The Sex Lives of Cannibals (21 page)

No one took their dogs to get fixed on Tarawa, even when there was a vet on the island. Dogs were banned on Christmas Island, but on Tarawa animal control consisted of an irregular sweep by a dogcatcher armed with a long stick and a noose. This did not alleviate the dog problem on Tarawa. Nor was it meant to. The captured dogs were used to feed the prisoners.

Instead, the surplus dogs were left to fend for themselves. I had wondered about how Mama Dog was managing to feed her surviving puppies. She was a resourceful dog. A dog has to be to survive on Tarawa. I had assumed she was simply scavenging along the reef, but as I was stunned to witness, she had taken a much more proactive role to putting dinner on the table. One afternoon, as all the dogs lay slumbering in the shade, a small dog of about seven months old wandered by. Our dogs raised their heads, and determining that there was no challenge to their territory here, they went back to their snooze. Mama Dog, however, pounced on the dog. It squealed pathetically. Moments later, Mama Dog had severed its hind leg and fed it to her puppies.

If I had not already been on Tarawa for a long while, I quite likely would have felt appalled and disgusted by this act of cannibalism, but my threshold for feeling appalled and disgusted had notched up considerably since I arrived. Although in the continental world I assigned all sorts of anthropomorphic characteristics to dogs, on Tarawa I saw them as wild animals doing whatever it took to survive. What troubled me here was not the fact that these puppies were greedily slurping away at another dog, but that they might not be able to finish it all and what remained would soon stink horribly and it would be me, of course, who had to dispose of the carcass and that was not something I wanted to do on any sort of regular basis. I resolved to get rid of the puppies. I convinced four people of the superior breeding of these puppies, and one by one, whenever Mama Dog wasn’t looking, I scooped up a puppy and delivered it to its new home. Then I resigned myself to feeding Mama Dog. I bought a bigger fish.

To my dismay, Mama Dog was soon in heat again and the cycle repeated itself. Her belly swelled. Her teats returned. I wondered if I would be able to drown the puppies myself. I did not think I could. There remained a residual Westernness in me that said only really nasty people kill puppies.

Fortunately, the new vet finally arrived and I made arrangements to spare the other animals from the urges and consequences of their hormonal imperatives. The cat was the first to go. Each morning he returned to the house a little more battle-scarred, and though he survived kittenhood, it seemed unlikely that he would survive as a cat unless he was fixed. I picked Sam up and carried him to the pickup truck. If you have never driven a manual-shifting car alone with an uncaged cat, I recommend that you go to great lengths to avoid the experience. I deluded myself into thinking that the cat would sit quietly in the passenger seat, but in fact moments after I started the car he found his way to the top of my head, which he used as a perch to leap toward the window, which sadly for him, was closed, causing him to experience a not inconsiderable amount of panic, which he manifested by ripping me to shreds, pausing only to relieve himself. By the time we reached the vet’s office, a two-room surgery in Tanaea, I was bleeding from a number of slashes and I smelled like cat urine.

“Hi,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you. Welcome to Tarawa. I have a cat for you. He’s presently locked in the glove compartment.”

Hillary, a young volunteer vet from Britain, was kind enough to provide me with antiseptic and Band-Aids. I retrieved the cat and after he calmed down Hillary sedated him. The surgery would be done by Manibure, Hillary’s assistant.

“I can see why he gets into fights. He’s got big balls,” Manibure noted.

“Well, make sure you get them both. I want a mellow cat.”

I returned a few hours later, and found Sam,
sans cojones
, just beginning to stir.

“Here,” Hillary said, handing me several needles. “You will need to give him antibiotics for the next few days.”

“Um . . . Do you mean to say I have to stick a needle into this cat?”

“Yes. Don’t worry. It’s very simple. Just lift up the skin and inject the needle.”

I tried to absorb this. I had been mauled by Sam simply for taking him on a drive. I could only imagine the abuse he would inflict on me once I stuck a needle in him. I need not have worried though. Without feline testosterone coursing through him, he offered nothing more than a meek what-are-you-doing-to-me protest, even after I accidentally punctured his skin the whole way through, sending a stream of antibiotics coursing through the air in a long, useless arc.

A few days later I brought the dogs. Unsurprisingly, they were much more amenable to a car trip. They exulted as they passed through the forbidden territory claimed by other dogs.
Ha-ha. You can’t get us
.

“We got Brown Dog just in time,” Hillary said. “In another day or two, she would have gone into heat.”

I thanked Hillary and Manibure heartily for sparing us from that nightmare. By the evening, both dogs were bouncing about as if they had not just that very morning undergone major surgery. They are resilient, these island animals.

I soon ran into Hillary again, as was bound to happen on our small island. I asked her how she was doing, freshly arrived on Tarawa.

“Well, I am not precisely sure what it is I’m supposed to be doing. Manibure is very good and doesn’t need much more training. He knows what he is doing with the pigs. So far, you are the only people to bring in their pets for sterilization. While I find Kiribati very interesting, I fear that professionally I might become a little bored.”

“What was your specialty in Britain?”

“Cows and horses.”

I laughed. Those animals were about as familiar to Kiribati as unicorns.

“I have just learned all these wonderful new techniques, and yet I fear I won’t be able to practice here. For instance, there is this great new technique for sterilizing dogs after they have conceived, and I would be very keen to try it out, but—”

“I have just the dog for you.”

“Really?”

“Yes. The only problem is she is a bit of a wanderer, and I can’t be certain when exactly I might be able to take her in.”

“That’s all right. I can swing by your house and we can do it there.”

The following day Mama Dog found herself strapped to our dining table. Hillary brought her surgical tools, and once the dog was fully sedated she set to work, skillfully incising Mama Dog’s belly.

“My goodness, would you look at that,” Hillary said. She was very exuberant about her work.

“It’s . . . uh . . . very interesting.”

“I have never seen so much fat on a dog. It’s astonishing.”

Mama Dog was not a fat dog. By Western standards she would probably be described as scrawny. This fat was her in-house store of energy. Darwinism at work.

“Oh dear.”

“Anything wrong?” I asked.

“Yes. Quite a lot. See this?”

“Um . . . yeah.” (Details omitted.)

“Her puppies died. See? They have already turned into pus. This would have killed her in a few days.”

“That’s not good.”

“No. This is actually turning out to be major surgery. You’ll give me a hand, won’t you?”

For the next hour, I followed Hillary’s directions—
hold this, put your finger there, pull, now stuff it all back in
. When Sylvia arrived home, she was not the least bit surprised or perturbed to find her dining table used as an operating table for a dog, though she did spend an awfully long time cleaning it afterward. I knew then that we had both made the mental leap from the continental world to the island world, where anything can happen and usually does.

A few hours later, I was amazed to see Mama Dog up and about, wagging her tail. She had just, quite literally, had her guts removed and yet she behaved as if it were just another day in a dog’s life on Tarawa. Was she a freak of nature, or was this what nature produced when allowed to go its own way, unhindered by breeders? If fed and trained, it seemed to me, these were good dogs. I would wager that in a match of strength and intelligence, a Tarawa dog would far outperform a Western dog with a pedigree.

Thanks to Hillary and the British taxpayer, I believed we had settled, once and for all, the number of animals making our home theirs, and so when one night we awoke to the cloying
arf-arf
of a puppy outside our window, I was in no mood to be generous. I went outside, picked up the pup, and took it to the reef, and to make my point clear, began to throw small rocks in its direction, encouraging it to skedaddle. Twenty minutes later, the puppy returned.
Arf-arf
. This continued for three sleepless nights, until finally I lost my patience and I stomped out of the house, grabbed the puppy, took it to the reef, where I had every intention of snapping the dog’s neck and tossing it into the sea. The puppy was doomed one way or the other. But I couldn’t do it. Yes, he looked upon me with sad, puppy-dog eyes. Instead, the following day, I picked up the little dog, walking around with it until I found a female dog with similar markings. Close enough, I thought, as I set the puppy down in front of his new mother. I never saw the puppy again.

CHAPTER
15

In which the Author describes the Behavior of Government Officials (drunken thuggery), the Peculiar System of Governance (Coconut Stalinism), the Quality of Government Services (Stalin, at least, got something done), followed by a recounting of the Interministerial Song and Dance Competition, when for nearly Two Months all government activities Ceased, not that anyone noticed, followed by the Shocking Conclusion to the competition, when the Ministry of Housing won with a dance that Shamelessly incorporated Polynesian influences, leaving the other Competitors to stew in their Bitter Bile.

E
lsewhere in the world, governments typically confine their activities to the defense of their nation, the education of their youth, monetary policy, and the disbursement of pensions. True, a few—maybe more than a few—governments have pursued more nefarious ambitions, such as global hegemony and world dominance in rhythmic gymnastics, but most . . . okay, many . . . all right some—let’s not get into this—confine their energy to security and improving the quality of life of their citizens.

Not so in Kiribati. The country lacks a military force because the I-Kiribati wisely acknowledge that no one else wants their country. Even the I-Kiribati aren’t too thrilled about having their country. Certainly they wanted to live there, but all things being equal, they would rather have had the British govern it. Nor does the country have any say about monetary policy, since it uses the Australian dollar as its currency. There was a brief pang of worry in Canberra that President Tito’s decision to double the salaries of all government workers would lead to inflation in Australia, but then they remembered that this was Kiribati after all, with a population that could easily fit inside the new stadium in Sydney. Besides, even by doubling his salary, President Tito, the highest paid government official in Kiribati, still pulled in less than US $10,000 per annum, which didn’t strike me as particularly inflated. Like us, he probably couldn’t find anything to spend it on either.

The government in Kiribati also has very little to do with education. There is but one state-run school on Tarawa, the King George V High School, where government workers send their children. At any given time, half of the
I-Matangs
on the island were there to do “curriculum development” for KGV. This had gone on for several years without any discernible change in the colonial-era curriculum. The consultants, however, did swallow most of the country’s education budget. The rest of the nation’s children made do with church-run schools. And pensions? Few in Kiribati live long enough to collect a pension.

One can then reasonably ask what exactly does the government of Kiribati do? As far as I could tell, the government spends a lot of time drinking and brawling. No workshop on global climate change is complete until the assistant secretary of the environment has passed out in a pool of beer barf. No meeting to discuss interministerial cooperation on transport issues can occur without a climactic brawl between the principal welfare officer and the deputy secretary for transportation. And no reception for the rare visiting diplomat can be considered a success until the chairs are hurtled in a fine display of drunken carnage. The higher one is, the more such displays are expected. The vice president, for instance, decided to honor the visiting Japanese ambassador by guzzling a dozen cans of Victoria Bitter and then punching his wife as the horrified Japanese delegation looked on.

One would assume then that the government of Kiribati practices a laissez-faire approach to governance. This would be an incorrect assumption. The government of Kiribati has, in fact, emulated the North Korean model of governance. It practices what I like to call Coconut Stalinism. It controls everything. It does nothing.

On the outer islands, this was good—the do-nothing part. Subsistence living is rarely eased through diktats from the capital. But on Tarawa, indifference and inaction could be exasperating. The government owns the food co-ops, which specialize in expired tinned fish, just the thing for the fish-weary consumer. It controls the infrastructure and, as a result, rare is the stream of electricity that lasts longer than a few hours before it fizzles. Air Kiribati, government-owned, is a disaster waiting to happen. So too are the state-owned ships.

The government also manages the hospital, and I am using the word
hospital
very generously here. It is a complex of dingy single-story buildings where dogs wander through the patient wards; where flies torment the unfortunate denizens because no one has bothered to install screens on the windows—even though screening is readily available at the island’s hardware store; where the emergency room lacks a sink and is therefore stained with the blood of innumerable patients; where the incinerator has failed to work, oh, for several years now, resulting in an island littered with hazardous waste; where the X-ray machine stands idle because no one bothered to order film, or general anesthesia for that matter, which means that patients undergo operations with only a local anesthetic, which just makes me shudder. In brief, the hospital on Tarawa was where one went to die.

The I-Kiribati knew this. That’s why no one ever went to the hospital until they were ready to meet their maker. In the meantime, they resorted to local plants presumed to have medicinal value, healing massages, and magic to treat their ailments. Only when the tumor bulged alarmingly under the skin, or the wound turned dangerously gangrenous, or the knife could not be removed from the heart was a patient delivered to the hospital, when, of course, it was too late to do much anyway. It wasn’t as if all of the half-dozen or so doctors on Tarawa were incompetent, though frankly I too was wary of seeking medical counsel from doctors trained in Burma, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea. The United Nations, in its wisdom, sends doctors from the most medically deprived corners of Africa and Asia to the Pacific Islands. In turn, it sends doctors from the most medically deprived corners of the Pacific to staff the wards in Africa and Asia. I am sure there is a very good reason for this, but my brain is too feeble to grasp what that reason could be. But I digress. The main problem doctors faced on Tarawa was that they simply did not have the diagnostic tools, the medicine, or a clean recovery ward, to allow them to do their job. Sylvia spent two years trying to donate hospital equipment, for free, gratis, as a gift from the American people, training included, but failed to do so because the secretary of health, a doctor himself, could not bring himself to sign on the dotted line. He was a busy man, attending conferences around the world sponsored by the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other groups that believe the best way to help the Third World is to lure away the few people in those countries who have the power to do something and bring them to a swank hotel in Geneva, where they can . . . where they can do what exactly? The program usually emphasizes “networking opportunities.”

For a long while, I assumed that the government was irredeemable, that its ministries were staffed entirely by idle sycophants with no greater ambition than to fritter away every foreign aid dollar that arrived in the country. This, however, turned out not to be the case. The ministries were indeed ambitious. They each had a goal, a drive to succeed, a desire to be the very best that they could be, and they were staffed accordingly. Academic credentials mattered not. Nor did experience. The critical skill a potential employee brought to their ministry was their ability to dance.

Every year on Independence Day, the ministries competed for the honor of winning the Interministerial Song and Dance Competition. This was the highlight of the holiday, and ministries spent months preparing. In the evenings, the
maneabas
on South Tarawa rumbled to the sounds of hundreds of ministerial workers singing and dancing into the small hours of the morning. Costumes were prepared; long grass skirts and pandanus brassieres for the women, matching lavalavas, intricate armbands and crowns that looked to be inspired by the Statue of Liberty for the men. As Independence Day neared, all semblance of official government activity ceased. For a month, each team, consisting of a hundred or more participants, fasted from dawn to dusk. The consumption of alcohol, remarkably, was forbidden. More remarkable still, sex too was prohibited. The dancing spirits—and how they loomed over the participants—demanded purity.

This struck me as a great sacrifice to make for the spirits. In a country like Kiribati, where most people struggle daily to ensure that they have enough to eat, there is little room for asceticism. A vegan, for instance, would very soon be a dead vegan in Kiribati. Even a less militant vegetarian is unlikely to survive on an atoll. In Kiribati, one eats what is available when it is available. And for a government worker to spurn alcohol seemed to me the height of self-denial, surpassed only by the repudiation of sex. The I-Kiribati struck me as a lusty people. Their conversations were laced with sexual innuendo, and in the months preceding the arrival of our dogs, rare was the night when returning from an evening out we did not stumble across a lusty couple coupling in our backyard, seeking an escape from the public forum that is I-Kiribati home life.

“Fasting I can understand,” I said to Sylvia. “And the no-alcohol rule strikes me as a pretty good thing. Most of these guys could use a little drying out. But clearly, this no-sex injunction is going to be hard for the dancers.”

“Clearly,” Sylvia replied, “you haven’t been talking to the women here about their sex lives.”

That was true. I was under the impression that to inquire about a woman’s sex life was a cultural faux pas of the first order, one that would very likely get me killed by an enraged husband.

“And now that I think about it,” Sylvia continued, “don’t start asking a woman about her sex life. She’ll believe you have designs on her, and this will get back to me—everything does, you know—and I’ll be expected to bite your nose off.”

This was also true. Biting off someone’s nose was an acceptable way to display jealousy. I had initially assumed that the large number of people sporting disfigured noses was the result of leprosy, but in fact it was simply the mark of a jealous encounter. Men bit the noses off women, and women bit the noses off men. This did not necessarily mean the end of the relationship. There were many noseless couples in Kiribati. There was, it seemed, a dark side to the sex lives of the I-Kiribati. I asked Sylvia what she knew.

“Have you heard of dry sex?” she asked.

“Isn’t that from the
Kama Sutra
?”

“It’s when a woman stops lubrication. This is done by inserting a mixture of coral and herbs into her vagina. It’s the preferred form of sex for I-Kiribati men. They claim it increases their sensation.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I was under the impression that only occurred in places like tribal Pakistan.”

“Here too. And just like tribal Pakistan, kidnapping your bride is an acceptable form of courtship here.”

“I had no idea.”

“That’s because you’re a man, and an I-Kiribati woman won’t talk to a man about that sort of thing. Did you know that Kineita kidnapped Beita?”

Beita worked at FSP. Kineita was her husband. Their marriage struck me as the very model of conjugal bliss. They were affectionate. Kineita was a respectful, doting husband. They had a precocious two-year-old son.

“Beita was in love with another man,” Sylvia continued. “She wanted to marry him, not Kineita. But Kineita apparently couldn’t take no for an answer, so he kidnapped her and held her for two weeks until she
agreed
to marry him.”

That seemed odd to me. “Why didn’t her family or the other guy rescue her?”

“What do you think Kineita was doing to her for those two weeks? He was having sex with her. That shamed her family. And the other guy wanted nothing more to do with her. She had no choice but to marry Kineita.”

“And yet she seems pretty happy with him.”

“She is. He is a Seventh-Day Adventist. He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t beat her.”

That made him quite the catch in Kiribati, I realized. And he had job security. Kineita, it turned out, was also a fine dancer. He would be representing the Ministry of Education, where he worked in curriculum development.

WITH THE COMPETITION LOOMING,
the ministries began to finalize their lineups of singers and dancers. Some took a rather expansive view of who constituted a ministerial employee. The Ministry of Environment, for instance, had talent-spotted Bwenawa and Tiabo, excellent dancers both, and so invited the FSP staff to participate under the banner of its ministry. FSP did environmental work; ergo FSP fell under the Ministry of Environment. This greatly excited the staff. Sylvia too was invited to dance. It was felt that the novelty of having an
I-Matang
woman doing one of the sitting dances would score extra points with the judges.

“I know I should do it,” she said. “It would be a cultural experience. I should have cultural experiences. That’s why we’re here, right? But I really don’t want to spend the next four weeks in a
maneaba
, staying up until 3
A
.
M
., learning how to do a sitting dance. Is that bad of me?”