Siren of the Seas

Taiohae, a small village located on Nuku Hiva, the largest island in the Marquises (a.k.a. Marquesas) islands, and the archipelago's capital, was the cruise ship's last port of call.

Like many other tourists onboard the ship, the exotic locales of French Polynesia drew me like a magnet. We had our far more famous predecessors.

There was Paul Gauguin, the post-impressionist French painter. He drew inspiration for his art while living in Martinique, a French Caribbean island. Then he moved to Tahiti and finally the Marquises islands, where he lived until he died.

There was the Belgian singer, Jacques Brel. He also found inspiration in the Marquises. He wrote the majority of the songs of his last album, aptly entitled 'Les Marquises', where he spent the last years of his life. Although he died in France, he was buried on Hiva Oa island, a few yards away from the grave of Paul Gauguin.

The islands of French Polynesia seem like paradise to foreigners. Bora Bora, Raiatea, Mo'orea, Ringirao all have unique and enchanting attributes.

Tahiti was not so impressive. Its capital, Papeete, has lost its exotic soul and natural beauty to the hustle and bustle of an over-commercialized modern city.

In comparison to Tahiti, the Marquises stood at the other pole. Aided by their isolation even from the other parts of French Polynesia, sparsely populated, and resisting commercialization, these islands, scattered like emeralds across a turquoise sea, are the last bastions of natural Polynesia.

But there was more to these lush tropical islands than their natural beauty. There was also the beauty of its siren.

I reminisce.

I heard her call when the ship anchored offshore, her song accompanied by the beat of Marquesan drums.

I followed that sound. I boarded a tender that took me to the island pier. Several Marquesan men were beating their large native drums while locals offered tours of the island or made cars available for rent.

I heard her. Then I saw her, the siren, singing a melodic Polynesian song on a hot tropical day. She stood on one of the pier's pylons. Her small feet clung onto its rocky hardness. Her voice ululated in a language we tourists could not understood, and probably never would.

I stopped and I stared.

She did not notice me. I was just another tourist, another foreigner from some place she could only dream about visiting, a place with cold winters and vast expanses of land, a place with lakes that that had islands bigger than Tahiti, the biggest island in French Polynesia a place that was exotic to her as hers was to me.

I looked at her closely, enchanted by her beauty.

She was petite and thin. She was the absolute antithesis of the Polynesian concept of beauty before the Europeans came. In old pre-European Polynesia, a beautiful woman was huge, fleshy, big-breasted, with loads of love handles. No waterbeds were needed when a man had a woman like that had an ocean of flesh.

No, this little cutie, this little sweetie was downright ugly by earlier Polynesian standards.

Did I mention thin? Yes, I did. Her breasts were the size of mangos. Her black hair was bunched up on the back of her head. She wore a haku lei of red flowers around her head. Her skin was a soft brown colour that reminded me of sweet milk chocolate.

I interrupt my reminiscence. I love chocolate. I look at her picture again. I am holding it in my hand. My mouth begins to water. She is such a delicious little morsel.

I reminisce again.

Her facial features were delicate. Her smouldering dark eyes shone brightly. Her snubby little nose hinted at tenderness and perkiness and sensuality. Her inviting red lips matched the red of her haku lei.

I remember wanting to press my lips against hers.

Her ancestors would have thought of her as an ugly stick of a girl. Two or three hundreds years ago she would have had difficulty finding a man who would take her. If I had been there, I would have snapped her up in a flash, relished the feel of her heat in my arms, and loved her.

But it is not two or three hundreds years ago. It is now. I sigh at how the Fates have conspired against me.

Again I think back to that day.

I stood on the pier. I looked at her again.

Did I mention her mango-sized breasts? I did?

Well, I didn't mention they were covered by a distinctly non-Polynesian white halter-top. She wore a black necklace that appeared to have been made from some local seed or nut.

I look at her picture again. I imagine myself pulling down her halter-top, exposing her twin mounds to my hungry eyes.

In the old days she would have been bare-breasted. European explorers, who brought both prudery and sexual diseases with them, really messed it up for us modern guys. They brought missionaries who viewed nudity and sex as sins and the work of the devil.

But who did the devil's work? The Europeans stole their land, seized their livelihoods, forever changed their way of life. They reduced the islanders to servitude and brought diseases that decimated their populations.

Gauguin and Brel knew. They caught the spirit of this island paradise and saw the odious erosion wrought by their country's missionaries and businessmen.

I gaze at her picture. I still hold it in my hand.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention it. She wore a red sarong covered with large white flowers and large green leaves. It matched her haku lei and her halter-top. It fell to her ankles. Her feet were bare. She was colour-coordinated.

I could only imagine what her legs looked like. I am sure they were beautiful.

I wanted to untie the knot that kept the sarong around her slender waist. I wanted to see her legs, and her cute little ass. I wanted to check to see if her pubic hair was as dark as the hair on her head. Probably. I've never heard of any blonde native Polynesians.

I reminisce.

She sang with her small yet loud, voice. She swayed her inviting hips.

She waved the palm leaves in her hand as the tourists walked. I walked by her too.

My eyes shifted to study the dark perfection of her nubile body and again I caught the sway of lovely behind.

I confess. What I really wanted to do was to undo the knot that kept her sarong around her waist. It was not the island I wanted to explore.

It would have been rude to be obvious. So my brief glance took in every detail of her winsome, lithesome body, and then I turned away, pretending I had noticed nothing special.

I walked along the bay until I reached the opposite side of the bay. I still heard her song as it flew across the water. I pretended to take pictures of palm trees and mountains, of local children playing, and foreign tourists bargaining.

I even took a local took that took me up a nearby mountain, pretending my admiration but wanting to return to the bay. I felt a void because the sight of her did not flood my eyes and the sound of her did not fill my ears.

Eventually the local tour bus took us back to the place where it picked us up.

The siren still she sang. Her song pulled me back.

I resisted. I sat down and pretended to take more pictures of the bay. Tourists asked me to take pictures of them. I pretended to take their picture. When the tourists looked at the picture, they said, "thanks man, good picture!" They were satisfied. I was not.

The siren's song pulled at me and once more I moved to follow it. I made my way around the bay to reach their pier.

I had to pass her to get back to the ship's tender. When she wasn't looking, I snapped a picture of her. Why did I feel embarrassed about photographing her? Isn't this was tourists do?

I know why. I wanted to hold this siren in my arms. I wanted to kiss her warm exotic lips and feel the softness of her svelte body. I wanted to remove her clothes and make love to her. I wanted to enjoy paradise.

Before I knew it, I found myself on the tender returning to the cruise ship. I was a tourist. Like Odysseus, I was tied to my ship. It ached my very soul that the ropes of civilization had tied me so closely to it that I could not break free.

The ship sailed away. Her song faded and then died with the distance.

I have her photo. I am looking at it now. It seems strange to me that I spent so many hours onshore and remember so very little of it, except for the singing siren and her song and the yearning of my simple soul.