A waitress swore in French at the dog. It slunk to a door and watched from there.
In the foyer I booked a ticket for a tour the following day, to Lake Vaihiria and inland Tahiti, in a four-wheel-drive. Then, guilty at abandoning Lady Myre, I booked her a ticket too.
She’d left a note on the king-size bed. As I was in solitary mood, it said, she’d gone to buy clothes and explore Tahiti by night. I bathed in lavender-perfumed water, shampooed my hair and turned on CNN news. I watched President Bush say he’d never relent in defending America, whatever it took. He said he had a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom. I began to wish I’d stayed with Lady Myre, eaten risotto, watched Spartacus and enjoyed the comfort of her arms.
It felt strange, the move from the fervent ocean to this nowhere room. At around midnight I worried she might have come to harm. Her French was so peculiar. Then I thought of how spirited she was and how indestructible she seemed.
The moon was eclipsed by neon. Nor could I hear the ocean above the music from the lounge. I imagined the Tahitian canoes with a hundred and fifty paddlers, the bright stars they navigated by, the tribal chiefs decorated with red and black feathers, the clanging of coconut shells to herald attack, the sound of wooden trumpets and drums from hollowed tree trunks, the dazzle of pearl-shell knives, and bright dancing skirts …
‘Mafera,’ Lady Myre hissed as she crawled into the bed. She gave her convulsive laugh, her hands were cold and for a moment I was totally alarmed. ‘I’ve had such adventures,’ she whispered.
I was pleased she was back safely, but I didn’t want to talk and be awake all night. She’d been to downtown Tahiti in le truc – the rough transport bus – and got herself tattooed. She wanted to show me, but I insisted she wait until morning. She said it was discreet – a bird of paradise at the base of her spine. It was very sore so I mustn’t be rough with her.
I said there was no danger of that. ‘Now go to sleep,’ I said. And I told her how in the morning we were going inland to the crater at the centre of Tahiti, which showed how the island was formed in a huge eruption aeons ago. I said we’d travel through the valleys in the mountains where Tahitian chiefs had ruled their tribes and Bligh gathered breadfruit plants.
‘What a determined explorer you are,’ she said. ‘But I don’t care about any of that. What I like is that no one knows where we are.’
I agreed that I liked that too.
Then she began her familiar caressing, which I’d also grown to like. I asked no questions about her past, her lovers and chance encounters. Our kisses seemed part of the journey, the sea and the surprise of each day. ‘What’s that?’ she said and guided my finger to a little lump in my armpit about the size of a clitoris.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘A cyst, I suppose.’ ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘But you’d better get it checked out.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not on Tahiti.’
‘No not on Tahiti,’ she said and we giggled, I don’t know why, then snuggled down.
41
Those sailors in their journals didn’t write the truth about their sexual behaviour and desires. They denied they were rapacious and didn’t admit to homosexuality, because it was considered a crime. One nautical punishment for it was to tie the offending men together, then throw them into the sea. It made me ponder Christian’s cry: that if Bligh humiliated him more he’d take him in his arms and jump overboard with him. And Peter Heywood told Sir John Barrow, who wrote about the Bounty in 1831, that Christian had a mitigating secret to do with his falling out with Bligh and that he himself had personal information too private to divulge.
Bligh, on his second breadfruit journey to Tahiti, logged his interest in an effeminate islander kept ‘solely for the caresses of men’:
The Young Man took his hahow or mantle off … he had the appearance of a Woman, his Yard & Testicles being so drawn in under him having the Art from custom of keeping them in this position; those who are connected with him have their beastly pleasures gratified between his thighs … On examining his privacies I found them both very small and the Testicles remarkably so, being not larger than a boys of 5 or 6 Years old and very soft as if in a State of decay or a total incapacity of being larger, so that in either case he appeared to me as effectually a Eunuch as if his stones were away.
Bligh didn’t record why the young man was brought to him, or whether he gratified his own beastly pleasure between his thighs. Perhaps his curiosity about his privacies and the texture of his testicles was academic, a diversion from potting breadfruit and commanding the Providence crew.
The Tahitians, unembarrassed by sexual diversity, wanted to accommodate all the desires of these mariners. They hoped to benefit from their visit and they deferred to their whiter skins, but they were bewildered by their behaviour and afraid of them too. A chief became morose after his pregnant wife had sex with George Hamilton, surgeon on the Pandora. He feared his child would be born piebald.
Nothing prepared the Tahitians for the contagious diseases European visitors brought them: gonorrhea, syphilis, influenza, dysentery. The effect was beyond the wrath of any of their imagined gods. Imported disease halved the population in four decades. Nor had they any choice but to capitulate to the power of firearms. If they resisted the men on these warships they were destroyed, like game, by their guns. Their response was to want guns for themselves, to want the power inherent in
