If you are brown and decide to date a British man, sooner or later he will present you with a Paul Gauguin. This may come in postcard form or as a valentine, as a framed print for your birthday or repeated many times across wrapping paper, but it will come, and it will always be a painting from Gauguin's Tahitian period, 1891-1903. Chances are nudity will be involved, also some large spherical fruit. This has happened to me three times with three different men, but on only one occasion did the color of my skin appear to push us out into the South Seas themselves. I say my skin, but, as with any pa**ion, this was a generalized one. M liked anything that lurked around the equator: Herman Melville, the early explorers, pirates, breadfruit (or the idea of breadfruit), and native girls of all varieties. We booked a holiday to Tonga. In normal circumstances, I would never be receptive to such an idea. I holiday in only one way: in my own house, on my balcony. (Or, at a stretch, in a hotel in Europe.) On this occasion, though, I was halfway through writing a novel. If a man with a canary had beckoned me to follow him down a mine, I would have gone.
For the twenty-six hours of our flight, M sat next to me, very merry in his specially purchased straw hat, and I was merry, too, working away at the free wine, but I think that, while M knew all the time we were going to Tonga, I still somehow expected to land in lovely, temperate Antwerp. I remember stepping onto Nuku'alofa's roiling tar runway in the face-melting heat and thinking, I have come to a country with no white tube-thingy, where you must walk along the roiling tar runway in the face-melting heat. How did this happen? Next thing I knew, we were on a boat so small that only the boatman, M and I, and one other couple could fit in it. It seemed appropriate to ask them if they came here often.
Us? Often?” the man cried.
They were English, and a throbbing, comic-book red all over.
“Well, it's paradise, isn't it?” the woman said reverently, as we all looked out toward the island we were heading for in our small boat.
“It's beyond your imagination,” the man said. “We never would have dreamt it. It's the holiday of a lifetime. But we won the lottery, didn't we?”
I thought he meant this figuratively, as in “life's lottery,” as in “lucky us, going on our upscale holiday with similarly lucky people like you.” But no. They'd won the actual lottery.
“This is the first thing we bought!” the woman said. “But how can it get better than this?”
Much has been written about the horror of upscale holidays, of the strange metaphysical loneliness instilled by constantly being informed by fellow-tourists that you are in paradise, of how the pleasures offered to the tourist mix poisonously with said tourist's personal guilt/shame regarding his or her relative wealth when compared with the indigenous people serving him or her tall cool gla** after tall cool gla** of Fuzzy Navel. Take all that as read. Also take as read the German-owned island, the existential misery of our Tongan waiters, the enforced “native entertainments” on a Sunday evening, and the Americans next door who had brought their own TV. What makes the whole thing stand out in my memory is my neurological reaction. I am an allergic person by nature: cats, dogs, horses, mosquitoes, and all facial products. But I have never before found myself allergic to a whole country. Allergic to its insects, its sand, its coral, its food, and—the clincher—its water. We had booked for two weeks, but five days into the holiday of a lifetime my windpipe began to close. I felt bad for M. He had his dream, and I was ruining it. He had his fale (traditional bungalow made of coconut fibre) and his hammock and his circle of beach. In the middle of this ring there was a brown girl, but Gauguin wouldn't have painted her. Her right arm was twice its normal size, her left eye would not open, her legs were bleeding. And she wouldn't stop whining. She refused to be excited by the fact that many Tongans can hold their breath underwater for an abnormally long time. That the men dress as women until they come of age. That the millennium would arrive here before it arrived anywhere else.
By the sixth day, M had given up on me. He made friends with a uniquely cheery Tongan waiter named Tony, who, interestingly, still wore women's clothing. They would sit together on our deck looking out at the ocean, sometimes playing Scrabble, while I sat indoors wrapped in a cocoon fashioned from mosquito netting. If you squinted, eliding Tony's fearsome biceps, you could imagine that M had met his Gauguin princess at last. ♦