The Sex Lives of Cannibals Read online

  The pilot’s voice revealed nothing. No tremor. No gulping for air. No crackling of the chords to indicate that we had very nearly met a most pathetic end, the unknown void, courtesy of errant swine. We made a second approach, landed, and in the rush fleetingly saw children on the side of the runway, as if they had been playing in a suburban cul-de-sac and had given way for a passing car. I absorbed this. We had departed a country where children are swaddled in helmets and body armor, and only then allowed to ride a Big Wheel in a carpeted living room, and now we had arrived in a country where children play on active runways.

  We emerged from the plane and were immediately stricken by the heat. It was astonishing, a wonder of nature, a blazing force that left us awestruck. As we walked—slithered actually, slowly melting, panting—across the tarmac, hundreds of people, dressed in the brightest of hues, observed us from behind the steel fence separating the two barnlike structures comprising the departure and arrival areas of Bonriki International Airport. The fence, clearly, was there for decorative purposes only. The runway had been reclaimed by children playing soccer. A shirtless man pedaled serenely across on his bicycle and was swallowed by a tangle of coconut palm trees. A dog was in urgent pursuit of five squealing piglets. Go, dog.

  There were two other planes on the tarmac. This would be the Air Kiribati fleet. One looked like a sickly dragonfly with a thin fuselage—was that tin?—and spindly wings. Each passenger had their own door. The windows were made of plastic sheeting with snap-on buttons. It was less an airplane and more a treacherous carnival ride. Could the pilots be carnies? The other airplane must have been the runt of aviation. It had a complex geometrical shape, as if it were a seven-sided box, and wings that did not seem to align. Shirtless men, the mechanics presumably, sat in the shade underneath the crooked wings, pondering the Air Marshall plane, a Saab 2000 turboprop, which suddenly seemed enormous, and it was not an enormous plane. One pointed at the Air Marshall plane, and I could see him thinking, You see. I knew the wings had to align. I could think of only one circumstance that would compel me to fly Air Kiribati. I wondered if there was any crack on the island.

  With trepidation, we approached the immigration desk. We didn’t have visas. The Republic of Kiribati doesn’t exactly maintain an impressive diplomatic presence abroad. It owns no imposing embassies. It does not have a fleet of black sedans immune from parking laws. It does not send forth trained cadres of expert conversationalists skilled in the usage of acronyms. Kiribati was not, in fact, even a member of the United Nations. There was no place to go to obtain visas. But there were procedures, and we followed them closely. We had letters from the District of Columbia Police Department stating that after an extensive search it was determined that we did not have criminal records. And we had letters from doctors asserting that after comprehensive examinations it was found that we did not have any communicable diseases. Being very broadly informed of the health situation in Kiribati, I speculated that the country was seeking healthy host bodies through which to transmit a little bit of Kiribati to the rest of the world.

  We handed over our letters and passports to the immigration official and explained that we wanted to live in his country and so far we had found it very lovely indeed. The immigration official had tattoos on his forehead. He looked at the papers and asked if we had onward tickets. No, we said. “Okay, no problem,” he said. I was pleasantly stunned. There is always a problem. He took out a cigarette. I lit it for him. I have learned to be deferential in these situations. I contemplated a kind remark about his tattoos, green stains that folded and bounced on his crumpling brow, but before I could inquire about his gang allegiance, a tall, rail-thin American woman appeared beside us. Here was our Kurtz.

  “You must be Sylvia,” she said, coolly appraising her successor. “And you must be her husband.”

  Oh, that’s right. I had forgotten. We were going forward with the marriage ruse for certain bureaucratic reasons mainly having to do with health insurance and also because we weren’t sure how a simple living-together arrangement would be received in Kiribati. But this was the first time I had been referred to as a husband and I suddenly felt a little older, more mature, content, though desirous of children. I patted Sylvia affectionately.

  The angular woman was Kate, the person Sylvia was sent out to replace. She was about fifty years old, and from the picture we had seen of her in Washington, she typically appeared years younger. One year on Tarawa, however, had aged her considerably, quite likely because she was suffering from malnutrition. She had the hard features of a bird of prey. Kate admitted this. One year on Tarawa, she calculated, was like five years elsewhere. She was leaving Tarawa mid-contract because, as she cryptically put it to Sylvia, “I just can’t take it anymore.”

  Kate turned to the immigration official. “I have letters here from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Health indicating that Sylvia will be the new country director of FSP and that her visa and residency permit should be processed immediately. These letters were forwarded to the Department of Immigration but I gather you did not receive them.” She stared at him hard.

  “Okay, no problem,” said the official.

  “And um… I’m Sylvia’s husband,” I added helpfully.

  The immigration official stamped our passports. I was pleased to see that it was a modest little stamp, unlike most developing countries, which seemed to have decided that if they couldn’t be Great Powers, they could at least have Great Stamps, ornate displays of grandeur occupying a full passport page, sometimes two. The more irrelevant, troubled, dictatorial the country, the larger the stamp, and so the small ink stain made by the immigration official seemed to bode well, as if Kiribati was declaring We are small. We are content. We have no illusions.

  But we had a few illusions and no one, certainly not Kate, a walking spout of bilious bile, was going to deprive us of what we wanted to see. We had traveled far, uprooted our lives, moved to the end of the world, and there was no way we were going to concede that we had made a mistake. The proverbial glass would be half-full today. We gathered our bags and emerged into Tarawa proper, where we were immediately enveloped by neon munchkins. Dozens of little ones gaped and giggled and twittered as we walked through, and all of them pointed and repeated the same word over and over again. I-Matang. Meaning what? I asked Kate.

  “One who comes from the land of the gods,” she hissed, Brando-like.

  Cool.

  Around us, entire extended families were gathered on mats weaved from pandanus leaves. It seemed as if they resided here in a swirling display of color. The women were attired in a bewildering kaleidoscope of primary colors displayed on wraparound lavalavas, crude sarongs featuring orgasmic flowers and melting sunsets, matched with extreme discordance with sleeveless tops that made each woman seem particularly buxom. The men seemed impossibly fit and weathered, bulging muscles and deep lines, tattoos and festering sores. These were outer islanders awaiting a rumored flight to their home island. A woman of prodigious girth did a brisk trade selling coconuts. She, I gathered, was the airport café.

  We put our bags in the back of a pickup truck and drove off with Kate, our eyes on the shimmering lagoon and the palm-topped islets that stretched and stretched until absorbed by an ambiguous horizon where lagoon and ocean and sky touched and were seamlessly fused into a blue-green oneness and the whole scene was one of such calm and tranquil prettiness that I couldn’t help but sputter about the beauty of the lagoon and that this sight right here was what the romance of the South Seas was all about.

  It’s polluted, said Kate.

  The homes we passed were traditional structures of wood and thatch, small stages raised on platforms with walls of flapping mats. These homes seemed well engineered, sensible, and cool.

  If you don’t mind rats, dogs, and prowlers.

  There was a vitality in the villages we rumbled through, not the brooding stillness we found on Majuro, but a sweet familiarity, a sense of playfulness that we
sensed in the smiles and laughter of people trading and gossiping.

  The I-Kiribati are like children, and you must treat them as such.

  The island was awash with fish. Alongside the road, women were selling their families’ catch out of large coolers.

  Most fish are toxic.

  Boys clambered more than fifty feet up coconut trees rich in nuts, where they sang and worked to extract toddy, the nutritious sap.

  They should be in school.

  Small children played with ingenious toys made of sticks and string.

  Most children have chronic diarrhea and there are indications that cholera has returned.

  Tarawa was the loveliest place I had ever seen. The water, the beaches, the palm trees, the colors, the sky, and the hovering silver-blue clouds bisected by the horizon.

  Tarawa isn’t a disaster waiting to happen. It is a disaster.

  We drove on. I was hoping we could be deposited at our new abode, wherever it might be, and have a cup of coffee and absorb atmosphere for an hour or two. But there wasn’t any time, we were assured. We would have a full schedule today.

  Besides, there is no coffee to be found on this island.

  A tic seized my eye.

  Our first mission would be to obtain driver’s licenses at the Bikenibeu Police Station, a humble two-room cinder-block building with a tin roof. A barefoot policeman snoozed on a bench outside. In front of the station was a doddering pickup truck with a cage in the hold. The paddy wagon, presumably.

  “You do have a driver’s license, don’t you?” Kate asked me.

  “Oh yes… though it’s a little expired.”

  A withering look. We weren’t getting along very well. I found her to be a contrarian.

  The policeman, however, didn’t seem much bothered by the fact that I was not legally entitled to drive anywhere on Earth. He opened up a dusty logbook that looked to predate the twentieth century. He entered our names with a careful scrawl and then went to a typewriter that would probably fetch a good price at an auction for collectible antiques. Slowly he hammered out our licenses on pink paper. Our licenses read Mrs. Sylvia and Mr. Maarten, respectively.

  The police are incompetent.

  Easygoing.

  Onward to the power station, which was a diesel generator in a small tin warehouse capable of meeting the electricity needs of, optimistically, three average Americans, provided that they didn’t use a refrigerator and a hair dryer concurrently. We waited patiently for the clerk, who was lying prone atop the counter, to arise from his slumber. He lay there like an offering until a chorus of throat clearing elicited unembarrassed consciousness.

  Kate rolled her eyes. You see what it’s like here.

  Relaxed.

  Kate wanted to change the electricity bill for the house that FSP had rented into our name. This proved impossible. The bill was filed under M for Mary. Only Mary could change the name on the bill. Kate explained that Mary, who was a former director of FSP, had left the country four years ago.

  “Well, she can change the bill when she comes back,” said the clerk, very patiently, I thought.

  And so it went. We continued madly driving up and down the atoll, swerving perilously around children, pigs, and dogs on an epic quest of errand fulfillment. I understood Kate. She was Washington, D.C., personified: a humorless bureaucrat, a taskmaster, a results-oriented person with long experience at the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose functionaries are best known for roving from one embassy cocktail party to another in deluxe SUVs, liberally sprinkling million-dollar checks on pliable dictators. Kate was accustomed to long, fruitful days spent writing memos and executive summaries, followed by a G and T or two on the verandah at the Club. On Tarawa, however, she had found an unrefined, crude little hellhole, an island that wanted little and strove for nothing, and this drove her well beyond exasperation and just shy of madness. I was not blind. I could see that Tarawa was a raw place. There was, for instance, no coffee on the island. Kurtz, let it be said, adapted. While it is true that he didn’t adapt very well, at least he tried. Kate, it seemed to me, refused to adjust, and I took note of this. I resolved to start drinking tea.

  Eventually, we pulled into a dirt road with cavernous potholes that led toward the ocean. We stopped in front of a “permanent house,” as such houses are called to distinguish them from “local” houses, which have a life span of about five years, unless it gets windy. This would be our house. Painted lime green, it looked like one of those single-story structures one might see in rural Oklahoma with car parts in the front yard, the sort of house that would be considered a step up, just, from a trailer. On Tarawa, though, this was one of the better homes on the island, a B-class house according to the government, which owned the majority of permanent houses on the island and classified them on a scale of A to F. It had a tin roof that allowed rain water to pour into gutters and then down into two large cement water tanks that stood like mute, massive sentries in front of the house. A water pump, bolted into a cement block, brought the water through the pipes. Instead of glass windows there were plastic horizontal louvers, plus security wire. Someone had once taken the trouble to plant flowers and maintain a garden, but this had long gone untended, and so there was a pleasant lushness to the front yard as the bush crept in and leaves were left unswept. There were tall coconut palm trees, stately casuarina trees, and slender papaya trees and also ferns and a squat tree-bush that looked to produce dimpled potatoes. Inside the house, the floor was gray linoleum and there was simple cane furniture, but what was most striking was the view out back. Our backyard was the Pacific Ocean, which is regarded by many as a very large ocean and believed by many more to be misnamed, and I found its presence in our backyard intimidating. We were just a foot or so above sea level, and it wasn’t even high tide. From the house, the reef extended about a hundred yards, where it met the deep water, the swells that had traveled thousands of miles so that they could rise up into steep vertical masses and blast into our fragile little atoll. These were breakers, as apt and succinct a description as can be. A steady roar came into the house, as did a fine salt mist from the fracturing waves. In each room, the walls were ringed with spittles of rust sent hurtling by corroding ceiling fans.

  Kate had left several bottles of boiled water and a few cans of lemonade for us and as I satisfied my thirst I regretted every bad thought I’d had of her. She told us that we should boil our drinking water for twenty minutes on account of the rats in the gutter and god-knows-what parasites in the water tanks. There was a shower, but it had only cold water, and while normally I would find the lack of hot water immensely distressing, climatic circumstances were such that I was not troubled in the least. More worrisome was Kate’s claim that it hadn’t rained at all during the year she had lived on Tarawa and that, therefore, there was not likely to be much water in the tanks and that we should consider carefully every drop we might use.

  She also suggested we continue to employ her “housegirl.” I had a vision of a lithe, undulating young woman, possibly wearing a grass skirt, swaying about the house casting come-hither glances my way, and I became amenable to the idea for a few fleeting seconds until the absurdity of the prospect set in. We were in our mid-twenties, barely solvent, here to do good deeds, or at least one of us was here to do good deeds, and having a housegirl would only stoke our inner guilt. I smoothly expressed our reservations.

  “Bah,” I said. “We don’t need servants.”

  Kate went straight for the jugular. “All right then. I hope you don’t have a problem spending your days washing Sylvia’s clothes, by hand, and mopping the dust and sea spray that coats this house each day. Sylvia certainly won’t have any time.”

  Sylvia looked as if she was not entirely displeased by this possibility. “Make sure you separate the colors from the whites,” she grinned.

  Kate, thankfully, went on. “And I’m sure you won’t mind if yet another girl is pulled out of school because her mother can no longer
afford the school fees.”

  Who was I to deny a child’s education? “So will she be coming once or twice a week?” I asked, silently noting that as the mother of schoolchildren, the housegirl was unlikely to be young and lithe, and she probably wouldn’t undulate either.

  Sylvia and Kate departed for the FSP office and I was left alone to ponder the immensity of the ocean and the giant sharks that were undoubtedly lingering behind the house waiting for some stupid foreigner to go for a swim. Probably tiger sharks. And black and white–tipped reef sharks, of course. Maybe hammerheads and blue sharks and bull sharks too, though it’s really the tiger sharks one needs to worry about. I wondered if sharks would swim over the reef. I scanned the water closely. I began to imagine things. Terrible things.

  But that water looked outrageously appealing. It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot. Staggeringly hot. The heat blasted from a contemptible sun; it came unbidden from the white coral sand; it floated in on humid waves. A faint breeze brought nothing but the stench of decomposition and the slight, acrid smell of burning leaves somewhere not too distant. As I stepped outside, little moved save for the flies that gathered around my legs, my sopping shirt, my face, seeking to feed off the salt I was steadily expelling. I yearned for Canada. I imagined tundra. I thought of boyhood winter days when I would return from excavations in the snow, hands so frozen that only with deft elbow movements could I turn the faucet and reclaim feeling in my fingers with cold streaming water. But it was pointless. The powers of the mind could not overcome the reality of the equatorial sun. A choice, therefore, had to be made. I could either melt into an oozing puddle, drop by drop—a slow, torturous death, for certain—or I could ease my suffering with a swim in the world’s largest backyard pool, thereby risking life and limb to the schools of sharks that were, and I sensed this strongly, circling at reef’s edge, awaiting a meal featuring the other-other white meat.