Maiden Voyage (18 page)

Luc came aboard
Varuna
and we talked for a couple of hours, ate the salad, passed some to Jean Marie, and toasted our landfall. Jokes and laughter shot through the night air between the two boats. I heard about how they had played Scrabble every day and how Jean Marie had won only once. On the last day, Luc finally admitted to cheating the whole time and laughed at how Jean Marie never noticed. With the reunion and the banter, I was catapulted out of my peaceful solitude and placed irrevocably back in touch with humanity.

A hush came over us as the breaking dawn colored in the blackness of a world without sun, and our two drifting sailboats stood in quiet awe of the scene. Slowly the lights of the day were turned on, unveiling lush vegetation cascading down the rugged mountains that pawed like giant bear claws into the bay.

A beach lined in a thicket of coconut palms lay directly before us. Off to the right of the bay, three sets of masts were visible behind
what looked like a small jetty protruding from the outer finger of land. Luc jumped back to
Thea
, threw me a line and, steering with the tiller to remain directly behind my tug,
Varuna
and I were towed through a narrow passage, between the end of the jetty and land, into the protected little harbor of Baie Taaoa. The enclosure was surrounded by more wanton tropical plants fringing the tops of little cliffs. A slight swell rebounded off the rock walls into the harbor and we joined a lone sailboat at anchor, gently rocking in the early morning calm.

What a feeling it was to cast off from
Thea
, let loose the anchor and have it hit the ground after twenty-four days and 2,965 miles. Murky brown water flowed past
Varuna's
hull, testament to the heavy rainfall and runoff from the lush Marquesas. I inhaled the perfumed air, musky with the underlying essence of smoke from the morning fires, and remembered that this was a place where only a few people had the luxury of a stove. Tied stern to the jetty were two other sailboats, brightly painted fishing boats and the local sailing pirogues. Double-checking to be sure everything was secure aboard
Varuna
, I dived into the water and swam to my friends.

•   •   •

My images of the South Seas had always been colored by childhood picture books—exotic beauties carrying trays of fruit and pirogues racing through turquoise lagoons as laughing girls looked on. Almost all the portrayals of the Polynesians were of a handsome, smiling people, always giving, welcoming and acting like eternal children. Now that I was really here, I would find each of these images to be the rule rather than the exception.

Since the first explorer disembarked from the blue void to feast his eyes on these pagan South Seas islands, the palettes of our imaginations have been changed forever. The painter Paul Gauguin reached his zenith here; the poet and singer Jacques Brel, when he learned he had cancer, came here to die; and explorer Thor Heyerdahl came to Fatu Hiva, an island just to the south, in search of an isolated place to create his own utopia. The Marquesas have the power to make men dream of paradise, and their dreams have shaped those of generations.

The first legal course of action upon arrival was the obligatory customs check-in with the local
gendarmerie
in the village of Atuona, about three miles around the harbor and up a hill. My legs wobbled and my balance was way off kilter after so long at sea. Trudging into town on a dirt road covered with snail shells made me remember
how little exercise the lower part of my body received on the boat. Only certain muscles had developed, while others had turned to Jell-O.

The mountain road was lined by orange, mango and tamarind trees and spattered with the riotous blooms of hibiscus. As we walked, the tap, tap, tapping of little hammers could be heard everywhere as women crafted the beautiful tapas they stretched from the pulp of trees before decorating them with intricate geometrical designs. Closer to town, shy groups of ravishing
vahines
, the beautiful women of Polynesia, stood around giggling.
“Bonjour,”
they said as we passed. This was French territory, and the Gallic influence was evident in the language spoken all around and in the tricolor flag hanging in front of the post office and
gendarmerie
.

Phone calls were placed through the post office, and I went there first, anxious to talk to my family at home and tell them I had made it. Jeri was first. The eleven digits of her phone number code left our small building, crossed the Pacific to California, zipped through the Midwest and, when the man signaled to me, I picked up the receiver and heard a ringing sound all the way back on the East Coast of the United States.

Jeri's voice was music to my ears. I had missed her and told her all about Panama, my trip, my birthday at sea, the Galápagos, the weather during the passage, the animals. She caught me up on all the local news at home and I was pleased to hear that not much had changed. Fritz was still his kooky self. Christian was preparing to come into the city and live at the loft with Tony and Jade because my father was planning a trip. How was my father? The same, she sighed. Although their relationship had ended the year before, she was still very much a part of us. After six years of being there when we needed a mother figure, she considered us her children.

“So who's Luc?” asked Jeri.

“He's just a friend,” I answered.

“Really?”

“Yeah, well . . . really.”

Next I braced myself for the call to my father. According to the itinerary, I should have been in Fiji by this time and still hadn't talked with him about staying in Tahiti for hurricane season. The man at the post office put the call through and my father accepted it jubilantly.

“Hey, Ding-a-ling! Happy birthday! How was it?”

Answering him in a flurry, I tried to make him feel my excitement.
“The trip was great, Daddy. And guess what . . .
Varuna
crossed the whole 3,000 miles in the same amount of time as Luc's boat, which is double her size. I even got here
before
them. They had to catch up to me in the end.”

“Wow, pretty good. Now, what are your plans for leaving?”

“Hey, wait a minute,” I stammered. “I just got here. Come on already.”

“Yah, yah. I just want to know if you're planning to stay one week, three weeks, two months . . . what?”

“Well, I haven't figured that out yet . . . probably two or three weeks. Anyway, there's something I want to talk to you about. What do you think about my staying in Tahiti for the hurricane season? The engine is totally broken, there's a lot of things that need work on the boat and I have friends who'll help me do it all. And
plus
, I have to wait out hurricane season somewhere, right?”

“Achh. The chances that you get a hurricane are slight. And even if you get one, big deal. You'll have a great story to write about.”

“Ha ha. Very funny. Seriously, I really have to stop somewhere and do all the work. Don't worry. I'll be home on time. I have two years, remember.”

No matter how lighthearted, our conversations always ended up making me feel as if I were shirking my duties. I'd just spent the past five months learning how to survive on a sailboat at sea, making daily decisions that directly affected my fate, yet every time I talked to my father, he made me feel like a child, causing me to seriously question my decisions. Regardless of the value of a good hurricane story, I finished the call deciding that the refit time would be spent in Tahiti.

I wrote down the number of my mother's apartment in New York so the man at the post office could put through my last call. Judging by all past experiences, this call would be a long one. When my mother used to call us in New York from her home in Switzerland, she would have talked all day if my father hadn't just hung up the phone after an hour.

Wondering what she was doing, I gazed idly from the doorway at little children playing with sticks and running around in the backyard. Their skin was a beautiful
café au lait
, their brown eyes stealing quick glimpses at me from under their mops of black hair. I waved and they ran away giggling. The man behind the counter finally signaled and I rushed to pick up the phone. It rang four times, then my mother's voice came over the line.

“Do you accept a collect call from Donia?” asked the operator.

“Donia? You must mean
Tania.”
Her voice, feeble as it sounded, still held the imperious bearing toward people in her service that had always embarrassed me as a child.

“Donia, Tonia, whatever,” the operator's voice crackled.

“Yes, she is my daughter. Of course I accept the charges. . . .”

“Hello, Mommy,” I said slowly. “I'm here in Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. I made it.”

“Oh, my dear Tania. I'm so happy to hear your voice. How are you? Do you wear the undershirts I sent you? Are you protecting yourself with sunblock? Are you eating all your vegetables?”

“I'm fine. I had a really incredible trip. I'll tell you all about it. But first, I want to know how you are.”

“Oh, I am very weak, but Tony and Jade are being very nice with Mommy. Will you please tell Daddy not to disconnect my phone? He is throwing tantrums only because I am trying to tell him the truth. He is threatening to cut me off. Tania, Mommy loves you. Mommy knows what is best for you. Daddy doesn't want to know the truth. I am trying to tell him but he refuses to listen. . . .” And off she went on one of her nonstop litanies about my father. Often, she would go on for so long that I sometimes felt like leaving the phone dangling and coming back later to see if she would even notice.

“Wait a minute, Mommy,” I interrupted. “Before we start talking about all that, will you just please tell me how you are. Do you feel better?”

“You know how I am,” she answered.

As much as I tried not to dwell on the situation, I knew well how my mother was. She was slowly dying, not only from the cancer that was rampaging through her delicate frame, but from demons that seemed to have overcome her when I was still a child. I always thought it had started on the night before my eighth birthday, after the car accident that she claimed was my father's attempt to murder her. But years later, he told me there was much more I didn't know.

Shortly after that accident, she stopped caring for her appearance and began wearing the same clothes for days, and then weeks at a time. Her moods darkened and the change in personality frightened us. We would beg her to make herself beautiful again, take her hair out of the tight ponytail, put on a skirt instead of the plain dark pants, to put on pretty shoes instead of clogs, but she refused.

To my mother, everybody who came to our house in those days
was a liar, cheater, prostitute or homosexual, and whenever her jealousy overcame her she'd fly into a fit of name-calling, virtually driving people out. Her hostilities also began to encompass my father's artwork, and when two pieces disappeared—a sculpture he had done and a table made by Fritz—she denied having anything to do with it. One day months later, while we were driving to school, I saw the table in a backyard and told my father. It was the house of a junkman who said he had found it in the dump. The sculpture turned up ten years later, when we got a phone call from some people in New Jersey who had received it from my mother. She had made them promise never to tell, but they had finally been overcome with guilt.

My father filed for divorce and custody when I was nine. It only made my mother rage all the more as she watched him pack his clothes, paints, brushes, canvases and stretchers. He moved to Soho in Manhattan, where he bought a loft with Fritz, leaving Tony, Nina, Jade and me alone in the emptiness of the house. My mother was miserable and desperate until she met the Intaglias, a family of religious fanatics that lived nearby. With them, she sought consolation and found a religious belief that embraced her confused passions and, even more important, showed her a way to help win permanent custody of her children. With the help of the Intaglias, she set out to prove that my father was a child molester.

For my mother, marriage and family were the most important things in life and, looking back, it seems she was trying everything in her power to hold on to my father by hurting him. I remember he used to tell us, “I swear, if I so much as showed admiration for a tree, Mommy would have it chopped down.”

But my mother's problems were not the problems of a normal woman; she was more deeply troubled than we ever really imagined. Young as I was, I couldn't begin to know how to help solve her problems. I only saw that my mother was totally different from the storybook mothers of my classmates. As good as her intentions may have been, I saw a mother who made us wear the same clothes every day to school, day in and day out until I was twelve—plaid skirt, blue sweater, wool socks and dowdy little leather shoes. She said she wanted us to be dressed the way she had when she went to boarding school in England.

Because I was the eldest, I was prepared to do anything in my juvenile power to help my father get a good story for the courts and win the custody battle. Whenever one of my mother's long-winded sermons began to deteriorate into persecution tirades about my father,
New York and everyone else in the world who was against her, I tried to defend him, often losing my temper. I got hit with wooden clogs, locked in the cellar and pelted with flying corncobs. Every time she pulled me around by the hair, I would carefully brush out all the loose ones, put them into an envelope and save them for my father to use as evidence in court.

For two and a half years Nina, Tony, Jade and I lived through endless sessions with psychiatrists and social workers who tried to interpret what we told them and decide which parent would be better for us. My mother had preachers who had never met the family sign affidavits saying they had seen my father performing unnatural acts with us; one affidavit that I saw by accident said he had forced us to have sex with our dog.