Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [103]
If you’re so smart, Mr. Underbrink, I thought, why don’t you have an island?
I slept under the coconut tree until dawn but before dozing off, I looked up into the stars and thought, Here I am on a tiny speck of land in the middle of a massive ocean on a planet in the middle of an inconceivably large area we call space, and I am sleeping on the skeletons of dead animals (which is what coral reefs are made of). After that night, I have never considered myself as the owner of the island, only that I have paid for the privilege of visiting it. I think of all the Tahitians who have been there before me, lain on that same beach and looked at the same stars five hundred or a thousand years ago, and I feel the spirits of those people whenever I go to Teti’aroa.
41
A DOZEN OR SO buildings built from native coral, cement and plaster were on Teti’aroa when I bought it, and most were badly in need of repair. I’ve always loved projects and began restoring the buildings while keeping my promise to change the island as little as possible. One of the first things we did was to rebuild the leper’s house, plant flowers around it and dedicate it to his memory. Later I began what became a twenty-year endeavor to make the island financially self-supporting. We started work on a modest hotel built in the Tahitian style, a school, homes for the Tahitians who worked on the island and, after our cook pulled a can of DDT off a shelf and mistakenly used it instead of flour to bread some fried fish, a rudimentary airstrip. Until then a mishap on the island could have been fatal. With no doctors or nurses, medical help was thirty miles away, and the only way to get it was to hail a passing fishing boat or wait for a chartered boat from Papeete.
Even before the incident with the DDT, I was reminded of the precariousness of life on Teti’aroa while I was diving in the pass between two of the islands. I’m a pretty good swimmer, and I decided to see if I could free-dive—without using an air tank—all the way to the bottom, forty feet down. On the way I passed several reef sharks six or seven feet long, enough shark to make me worry, but I didn’t seem to bother them, so I kept going. Holding my breath, I touched bottom, but there, waiting for me, was a solitary shark that was a lot bigger than the others. It turned its head, gave me a look and then began swimming in my direction. I didn’t like the way he looked, and he obviously didn’t like the way I looked. Unfortunately I was in his backyard. He started swimming faster, moving his body back and forth to gain purchase in the water, and when he was a few feet away I thought I could see him sizing up my calf for his lunch. I’d read somewhere that in situations like this divers are supposed to look the shark squarely in the face and smack it on the nose. Instead, I started clawing my way to the surface like a scalded cat. Whether the shark followed or not, I don’t know; I don’t even remember getting to the surface.
This incident reinforced my sense of isolation. If the shark had taken a bite out of me, I probably couldn’t have gotten off the island for treatment until it was too late. I wasn’t on Teti’aroa when the cook mistook DDT for flour, but those who ate the fish became very sick. Fortunately two people missed the meal and were able to look after the victims until a boat came by and took them to Papeete. Still, I decided we needed an airstrip.
In the mid-seventies,