White Sands Read online

  After the museum we went to Mataiea and Punaauia (now a featureless suburb of Papeete), where Gauguin lived and where some of his most famous works were painted. I suddenly had the idea that yellow might be a symbol for banana, but apart from that my mind was completely blank and I couldn’t think myself into Gauguin’s shoes, couldn’t see the world through his eyes. As I stood there, however, seeing what he had seen without even coming close to seeing as he had seen, I did get an inkling of the attraction of Islam. Impossible—not even conceivable—that a Muslim, on making the mandatory, once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, could be disappointed. That is the essential difference between religious and secular pilgrimage: the latter always has the potential to disappoint. In the wake of this realization there swiftly followed another: that my enormous capacity for disappointment was actually an achievement, a victory. The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment (‘I am down, but not yet defeated,’ Gauguin snivel-boasted) was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had of it. When I am no longer capable of disappointment the romance will be gone: I may as well be dead.

  A Faaohipa noa i te taime ati

  There’s no use putting it off any longer. The unaskable question is crying out to be asked. Not ‘Where are we going?’ but ‘What are the women like?’ Are they babes? No one was more eager to answer this question than Gauguin himself, and the answer, obviously, was yes, they’re total babes in a babelicious paradise of unashamed babedom. Many of Gauguin’s most famous paintings are of Tahitian babes who were young and sexy and ate fruit and looked like they were always happy to go to bed with a syphilitic old lech whose legs were covered in weeping eczema. Of course, he was also a great artist, but they didn’t know this, since at the time he did not have the reputation that he has now, and to see how great an artist he is you have to know something about art, which they didn’t, because they hadn’t seen any. To them he was just a randy old goat who was always trying to persuade them to get their kit off, which they were happy to do even though the killjoy missionaries who had come to the island before Gauguin and converted people to boring old Christianity had got them to cover up their breasts. The missionaries made them wear something called a Mother Hubbard, which was a shapeless and not very flattering frock, but Gauguin knew that underneath their Mother Hubbards they were, as a famous British ad campaign from the 1980s had it, ‘all loveable,’ and their melon-ripe breasts were still there, and were no less nice for not being visible to the naked eye until they were undressed. They might not have known he was a great artist but Gauguin believed himself to be one, right up there with Manet, whose Olympia bugged him in the sense that it goaded him to do a really horny picture of a naked Polynesian woman, ideally one who was only about thirteen, as much a girl as a woman. At first, though, Gauguin didn’t do much painting. He just tried to look and understand what was going on in their heads. He read about Maori art and artists and this helped him understand, but he was an artist, and for an artist looking is its own form of understanding. Earlier visitors to Tahiti had noticed the grace and stillness of its inhabitants, but while they interpreted this as torpor or boredom, Gauguin saw ‘something indescribably solemn and religious in the rhythm of their poses, in their strange immobility. In eyes that dream, the troubled surface of an unfathomable enigma.’ As well as trying to understand what was going on in their heads he was also keen on getting down their pants, and the other colonials took a dim and possibly envious view of this.

  That’s how it was in Gauguin’s day. But what about now? I can give a very good answer to this, because it so happens that while I was there the finalists for Miss Tahiti were all being photographed by the press, in the luxury of my hotel, looking like they’d stepped straight out of a Gauguin painting. So, yes, Tahitian women, they’re really beautiful—especially when they’re young. Then, almost overnight, they get incredibly fat. It’s as if they discover Fat Is a Feminist Issue and gobble it up. They don’t just read it; they eat it. Not to be outdone, the dudes get even fatter. It’s like some calorific battle of the sexes. The most popular sport here is canoeing, but the thing at which Polynesians really excel is weight-lifting, otherwise known as walking or standing. Every time they heave themselves out of a chair they equal or exceed a previous personal best. And although the canoe is essentially a slim-fitting vessel, in Tahiti it has presumably adapted and evolved—in a word, expanded—to accommodate the area’s distinctive twist on Darwinism: the survival of the fattest. The people are huge. They stare at you from the depths of their blubber. It’s like they’ve gone into hibernation within the folds of their own flesh. Part of the reason for this, according to Joel (slim by Tahitian standards, immense by any others), was that Polynesians have the highest per-capita sugar intake in the world. It so happened that as Joel was saying this I was taking my first, tentative sips of a canned drink called South Sea Island Pineapple. Huge letters proclaimed that it was ARTIFICIALLY FLAVOURED, as though the lack of the natural were a major selling point. A closer reading of the can revealed that it had more Es in it than a nightclub on that other island paradise Ibiza. It was also, by some considerable margin, the sweetest drink I had ever tasted: anecdotal confirmation that, as Joel explained, Polynesians were also the world’s number two in diabetes and number three in cardiovascular illnesses related to sugar. Joel reeled off these statistics with a kind of appalled pride, as if this ranking in the league-table of sugar-derived illnesses were the source not only of the nation’s obesity but also its pre-eminence.

  Another claim to fame announced by Joel is that they’ve got the highest electricity bills in the world. It would be strange if this were not the case, because everything here costs a big fat arm and a leg. Everything is imported from France, and by the time it’s made its way around the world it costs a thousand times what it would in Europe. As I sat down for dinner one starlit night, a waitress waddled over to explain the difference between this over-the-water restaurant and another, less glamorously located elsewhere in the hotel.

  ‘This restaurant is gastronomic,’ she said.

  ‘Astronomic, more like!’ I quipped.

  The fact that it was astronomically expensive meant that I ended up like Gauguin, eating ‘dry bread with a glass of water, making myself believe it is a beefsteak.’ Metaphorically speaking, anyway. I was actually eating mahi-mahi with vanilla sauce, as I did every night of my stay. Mahi-mahi was in season and vanilla is the opposite of money: it grows on trees—but still ends up costing a fortune—and tastes like concentrated essence of artificial flavour, flavour for people whose idea of culinary refinement peaked with bubble gum.

  The expense didn’t just mean that things cost a lot. It meant that my fellow diners and tourists tended to be on the old side, were usually on a cruise, often a tad square—and always in couples. I was surrounded by couples, murmuring couples who amused each other over dinner by tossing bits of baguette into the sea, where they were gobbled up by fat fish. The idea of the all-you-can-eat buffet had been extended to the ocean itself. The fish were so domesticated that if they’d had fingers they’d have signed for the meal and charged it to their room. That the ocean had been tamed in this way contributed to an impression that had been building up in the course of my stay, and which I now communicated to another solitary tourist, an optimistic Australian in whose company I had sought solace.

  ‘We are not in Polynesia at all,’ I said. ‘We are in a casino in Vegas called the Tahiti or the Bounty.’

  ‘But look out there,’ he said. ‘Look at that amazing sea.’

  ‘You obviously haven’t been to Vegas recently,’ I said.

  We only chatted together for five minutes, but that was enough to make him my closest friend in Tahiti. Where, I asked myself, were the modern primitives of the international party scene, the tattooed savages with their piercings and dreadlocks whose company I enjoy even if I cannot count myself among their number? They were nowhere to be seen, that’s whe
re they were. Even when I was nowhere to be seen, when I was alone in my room, I felt a bit embarrassed to be here in this once-natural paradise that had to be cosmetically improved and maintained in order to look perfectly natural. Useful, in an entirely useless way, to discover that embarrassment is not only a public emotion or reaction, that it’s possible to experience it in private, when no one is looking. If embarrassment became something else when internalised in this way, if it began to transmute itself into any kind of insight or resolve, it would have something going for it. Instead, it lingers like a blush which deepens the more intensely you try to wish it away.

  Tei raro ae the hatua poito i to outo parahiraa

  Gauguin stayed in Tahiti for two years. Then he went back to Paris. Then he came back to Tahiti, but he didn’t like it, because in the time he’d been away it had got all developed and wasn’t savage enough for him any longer, so he decided to go somewhere more remote, to Hiva Oa, north-east of Tahiti, in the Marquesas. He didn’t actually get there until 1901, and in the meantime he moaned and groaned and complained about everything, but he never lost the sustaining artistic belief that he could turn everything that happened to him to creative advantage. It was in this period that he produced some of his greatest paintings, many of which had Tahitian titles—Merahi metua no Tehamana, Manao tupapau—even though his grasp of the language was fairly flimsy and sometimes these titles did not mean quite what they were meant to mean. Things often went badly. Sometimes he found himself on the brink of despair, but always, at the last moment, something turned up to bring him back from the brink or push him over it—but if he did go over it then it turned out that that was a good thing, because going over the brink had a somewhere-over-the-rainbow quality to Gauguin. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was a martyr to his art. One picture was called Self-Portrait near Golgotha—his way of saying that although he was in desperate straits he was going to redeem everything in paintings like this one of himself near Golgotha. All of his other paintings he sent back to France, but the Golgotha one he kept by him and took with him to Hiva Oa so he would always have an image of his own suffering to keep him company and cheer him up. There is a moral in this, as there is a moral in almost everything. In this case the moral is that paradise or what we call paradise is often a kind of Golgotha, as exemplified by the experience of the many tourists who each year find their holiday dream turning into a nightmare as they are stranded at Gatwick for several days due to an air-traffic controllers’ dispute in Spain. Either that or their luxury villa turns out to be a crumbling pit with plumbing problems. Gauguin didn’t care about things like this. He was happy with a basic hut. He didn’t crave a deluxe over-water bungalow, though he was perturbed by the increasingly desperate state of his own plumbing, namely his poxy old schlong, which, frankly, no one in their right mind would chow down on unless they were paid a good deal of money and offered a course of high-dosage penicillin.

  The flight to Hiva Oa took three hours, and since, in Gauguin’s day, you couldn’t just hop on a plane and fly anywhere, it must have taken a long time on a boat, because it’s a long way and even now people in Tahiti regard Hiva Oa as the back of beyond, so he really did end up a long way from home, so far away that if he’d gone any further he’d have ended up nearer home, the world being round like a melon.

  A simple and single law governs life on remote islands: there is nothing to do except go completely to pieces. Gauguin was no exception, and although he continued working, much of his time on Hiva Oa was spent squabbling with priests and judges and generally making a nuisance of himself. He still painted, but the years of his greatest productivity were behind him, and one day he just died, and although a friend of his bit into his scalp to try to bring him back from the dead it was to no avail, because this time he was not coming back. He had joined the spirits of the dead who look over naked thirteen-year-old girls, as in the infamous painting Manao tupapau, in which, he had said, it is difficult to tell whether she is dreaming of the scary spirit or the spirit is dreaming of her, specifically of her ass, of which we enjoy an unimpeded view. But he had also joined the immortal dead, the great artists of the Western world, the choir visible, and he wanted to lie back and enjoy a view of the posthumous fame to which his strange life was no longer an impediment.

  Gauguin is buried in the cemetery near the village of Atuona. There’s a rock with his name on it, and a tree. It merits a stop of about two minutes, max, and visiting it was pretty much a non-experience. It did nothing for me, possibly because, a few minutes later, I came to another memorial, to someone I had never heard of:

  NAOPUA A PUUFAIFIAU, SOLDAT:

  MORT POUR LA FRANCE 1914–18

  There are memorials like this throughout France, but none of these had expressed so powerfully the scale of a catastrophe that had engulfed not just Europe but the world. To think that someone born here, in one of the most remote places on earth, could have been sucked into the First World War: Gauguin’s movement was centrifugal, from the centre to the edge, but it was counter-balanced by this opposite, centripetal movement compelling someone from the fringes of the world to the epicentre of history. From that moment on it would be impossible, even in paradise, to live in a way that was untouched by history. Working backwards from this, we can deduce that our (historically constructed) idea of paradise is, precisely, a place untouched by history.

  After visiting the grave, I was scheduled to spend an hour at the Cultural Centre, which is a facsimile of the house Gauguin built for himself. There was one slight problem: it did not exist. Effectively, I was shown the place where the Cultural Centre was going to be (i.e., a building site). As such it was almost indistinguishable from building sites the world over, but they had begun work on reproducing the carved door-frame that Gauguin made over the threshold of his ‘Maison du Jouir’: ‘Soyez Amoureuses et Vous Serez Heureuses.’

  The climax of that day’s tour came with the chance to see objects found in Gauguin’s well. Actually, that is to put it too grandly. I should say remains or fragments of objects: some broken bottles, bits of crockery, jars, a syringe, ampoules of morphine and clumps of congealed paint. It was, on the one hand, just a load of old junk. On the other hand, it was still a load of old junk, but no more persuasive exhibition has ever been mounted to demonstrate the status of art as religion, the artist as secular martyr. We were pilgrims and these were the relics, invested with all the majesty of Christ’s sandals or whatever it is they have in Lourdes. And this secular veneration does at least have the benefit of honesty and scepticism. As the curator explained: although they were found in Gauguin’s well, ‘we can’t certify that they were Gauguin’s, but it’s quite possible they were.’

  ...

  Because Hiva Oa was not beautiful in the way I had expected, it took me a while to see that it was beautiful at all. The island looked both tropical and non-tropical and it seemed that every kind of tree grew here. This was a result not just of the fecundity of the soil but of the long history of trade and exchange. Joel had explained to us that Cook or Bligh (of Mutiny on the Bounty fame) had brought the pineapple to Tahiti from somewhere else—Hawaii, I think—and taken away the breadfruit or something like that, but I could not remember the exact details and so was unsure whether the grapefruit was indigenous or imported. Either way, as I was taken on a march through jungle which seemed, in places, more like Sherwood Forest than the lush tropical paradise of Rousseau (Le Douanier), the grapefruit and every other variety of fruit and flower seemed happy to have made a home here. In places the island was lush, in others stark and jagged, cloud-shrouded and desolate. This, together with the cosmopolitan mix of vegetation, meant that it kept looking like somewhere else, mainly like Switzerland in the grips of a record-breaking heat wave. This was not what I had expected at all. I had been expecting to meet local artists who continued a tradition initiated by Gauguin but soon came to see that the real art of the Marquesas, and of Polynesia generally, was tattooing. Everyone here has tattoos of
breathtaking geometrical precision, density and intricacy. There was a time when a tattoo was like a bodily CV conveying all sorts of data: who your mum and dad were, the names of your ancestors, what your trade was (warrior, nobleman), what grade A-levels you got and even, possibly, what you had for lunch last Thursday. The tattoos were the Polynesian way of answering the questions ‘Where do we come from?’ and ‘Where are we going?,’ the very questions that religions either answer or—to those of a Nietzschean bent—are designed to stop you answering.

  The missionaries buried the pre-Christian, polytheistic religion of Polynesia (and, for a time, put a stop to tattooing) but it is possible to visit some recently excavated sacred sites. The most impressive of these is at Iipona on Hiva Oa, where there are five monumental sculptures or tiki.

  I was not that keen on going, for several reasons. Instead of recovering from jet lag, I was sleeping less and less every night. I didn’t just have jet lag; I had jet-lag lag. I had also developed a terrible heat rash, which was tormenting me every bit as much as Gauguin’s eczema, and all I could think about was the non-availability of soothing ointment.