Playground, page 28
A cookout after the churches let out on Sunday: Didier Turi put out word by the island’s social media and supplemented it with dispatches on the coconut radio. Everyone but the Hermit Tamatoa used one of those two channels. Meanwhile, the mayor made available all the materials from the President’s people on Tahiti and those he’d gotten directly from California. The meeting would address remaining questions about the proposed pilot project and pave the way for the referendum.
Didier went to Palila Tepa to ask for a special favor. “Auntie, would you please go tell your old friend? He would barely let me say three words, when I told him about the last meeting.”
The Queen grinned. Her teeth were wonderful, for someone who had not seen a dentist for a decade. “What makes you think he’ll let me say more?”
The mayor made no mention of the Queen’s history. “People listen to you.” He stopped short of asking if she wanted to be the mayor for a while.
“Why is it so important to you that he know?”
All Didier ever wanted from his stint in public life was to finish this job without reproach from anyone. He was beginning to understand how impossible that was.
“Everyone must know. This is a huge favor. But I will be forever in your debt.”
The Queen blew a raspberry. “It’s not a favor at all. It’s an opportunity. I love to torture that man! But you’re right about one thing. You’ll be in my debt forever. For one little thing or another.”
DIDIER TASKED HIS STAFF—one semi-paid woman named Heirani Morane—to assemble the craft circle and the uke players and the fishermen and the self-appointed champion grillers to get the community center ready to host another gathering. And he asked his tech man, Manutahi, to set up the gear he needed to stream video.
On his way home, he stopped to inform the Americans, whose family represented five percent of the island’s votes. As he drew near the restored cabin on his motorbike, Didier slipped briefly into dream time. A strange shape speckled in the craziest colors rose above the roof behind the shack. Everyone knew that the American woman made things, but never anything as strange as this. The form was graceful and organic. It reminded the mayor of something he couldn’t place.
On a platform lashed together from portia branches, plywood sheets, and palm leaves, Ina Aroita stood next to the growing monster, attaching more shiny pieces. The platform swayed. The sculptor heard the motorbike and turned to wave, almost tumbling over the edge of the rickety scaffold into the sculpture. The mayor did a flying dismount and left the motorbike lying in the weeds. By the time he reached the scaffolding to catch her, the American woman had scrambled down to welcome him.
Up close, the monster shocked him again. It was pure garbage—bright plastic trash. Bottles and drums, crumpled PVC and containers in cartoon colors. Glued, stapled, and lashed together, the statue of beachcombed plastic thrust five meters high into the air.
“What on Earth is that?”
The artist laughed. “Good question. Does it look like anything to you?”
It looked to the mayor like something supernatural. Something powerful, oceanic, and tapu. The plastic parts had been grouped to form indigenous motifs and tiki figures. She was tapping into something ancient and mythic. He knew of her obsession with the old gods. Was this going to be a gigantic plastic Ta’aroa, shaking out his feathers like the ones that fell to Earth and rose again as the first trees? He tried to recall what other old myths this shape might represent, but his memories were crowded out by Mary and Joseph and the ox and the ass and the manger and the shepherds and the three kings.
“Tell me,” he said.
“I wish I knew!”
“Is it a study for something?” She usually worked in shell, bone, feathers, wood, and coconut fiber.
“I think it’s a study . . . for itself. It came out of a bird.”
“All this?”
“Oh, no. Just the first bits. The rest of it came in on the currents.”
The mayor nodded. Makatea, whose magic rock had helped the industrial countries achieve liftoff, was now another rubbish tip for those ignited countries. The thought reminded him of why he came.
“Are your husband and children here?”
The artist led him into the family’s house. The little girl was dancing by herself to silent music in the front room. The little boy sat across from his father at the table in front of a stack of colored stones, explaining the rules of a complex game that he was inventing on the spot. He had his finger in the air and was saying, “Except when, except if . . .”
Everyone on the island had loved the children’s birth parents. The father, Julien, died when he capsized his fishing boat coming back after selling his catch in Rangiroa. The waves must have been tremendous, because Julien could handle a boat as well as anyone. Four months after Julien drowned, the mother, Marielle, suffered a diabetes-induced heart attack. By the time the emergency seaplane from Tahiti got to the island, she was dead. The coroner called it the “widowhood effect.”
Then two strange Americans who worked with a social services NGO heard about the tragedy and applied to be the children’s new parents. The authorities were skeptical, reluctant to allow so old a foreign couple to adopt two native islanders so vulnerable and young. But when the couple said they would raise the children in place, on the island of their birth, all objections disappeared. And now, a few years later, the children called them Father and Mother, although they were old enough to be the children’s grandparents.
“Mr. Mayor!”
The man, Rafi, made Didier nervous. The mayor’s words come out fast and telegraphic. “Hello, hello! Big meeting tomorrow, after church. Important that you be there. We have lots of information straight from the source that should answer everyone’s questions.”
The father saluted. “We’ll be there, Chief!”
The son followed suit. “Yes, we will be there!”
The girl stopped dancing and shouted from across the room, “I can sign my name!”
That made the boy start jumping in place. “Me, too! We get to vote!”
Not for the first time, Didier wondered how the island had thought it a good idea to entrust their future to creatures who still had their milk teeth.
The mayor cast another glance at the sculpture on his way out. Didier could not decide if the sculpture was beautiful or ugly, hopeful or threatening. All he could say for sure was that a great deal of plastic was washing up on the shores of Makatea. He did not care for the medium, vastly preferring Ina Aroita’s more traditional pieces. But so tall a thing made from something so jarring commanded his attention. He had seen the contour somewhere before. The odd, sweeping curve of it, the way it tapered, the gaping opening in the middle.
“I’m sure I know what this is! I just can’t say what.”
The American woman had such an easy laugh. “Let me know, when it comes to you!”
THE QUEEN WORKED HER WAY to the southern tip of the island to inform the Hermit. The walk was two and a half miles in each direction, and she gave herself all afternoon to accomplish the assignment. She sang and botanized and tried to imagine the island’s two paths into the future, in the wake of the referendum. She thought of the Hermit, her history with him, and what a difficult man he was. His name, Tamatoa, came from two Tahitian words meaning “child” and “warrior.” He had lived up brilliantly to both.
Tamatoa saw the Queen coming from half a mile away. The Hermit let no person sneak up on him. But he held his ground and didn’t shout at her to go away. That only confirmed what she knew full well. He would always be interested in anything she had to say to him, if only to try to refute her.
“Hello, my dear,” she sang to him as she closed the distance. She came within a meter and smiled in his face. He scowled but did not move away.
“Big meeting tomorrow.”
His face fell in disappointment. “That’s all you have to say? You just had a big meeting. I didn’t go to that one.”
“And we all missed you so much, mon cher.”
For a split second, he softened. Then he cursed her impudence.
She ignored the curses. “You realize the island’s future is at stake?”
He glared at her, and the Queen wavered a little in her heart. She had never known another human being who more badly needed the world to be perfect and who felt its shortfall more bitterly. There was something heroic, almost artistic, about that need. Her old, endlessly idealistic lover’s unrequited love for the universe would make a good song. It was what made her take him for a lover in the first place. But his bitterness spoiled that need.
He wore that bitterness now like a ceremonial robe. “Why did you come here?”
“To get you to come vote.”
Behind him, on this cliff rise, was the ocean. Ocean to the left and right. In the direction he faced, more ocean appeared over the far end of the teardrop island. All the need of their world came down to nine square miles. He narrowed his eyes at her.
“The Popa’ā made us scramble down on a rope into holes deep in the ground. We cut chunks of rock out by hand and lifted them to the surface, for ten hours every day. I was twelve. The foreigners treated us like animals and paid us shit. A few francs per ton of rock.”
She lifted her chin high and appraised him. “Yes, dear. I was there. I know that song.”
“Then you know my vote, too. If outsiders set foot on this place again, I will do my best to kill them.”
“No vote is also a vote.”
He roared in impotence, a foot from her face, terrible words that only the broken could say. She ignored the ceremonial violence and stroked his cheek with one finger.
“You should see a doctor, Tama. Your skin has a green cast to it. Not good.”
His palm flew up to strike her. She did not flinch.
“Get away from me, woman. You wrecked my life once already. Leave me in peace.”
She withdrew her hands and folded them in front of her. “What we two had was very beautiful, for a while. Do not blame your fear of life on me.”
The fire went out of him, and his face let slip his real, enduring problem. But he knew no better armor than righteousness.
“We fed the world. Now people should leave us alone. Let the rains and the sun and the plants and the animals bring Makatea back.”
The Queen smiled. “Come say that in front of everyone.”
She turned and went down the rise, singing her way back home.
ROTI GREETED DIDIER from the kitchen as he came in.
“How are those dear children?” His wife doted on them both.
He sighed. “Still dear.”
“Those Americans sont comme des mau melahi du paradis, pour venir s’occuper d’eux.”
Island talk. Three different languages in the space of thirteen words.
“Yes,” the mayor snapped. The Americans were indeed like angels from heaven, coming to take care of those children. But saying so out loud bothered him. He lay back in the wicker chair, drained. He wanted to watch an American movie. Something with superheroes in it. A dozen superheroes who struggle to get along with one another, but who, together, are unbeatable. No such movie was available on the island, so he closed his eyes and began to film one himself.
He opened his eyes when something brushed his leg. His wife’s face, half a meter from his, startled him upright.
The face said, “How are you going to vote?”
He waved his hands around his head as if to scatter a troublesome swarm of flies. “Jesu Maria. Don’t do this to me.”
“Do what? I asked you a simple question.”
“What do you want from me? I will respect the wishes of the majority.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
He stared at Roti’s placid face, gauging what had come over his wife. Some altogether unexpected burst of authority. But they’d known each other too long for unexpected to become fascinating.
“How am I voting?”
“How are you voting.”
“How are you voting?”
He was acting like a child; even Didier could hear that. And it made him want to double down on his foolishness. Her question infuriated him, and something in him was desperate to avoid answering. Once, when he was sixteen, and it dawned on him that he would not, after all, play for the French national soccer team, he came close to stowing away on a massive cruise ship that had stopped on its way from Tahiti to Rangiroa to see the quaint and curious ruins on the forgotten island of Makatea. That ship’s next stop after Rangiroa was Oahu. If he had stayed the course, kept his nerve, and seized his destiny, he would have been American himself by now, and he wouldn’t have to oversee the fate of his island and all the people that he cared about in this world.
“I don’t know how I’m voting! That’s how I’m voting!”
His vehemence belonged to a stranger. Roti closed her eyes and opened them again.
“You are unhappy. Do you need to go visit . . . someone?”
Her code to say that if he needed to relieve himself with the Widow Poretu—the birdwatching woman they would sit behind at church tomorrow morning—then she, Roti, his lawfully wedded wife, would look the other way and see nothing.
Her goodness made him shout at her, “I am not unhappy!” At this she tilted her head, shrugged, stood up, and turned to walk away. She’d gone no more than three steps when he pleaded, “Tell me how you think I should vote!”
She turned to smile at her pathetic, beautiful husband. She walked back to the wicker chair and knelt before it. One hand reached out and lifted his chin. She stayed with him, Didier realized in that instant, because he was her only child.
“My tāvana. This is not your doing.”
“Perhaps not. But it will be my undoing.”
“Not at all.” Her voice suggested: It might be the making of you.
“Leave everyone in boredom and poverty, with substandard education and healthcare, for another generation? Or sell the island to the Westerners again? With half the island hating me, for whichever course I propose.”
She petted his cheek. “Mon pauvre mari. How did we ever get into politics?”
“Please. You tell me.”
“Just remember. Impossible decisions are really the easy decisions.”
“Wait, what? Is this some kind of deep feminine wisdom?”
“You are in no position to mock. Would you like me to explain?”
“No. Yes. Please.”
She put her hand on his neck. It paralyzed him, like a kitten being lifted by the scruff in its mother’s mouth.
“If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into another.”
For several seconds, Didier could not decide if what his wife had just said was banal and absurd or the single insight that his entire life had been struggling toward, the one that would solve all the flaws of his temperament and leave him enlightened. He frowned at her.
“So how are you voting? I’m just . . . curious.”
She glowed, lit by a maddening inner confidence. “That depends on what you tell us tomorrow—all the secret disclosures that even the mayor’s wife has not yet been allowed to know. I’m tired of the world treating us islanders like little children. Like we can be bought off for a little candy. But if their price is right, then sure. If they give us a fair share of what this scheme is worth, why not live like the gods?”
Didier was still trying to decide where his wife had gone when she added, “Does the Canadienne know about tomorrow’s meeting?”
“Ah, zut!” He slapped his forehead and clicked his tongue. A ninety-two-year-old foreigner who’d been on the island for only seven months and who might die at any moment also got to vote on their collective future. Had there ever been a nation as hopelessly democratic as the eighty-two of them on this birdshit-sized rock? He rooted around in the bowl by the door for his motorbike key.
“Didi, it’s pitch-dark.” The island had few outdoor lights, and the ancient diver’s makeshift quarters were a mile away on a moonless night.
“She must be told.”
“Tell her in the morning.”
“I’ll be fine. Back in ten minutes.”
“Please be careful.”
“If you insist.”
HE APPROACHED THE CANADIAN’S encampment, a recovered fishing cottage near the eastern coast. The diver’s hut was lit, and simple, celestial music trickled out into the surrounding dark. Didier stopped to listen. The notes came from a cheap electric keyboard, and the beginner’s fingers trying to find them stumbled several times on their way to glory. The music was Western, old, something fitted together by a man in a wig. Its harmonies were fine enough—like surf rushing along over the top of the reef before surging onto the beach. But what caught in his windpipe was not the tune alone, but the idea that a woman in her nineties thought it might not be too late to try to learn how to play it.
He went to the window and peered in. Evelyne Beaulieu was not pressing the keys. She was standing next to the performer, young Kinipela Temauri, and had her arm around the girl’s shoulders. The girl sat on a stool, reading the sheet music propped up on the portable keyboard, wrestling with the notes and laughing each time one eluded her. The girl’s father, the redoubtable Wai, lay on his back on the cottage floor. His great girth mounded up above him like a volcanic mount, and bliss spread across his face as if the mold-covered crossbeams of the shack were the night sky itself.
