Tiare in Bloom (3 page)

Otherwise, nothing much has changed around here in the Tehana
quartier.
Aunties, older now, are still hanging clothes on the line, watering flowers, gossipping over hibiscus hedges, raking the
leaves, minding the great-grandchildren, keeping busy. Pito walks past the row of neat, proud fibro shacks, his eyes firmly
on the dirt path. He’s hoping to pass unnoticed, but of course this is impossible.

“Pito,
iti e!
”

Pito looks up and waves to his auntie Philomena, one of his father’s eight sisters, and the one Mama Roti likes the least
because she talks to say nothing and asks too many questions. Apparently, Auntie Philomena used to be very reserved in her
youth, although this is hard for Pito to believe.

“Come here a little,” Auntie Philomena cackles, opening her fat arms to her nephew. “What’s this walking with your eyes on
the ground, eh?” She squeezes Pito tight, strangling him almost. “So? How’s life in Faa’a? How’s Materena? How’s her mother?
How’s Ati? How are you? I hear Materena is a big star now, eh? How much are they paying her at the radio? More than when she
was a cleaner, that’s for sure, eh? I wanted to work at the radio when I was young, but your uncle said it was not a place
for a woman, can you believe it? The world has changed, eh? When are they going to give Materena a limousine? When I was young
I wanted to drive a car, but your uncle said cars are not for women, can you believe it? The world has changed, eh?
Aue,
we’re all getting old, Pito, and you too! I remember when you were a baby, you ate a peg, and it came out with your
caca
two days later! I know you don’t believe me, because your mama told you it’s impossible for a baby to shit out a peg, but
I saw that peg with my own eyes.
Enfin,
you’re here to visit your mama? That’s nice. She looked a bit sick last time I saw her. But how does it feel to be married
to a star?” The auntie stops talking and she’s now expecting her nephew to answer.

“A star?” Pito chuckles. “Materena is still the same.”

“Stop doing your idiot, Pito, everybody who works at the radio is well known, but Materena is the most popular. And she’s
only been at the radio for one year! Imagine a little in ten years! She’s going to be better known than Gabilou. I like Materena’s
radio program, it talks about things I understand, like life, love, youth. I told Tonton to listen, but you know your uncle,
he just wants to listen to his doum-doum music.” Auntie Philomena stops talking to take a deep breath.

Okay, it’s now or never! “
Allez,
Auntie,” Pito jumps in. “I see that you’re busy. I leave you.” Before she starts up her speech again, Pito walks away, nodding
in agreement to the words she’s calling out to his back.

Auntie Maire, watering her flowers with her latest great-grandchild fast asleep in her carriage nearby, stops him two yards
further. The eldest sister and the skinniest, she’s the sister-in-law Mama Roti likes the most because she doesn’t talk to
say nothing.

“Pito!” Auntie Maire bends her hose to stop the water flowing and gives her nephew a big kiss on his cheeks. “It’s very nice
of you to visit Mama,
haere,
go . . . don’t let Mama wait, and give my felicitations to Materena for her first year at the radio.”

Pito gives his promise and keeps walking, only to be stopped yards later by another auntie, and another auntie, and another.
At last he reaches the house where he took his first steps, drank his first beer, smoked his first
paka,
and lost his virginity with a friend of a cousin.

He was about sixteen and she was more than twenty. It was the big love for Pito, but she dropped him for an older man who
worked at the bank. Pito was heartbroken for months, and after that he was a little obsessed with older women for a while.
Sitting across from an older woman in a truck, he’d be transfixed, watching as she rolled a cigarette, licking the paper and
telling him with her eyes, I bet you’d like me to do that to you, eh, kid? Pito would swallow hard. He’d fantasize about that
sexy mama for weeks.

Enfin,
here’s Mama Roti at the door, warned of her son’s visit by the exclamations of the sisters-in-law. As he gets closer, she
looks Pito up and down and says, “You’re getting fat.” There’s no
Iaorana,
how are you, thank you for remembering that I’m alive.

“I’m the same as last week when you saw me.”

“Where’s my Materena?”

Your
Materena, eh? Pito snorts, thinking back to the night when he overturned his mother’s kitchen table after she said words
about Materena that did not please his ears. Plates and glasses smashed on the floor right before Mama Roti’s horrified eyes,
but at least she got Pito’s message: Don’t talk bad about the mother of my children. Pito was drunk and Mama Roti not too
far off, and it’s very possible that the words got a bit exaggerated, but they both learned a valuable lesson that night:
Don’t drink together. “Materena is in town for her driving lesson.”

“Driving lesson?” Mama Roti cringes as if she’s just been told an absurd story. “And after? A passport? She has a car at least?”
Mama Roti knows many people who take driving lessons and they don’t even have a car. What’s the use of that? Pito informs
his mother that actually, yes, Materena has a car. She bought Mama Teta’s Fiat two days ago, to be paid for little by little
as per the Tahitian finance tradition. Mama Teta didn’t need the Fiat anymore, having upgraded to driving a minibus since
starting her nursing home. That way, she can take her clients to Papeete for their medical checkups and to special outings
like bingo.

“You have lots of gray hair, Pito.” Mama Roti doesn’t care about Materena’s car. “What’s the story? You’re stressed?”

“I’ve had gray hair for the past three years.”

Mama Roti looks into her son’s eyes. “Maybe it’s time for you to put your flag down and do something.”

“Do something?” Pito asks, wondering what his mother is going on about. “What?”

“It’s not up to me to tell you,” Mama Roti snaps. “Materena isn’t my wife. I don’t know what she loves. Pito, eh, you were
so handsome before, but now you look so old and you’re not even a grandfather yet.”

“Eh?”

“When I look at you,” Mama Roti sighs with deep concern, “it’s like you have ten grandchildren.”

“Eh?” Pito repeats, thinking, Is this a son’s reward when he remembers that his mother is alive? Criticisms and guessing games?

“
Aue,
Pito.” More sighing from Mama Roti. “Look at yourself in the mirror now and then, hum?”

Two hours later, in front of the mirror, Pito is shaving. He shaves when there’s a funeral, a wedding, a baptism, a meeting
at work, and when he wants his wife. After the shaving, Pito scrubs his body clean with soap, dabs eau de cologne on his neck
. . . in brief, he makes himself beautiful like a prince.

He thinks fleetingly of how when it’s the wife who’s in the mood, she doesn’t have to use any tricks to interest her husband.
She just gives him the look, the look that says,
Coucou,
look at me closely, I’m interested! And the husband better be interested too, otherwise she gets suspicious. “How come you’re
not interested? You have a problem? Another woman?” It’s a cruel world,
oui,
but Pito isn’t going to waste time philosophizing about it. He’s too busy getting prepared.

When Materena walks into the house, carrying a big box, Pito — shaved, smiling his
uh-huh-huh
smile, and puffing out his bare chest — is posing for a Mr. Universe photograph on the sofa.

Materena bursts out laughing.

“What?” Pito asks, sucking his belly in. “What is funny?”

Still laughing, Materena delicately puts the box on the ground and massages her sore arms. “I’m not telling you,” she says.
“But that box was heavy.”

“What did you buy this time?”

“A thing to put things in.” What Materena means is a multiple-tray rack. “It was reduced by eighty percent.”

“With you, it’s always reduced by eighty percent,” Pito chuckles, but when he sees Materena rip the box open, his heart sinks.
“You’re not going to do this now!” Out come pieces of metal and plastic. “It can’t wait a little?”

Materena reads the instructions with Pito looking on, amused.

“Okay, okay,” Materena says, grabbing one of the pieces. “
Oui,
I put that with that.” She grabs another piece. “Then I do this . . . All right, then, it’s not the right piece, maybe it’s
that piece.
Non,
it’s not that piece either, okay, how about I try with another piece . . .
Merde!
Okay maybe I’m going to read the instructions again, eh?” She reads. “Okay,
oui,
I put that piece with that piece, and then
non,
ah,
oui,
silly me, it’s that piece . . .
non
. . . But! Who wrote these stupid instructions? Okay, let’s start from the beginning again.”

“You’ve got two years?” Pito asks, letting his belly out a bit.

Materena looks up and starts laughing again. “I can’t look at you, Pito, you’re making me laugh with your belly like that
. . . Okay, Materena, concentrate.”

Pito looks on, stroking his smooth chin. Materena doesn’t understand instructions, it’s like with plumbing, electrical wires,
digging holes . . . Pito isn’t making fun of his wife though, it’s not the moment to annoy her.

“You want me to help you?” he asks sweetly, sucking his belly in again.

This . . . , says Materena to herself, goes here or here?

Half an hour later she cracks. “I don’t understand your instructions!” she growls at the piece of paper.

“You want me to help you?” Pito asks again as he gets off the sofa as naturally as possible. The trick here is not to look
like he’s superior. Pito knows from experience (though very limited) helping Materena that when he puts his I’m-superior look
on his face, Materena changes her mind about being helped.

Materena passes him the instruction sheet.

“Let me see,” Pito says, also as casually as possible, still careful not to look too confident. “Maybe this piece goes there
. . .” Pito lets his voice trail off. Of course he could assemble that plastic piece of shit in less than a minute, but he
knows that it is in his interest to show a bit of a struggle. “Maybe it goes here instead.” He lifts his beautiful eyes to
his wife for a few seconds to see if she’s watching him. “I wonder,” Pito continues, glad that Materena is paying him undivided
attention, “if this piece and this piece are not a couple, by any chance?”

By the time Materena’s multiple-tray rack is half built, Materena is sending her husband very positive signals. A little smile,
soft eyes . . .

Eh, eh, Pito cackles in his head. I’m still the man, don’t you worry about that!

A
h, a man doesn’t need much to be happy. Food, sexy loving, peace and quiet at night. He can breathe like he wants. His wife
is at work.

Tonight, for example, Pito can relax in front of the TV without having to listen to Materena’s sighs and comments every time
she walks past about how she can’t believe he’s wasting his life watching a movie that has no tail and no head. He can watch
a
good
movie and there will be no distractions from Materena, ironing in front of the TV because she also wants to watch the movie.
He can rest his eyes on the sofa for a while and Materena won’t tap him on the shoulder and whisper in his ear, “Pito! You’re
sleeping? Go to bed now,
allez,
I don’t want to carry you.”

When Materena got that job at the radio Pito was scared she was going to start speaking high class, become a
Me, I
person, but she’s still the Materena Pito has been living with for almost a quarter of a century. She runs around the house
with the broom, though less than she used to do — at least now the broom has a rest. She lends eggs to relatives who didn’t
have time to go to the Chinese store before it closed. She cooks, laughs, complains, rakes the leaves, and stresses out when
her banana cake comes out of the oven bizarre. She goes to mass, talks to her relatives, weeds her ancestors’ graves, regularly
visits her mother . . . She’s a typical Tahitian woman.

And she’s not home. So, whistling because he has no one to answer to, Pito steps out of the house to attend the very important
nocturnal rendezvous with
les copains.

Meanwhile, in the studio of Radio Tefana, Lovaina, the fifth caller tonight, is telling Materena that her father is French.

“He came to Tahiti a young man and —”

“For military service?” Materena asks without thinking, then realizes she has interrupted her caller. “Oh, excu —”

“
Ah non!
” The caller interrupts Materena’s interruption, sounding very offended by the question. “I know that there are a lot of children
born in Tahiti from French
militaires
and Tahitian women meeting in bars, but my father
is
educated.” For the record, Lovaina informs all listening that her father was actually in his third year of legal studies
at university when he came to Tahiti for a three-week holiday. But he met a beautiful Tahitian woman one day at the market
where she was selling her vegetables . . . and he never left, that’s all.

“Ah, okay,” says Materena.

“We can say that Papa is now a French
tropicalisé,
” Lovaina continues. “He speaks Tahitian, he eats
fafaru,
grows taro, he wants to be buried on Tahitian soil. . . . He feels more Tahitian than I do.”

“Do you think of yourself as French?” Materena dares to ask.

A silence. “I don’t know who I am,” Lovaina whispers at last. “I’m so confused about my identity. My father, who is French,
acts like he’s Tahitian. My mother, who is Tahitian, acts like she’s French. She does the
reuh-reuh
when she speaks, she’s a Madame, she’s always quoting French sayings, and as soon as she meets someone, the first thing she
says is, ‘You know, my husband is French, his family owns castles . . .’” A big sigh from Lovaina. “Who am I?” she asks. “Half
Tahitian, half French . . . but where do I go?”