Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [24]
“And what’s up with the dogs?”
Many of the expatriates had dogs. Though Port Vila, like elsewhere in the Pacific, had no shortage of island dogs, many of the Westerners had imported purebreds from overseas, including little yapping, quivering dogs brightly festooned with bows. If such a dog were ever to be allowed outside the gates of its owner’s villa, no doubt it wouldn’t survive the afternoon once the island dogs were through with it. But the decorative dogs were never allowed outside the grounds. Even the dog community was segregated in Port Vila.
When explorer Pedro Fernandez de Quirós first alighted on Vanuatu in 1606, he established a short-lived Spanish colony called Nueva Jerusalema, and seeing how Westerners lived in Vila today it wasn’t hard to discern a certain continuity between the original Western settlement and contemporary Port Vila. Fernandez de Quirós, feeling very pleased with himself for discovering what he assumed was the fabled southern continent of Australia, saw fit to appoint his ship’s crew to rather exalted positions. “It was a marvelous thing to see such a diversity of knights,” wrote a priest at the time, “for truly nothing like it has been seen since the world began, because there were sailor-knights, grummet-knights, ships’ page-knights, mulatto-knights and Indian knights and knights who were just knight-knights.” For the tax evaders and offshore bankers who now called Vanuatu home, Port Vila remained a Nueva Jerusalema, a place where they felt free to carry on like grummet-knights.
The most mystifying part, of course, was the reaction of the Ni-Vanuatu themselves. In America, if we were to allow a very small segment of the population to create an economic system that works entirely to their benefit while the vast majority of Americans simply scrape by, why we’d…call them shrewd businessmen and patriots and elect them to higher office. But if they were foreigners, why we’d…welcome them as investors. Perhaps, then, my feelings were misplaced. Perhaps there was nothing unnatural in the way society seemed to be organized in Port Vila, though it did seem uncomfortably colonial to me. The French were the functionaries, the Anglos the capitalists, the Chinese the shopkeepers, and the Ni-Vanuatu the hired help, admitted when necessary but otherwise kept outside the gates. Then, one morning, as I walked along the dirt road that led from our house toward the main road, I was greeted with a word that left me reeling in bewilderment.
“Gudmorning,” I said in Bislama to the elderly man I encountered. He was shoeless, and he carried a bush knife. He regarded me with a friendly eye.
“Gudmorning, maste,” he said.
Master. No, I thought. This is a very weird place.
ONE OF THE GREAT BENEFITS OF LIVING ABROAD IS DISCOVERING that there’s a whole new world of intoxicants to explore. And I like intoxicants. Fortunately, I realized early on that I had a predilection for chemically altering my state of mind, and so by the time my friends were snorting their paychecks up through their noses, I knew myself well enough to realize that, were I to do even one line of cocaine, I’d soon find myself on the street turning tricks for crack. Likewise with heroin. When a Bosnian acquaintance of mine in Prague suggested we shoot heroin together, I had enough self-awareness to realize that, were I to join him, I’d have to write off the next ten years of my life as I devoted myself to traveling the Needle Park circuit of Europe. Instead, I spent nearly ten years trying to quit smoking, and painful and unpleasant as each of those forty-three attempts were, I realized that it could be much, much worse.
Still, even though I drew my line at hard drugs, there remained a plethora of narcotics to enjoy, and I availed myself of all that came my way. I like to think that I failed Algebra II in high school not because of any particular ineptitude with mathematics, but simply because of a quirk in my schedule. Algebra came after lunch, and the lunch break, of course,