The Sex Lives of Cannibals

The one question that was never asked was What’s for dinner? Until…

The tuna disappeared. Just like that. I biked the entire length of South Tarawa searching for a tuna. But there was nothing. Just the dreaded salt fish and a few sharks. It was as if giant nets had suddenly appeared to enmesh every tuna in the greater Tarawa area. It was like that because that’s what had actually happened. The Korean fishing fleet had gathered in Tarawa Lagoon to offload their catch onto huge mother ships. Emptied of fish, the trawlers immediately set forth to empty the seas around Maiana and Abaiang, the fishing grounds that supplied Tarawa. I could see them from the house, giant fishing machines with industrial silhouettes that I had last seen in New Jersey, and I could only imagine the effect of their wakes on inshore canoes. That the government of Kiribati allowed this was deplorable. There are two million square miles of ocean in Kiribati’s exclusive economic zone in which the trawlers can fish, and yet they were permitted to work the twenty square miles of water upon which half of the nation’s population depends for sustenance, betraying again the ineptitude and petty corruption of Kiribati’s leaders. The fish sellers were glum. Each day they appeared with a few reef or lagoon fish, all that their husbands and brothers and fathers could catch now that the deepwater fish, the fish that could be consumed with a strong likelihood of maintaining one’s stomach intact, had been netted, destined for the canneries of Korea. Usually, we could weather these periodic convergences of idiocy and bad luck, but during these same tuna-less weeks an event of cataclysmic proportions occurred, an event that tested our very will to live. The beer ran out.

This was shocking. South Tarawa was completely dependent on beer. It was completely dependent on beer because a large proportion of the male population had what those of a more judgmental disposition might call a drinking problem. On payday Fridays it was impossible to drive on Tarawa, not simply because every driver was drunk, but because a good percentage of the male population could be found sprawled on the road, resting, or as some prefer, passed out. These nights were usually very lively and I made a point of always keeping a large bush knife within easy reach. I had become much more sympathetic to Kate’s experience on Tarawa. The house was riddled with gaping holes in the plywood trestle that gave the roof its slope, reminders of all the attempted break- ins she’d had to endure. Most of the window screens had been sliced open by Peeping Toms, who would quietly insert a stick and pry open the curtains. This did not happen as much now that I, a man, had moved in, but still it happened, and now and then I would quietly step outside for a cigarette only to discover some cretin snooping at the window, hungrily watching Sylvia read a book. This bothered me to no end, and with a surge of angry adrenaline, I frequently gave chase, wildly hurling rocks and epitaphs to compensate for my slow feet, encumbered by flipflops, which were no match for the callused bare feet of the detected perv. No one would dare lurk around an I-Kiribati household, but we I-Matangs were fair game, unprotected by family and clan. I dearly hoped to catch one of these creeps, but if I sensed they were drunk, I eased my way back into the house, bolted the doors, and grabbed the machete. When sober, I-Kiribati men are typically shy and gentle and all-around good guys, but when drunk something seems to give way—let’s call it reason—and the I-Kiribati male becomes the most frightening creature in the Pacific.

Outsiders tend to believe that Samoans are the islanders to fear. Ask a Pacific islander, and he will tell you that the meanest, toughest, scariest islander is the drunk I-Kiribati. There is even a word for what happens when an I-Kiribati man loses his mind and any semblance of restraint: koko—a word that I think nicely captures that state of lunacy caused by drink among I-Kiribati men. On payday Fridays, I put on my best Don’t Fuck With Me face and made sure that Sylvia’s pepper spray worked. The neighborhood dogs worked hard on those nights.

Despite the excesses though, I found I quite liked the easygoing, anything goes, why-not-have-another-beer air of Tarawa. It was refreshingly different from the prissiness that characterizes life in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. Government leaders in Kiribati were of an entirely different disposition than the lifeless ogres of Washington. At one function, I asked the minister of health why cigarettes were so cheap in Kiribati. We both had a cigarette in one hand and a can of Victoria Bitter in the other. “Because otherwise the people can’t afford them,” he said, an answer I liked very much. At the same event, the secretary of health, a doctor by training and a politician by temperament, insisted that we take a few beers with us for the drive home. “I always like to have one for the road,” he said, waving us off. Some might regard this is reprehensible, but I think this why-the-fuck-not attitude was reflective of a certain joie de vivre. The daily consumption of several cans of Victoria Bitter became an integral part of my well-being, possibly because I am of Dutch-Czech stock and thus warmly inclined toward beer, but also because it is immensely fun to quaff beers with your loved one while sitting at reef’s edge watching the world’s most spectacular sunsets. Plus, beer tends to be parasite-free and calorie-laden, two very useful attributes on Tarawa.

So imagine my despair when I walked into the Angirota Store to buy a six-pack only to be confronted by a glaringly empty refrigerator. “Bia?” I asked hopefully, using the I-Kiribati word for beer, which sounds very much like the Australian word for beer. “Akia,” I was told. Akia is the most commonly used word in the Kiribati language, which can be roughly translated as “unavailable.” The words akia te bia are the most painful words I have heard spoken. The owner of the shop, Buorere, a large man with the grooviest sideburns this side of the dateline, was as stunned as I was. As the only local capitalist on the island, he was no doubt aware of what the absence of beer would do to his profit margins.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“Kiritimati Island,” he muttered darkly. “They sent the beer to Kiritimati Island.”

Kirimati Island was approximately two thousand miles east of Tarawa. It seemed unlikely that they would send the beer back. In one of those screwups that seemed to typify life in Kiribati, Tarawa’s shipment of beer had been accidentally sent to an even more remote corner of the country. I abandoned my loyalty to the Angirota Store, and immediately set off to scour the island’s co-op stores for beer. Surely, the government would have a reserve stock of beer, hidden and well guarded, which could immediately be brought into circulation during a time of crisis. Akia te bia I was told, again and again. Clearly, better planning was needed.

I turned to the Otintaii Hotel, where every Friday the island’s European and Australian volunteers gathered on Cheap-Cheap Night for an evening of immoderate drinking.

Akia.

This was dire. There had to be beer somewhere on the island, I thought. Tarawa without beer was incomprehensible. Life on the island just wasn’t worth it without beer.

“Have you tried the Betio Saloon?” Sylvia asked. Not much of a beer drinker before arriving on Tarawa, after a few months on the island Sylvia had adapted to local cultural mores. She now crushed beer cans on her forehead. Actually, that’s not true, but she had developed a taste for ale, and while she wasn’t quite as shaky about the prospect of a beerless Tarawa as I was, there was no doubt that the absence of beer represented a serious downgrading in her quality of life on the island. If anyone still had beer on Tarawa, it would be the barflies at the Betio Saloon, a one-room tin shed deep in the heart of Betio, where the island’s more dissolute I- Matangs could usually be found.

“It’s a fucking tragedy, mate,” said Big John, one of the proprietors.

Akia. A fucking tragedy, I agreed.

“We’re going to have to fly a few cases in,” he said. Big John, who had lived on Tarawa for twenty-odd years, was a man of action. I admired this. Soon the entire island was talking about Big John, who at six foot five was easily the biggest man on Tarawa. Big John’s flying in three hundred cases from Nauru.

We waited. Five weeks would pass until beer returned to Tarawa, via a fully laden Air Nauru. They were dark days. True, they were peaceful days, but in no way does this compensate for the ache of a beerless evening.

Sitting over a bowl of rice, Sylvia plucked the weevils out, and declared, apropos of nothing: “Avocado.”

I hated when she did this, for it triggered so much. “Blueberries,” I said.

“Bagels,” she said.

“With lox and cream cheese.”

“Apple-leek soup.”

“Asparagus.”

“Antipasto.”

“Risotto.”

“Salad. A real salad.”

“Steak. Grilled medium rare.”