Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [104]
“Okay,” I said, figuring that if you have gray hair in Tahiti you must know what fish are safe to eat.
At two o’clock the next morning, I woke up with no sensation in my lips; they were completely numb. My feet were tingling, the palms of my hands were itching, and I had a headache as big as a Buick. I knew it was the fish, though I hadn’t eaten very much of it. I had read stories about fish poisoning in the South Seas and didn’t want to die that way: depending on the toxicity of the species, some kill you within hours and some take three or four days to send you screaming into the arms of death. I had heard stories of people ripping the flesh off their bodies because they itched so much. I got up and went around the island and learned that everybody who had eaten the fish was sick. Being captain of the ship, I had to give what medicine we had to them, and then radioed Papeete to send a charter plane to take them off the island.
Sickest of all were Grandpère and four of his friends. They had eaten the poison fish with fafaru, a Tahitian version of Limburger cheese to the ninth power: scraps of fish (usually intestines and innards) are left out in the sun to rot in a coconut shell filled with seawater until the mess stinks and worms flock to it. Then the shell is emptied and fresh seawater is mixed with the bacteria left by the rotting process to create a bacterial soup that is then used to marinate fresh fish. After four or five hours the fafaru is ready to eat and it smells like the foot of a dead alligator left out in the sun for two months. It is putrid beyond description, the only thing I’ve ever seen buzzards refuse to eat. In fact, I’ve heard that buzzards have fainted from the odor.
Not all Tahitians eat fafaru, but some, like Grandpère, adore it. At meals they usually sit downwind of everyone else at the table, but you can still smell people who have eaten fafaru a mile away. Unfortunately, Grandpère and his friends had put pieces of the poison fish in their fafaru the night before, and they were in terrible shape. The plane took them to Papeete, where their stomachs were pumped and they spent two or three weeks in the hospital enjoying a vacation.
Although we established an air link between Papeete and the island, it was never first-class service, or anything approaching it. It was usually provided by an ambitious pilot on Papeete who decided he was going to establish an airline with one and a half planes, though because of breakdowns it was more often like half a plane. Before takeoff, one of the passengers had to get out and crank the propeller.
Once, after spending a few weeks on the island, I had to go to Los Angeles for a movie and the pilot arrived from Papeete in what for him must have been a sleek, fancy, upscale airplane, a two-engine crackerbox that Wiley Post would have discarded. There were five of us leaving Teti’aroa that morning, but a few minutes after we took off one of the propellers stopped turning. “Mayday, Mayday,” the pilot said into his radio, “my starboard motor has quit.…” Then he turned around and told us casually, “Don’t worry, this thing can fly on one engine.”
I knew enough about flying to know that when one motor conks out, the pilot has to use a hard right or left rudder to compensate for the loss of power on one side and keep the plane from flying in circles. The pilot did what he was supposed to do quickly, and since we were only about five minutes out of Teti’aroa, he turned around and headed back to the island. But now the other motor started choking and missing.
“All right, everybody,” I said, “we’re going