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I am in Punaauia, Tahiti, in a thatched bungalow with a twenty-four foot ceiling. My
bungalow sits at the end of a clattery wooden walkway, built over Punaauia's perfect blue
lagoon. The South Pacific, here in its gentlest mode, laps a few feet below my bed. In
effect I sleep on the most soothing of water beds, one whose blue waters slap and sigh,
untrapped.
The artist Paul Gauguin lived in Punaauia for a short time in the 1890's, on the second of
his forays into Tahitian life. Earlier, not long after he had arrived in the Society
Islands for the first time, hoping to scare up some portrait work, a disturbing thing had
happened. One night, while waiting for Paul to return from an errand in town, his young
Tahitian mistress, Teha'amana (sometimes spelled without the apostrophe, sometimes spelled
Tehura, or in other ways) grew terribly frightened of the night spirits. Since the time of
Bougainville and Cook, Tahitian women had been prized for their quiet ease, their serenity
of soul; but Teha'amana's serenity had deserted on this night. She was then thirteen or
fourteen, a young girl living with a Frenchman three times her age, grown fearful,
suddenly, in the deep tropical darkness.
It is doubtful that Paul Gauguin, a French artist with little reputation and less money,
newly arrived from Europe --- where he had left his Danish wife and their five children
--- was the ideal person to allay Teha'amana's terrors; but at least her fear made a deep
impression on him. He painted what amounts to a note about it, an oil called Manao
Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching) --- now in the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo,
New York --- in which we merely see a scared girl lying facedown on a bed. But Gauguin
soon followed this up with a whole series of variants on the scene, focusing on
Teha'amana's innocence, rather than just her fear. These studies --- in pen and ink, in
pastel, in woodblock, in transfer drawing, and in oils --- he called Parau na te varua
ino (Words of the Devil); he insisted on keeping the title in Tahitian, to the
puzzlement and irritation of the Parisians who were expected to buy these strange works.
In the pastel --- on the front cover of this book --- Teha'amana, a startled young girl,
realizes she has lost something. Too late, she covers herself. The sun sets quickly in the
tropics; no less quickly, innocence goes. In the oil, though (on the back cover) --- it is
in the National Gallery, in Washington --- Teha'amana is smiling a mysterious, Evelike
smile; it's the blue devil behind her who is in some sort of blank-eyed shock ---
pussywhipped, it may be. This quiet, smiling young woman has somehow bested the devil; she
will go on to become the imposing woman in two of Gauguin's greatest portraits: Vahine
no te tiare (Woman with a Flower) and Vahine no to vi (Woman with a Mango); in
the latter she is pregnant. Gauguin, as he is uneasily aware, has taken a child to wife
--- does he have her, or does she have him? When he is not making love to Teha'amana he is
drawing her, sketching her, painting her, hoping that the mystery of his young Eve will
reveal itself to his eye or submit to his line.
In some of Gaugin's later work his Eves have faces like fish, as if he is pursuing the
problem of innocence back to an earlier life stage. Does Teha'amana have no knowledge, or
does she have too much? Paul Gauguin was still worrying that question when he died, much
as the aging Yeats worried in "Leda and the Swan":
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Paul Gauguin knew many women, but it is doubtful if any one of them left as deep a mark on
his art as Teha'amana, betrothed to him by her parents when she was thirteen --- a young
girl who lived in paradise.
***
I have come to the same paradise --- Tahiti --- a place whose beauty neither writers nor
painters nor mariners have ever managed to overstate, in order to think and write about my
parents, Hazel and Jeff McMurtry: there they are, as a young couple, in the frontispiece
of this book. The whole of their forty-three-year marriage was spent well in-land, in
Archer County, Texas. Many people like Archer County, and a few people love it, but no one
would be likely to think it an earthly paradise.
It is hard to think to Tahiti in any other terms, though I know, of course, that if I left
my well-tended French hotel and wandered around Papeete long enough I would discover a
multitude of social and political problems --- problems of the sort that are likely to
occur in any colony, however well administered.* In 1987 there was a strike by sailors and
dockworkers that got way out of hand, with much property loss. The French were forced to
send in many soldiers to settle the Tahitians down.
I did drift around Papeete long enough to discover some slummy parts; and yet so gracious
is the climate, the flowers, the fruits, the sea that even the slums of Papeete seem
mainly to partake of the gentle seediness common to almost all littorals, even the best
groomed. In a recent book called Roads I put my case for littorals thus:
One beneficent characteristic of oceans is that they tend to relax the people who live
by them. Worldwide, in my experience, littorals are apt to have a wait-and-see gentle
seediness. Even the most manicured littorals --- Malibu, Lanai, Cap d'Antibes --- have a
touch of it. The force of huge money may keep the beaches looking neat for a mile or two,
but neatness and the seashore don't really go together; only one hundred feet or so past
the great resorts the old casual seediness begins. The structures lean a little, and the
people who inhabit them don't worry too much about the dress codes. The sea, eternal,
shelters and soothes them, saves them for a time from the ambitious strivings that drive
people who live far removed from the ocean.
One thing worth thinking about, while in an earthly paradise such as Tahiti, is whether
there can be gradations within paradise --- if not, does this lack of grade or lack
of contrast mean that for most humans, paradise really doesn't work?
The boat I am to take, the Aranui, is a freighter which makes the trip from Papeete
to the Marquesas Islands thirteen times a year. The writer Pail Theroux traveled on it
about a decade before me; there's a fairly neutral mention of it in his book The Happy
Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. Paul Theroux had a rubber boat with him, which
he used to make his own investigations of several island groups.
The Aranui makes delivers at all of the seaside communities in the six inhabited
islands of the Marquesas. It also stops at a neighboring archipelago, the Tuamotus, where
the French have a nuclear "installation," or testing ground. De Gaulle himself
witnessed the first test, which took place in 1966.
The Aranui is a supply ship, delivering all manner of staples and bringing back
copra, dried coconut meat, a crop subsidized by the French throughout the several island
groups now known as French Polynesia. "Copra" is a word that once evoked all
that was romantic about the South Seas: coconut palms dropping their fruit on beaches of
brilliant white sand; welcoming young women such as Teha'amana wandering topless under
these same palms; writers on the order of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, or Somerset
Maugham occasionally dropping in. This, of course, is romance-for-export: to the islanders
copra is just a crop the French will pay them for, no more romantic than soybeans.
*Scott Malcomson's Tuturani (1990) is the best
short analysis I know of political unrest in French Polynesia.
Excerpted from PARADISE © Copyright 2001 by Larry McMurtry. Reprinted with permission by Simon and Schuster. All rights reserved.
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