The Sex Lives of Cannibals

collapsed umbrellas. I could hear the dull thuds of coconuts loosened by the wind. Children on the beach ran with outstretched lavalavas like gangly birds at takeoff. Our accommodations were on the ocean side of the atoll and we walked along a path that crossed the breadth of Maiana, about a hundred yards, taking care to avoid the trajectories of falling coconuts. The guesthouse was a gray cinder-block house with a dirt floor. It had a living area with a hammock. The sleeping quarters were arranged like horse stalls with hard bunks and mosquito nets. A well and a bucket supplied our water needs.

On this side of the island we remained in the wind’s shadow, and, despite the gale, we were able to get a fire going and grill Bwenawa’s barracuda. The tuna was left with Beiataaki and Tekaii, who had quickly turned Martha around and were racing across the lagoon to navigate the channel before sunset. They planned to sail through the night back to Tarawa and return a week later to pick us up. As the day diminished into an opaque dusk, we could see the ocean churning in the graying light, deep chasms were carved as the wind sent waves rushing and hissing across the horizon. Rain began to pelt the guesthouse. Leaks appeared in the roof. Pools of water turned the floor into mud.

“I think it is raining on Tarawa too,” Bwenawa said. We hoped it was. We hoped this storm marked the end of the drought.

“Just think of it,” I said to Sylvia. “Full water tanks.”

“Provided that the water actually gets into the tanks,” she said dryly.

Sylvia still had little faith in my fixing abilities. But I was confident. I had spent hours clearing the roof and gutters of leaves and nettles. I had, very ingeniously I thought, used the materials at hand to plug the holes in the gutter—plastic lids and an extremely valuable roll of electrical tape.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a Dutchman. And Dutchmen know how to channel water.”

“You’re only half Dutch,” Sylvia noted. “And you left Holland when you were six.”

“It’s an innate knowledge. We’re water people. Soon, you’ll be able to wash your hair guilt-free.”

“Twice a week?”

“Twice a week. I promise.”

We paused to listen. It was an angry storm.

“I am glad we’re not on the boat now,” Atenati said. We all pondered for a moment what it must be like for Beiataaki and Tekaii, sailing Martha through the black darkness of a starless night, the ocean a violent maelstrom, rogue waves unseen. And then we went to sleep.

CHAPTER 13

In which the Author discusses how unfuckingbelievably scary the South Seas can be.

The next day, in the dim blue light of a tempestuous dawn, we were surprised to see Martha anchored in the lagoon, the boat battened down like a fortress.

“Too rough,” Beiataaki said when we encountered him on the beach. He had sailed the Gilbert Islands for thirty years. His skin was blotched from sun damage. His face was creased from wind. That he had declared the conditions too rough for sailing, particularly when he did not have any queasy landlubbers on board, suggested some intense roughness indeed. “We got through the channel, but then the waves were too big to keep sailing,” he said. “We’ll try again later.”

But they did not try again later. As the days passed, the storm did not. Each day saw Maiana swept with wind and rain. Papaya trees were felled. Maneabas lost their roofs. The island was bathed in a dismal gray. Villages were sodden. Women shivered as Atenati conducted cooking demonstrations, showing how island-grown vegetables rich in vitamin A could be used in the local diet, alleviating the night blindness that stalks malnourished children in Kiribati. Bwenawa returned to the guesthouse late in the afternoons, having spent his days roaming from garden to garden, offering tutorials on the proper sun-to-shade ratio for optimal tomato growth and spreading the wonders of chaya, bele, and nambere, the only green leafy vegetables that grew on an atoll. Making the weedy leaves edible was Atenati’s job.

In the maneabas, the unimane fretted about the wind and the harm it had inflicted. Each village had at least one maneaba with a damaged roof and the old men were concerned about the lack of young men with sufficient maneaba- building skills. The population on Maiana was dwindling as each year more of its young people were lured by the flickering lights of Tarawa.

Sylvia and I grew ever more intimate as we made do without a mirror.

“You have eye gunk.”

“You’ve got a booger.”

“There’s something…”

“Where… here?”

“No… not…”

“Did I get it?”

“Here… let me.”

As the storm ebbed and flowed, with rain showers followed by hard winds, Maiana seemed a gloomy, dejected island, enlivened only—from my perspective—by the unbearably pleasant feeling of coolness, a briskness to the air that meant I could now go through a day without risking dehydration, without feeling the need to douse my food with salt, without succumbing to the torpor of midday, when, typically, the entire country’s energy level is reduced to just a shade above comatose. I had long wondered why the temperate world was so much more advanced than the equatorial world, but it seemed obvious to me now that the heat was the key. How productive are New York and Paris in August? Not very, and they have air-conditioning. Now imagine the perpetual August without the cool breath of a humming air conditioner. Would New Yorkers still be working eighteen-hour days, churning out lawsuits and magazines? Would anyone care if Cisco dropped by forty points? No. In the perpetual August, New Yorkers would spend their workdays draped and drooling over their desks, just like the government of Kiribati.

There was another unexpected benefit brought about by the wind. It was too rough to fish, and we had resigned ourselves to rice-intensive meals, when Kiriaata, the gracious caretaker of the guesthouse, apologized for the lack of dinner options. “I can make the chicken curry,” she said, holding up a rusty can of Ma-Ling Chicken Curry, which I knew from hard experience contained only those parts of the chicken that even the Chinese would not eat —gizzards and bones. “Or we can have crayfish,” Kiriaata offered, reaching for four of the largest, most delectable lobsters I had ever seen. “I am sorry. That is all we have.”

Sylvia and I mewed and groaned and made all sorts of deeply primal noises.

“You want chicken curry?”

“No!” we barked. “Crayfish.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

The I-Kiribati do not have a taste for lobster. I believed this was because their taste buds died when the English arrived. Not only was the I-Kiribati diet pretty grim to begin with, it was now enhanced with canned corned beef and “cabin biscuits,” the staples of the nineteenth-century seaman’s rations. This combination of atoll food with English food that can survive for years and years on a boat had destroyed the I-Kiribati palate. I thought it would be impolite to test this theory on Bwenawa, so I simply asked him why the I-Kiribati don’t like lobster. He explained that they regarded lobster as a disgusting reef cleaner, and he looked at me knowingly, until finally I said: “Ah, yes, I see your point.”

It mattered not. While I might not have eaten a lobster caught on the reef in South Tarawa, a quick risk analysis of the situation on Maiana suggested that I could eat a lobster and probably maintain my health, and even if I did get sick it certainly wouldn’t be the first time I’d gotten sick eating in Kiribati, and at least I would have had the pleasure of actually eating something I liked.

“I don’t suppose you have any butter or a lemon here?” I asked Kiriaata.