Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

The wedding party had grown restless. Young men camped out along the beach, bored by the lack of action, were getting into fistfights. Since there was no telling how long Cooked would be away, she prepared to announce that they should return home. Wedding postponed. Her priority was to get things back to normal for Loren.

Titi’s father left soon after her birth, and Loren had filled in as a kind of semi-father, crazy uncle. All this activity was too much for him in his current state. She worried that it would send him into a tailspin of depression again.

His drinking binges had been legendary. She had to bail him out of all kinds of terrible situations. Over the last year, he had hidden the signs of his illness as well as he could but had no choice but to confide in someone. No one could exist utterly alone, although Loren came close. She was steady as a caretaker because she had gone through her grandmother’s and aunts’ illnesses. Together they went to his doctor’s visits. There came a time when her grandmother, too, had refused treatments as Loren was now doing. Titi respected his decision. The doctors took the dignity of life away, took away the soul, and everyone knew you eventually died of the poisoning no matter what. He might as well be where he wanted. Everyone said what a shame it was that Loren had never married some woman who would be there for him. He was way past indulging in men. It was unthinkable on the islands to die alone, and so his care would come down on Titi’s shoulders, which she accepted.

In his hut, Loren lay in the darkness. She knew better than to try to open the windows, but left the door open to air out the fetid smell.

He smiled when he saw her, the skin drawn tight across his cheeks. Fever.

“How is it?” she asked.

“It hurts.”

She nodded and patted his arm.

“So what do you think, little Titi? Are you impressed? The whole world watching us.”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters because the resort will be full.”

It touched her that such details could interest him.

“The wedding will happen as soon as Cooked returns,” she said.

“I can wait.”

“You will sit in the place of my father?”

Loren nodded. He turned away, gruffly telling her to shut the door on her way out, but he couldn’t fool her. She saw the tears.

Twenty years before, their people had been thriving. People believed that the prosperity brought by the new hotels would trickle down to them, and they would all grow rich. It was still enough of a novelty to see a Frenchman that the children came out to stare, but the true novelty was the appearance of two young French girls standing behind him. They stared back at the pack of children while the man went inside Titi’s grandmother’s house to look for a place to stay.

While the Frenchman worked as a manager of a nearby farm in the day, Titi’s grandmother was paid to be babysitter, but the way things worked was that Bette and Lilou joined a big extended family of a dozen children and twice as many adults. The girls thrived, and since Loren spent every spare minute with them, he ended up part of Titi’s extended family also.

Although she had only been a child, Titi remembered a different man back then. After work, he’d come and play with the children, teaching magic tricks (to that day almost every man in the family could pull a coin out of your ear as easily as walking down the beach). He used to spin his daughters in his arms, faster and faster till their legs flew straight out and they squealed in delight; then he slowed and laid them on the earth like drunken butterflies. They giggled, tried to stand and staggered, fell back down. Titi had longed to be spun but was too shy to ask.

One time, Lilou cut her leg. They rushed her to an aunt who was a nurse. Holding her, watching the aunt stain the skin with iodine, then begin stitching, Loren cried along with his daughter. What a good father, the women said. What a good husband he’d make. He should marry, have more children, become settled. They sent attractive young women his way, but he showed no interest.

The day the girls were taken away by the French policemen was the saddest day in the village. After Loren came out of prison, not only he but the whole village mourned. They erected new stones for the girls on the marae . Ceremoniously, Loren gave the girls’ belongings to Titi because, even if they did come back, by then they would have outgrown such things. In her young heart, Titi felt that she was being called on to replace them. The villagers decided the only cure for Loren was marriage and a new family. Once again women were brought out, not callously, but with the idea of new beginnings. Instead Loren chose old endings. Chose drink and trouble. As they found out only later, chose men over the company of women.

On the days he was still himself, he played the role of uncle to Titi. In reverse of those French fairy tales that Loren read to her, the pretty princesses vanished, and the dark, heavyset girl got to take their place. Later, when Cooked moved to the village and became inseparable from her, Loren tried to be a big brother to him also. He paid for special things they wanted but couldn’t afford. He played cheerleader at their school events, and always was the prime organizer of birthday parties. He made them the wager that if they got good enough grades to get into college, he would pay for it.

As she got older, sometimes she felt they were taking advantage, as if Loren were offering himself only because of the loss of his girls, but they couldn’t afford to refuse. Faufau, Grandmother, and the aunts did look after him; as badly as he took care of himself, he would have died many times over otherwise. Cooked and Titi were both in college in Papeete when news came of his sickness. Although he said it was otherwise, Titi knew it was the same wasting disease that the others had. He ate the same fruit and fish, breathed the same air, and swam in the same ocean. He’d sat at her grandmother’s bedside as she wasted away, listened to Faufau’s story of playing with the poisoned snow that now they understood was ash. The illness made him even more reckless; he went on drinking binges lasting weeks. It was a fluke when he won the island in a poker game. Loren asked them to drop out of school to run the hotel as if it were the most natural request in the world.

Cooked was unhappy about it, saying they would become servants of the tourists. But after all Loren had done for them, how could they complain? Without his help, they couldn’t continue their studies. Once they settled down to running the resort, he became a stranger, a boss, talking to them only about business — were the rooms done, the food ordered, the plumbing fixed? He treated them as servants. Now things were changing once again.

“You don’t have to turn over the hotel now,” Titi said. “It can wait.”

“I’m cheating you two out of your inheritance. Ill-gained as it was.”

“We aren’t ready.” This was the truth she had been avoiding.

“Sometimes events force you to be ready.”

“I want to change the name of the hotel,” she said.

Loren looked surprised. Change came so fast, so hungrily.

“A name in our own language.”

He nodded.

“Mara ‘amu.”

“Trade winds. Yes, I like it.”

Titi got up to leave. “I thought you should know — another guest has landed on the beach without permission.”

* * *

When the outrigger pulled away from the beach, Cooked would not look back at his and Titi’s relatives singing and throwing flowers in the water, a hero’s send-off. In spite of his baseball cap and T-shirt, he felt like one of those ancient warriors the old people told stories about who went out to do battle against the enemy. For a proud moment, suspended over the lagoon, the sun reflecting off the water, he felt his presence in the boat was destiny. He felt brave. But when a paddle jabbed him in the back, it all disappeared. He was again scared of reaching their destination.