White Sands. Geoff Dyer

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      A few days earlier, before the rash really got going, we had visited another archaeological site, which, in its small-scale way, was a monumental disappointment. There were just a few blackened stones that the guide sought to render interesting by nattering on about human sacrifice and cannibalism while I stood there, both not listening and looking like I was listening.

      It was a short-lived relief to go from here to another site—at Taaoa, near Atuona—where the tiki’s power had been denuded to almost nothing: a round rock as big as a beach ball on which the residue of a human face—slits for eyes and mouth, the merest hint of a nose—could just about be seen. Aesthetically it was on a par with Wilson, the volleyball with whom Tom Hanks develops such an intense relationship in Cast Away. As Hanks ekes out his existence, the longing for something in which one can invest belief and hope is shown to be almost as basic as the need for shelter and warmth. The thing—-in this case a Wilson volleyball—responds in kind, taking on the magical quality of those hopes. Taaoa, though, СКАЧАТЬ