiarity.

The typical yachtie women, in their twenties, scantily clad, voluptuous, dark-skinned, uncommunicative, hadn’t been abducted like the first mothers of Pitcairn, but they completed a male fantasy. The men were the masters, in love with the ocean, the horizon and their boats. They were timeless voyagers, mutineers who’d turned away from society’s constraints. They liked world music, drink, hashish, the wind in their sails and a distant island.

It was unsurprising the Mangarevans wanted them gone. They came from an unknown place, spoke unfamiliar languages, were unpredictable and fell out of trees.

I left the bar while Lady Myre was in the dunny, and walked to the Cathedral of St Michael that loured over Mangareva. It was a testament to the mad rule of Father Honoré Laval, a French Catholic priest who’d arrived in 1834. He’d heard of the islanders’ pagan ways from whalers. He made them build this cathedral as proof of conversion and repentance. It was seventy-five feet high and modelled on Chartres, with seating for two thousand people – four times the current population of the island.

Laval had been received with all hospitality by King Te Maputeoa, given food and accommodation, and accorded respect. He repaid this by uprooting the island’s culture. The Mangarevans were forced into Catholic marriage or celibacy and punished brutally for disobedience. Through punishment and the threat of damnation he made them build, as well as the cathedral, a prison, a monastery and a convent. They hewed basalt, cut coral blocks from the reef, made limestone from firing coral. Fifteen hundred people died in his ten-year rule. Workers were brought in from Tahiti. All the Polynesian icons, temples, gods and holy relics were destroyed and the stone used for Laval’s Catholic fantasy. King Te Maputeoa was baptised and renamed King Gregorio in homage to Pope Gregory the Sixteenth. Accounts of Laval’s savagery reached the bishop of Tahiti from sailors, traders and French officials. He was summoned there in 1871, declared insane and forbidden to return to Mangareva.

Above the cathedral door was the inscription Quis ut Deus? – Who is as God? This strange, lofty, empty space, its vaulted blue ceiling studded with mother-of-pearl stars, its twenty high pillars, its frescoes, cornices, triglyphs, arches and friezes, was a monument to one man’s arrogance and certainty. The altar and tall cross were inlaid with flower sprays of pearls and shells. Once a blue pearl of fabled size lay on the altar, and once a necklace of black pearls adorned the plaster image of the Virgin Mary.

The Mangarevans had been pearl fishers, their lives shaped by their island, the sea, bright flowers, colourful cloths, the food they found, the music they made from shells, pipes and drums. Their soul was still there in the clear lagoon, the silver sands, the small atolls with coconut palms, the huge oyster shells. Pretty children still played, their skin and eyes brown, their noses flat, their legs thick and sturdy. The girls wore garlands of shells, and hibiscus flowers behind their ears. I climbed through forests of hibiscus, candlenut, coconut and giant ferns. Chickens pecked in the aeho grass. From the convent ruins high on a hillside I followed the stone path Laval made the islanders build. It wound down to the shore. When a boat arrived they’d formed a human chain and passed provisions up the steep cliff side.

The fate of this island seemed as capricious as Pitcairn’s. Good didn’t triumph, but neither did bad. Nothing lasted. But the reflections of this day mattered – the smell of the sea, shifting sunlight,