Travail in Tahiti

Short Story:

By Ward Holm Tanzer

IT was during my second week in Tahiti that I ran across my old school mate, Fred Avakian, from Fresno, California.

I had been in Papeete. Cycling back along the Rue de la Ceinture, I stopped at the Chinaman’s store in Punaauia Dis trict for a drinking coconut. The interior of the grocery, a small clapboard building set back under two flamboyant trees, was dark with shadow. Slowly I distinguished among the native customers a thin, bald headed man in a red pereu shirt sitting on the counter. I heard him clear his throat as I asked the Chinaman for a green nut. A moment later he slid to the floor and said, “Hello, Joe Wood.”

The voice, deep and rasping, was a familiar one. But the face possessed nothing recognizable. It was long, hollow cheeked. A great nose fell in a Levan tine hook over a black moustache, under which white teeth gleamed. He had but one eye. My “Hello” was uncertain.

His grin widened. Thrusting forth his hand, he chanted, “Fight ’em, butt ’em, that’s our custom, Fresno Junior High!’ ”

“Fred Avakian!” I said.

“At your service.” He bowed.

I stood dumbly for a moment, trying to reconcile memories of Fred. The sunken socket, which drew my glance in spite of my efforts, lent his face an alien look.

Only Fred’s posture seemed the same.

Even as we grinned foolishly at each other, his rump was backing toward the counter, his body assuming the lines of a lazy curve. He said now, “Funny, huh 9 . . . you and I meeting up way down here in Tahiti. You going to be here for a while?”

When I said a couple of months, he said, “I’ve lived here ten years.” His one eye rolled toward the Chinaman coming with my drinking coconut. He waved the nut aside. “Put your money back and come to my house,” he said.

“My vahine just made a batch of orange beer.” The brown eye circled to the sun lit doorway. “I want you to meet my family.”

It was early, not yet four o’clock. I was staying at Rivnac’s only two kilo meters up the road.

“I have to check out my road crew first, but that won’t take me long.” He pushed himself into an upright position and put his pandanus hat on his head. “I have a job. Overseer for the Travaux Pub liques.”

The idea of Fred’s being identified with any sort of labour gave me pause. But there was no time for comment; he was leading the way through the door. Grace fully Fred slithered onto the seat of a blue bicycle with a yellow purau blossom stuck under the bell on the handle bars.

We rode for perhaps a half mile, with Moorea Island rising lazily out of the blue mists of the sea on our left, the inland mountains of Tahiti to our right.

Fred sat far back on his bicycle seat, his knees comfortably awry. He said, “My crew repairs the surface of the road one day and cuts grass the next.” He gestured toward the high growths of matie grass lining the coral-packed roadbed.

“When you passed my crew were they working?”

As I remembered, the men by the Puna auia bridge had appeared active enough, though from my acquaintance with Tahitians, I knew they usually assumed a reclining position the moment the boss left.

We had rounded Punaauia Point now and could see Fred’s labourers, perhaps a dozen of them, slowly swinging machetes in the lush matie. He fixed his eye sternly upon them and stopped beside the last workman, a small, impish native whose back was quite dry. The other labourers glistened with sweat. To the little fellow Fred spoke sharply in Tahit ian, rode perhaps fifty feet farther, and then stopped. “That one is a trouble maker,” he said to me. “His name is Leo. I have assigned him extra duty for tomorrow.”

With that, he laid down his bicycle and strode across the road to a fence post, one of those which had taken root in Tahiti’s rich, damp soil. Carefully Fred separated the shoots growing from the top of the post and withdrew a small, round object. With a quick motion, he pulled forward his right eyelid and popped the glass eye into the empty socket. It was blue and tracked off in the direction of the bridge as he returned to his bi cycle. The brown one fixed on me. “We will repair to my house now where we can relax.” rED’S house, a small frame building with a galvanised roof standing by Punaauia lagoon, was unpainted but tidy. Fresh blue pareu curtains swayed in the windows. At a creek running by the verandah, a big Tahitian vahine woman was pounding the laundry with a stone. At Fred's whistle, she looked up, smiled, and pushed aside her hair with the back of her soapy hand. As she waddled toward us, Fred said, “This is my vahine, Totoi.”

Totoi wiped her big hand on the skirt of her black mother hubbard dress and shook my hand vigorously. “Hoa popaa?”

Fred nodded. “Old friend. From Fresno.”

“Fresno?” From the look in her eyes, I guessed that Fred had spoken often of his home town. “Meme ville! You big lover, too?” She chuckled and beckoned to two tiny, naked girls sitting round eyed on a coconut log.

“Haere mai!” Fred ordered. As the two edged forward, he called over their heads at two young boys washing a horse in the lagoon.

Pointing to the little girls, who hid their faces against their mother’s thigh, Fred said, “These are our latest. Being twins, they’re objects of great curiosity in Tahiti.” Both had light, creamy skins and mischievous black eyes. “Do you think they look like Tahitians or Fresno In dians?” Fred asked.

It had been years since I heard the old Fresno nickname for Armenians. I laughed and said thev were mighty cute, whichever side they favoured.

One of the boys looked about ten— a chubby lad with Fred’s remembered growth of lank, black hair. The younger was slim. Out of his grave, brown face two blue eyes peered. “That one is Sher wood,” Fred explained. “You remember Miss Sherwood from Junior High?”

I had not thought of her for ages. “Our English teacher?”

“Yes. The only one I ever got along with.” She had allowed Fred to write poems, I remembered, while the rest of us toiled over themes. He said, “She’s the inspiration of my real work in Tahiti.” Without explaining the nature

of this endeavour, he continued, “Sher wood here had heard me speak of her so often, he named himself after her.

The older boy calls himself Oto-mobile.”

Was it a Tahitian custom for children to name themselves, I asked.

“Oh, no, I just think it helps place a child with himself and his environment.

The twins will decide what their names will be later. Now they go by the titles the midwife gave them. This one is Moonlight-Which-Whitens-the-Skin and the one on your knee is Hands-of-the- Goddess-Pele. We call them Moony and Goddy. Let’s go into the house.”

As I set the twin on the ground, Fred saw my glance wander back to Sherwood.

Fred said, “Good looking, huh?”

I nodded.

Fred yawned and pushed back his hat.

“We love Sherwood equally with the others, even though he is what you might term an error arising out of the July Fourteenth Fete several years ago. So many faces, such confusion. Totoi called him the Fall of the Bastille until he named himself. We were grateful it wasn’t a Chinaman. Oto-mobile, bring some orange beer.”

The admiring family group broke up.

Totoi returned to her washing—followed by Moony and Goddy. Sherwood ran after the horse, and Oto-Mobile brought pungent orange brew from the cooler in the creek.

“Now, tell me about yourself and Fres no,” said Fred, rolling a Tahitian cig arette.

As I obliged him, Fred sighed and took a deep drink of beer. “Someday I must re-visit Fresno, to prove to myself that my philosophy is right.

Perhaps when I get the coconut grove paid for. Life is all work at this stage.” He pointed to the grove.

“Besides the responsibilities here, I carry a full load down on the road, as you know. And, of course, there is my ser ious work . . . But he brushed it aside, to describe the operation of his three hectares of coconut trees —how Sherwood picked up the nuts as they fell, how Totoi split them, how Oto-mobile gouged out the meat and the sun dried the lot of it into copra. Then the Chinaman sacked it and took the loads into Papeete. “Four times a year I go through that ordeal,” he sighed.

“Do you have to plough or fertilize?”

His two eyes crossed in a look of in credulity. “Why?”

I had assumed there were responsibili ties of some sort. “You just let the nuts drop? ’ I asked.

I finished my beer. As I got up to go, Fred said, “Tomorrow you must come back and appraise my efforts in trans lation.” He smiled at my look of con fusion. Pointing behind him to a small table stacked with books and papers, he said, “There is my real work. I am translating Homer’s Odyssey into Tahit ian. The curator of the museum in Papeete has reserved a glass case.” When I said nothing, he patted the arms of his chair. “Each morning I sit here and reflect and in the afternoon I translate, I have completed twenty-eight pages.”

As I expressed my admiration for such an ambitious project, Fred’s face broke into a charming smile. We left the verandah and joined Totoi and the chil dren behind the house. “You say you’ll be here through August?” Fred asked.

“Good. You can come to our wedding.”

I looked at him blankly. “Totoi and I are taking the step as a favour to the Puanaauia missionary. Reverend Dent,

a friend of mine,” Fred explained. “His church is just down from the China man’s. He has to send in his report to the Boston Missionary Society for the year ending June 30th and he’s short on marriages perfprmed.” He punched Totoi. “We told him we’d throw in our weight if he fell short of his quota, didn’t we?” 4 ’

Totoi gave a good-natured grunt of contempt.

Fred added, “Couples with offspring are called Reclamations in the report and count two.”

DURING the succeeding two weeks, I dropped by chez Avakian frequently.

I saw Fred’s manuscript, the first ten pages of which were written in green ink on white paper, the second ten in black ink on yellow sheets, and the last eight—this comprised his total for three years—were done in green ink on the backs of blank Travaux Publiques reports, which were blue. Scrolls and doodles illuminated the margins. When I asked who would read the finished product, he said, “Posterity.” The significance of this oftejn commanded his entire thoughts during his “think-period” in the morning, he said, and spurred him toward greater efforts in the afternoon. But, of late his tranquillity had been interrupted by intrusions, the wedding for one thing, his road crew for another —Leo in partic ular. Through the “coconut radio” I heard that during a wind storm Fred’s glass eye had rolled from its perch upon the fence post. Leo, in a burst of brava do, had picked it up, found it to be glass and therefore devoid of magic. It was only a matter of time until Fred found out that the crew laboured only when he arrived on the scene in the morning with the glass eye and when he returned at night to pick it up.

It was under these precarious circum stances that Fred’s wedding day dawned, June 29, the day before the preacher sent in his Activities Report to Boston.

I had been asked to give the bricfe away.

The ceremony was set for ten. At a quarter to, I had arrived on my bicycle at the Punaauia chapel, a white frame building with an emormous steeple which pierced the green canopy of palms on the shore side of the Rue de la Ceinture.

On the steps stood Fred’s friend, the Reverend Mr. Dent, his fat, smiling face already beaded with sweat, his pince-nez glasses fogged by the morning’s humid ity. As we shook hands, I could see Dent’s barefoot Tahitian sexton sitting on the floor of the vestibule, ready to toll the steeple bell. Over the backs of the pews inside, the dark heads of a few early arrivals lolled. From the piano came the sound of Mrs. Dent warming up with scales.

“Did you remember the ring?” asked the Reverend.

From my shorts pocket I drew forth an old fraternity ring, which I had prom ised Totoi as a wedding gift. Taking it, Dent said, “Fred sent word they’d be a little late. On the way here, one of the twins took off her dress and threw it in the creek. They’re drying it at the Chinaman’s.”

He patted the license in his pocket, “You know how the folks back home are, they want evidence from the field, in black and white.” Blowing his nose, he turned and nodded at an old Tahitian couple plodding up the walk. The man, carrying a fighting cock, stopped to tether the bird at a banana stalk. As he climbed the steps behind his bent vahine,

he smiled timidly at Dent, who shook his head.

When the natives had passed inside.

Dent said, “That old boy certainly caused me trouble getting this licence in town.

He and the old woman are Totoi’s feed ing parents, took her when she was a baby from her own folk in exchange for a way they d° down here.

When the Registrar of Births canvassed the District, the old man gave the sex of his own child instead of Totoi’s. So on the books she was a male. We had the dickens of a time convincing the Licence Clerk yesterday in town . . . you know the French. Even though Fred presented the four children as evidence, we had to send all the way out to the District for the old man to attest . . . ”

He broke off.

An automobile had stopped outside the church. Dent said* “Here comes the Commissaire des Travaux Publiques.”

After greeting us both, the official re moved his sun helmet, bowed again to Dent and passed into the Church. The Reverend said, “He’s verv fond of Fred gave him two bottles of Scotch for a wedding present and is going to give them a ride back to the house in his Plymouth.”

“Does he know about the trick Fred has been playing with his glass eye?”

“Oh, yes. He doesn’t care, as long as the work progresses.” Dent called to his wife to begin the music and motioned for the sexton to pull the rope.

Preceded by a cloud of coral dust, the Avakian family rounded the clump of banana plants in front of the church.

Totoi’s figure—set off in a flowered mother hubbard, with the waist taken in for style—dominated the group. Beside her hopped the two boys, sporting their first pairs of pants, blue jeans ordered from Papeete. Moony and Goddy, the twins, wore new dresses cut from blue pareu cloth left over from the curtains. Last to appear was Fred in a tropic-yellowed steward’s uniform with S.S. Manganui embroidered on the pocket. “My friends!” he called. Wiping his forehead, he pumped our hands. “What do we do now?”

“Get the children in first,” Dent said, giving the sexton the order to silence the bell.

“Omaha, omaha!” cried the twin in the wet dress.

“Shut up!” yelled Fred. “Come here, Totoi.” Sherwood helped her on with her shoes and rescued from the clutch of the dry twin Totoi’s bouquet, a bunch of hibiscus tied together with a string from which two emblems of White Horse Scotch dangled for decoration.

(Continued on page 77)

“Now, ’ said Fred with a sigh.

Dent gave him the ring, then with a “Horo! Horo!” shooed the children down the aisle. When they had reached the front pew, he called to his wife for Lohengrin.

A few moments later we were assembled at the altar. Mrs. Dent at the piano sounded a loud chord and stopped.

“Dearly beloved, we are met here to day ...” Dent began.

During the ceremony, the fighting cock tethered outside crowed, a baby in the audience cried, and two mynah birds, flying through the open doorway, alighted on the window sill and made love, which caused titters. But there was a certain sweetness and solemnity about the cere mony. Fred’s face glowed as he pushed Totoi’s fat finger through my Phi Delta Theta ring.

Then it was over. There was the kiss, the triumphant strains from the piano, the toll of the bell. Outside in the sun shine, Totoi stilled Moony’s cries of “Omaha!” with a quick trip into the bushes. Mrs. Dent photographed the group. Dent thanked Fred profusely for his trouble. Then Monsieur le Commis saire, with a sweeping gesture, indicated the Plymouth. Into it the wedding party climbed, bound for chez Avakian to re ceive congratulations from friends and relatives and to consume the two bottles of White Horse. ★ THREE weeks after the wedding I received a radiogram calling me back to Fresno. Reserving passage on a freighter leaving Tuesday, I spent Monday night packing. My goodbye to Fred would have to be made on my way into town on the morning bus.

The driver agreed to a short stop, but warned that it was boat day; the bus, jammed with half a hundred natives, was an express. They would brook no greater delay than twenty minutes, a half hour at the most.

A short time after leaving my house, we sighted the perspiring figures of Fred’s road workers in Punaauia. The bus stopped. As I alighted and crossed the road, the passengers arranged them selves on the benches in various positions for sleep.

On the far side of the road back under the palm trees, sat the road crews oVer seer. His back was propped against a coco nut tree, his bald head cushioned by a red pareu pillow. To his right sat Totoi, weaving a pandanus hat. One of the twins was teasing a hermit crab, the other slept beside Sherwood, who held a kerosene tin, on which rested Fred’s copy of Chapman’s Homer and some blank blue paper and pencils. To Fred’s left squatted Oto-Mobile, his round face very grave, his chubby finger stuck through the hole of a bottle opener. Between his legs rested another kerosene can i packed with damp miri fern, out of which stuck the brown necks of six bottles of ibeer.

I “Hello, friend,” said Fred, rubbing his leyes. “Heard you were leaving Tahiti.”

He placed his thin left arm on the niau mat beneath him and held out his right.

I said hello to Totoi. She shook her head, and said in a deep voice, “Aita maitai.”

Fred said, “She thinks our wedding brought all this bad luck on me. Ridic ulous idea, of course.” He smothered a yawn and added soberly, “It's a deeper force at work ...”

“You have to stay down here all day?”

I asked.

He tore off a palm fibre, ran it between his teeth, and said quietly, “From seven in the morning until eleven. From one thirty in the afternoon until four-thirty.

Five days a week. Oto-Mobile, open some beer.”

I said, “Something will come along to change things.”

“Most certainly,” Fred answered, with sudden spirit. “This is just a temporary set-back for me, a quirk of destiny. Credit will always be earned where credit is due, if the environment is right.” He took a mouthful of beer.

“Anything I can do for you?”

He said, “You might phone Miss Sher wood and tell her . . . what I was doing ...”

As I promised to let her know, he said, “Tell her about her namesake, too,

and how he is learning English.”

“Maybe you can adjust, Fred,” I said.

“Maybe you can get used to it down here and pick up again on your manus cript.”

“Impossible, while I’m on the move.”