Tiare in Bloom (23 page)

“Who said I’m still going to be with her in two weeks?” Tamatoa gets up.

“But what if — ”

“She’s married.” There, that does the trick. It shuts both his parents up. “She has a wedding band on her finger, she has
a rope around her neck, she’s a bored housewife, and there’s no restaurant. I’m going to her house and it’s not to talk.”

“Ah,” Pito says, hugely relieved. A bored married woman looking for a bit of fun is safer than an unattached woman searching
for a husband, the father of her future children. “Well, have a good night.”

“
Merci,
Papi.”

Father and son give each other a firm handshake.

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Tamatoa sings, stepping out of the house. “Early.”

Tamatoa does come home in the morning, early — but three days later.

“She has a blind husband or what?” Pito, at the kitchen table, buttering his granddaughter’s bread, asks.

“What are you doing up so early?” Tamatoa looks like he can’t believe his father is up at five forty-five. “You fell out of
bed?”

“Some of us have to get Tiare breakfast and go to work five days a week,” Pito snorts. “You’re going to say
Iaorana
to your daughter? It’s not like she’s invisible.”

Tamatoa smiles at his daughter, who is dipping her buttered jam bread into her Milo, and plants a quick kiss on the little
one’s forehead. He’s come home to get some clothes, he says, and will be away for another five days. “Don’t worry,” he hurries
to answer his father’s questioning look. “I know my duties, she’s going to drive me to work.” And to make things clearer,
Tamatoa explains the situation, which is quite simple really. The husband is away with the children for a week.

“And
bébé?
” Pito asks. “She’s in your plan too? I didn’t pay for your plane ticket for you to play Romeo.”

“
Eh hia.
” Tamatoa dismisses his father with the back of his hand, drinks a glass of water at the sink, and heads to his bedroom to
pack.

“Stay at the table,
chérie,
” Pito tells Tiare as he gets up. “I’ll come back.”

In his son’s bedroom now, with the door closed, “Tamatoa,” Pito begins, speaking with his let’s-be-allies voice, “I just want
to open your eyes a little.”

“What?” Tamatoa, shoving clothes in a bag, is immediately on the defensive. “You’re not going to tell me about the plane ticket
again, are you? I’m going to pay you back.”

“I asked for my money?” says Pito, his voice rising up.

“I’m still going to pay you back.”

“Spend a bit more time with your daughter, it’s for you.”

“I’m just doing what you used to do.” Walking past his stunned father, Tamatoa elaborates. “You were never at the house.”

He opens the door. He’s gone. And Pito, standing still like a coconut tree, pale and mute, hears his son tell his daughter,
in a father’s voice, mind you, “Don’t put your elbows on the table, it’s not polite.”

Later that night, in the dark, in the bedroom on this humid night, with gentle rain splattering on the tin roof . . .

“Materena?”

“
Oui.
”

“Was I a good father?”

“What do you mean
was?
You’re still a father, a good father.”

“I was hardly at the house like I am now.”

“True, but the kids still knew who you were.”

And to refresh Pito’s memory, Materena takes her husband’s hand in hers and talks about the day their eldest son found out
the truth about prisons.

A gendarme parks his car in front of the house and Materena, hanging clothes on the line, asks herself, “What is this gendarme
doing at my house?” When Tamatoa gets out of the car, Materena shouts in her head, “But! What is my son doing in a gendarme’s
car!” She forgets all about the clothes and rushes to the gendarme holding her son by the arm.

“Good morning, Monsieur.” Materena looks at her son staring at his feet. The gendarme eyes the pegs clipped to Materena’s
oversize T-shirt.

“Are you the mother of this young boy?” he asks.

“
Oui,
Monsieur.” Materena is full of respect and anxiety. Gendarmes don’t give lifts because they feel sorry for you walking. You
must do something for a gendarme to give you a lift, something against the law. The thought that comes into Materena’s mind
is that Tamatoa has been shoplifting. She hopes it wasn’t at the Chinese store where she does her shopping.

“Your son was caught stealing,” the gendarme says, looking into Materena’s eyes with that air of superiority.

“What did he steal?” Materena’s voice is shaking a little. “Lollies?”

The gendarme gives Materena that cold stare gendarmes give when they think people are playing smart, and Tamatoa’s giggle
only makes it worse. He yells, “Do not make me regret my leniency, Madame!”

Materena jumps with fright and profusely apologizes and thanks the gendarme for his leniency, although she’s not quite sure
what that word means. The gendarme calms down a little and informs the mother why this young thief is here today.

It seems Tamatoa and another friend were having a little promenade at the airport, next to the jetty where people park their
speedboats. And their canoes. Most canoes are chained to a pole, but one wasn’t, so what did Tamatoa and his friend do? They
pushed the canoe into the water. And since there were paddles in this particular canoe, they started to paddle away. So here
were the young boys paddling, and meanwhile, the owner of that canoe arrived to go fishing and found out that his canoe had
been stolen. He contacted the
gendarmerie,
and this gendarme was sent out to write a full report. But on his way to the airport, he spotted two young boys pushing a
canoe into the sand.

The gendarme ordered the two young boys to carry the canoe back to where they had found it and introduced them to the owner
of the canoe, who fortunately did not press charges.

Materena glances at her son, still staring at his feet, and she really wants to smack him on the head, but she’ll do this
later. Until then, she just gives him a very cranky look.

To Leilani and Moana, peeping from behind the curtains, she gives a very cranky look too.

The gendarme, now addressing himself solely to Tamatoa, says, “I will not be lenient next time, young boy. Do you understand
me?”

Tamatoa nods and Materena wishes he would look up.

“Next time,” the gendarme continues, “there will be fingerprints.”

And with this, he excuses himself and leaves.

Materena waits until the car is fully out of sight to start giving Tamatoa his punishment, but he’s disappeared.

“Tamatoa!” She’s even crankier now. “Come here right now!”

“I wasn’t going to steal that old rotten canoe anyway!” Tamatoa’s voice is coming from inside the house. “It was only to borrow!”

“When you borrow from people you don’t know, it’s called stealing!” Materena marches to the house. “Tamatoa?”

“
Ouais,
what?” He’s in the kitchen, spreading butter on a piece of bread. He looks at his mother like, Can’t you see I’m busy?

Ouh
. . . Materena is going to get the wooden spoon and give that boy a lesson! But she can’t find that wooden spoon, and she
wants that wooden spoon. The frying pan goes flying, plates are smashed, where is that spoon!

Tamatoa is now spreading a thick layer of peanut butter on his bread. Materena picks up her frying pan, and the light flickering
in her eyes cannot be mistaken for a light of joy. Tamatoa, firmly holding on to his sandwich, rushes out of the kitchen in
a flash. His mother chases him, brandishing that frying pan, and threatening to hit him with it.

The chase continues through the living room. Materena now has two helpers, the treacherous brother and sister, but Tamatoa
moves here, moves there, jumps over the sofa, under the table. Three times Leilani nearly catches him. Materena wants to laugh
now because it is so funny, all of them running around in the living room, but she reminds herself of the serious situation.
She just won’t have any of her children coming home in the gendarme’s car!

Moana gets hold of his brother’s leg. “I’ve got him, Mamie!” But Tamatoa shakes his leg and thumps Moana on the shoulders
and now Moana is crying. Tamatoa bends over to see if his brother is okay but here comes Mamie with that frying pan.

He flies out the shutter, he’s now climbing up the breadfruit tree like a monkey. Materena can’t believe Tamatoa’s audacity
. . . and what agility! She didn’t know he was such a good climber. She throws the frying pan away and climbs up the tree
too, muttering, “You wait until I get you!”

But she’s getting a bit worried now. Tamatoa is still climbing, and what if he falls?

“Tamatoa!” she calls out with her normal voice, not wanting to frighten him more. “When I tell Papi, he’s going to get his
belt and give you some.”

She doesn’t have to say more than that. Tamatoa stops and turns to his mother. “Are you going to tell Papi?”

“Well, I’m going to have to,” Materena replies.

“
Non,
please don’t tell Papi.” Tamatoa is pleading with all his heart and soul.

Ah . . . Materena wished she had the power Pito has over the kids. All Pito ever needs to do to get some respect and obedience
is cough. Or yell for one second. She can yell for hours and still nothing will happen. Especially when she’s yelling at Tamatoa.

“Did you get him, Mamie?” Leilani and Moana call out from the shutter.

“
Oui,
” Materena calls back. “You two go eat some chocolate cookies.”

“
Chocolate
cookies?” the children say with delight.

To Tamatoa, Materena says that he doesn’t deserve the chocolate cookies and to her other children she reveals the hiding place.

“Now,” Materena says to Tamatoa. “We talk a little.” She makes herself comfortable on a branch, checking first that it is
thick enough to support her weight.

Speaking very seriously, Materena tells her son that when the police have your fingerprints, it means you have a police record,
and when you have a police record, it means you are a criminal, and when you are a criminal, it means you can go to prison.

She goes on about the inconvenience of having a police rec-ord: whenever there’s a break-and-enter or a fight, the first people
the gendarmes suspect are people with a police record, and this has happened to her cousin Mori quite a few times. That’s
why Mori always has to make sure that he’s never alone, so that he always has witnesses to testify to his whereabouts, and
when he’s alone drinking, for instance, he can only drink under a tree by the side of the road for everybody to see.

“Your uncle Mori,” Materena says, looking up to her son, sitting two branches higher, “is condemned to live in the public
eye.”

Another inconvenience of having a police record, Materena continues, is that you can’t get a job, because no boss wants an
employee who has a police record working in the company. You can do a super interview and the boss can tell you, “You’ve got
the job, welcome aboard!” but when he finds out about your police record, he’ll send you a letter instead to tell you that
you didn’t get the job. This has happened to Mori. Mori has tried to get a job seventeen times (Materena exaggerates here
a little), and seventeen times a boss has said to him, “Welcome aboard!” but three days later he’s gotten a rejection letter
because of his police record and his visits to Nuutania Prison.

Tamatoa eagerly nods and Materena knows he’s only doing this so that she won’t tell his father about the canoe story. But
perhaps he’s listening too.

Materena goes on with her talk about prisons and how, according to her cousin Mori, who’s been there quite a few times, it
is a horrible place to be. The food is horrible, the toilets are horrible, and the beds are not comfortable at all. The beds
in prisons are special beds, made for discomfort to punish the prisoners. The prison, even if we Tahitians call it a five-star
hotel, is definitely
not
a hotel.

“But Mamie,” Tamatoa says. “It was only a canoe, and it was rotten. We nearly sank, that’s why we stopped paddling.”

Ah hia hia,
Materena is so annoyed. Her son didn’t get the message at all. “Eh,” she says angrily. “Have you heard of that saying,
Qui vole un oeuf vole un boeuf?
”

“
Qui vole un oeuf vole un boeuf?
” Tamatoa obviously hasn’t.

“You understand that wise saying?”

Tamatoa shakes his head. No, that saying means nothing to him at all.

“Today you steal an egg,” Materena says. “And tomorrow you steal a cow. Today you steal a canoe, tomorrow you steal a hi-fi
system.”

“But I didn’t steal anything!”

Ouh,
Materena is beginning to lose her patience and she’s about to growl something, when out of nowhere, Pito appears. He’s standing
by the tree, eating a Delta Cream cookie and looking up to Tamatoa. “The whole neighborhood is talking about how you came
home in a gendarme’s car,” he says. “What’s the story?”

“Pito,” Materena hurries to say, cursing her big-mouth relatives. “I already smacked Tamatoa with the frying pan and I’m just
—”

“I’m talking to my boy, Materena. What’s the story?”

Tamatoa tells his father the story, and by the end of it he sounds like he’s going to burst into tears.

“You got caught!” Pito says. “That was pretty stupid.”

“Luckily for Tamatoa, the gendarme didn’t take his fingerprints.” Materena is a bit put off by Pito’s slack comment. Let’s
not move away from the seriousness of the situation. “When there’s fingerprints, there’s a police record, and then there’s
the prison.”

“You know what happens in prison?” Pito asks Tamatoa.

“You eat horrible food?” Tamatoa replies.

“Food!” Pito exclaims, stuffing the last piece of cookie in his mouth. “Prisoners don’t care about food. You know what they
really care about?”

“
Non,
Papi, I don’t know.”

Pito swallows his Delta Cream and informs his son that what prisoners really care about the most is to keep their virginity,
because in prison there are no women, and when there are no women, some men have to become the women. Sometimes willingly,
more often not. Nonchalantly, Pito speaks of young men caught stealing TVs by the gendarmes, sent to prison, and ending up
at the prison hospital to have their bum stitched up. “You understand what I’m saying, Tamatoa?”