Tahiti

Money, money, money

Julian Evans

Papeete

ter I left the President's office, I met Pascal on the waterfront and we drank cold Hinano beer in the Bar du Port. Pascal was determined to show me a good night out. We moved on to vodka at Serge's bar, and stayed on it at Andre's, though when we left neither of us was drunk. Now, much later, we stood in the dark on the doorstep of the Club 106 — Tahiti's smartest club and Pascal cried, Tognon! Pognon! Pognon! Pognon! [A slang word for money.] That is all! That is all they are interested in! I am ashamed of Tahiti for you! They go to the clubs, these Tahitian girls, they go to the best clubs and they refuse to dance! Some- times, sometimes, they make an exception. If you look rich enough.'

Inside the club, whose clientele was European men and Tahitian-French metis women of devastating beauty, my attempts to find a dancing partner had met with fail- ure: a lightning-fast shake of the head, the traditional Polynesian rebuff. These things happen. But Pascal, a friend from Mar- tinique, who has made Tahiti his adopted home, was excited on my behalf. He walked over to one of the girls I had spoken to. I heard him say, 'Where has your Polynesian welcome gone? Is this how you treat my friends? You should be ashamed of your- self!'

Outside, I said, 'Pascal, it doesn't matter.'

`I-lah! Pognon! It's the only thing that interests them! But I will show you the place. Come. We go to the Piano Bar.'

I looked doubtful. Pascal took my arm

And here s one we planted last spring.' and said in his stage English, 'Oh no, sir. This is com-pul-sory. Tahiti by night is not complete without the Piano Bar.'

We set out eastwards along the water- front, past the string of caravan-restaurants on the dockside and the French cars bowl- ing up and down the Boulevard Pamare. An expensive and uninspired orgy of con- crete by day, Papeete is a grumpy and stage-managed town where you can't do much more than hang out in (expensive) French restaurants and bars, and trawl for (expensive) Polynesian souvenirs. At night it is not so bad. The soft air and the bright Pacific starlight blur its colonial preten- sions; and, in common with other inhos- pitable places, you only have to find a friend for the mood to change.

Tahiti, or more precisely the five archipelagos of French Polynesia, has been a colony since 1880, when the French gov- ernor of the protectorate persuaded the dipsomaniac king, Pomare V, to sign away his kingdom for a monthly pension of 5,000 francs. As a stratagem to remove her colo- nial jewel from United Nations scrutiny and keep it off the UN list of territories await- ing decolonisation, France has recently granted French Polynesia a superficial autonomy. The powers of the self-govern- ing statute have been designed, needless to say, not to embrace anything that could be construed as a strategic French interest. The greatest of these, of course, is the mis- sile-testing of the Centre d'Experimenta- tion du Pacifique at Mururoa atoll. This sit- uation has lain dormant for a year with President Mitterrand's moratorium on nuclear activity in the Pacific, but it will not go away: the French government is intent on resuming testing after the metropolitan elections next spring.

My meeting with Tahiti's President, Monsieur Gaston Flosse, had been brief, unrevealing and, in character with the place, orchestrated. He is a bulky, white- haired man who speaks French with a dis- tracting provincial just-so-ness. He has been in politics, and in business, for a very long time. He is pro-nuclear, anti-indepen- dence, very Gaullist and very wealthy, and he believes the activities at Mururoa atoll hold no danger.

`The day there is the slightest doubt about a danger, whatever it is and however mini- mal, I will be the first to ask for the defini- tive end to nuclear experiments.'

Since 1966, more than 160 nuclear explo- sions have been detonated in the area. The French authorities have maintained that there is no contamination, but reports by independent scientists of reputation suggest that the atoll, riddled with cavities like a Swiss cheese, is cracking under the colossal stresses and leaking radiation into the ocean.

At the end of our meeting, Monsieur Flosse had a different explanation for the world's concern. With the air of a man explaining an overlooked truth, he said that those who were against the testing were not really against the testing. 'They are against France.'

Pascal and I reached the Piano Bar, which has a shiny red awning over one of those narrow entrances that you have to sidle through because you are not supposed to see inside from outside. In the darkness I could hardly see anything, except that the costumes of some of the women — who seemed to be more than average height looked more like theatre costumes than, well, what people normally wear to clubs. The second thing I noticed was this: the length of the bar, there were men with real- ly brutal haircuts. Their hair made them look like escaped convicts, or . . .

Enlightenment dawns slowly. Soldiers, and transvestites. I asked Pascal if I was right. He held up a scholarly finger. 'Not soldiers: legionnaires. And not only transvestites. Transsexuals — raerae.

`Why don't the legionnaires go for straight girls?'

`But you have seen the girls! So snobbish, and such allumeuses! They light the fire, then they put it out. If you are a legionnaire with one week's conge from Mururoa, why waste your time? Wouldn't you rather be looked after nicely by someone who cares about their appearance, has good manners and wants to give you pleasure?'

`What's in it for the raerae?'

`This has a place in Tahitian culture. When there is only one boy in a family of girls, he is encouraged not to be different from them. Now it's changed a little. It's like the rest of French Polynesia. They have adapted to the big-cash economy. Now they go to Australia for hormone treatment, and for the big cut. That way they can earn more, and who knows? They might one day hit the jackpot and end up in the arms of a European who only cares that he has found a Tahitian beauty with fine bones and the hips of a snake.

We sat in a booth at the edge of the dance floor. The people in the club were not all soldiers and raerae, and the atmo- sphere seemed uncomplicated and friendly.

`Thank God it's Monday.'

Pascal found a Tahitian — a girl — to dance with. I needed to pee. In the gents a polite man in a dress of sapphire sequins made a playful grab, then offered to do something to me a l'Italienne. I declined. I got back to the booth just as the striptease started.

The music was loud, and the audience sat quietly, four raerae on either side of us holding their lace-gloved hands demurely in their lap. It wasn't a pleasant or an unpleasant experience. It was sweet in a strange way: the set-up a bit amateurish, the dancing unskilful, the raerae egging on their friends like schoolgirls at the school play. The two striptease artists were intro- duced as Miss Piano Bar 1991 and Miss Piano Bar 1992. Both were over six foot. They were dressed in wafting layers of cheap lace, and their titles gave them a sort of production-line quality. The impression was reinforced, after three or four minutes of dusky undulations, by the final removal of their G-strings. Naked, they both had slim, feminine, lovely bodies (with narrow hips); but as each one straddled a chair, the body language seemed to be an expression of authentication more than eroticism. The message wasn't, `It's sexy!' so much as, 'It's real!'

Pascal's good humour had returned. As the girls acknowledged the applause, he raised his index finger again. `Do not think they are clapping for the dancer,' he said. `They are clapping for the surgeon.'

Some Tahitians, according to him, would do anything for money. Some would do nothing that wasn't for money. The Presi- dent himself had the manners of a concierge (I kept remembering his accent; and the collection on a table in his office of 30 or so glass and china turtles), but he was a smooth old fox who had became one of the richest men in Polynesia in the course of his career. Pascal was right. The Polyne- sian welcome — smiles are fragile things has vanished. Tahiti has been given an arti- ficial economy, and deliberately trivialised and manipulated for the sake of France's great-power aspirations.

But something small and unexpected has came out of the transformation. There was same intangible but sympathetic influence, far sweeter than the glamour of the Club 106, at work in the Piano Bar.

The raerae sat round the dance floor with their legionnaires, some on their soldier's lap. Some of them were laughing, tracing a lacy finger along a jaw in the manner of old-fashioned films. They looked happy to accommodate each other. There was no all- eclipsing desire, vibrating in the air, that soldiers on leave unconsciously transmit. The girls were being playful, thinking of satisfaction and a little pognon. The legion- naires, with their Hinano beer and their girl, were content.