If you like eating beyond sin and calories, the place to go is the group of islands known as the Polynesian group. They may not be all the travel posters say, but they are wonderful for food—it has a flavor that is just about this side of heaven.
Mike Murder, my director and cameraman, and I got to an island called Monox Four one lazy afternoon, bent on shooting some pearl divers for the television screens of the world. We were on our way home after exposing a lot of film, and as our journey drew to an end and trouble boiled over in Asia, we felt a little better about getting home.
Monox Four was a company island, part of a group owned by a soap company that bought up its coconuts and kept the natives in comic books, recordings of South Pacific, and hair ribbons worn by both sexes. Mike looked over the island and shook his head.
“We build them better in Hollywood.”
“You mean it looks faked?”
“Sure, the back lot at Metro has a better native village. Look at those roofs, tin roofs made from signs reading Standard Oil.”
“It does keep out the rain.”
“And jeeps! Holy cow, imagine jeeps on a South Sea island.”
“There used to be a war around here.”
“I still don't like it.”
Mike, under his tree bark, was a romantic. I have no use for romantics any more. Maybe because I used to be a romantic myself. I got rid of that dreamy outlook on men, morals, and women after being hit on the head with a baseball bat. It wasn't a real baseball bat, but there was enough shock in it to make me want to see life without the rose-colored glasses. I liked the tin roofs, and the jeep was handy to take us up to Ali's place, a sort of trading post run by a half-Irish, half-Arab gentleman called, of course, Ali. We had a letter of introduction to him, and he stopped sorting some moonstones to smile at us.
“Bad season for camera work. Lousy clouds.”
“Can we see some diving?”
“All the time. Care to buy some moonstones?”
“Maybe later.”
“I'll throw in a free set of recordings of South Pacific. By the original cast.”
“No, thanks.”
“I'm stuck with a hundred sets. At first the natives were amused by the stuff, but now I can't move them.”
“Too bad,” said Mike, “We ran into something like that down under. All the sheephands spoiled by Hopalong Cassidy films. Civilization is the curse of the tropics. Only it's not gin and clothing any more, it's films and records.”
Ali put away his collection of moonstones. “Things were simple in the old days, my old man used to tell me. The missionaries used to land with Bibles, and the natives had the land. In a few years the natives had the Bibles, and the missionaries had the land. A man could make a decent buck in those days. How would you fellas like to go to a big party?”
Mike beamed, “You mean one with native rituals and stuff?”
Ali shook his head. “The headman just got a new Buick and he's celebrating. He put his name down in 1940, and it just came through.”
“That's better than you do in Beverly Hills,” I said.
The party was held in a big grove of coconut trees, and the car was covered with flowers. The headman made us welcome and introduced us to his daughter, who was a real native type in her California sun hat and Hollywood sun glasses. But the food, at any rate, was the real thing. We sat on the ground and thanked the Lord we still could eat in Polynesia.
The food was wrapped in banana and taro and breadfruit leaves and cooked in great pits filled with hot stones. They grated taros and yams and soaked them in coconut milk. The fish, freshly caught and still colored like the rainbow, were packed in huge banana leaves and baked between flat stones heated as hot as they could get. Prawns, crayfish, everything was wrapped and cooked.
The pig was the best of it. It was the headman's own pig. and he was rather proud of that pig. The hair was scraped off, the insides removed, and the animal rubbed down with salt and garlic and lime juice. It was stuffed with hot rocks and mango leaves, also with onions, garlic, and peppercorns. It smells good when it's cooking, and it tastes good while it's being eaten, and it's regretted when it's all gone.
The natives had learned to drink American soda and beer, but there was for those who could take it the native kava, made from the fibers of the kava, fermented with some fo plants that give it a licorice flavor. I didn't care for it, but Mike seemed to think it was pretty good.
After the food, we went up to the headman and asked if we could film the boys diving.
“Sure,” said the headman, “but we dive for moonstones.”
“No sponge or pearl diving?” Mike asked.
“No money in those any more. But moonstones, pretty fair. I want to save up and go to America.”
“We're going home ourselves,” Mike said.
“Good deal. You see South Pacific?”
We admitted we hadn't. The headman seemed shocked. “How come?”
“Never got around to it,” I said.
“Too bad. One thing I want to do, see that South Pacific.”
“But you live in the South Pacific … why worry about a show that isn't very real?” Mike asked.
“Here,” the headman said, “the woman they get fat, here is always taxes and trouble and the boys wrecking the jeeps and the banana trees dying. In play, all the woman are beautiful, they sing much better than our girls, and the music has more beat. Do you get me?”
“I get you, Jackson.” Mike said, “But it's all made up.”
“The people on the stage are real, no?”
“They are, yes.” I said. “We'll film the divers in the morning and hope the clouds look good.”
We went back to Ali's, where we had rented his second best room. Mike took off his shoes and drank some old army beer.
“How do you like these cookies? They have everything, and they want to see a show about a place you could never find on a map.”
“They're romantic, Mike, like you.”
“Is that a dirty word?”
“It's a state of mind, Mike, in which everything is twice life size and everybody is pretty beautiful.”
“Is that bad, chum?”
I pulled the insect net tight around as I got into bed. “You walk around star-eyed and then somebody hits you over the head with the biggest club in the world and you wake up counting your illusions on the floor. I've resigned from the romantics. The headman had better, or they'll take back his Buick.”
Mike looked at me and shook his head, “I think the quicker we get you home, the better. You'll be attacking love next, and this I ain't going to stand.”
“Take a nap Mike, beer catches up with you in the tropics.”
“Yeah … you know, this ain't at all like the movies we used to make.”
“Nothing is ever like the movies, Mike.”
I heard a snore. Mike was sleeping on his back, his mouth open, some empty beer cans around him.
It rained that night, several hundred times. It would come down on the tin roof making thunder and fury, then it would stop and a dripping effect would take over for some time. Then it would get hot under the tin roof, and the insects would try to find the lamp to light it and play games, and then the rain would start again. It was that way until morning. Mike slept through it all and woke up with the sunlight bathing his battered features.
We went out to the diving grounds and found a lot of handsome men with big, brown bodies going off small boats into fifty feet of water. The water was very clear, and we could take pictures right to the bottom. Little fish fed bigger fish, and the coral growths on the bottom looked like a pretty garden in a New England village. We took a lot of footage of the moonstone divers and went up to have lunch with the headman.
His daughter was wearing Paris slacks and reading a novel by Evelyn Waugh. It turned out she had gone to college in California and hoped papa would make enough money someday so she could live in Pasadena and ride in the horse shows. She was a very bright girl and couldn't do the native dances or sing the native songs. I could see Mike felt very let down about this because he always expected life to be just like the movies he used to direct.
It rained while we were at lunch, and it leaked.
The headman looked up and shook his head. “Since the army left, it's pretty hard to get Standard Oil cans.”
His daughter grinned. “That's the trouble with a civilized war. They build you up to expect solid comforts like Kleenex and canned pork and beans and cold cream and girdles, and then they finish their old war and leave us here to go back to banana-leaf underwear and fish bones in our hair.”
The headman shook his head. “Just because you've been educated, don't mock our ways.”
We ate what they call fish sticks, or i'a. The fish are cleaned and then wrapped in cornhusks and tied up tightly with string. They are first peppered and salted. A large pot of water is brought to a boil, the fish are suspended over the water without touching it, the pot is covered, and there they steam and cook for half an hour. When done, the husks are full of well-cooked fish and sauce and to this are added yams dipped in the fish sauce. Mike ate three packages and had to be stopped from eating the husks.
We spent the evening listening to Ali play his record collection and lament his stock of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
In the morning we were back at the diving ground, and Mike got the idea of going down in an old diving suit left on the island and letting me take pictures of him spearing fish.
I didn't like the looks of the diving suit, but Mike was game, and as I was happy not to be asked to take the dive, I agreed.
We got Mike into the patched canvas suit and explained to the boys how to keep the air pump going. Mike opened the little glass window in the battered brass head of the suit.
“Let's get the signals right. One pull, okay. Two pulls, more air. Three pulls haul, get me the hell up.”
“Understand?” I said to the native who owned the suit.
“Sure, kid.”
Mike asked, “What's two pulls?”
“Ding dong,” said the native.
“The trolley song,” said Mike. “No, two pulls means more air. Got it?”
“Free air, you said it, boy,” said the native.
I asked, “Where did you learn English?”
“P. G. Wodehouse book, headman's daughter she lend him, hot stuff, oh you kid.”
“You bet,” said Mike. “Keep an eye on me, chum. I have an idea this character thinks human life is some lark.”
Mike closed his little window, the air bubbled in and out, and he sank slowly, a fish spear in his hand. It took him a long time to reach bottom, then he waved and did a slow walk, like a ballet step, and lunged at a fish. He missed, and the natives laughed, and I had to poke them to get them pumping air again.
A big fish passed; Mike sideswiped it, and it pulled him off his feet. He took a head-over-heels fall, very slow, and went over and over.
When he got up again, I could see him gesturing with a closed fist and stamping around, but the fish and spear were gone for good.
I gave the signal to pull him in, and he came up slowly—I didn' want a case of bends on my hands. I didn't know a damn thing you could do for bends in the middle of an ocean island. We got Mike's little window open in the brass head. He had turned a nice shade of blue and was breathing bard. The suit had leaked and water was dripping over his face.
“How'd I do?” he asked.
“Well, we didn't get any shorts of you spearing a fish.”
“Did you see the one that got away? Musta been twenty feet long.”
The native who owned the suit shook his head. “Three feet most like, maybe.”
“Pulled like a wild bull.”
“You owe ten dollars for spear.”
“Ten bucks!”
“Sure, that no native spear. I order him from Sears Roebuck … steel shaft, tempered head. Best.”
Mike scowled. “You can say what you want, but there ain't no simple children of nature, and maybe never was. Ten bucks!”
“Ten dollars,” the native repeated.
We got to Ali's, and he said a steamer was standing off the next island and would pick us up, the radio had said, if we got there before morning.
“How do we get there?”
“The headman has a motorboat … he can do it.”
We went to see the headman, and he said he was sorry. He had a motorboat but only three tins of gas, the real old Standard Oil tins, and he wasn't going to use it up for nonsense.
“When does the next boat stop here?” I asked.
“Oh, maybe in two weeks.”
“We want to go. We've been away a long time. We'll pay double.”
“What good is money? It can't replace the gas.”
Mike rubbed his red face and smiled. “Look, you want an autographed picture of Pinza, of South Pacific? Well, my buddy here, he's a member of the Screen Writers Guild. So is Dore Schary for whom Pinza works at Metro. You get the picture?”
“So?”
“You get us to that ship. And we send you a personal picture, signed by Pinza, saying: To my friend, headman of Monox Four, with love and admiration, Ezio Pinza,—or however he signs it.”
“Well?”
“And with the tin cans you can fix the roof. It's not neat to eat off a wet table.”
That did it. We got to the steamer just as she was getting ready to pull out and we waved to the headman and his daughter and promised to send her a year's supply of the Book of The Month Club.
We stood at the rail, the hot wind drying us off, and as the motorboat went spanking off across the sea, Mike shook his head.
“I think I'm resigning from the romantics club. too. Nothing was right on that island. I've made a dozen South Sea pictures, and I know the real McCoy. That wasn't it.”
I left Mike at the rail, still talking, and went below to figure out on the map how far we were from home. There was a long bit of equator still to go, but I was happy to remember that a Straight line is the shortest distance….