The Sex Lives of Cannibals Read online

  There are, simply, too many people on South Tarawa, particularly on the islet of Betio, which has the world’s highest population density, greater even than Hong Kong. Unlike Hong Kong, a city in the sky, there is not a building above two stories on Betio. Some eighteen thousand people, nearly a quarter of the country’s population, live on this shattered islet, one square mile of blight linked to the rest of Tarawa by a mile-long causeway. The tangible squalor of their lives shocked us initially, before we became numb. Housing was most often a strange fusion of coconut wood, thatch, corrugated tin, plywood, and rice bags, and it took time before we could distinguish the dwellings of humans from those of pigs. The beaches on Betio, both facing the lagoon and the ocean, were a minefield of fecal droppings. The odor at low tide, as waste both human and otherwise sizzled in the sun, was repellent, like eighteen thousand stink bombs going off at once. To be on the beach at low tide is to feel your body absorb the stench, internalize the repulsive, until you too feel the need to emit something somehow. Clean water was impossible to find. Most people relied on well water. They did not have to dig deep. The water lens is only about five feet below the surface, which would be convenient if coral wasn’t so porous, allowing everything dropped or spilled, such as piss and diesel, to quickly be absorbed by the groundwater, which soon becomes the happy abode of interesting parasites. Boiling water was essential, but few had stoves or the money to pay for gas canisters. There were still palm trees on Betio, which provided coconuts and toddy, but there wasn’t any shrub left for firewood, which is a poor emitter of heat anyway. Everyone had worms. Every child had hepatitis A. Tuberculosis was rampant. There were lepers. Cholera was inevitable: It had struck once before. It would strike again. Betio still functioned as a village, but it was no longer a village. It was a slum. The rest of South Tarawa trailed behind.

  In this environment, the odd mixture of Robinson Crusoe–like isolation combined with the favelas of Rio, good eating was hard to find. On South Tarawa, anything caught inshore—lagoon fish, octopus, mantis prawns, sea worms—was guaranteed to induce gastric explosions in the unfortunate diner. More distressing, ciguatera poisoning was common. This occurs when untreated wastewater, which is the technical term for shit, leads to toxic algae, which is then eaten by fish, which are in turn consumed by humans, who soon feel a tingly, numbing sensation in their mouth, the first sign of the impending collapse of the body. The hands and feet become paralyzed. The skin feels like it is carrying an electric current. Bones creak. And if you are old or very young or if your immune system is weak, you may very well die. The most sensible advice we received from a volunteer teacher on the outer islands, who had became ill with ciguatera poisoning from a contaminated red snapper at a first birthday celebration, a feast that ultimately claimed the lives of three children and one old man, was to stick your finger down your throat at the first tingle and keep puking until you can puke no more. Even then, it might be too late.

  We would have been happy to avoid reef and lagoon fish altogether, but dining options were few. Little grows on Tarawa. A drought combined with nutrient-deficient coral does not do wonders for the cultivation of fruits and vegetables. The I-Kiribati are quite possibly the only people on Earth without a tradition of gardening. As a result, FSP had a demonstration garden where people were taught how to cultivate something besides coconut trees. The garden was Bwenawa’s pride and joy, though it looked very much like an overgrown dump yard. Tin cans were strewn about and buried to boost the iron content of the soil. Fish guts and pig manure were regularly shoveled into the trenches. And the compost that was the happy result of Sylvia’s Atollette was placed around the banana trees, where, at the staff’s insistence, it would not touch anything edible. Every day, the garden was calibrated just so, but the yield was nonetheless meager for the effort. Tomatoes were no bigger than pinballs. Eggplant could not be coaxed to grow larger than crayons. A head of Chinese cabbage would not feed a rabbit. Bananas refused to bud without rain.

  Despairing at the utter meagerness of the island’s culinary world, I too decided to start a garden. Like many writers, I believed that clearing brush under the equatorial sun was preferable to actually writing, and so with machete in hand I carved what would become our garden. It was more like recovering a garden, since years earlier the shady plot conveniently located to take advantage of any leaks in the water tanks, was, by all accounts, a particularly fertile garden, quite likely because years earlier there was rain. I had high hopes that one day soon we would be dining on light and refreshing salads and snacking on tasty fruit. I asked Bwenawa about compost and shade and water and all sorts of other highly technical gardening questions, but he dismissed my inquiries and told me that the most important thing about gardening on Tarawa was a sturdy fence. “Dogs, pigs, chickens, and crabs,” he said. “They must be stopped.” Fortunately, I had the remnants of the old fence and I set about constructing what Bwenawa called a “local” fence. This consisted of sticks tightly knotted together with coconut fiber rope. The effect was to enclose the garden inside something like a mock colonial fort. I say mock because deep down I knew that if a pig so much as huffed and puffed on my garden fort it would blow down, but it looked good and it provided me a fleeting sense of accomplishment. Sylvia too was very impressed with my fence, though her confidence in my construction skills, and possibly even my judgment, suffered when she took a closer look at the gate.

  “Where did you find that?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “That,” she said, pointing at the thin plastic tubing I used as a latch for the gate.

  “Oh that. I found it on the reef.”

  She stared at it. Her face contorted. She was appalled. I had, it appeared, done something wrong.

  “That’s a hospital IV. It’s full of blood.”

  And so it was. It’s funny how you can miss things. The hospital incinerator hadn’t worked for years, and so hospital waste, like so much of the detritus that Tarawa generated, was thrown on the reef, where each day the tides took it out and redistributed it a little farther down the atoll. I unraveled the IV—how could I have missed that?—and tossed it into our burn bin. “Maybe I should wash my hands.”

  My adventures in gardening ended soon enough. One morning, I discovered that the fence was gone. I knew immediately what had happened. Every evening, the neighborhood kids swept through in a quest for firewood and te non, a foul-smelling fruit that was used for pig food and traditional medicine. They were very polite about it at first. A few boys shyly asked if they could have the te non that dropped uncollected and possibly gather any twigs that might be lying about. Soon though, armies of children besieged what remained of the natural world around our house. A dozen boys would climb the casuarina tree and hack at the branches with large bush knives. The te non would get shredded from the bush, and then the bush itself would be taken. When I saw the kids begin to chop down the one tree that provided us with any shade, I decided that the time had come for a few limits. “Hey, you kids,” I found myself saying, suddenly feeling very old. “Please don’t cut down the tree.” The following day we found our pickup truck smeared with te non, the island equivalent of being TPed. In Kiribati, as elsewhere in the world, there is no more destructive force than an eleven-year-old boy. My fence, as I knew it would, had become firewood. The garden, and the mango tree I defiantly planned on cultivating, remained an unrealized dream.

  AND SO WE BECAME dependent upon the ship. Every six weeks or so, a ship arrived to discard food deemed unsuitable for Australian consumption—rusty cans of vegetable matter, corned beef with a fat content guaranteed to induce a cardiac event within minutes of consumption, weevils together with rice and flour, rubber that was alleged to be meat, packaged chicken “pieces” that had been frozen and defrosted so often that each package had right angles, food products generally that had expired three to twelve months prior, and all priced beyond the range of everyone except those truly desperate to nibble on something beside a fish. Fortu
nately, the Australians came through with the beer, which was a good thing because South Tarawa had a prodigious appetite for beer. On a few rare occasions potatoes, oranges, and cheese could be found, but one had to be quick because certain unnamed wives of foreign men on lucrative aid contracts were unscrupulous hoarders (you know who you are). Bonriki wives we called them, after the village where most of them lived in their A-grade houses. Nonetheless, among the I-Matang on Tarawa it was gleeful pandemonium whenever a ship arrived as rumors swept the island of exciting edible goods to be found in the otherwise depleted stores.

  “There’s broccoli at the One-Stop!” Sylvia would inform me, calling from her office.

  “Hush. Don’t be saying things like that.”

  “Go now!”

  And I would pedal with demonic fury only to see one of the Bonriki wives—women who referred to the I-Kiribati as “the blacks,” doughy, petulant women who never ever should have been allowed to leave suburban Adelaide—inevitably marching out of the One-Stop with the entire shipment of broccoli, the last potatoes, the only oranges, and every package of Tasty Cheese that had not yet turned green. I would be left stewing in my bile, empty-handed once again. I wished them ill.

  The ship—it was always The Ship—was what sustained existence on South Tarawa, if not always by what it carried, then through what it promised. Often enough there were very real shortages of the basics—rice, flour, diesel—and it was just the knowledge that, sometime in the foreseeable future, replenishments would arrive that enabled us to endure. In the meantime, I hunted for surprises at our local shop, the Angirota Store, which despite its modest cinder-block façade, represented the entirety of the I-Kiribati free enterprise system. There were five I-Matangs on Tarawa, long-term residents with I-Kiribati wives, who had started businesses of their own—the One-Stop, Betio Hardware, a used-car dealership, Yamaha Motors, and a sign-painting/electrical repair conglomerate, but the Angirota Store was the only business, the only true business, to be run by I-Kiribati. Every other shop on Tarawa was a government-run cooperative, where you were as likely to find a dead rat on the shelves as anything edible, though now and then, a startling find could be made at the Nanotasi, such as when an entire wall was devoted to the display of fabric softener, which was very interesting because there is not one dryer on Tarawa. Not one. I checked.

  At the Angirota Store in contrast, one could find seven different audiotapes featuring “La Macarena,” which might actually constitute an argument against capitalism, but I admired the Give the People What They Want attitude. It was subversive in Kiribati. But even at the Angirota Store, there was only so much that could be done to improve the fare on Tarawa. There was a counter behind which the available goods would be displayed—canned tuna, canned tuna with tomato sauce, canned corned beef, cans of Ma-Ling Chicken Curry, “cabin biscuits,” Milo powdered sport drink, powdered milk, Sanitorium brand peanut butter. It was little different than the victuals found on an English ship, circa 1850. There was a refrigerator with a glass door that contained cans of Victoria Bitter, Longlife milk, apple-cranberry juice, and now and then wilted cabbage. In a wooden cabinet with a fly screen there were loaves of sweet white bread. In addition to the aforementioned collection of “La Macarena” tapes, one could also find A Techno Christmas, Melanesian Love Songs, Big Band Celebration, and what appeared to be the collected works of Wayne Newton.

  The routine was almost always the same. The woman tending the store would be draped over the counter, a pose that reminded me of tedious school days when the boredom would creep in and slowly I would lean and extend myself forward and breathe the ammonium scent of my desk, dreaming, until clubbed by the chalk or eraser that a thoughtful teacher would hurtle my way. I would enter with a hearty “Mauri” (greetings) and with colossal willpower she would heave herself off the counter and arch her eyebrows. English was an official language of Kiribati and so I just plowed forward. “Any fruit today, apples, oranges, strawberries, something, anything?” The brow would crinkle and this would mean no. “How about bread, a rustic batard, a loaf of sourdough, Jewish Rye perhaps?” She would twitch her nose and nod toward the bread cabinet, which contained the weevil-infested loaves of what passed for bread on Tarawa. It was mere stomach filler. I would ask for the peanut butter and she would arch her eyebrows in acknowledgment. Apple-cranberry juice? And once again the eyebrows were launched. Inevitably, once I got home I would discover that the juice had expired three months before, and that the jar of peanut butter contained a colony of ants entombed in a sticky, nutty quagmire. The juice would get drunk, the ants would get scraped out, the weevils plucked from the bread, a peanut butter sandwich would be eaten, and I would be pleased with myself for finding sustenance that did not involve a fish.

  It was difficult, however, to go through an entire day without resorting to the consumption of a fish. Almost always it would be a tuna, either skipjack or, preferably, yellowfin. One fish, say about two feet long, cost roughly 50 cents American, and its purchase was the culminating errand of my bike rides. At this point, because I tended to bike hard and it was always—I really want to stress this—hot, I was usually sweaty, not sweaty like northeasterners get after a brisk workout in an air-conditioned gym, but sweaty like Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, drenched, and the reason I bring this up is because it is really difficult, almost impossible actually, to bike on a road congested with pigs and chickens and pedestrians and minibuses while carrying a large wet fish in a perspiring hand. The women who sold me the fish were amused by my efforts. I was a novice to fish buying at first and I spent a lot of time shuffling from cooler to cooler, prodding the fish, studying the eyes, sniffing for fishiness, and this, because they are fish people, was the source of much mirth and cackling to the vendors. That I would stand soaked from head to toe in sweat induced by exercise, which is an unfathomable concept in Kiribati, further confirmed that I was a fool and in need of mocking. When I accused them of being tokonono (naughty), they emitted screams of laughter.

  With my fish selected and paid for, and confident that my very existence on Tarawa was amusing to so many, I eased myself back on my bike, a tuna fish dangling from one hand, the tail fins hooked between my middle fingers, and weaved precariously until I built sufficient momentum to continue in a more or less straight line, steeling myself for the gauntlet. It was always very exciting biking past several hundred hungry, emaciated, mange-ridden, angry dogs while swinging a fish past their snouts. The trick was to bike very, very slowly, sneaky-like, particularly when confronted by a pack of dogs. Under no circumstances should eye contact be made. And never let them sense your fear. This knowledge, of course, is hardly intuitive. I lost three fish to the snarling hell demons before I figured out that a pack of hungry dogs will always move faster than a cyclist gripping the handlebars with one hand while using the other to swing a fish like a club, a tactic that was remarkably unsuccessful, though it did leave bystanders doubled-over in belly-rumbling laughter. I am sure they are still talking about it today.

  Once safely home with an intact fish I set about preparing it. Off went the head. Then the tail. The knife sliced open the underside of the fish. The skin was pulled off. The dark, blood meat was trimmed, worm indentations were scoured for, and if none were found and I was hungry, I had myself a snack of raw tuna. Then there was the question of what to actually do to the tuna steaks. How to dress it up, as it were, for the dinner plate? Sylvia might inquire if the mayonnaise I purchased for a tuna salad was actually safe to eat, given that it had expired six months earlier. She would sniff it and wonder, “I can’t tell if it’s bad because it’s turned or because it’s Australian.” It was a pet peeve of hers, Australian mayonnaise, but if it wasn’t rancid it was eaten. If there were a couple of tomatoes available, I would make tortillas from scratch, sear the fish, and have fish tacos. When finally we succeeded in cultivating yogurt from a yogurt culture that had been passed from desperate I-Matang to desperate I-Matang as if it were some sacred life for
ce, I pasted the yogurt on the fish and sprinkled on the curry powder we found deep in the recesses of the kitchen closet. We had stir-fried tuna, sautéed tuna, pan-fried tuna, grilled tuna, boiled tuna, raw tuna. We even had tuna carpaccio. The one question that was never asked was What’s for dinner? Until…

  The tuna disappeared. Just like that. I biked the entire length of South Tarawa searching for a tuna. But there was nothing. Just the dreaded salt fish and a few sharks. It was as if giant nets had suddenly appeared to enmesh every tuna in the greater Tarawa area. It was like that because that’s what had actually happened. The Korean fishing fleet had gathered in Tarawa Lagoon to offload their catch onto huge mother ships. Emptied of fish, the trawlers immediately set forth to empty the seas around Maiana and Abaiang, the fishing grounds that supplied Tarawa. I could see them from the house, giant fishing machines with industrial silhouettes that I had last seen in New Jersey, and I could only imagine the effect of their wakes on inshore canoes. That the government of Kiribati allowed this was deplorable. There are two million square miles of ocean in Kiribati’s exclusive economic zone in which the trawlers can fish, and yet they were permitted to work the twenty square miles of water upon which half of the nation’s population depends for sustenance, betraying again the ineptitude and petty corruption of Kiribati’s leaders. The fish sellers were glum. Each day they appeared with a few reef or lagoon fish, all that their husbands and brothers and fathers could catch now that the deepwater fish, the fish that could be consumed with a strong likelihood of maintaining one’s stomach intact, had been netted, destined for the canneries of Korea. Usually, we could weather these periodic convergences of idiocy and bad luck, but during these same tuna-less weeks an event of cataclysmic proportions occurred, an event that tested our very will to live. The beer ran out.