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By Root 4487 0

rope bed and watch her movements, as if he had never seen a girl before, and sometimes with a cry of joy he would leap up, catch her in his arms and carry her to the bed in a blizzard of kisses. Once he asked her, "Is it always like this in Bora Bora?" and she replied, "Usually we don't have so much good wine." And he thought: "In other parts of the world there is a war, and in Hawaii nervous men are arguing with each other, and in New York girls are calculating, 'Should I let him tonight?' But in Bora Bora there's Tehani." Like the general, he was amazed at what a man of forty-four could do ... if he had the right encouragement.

On the next-to-the-last day Tehani whispered, "Tell the others you won't be there tomorrow," and at dawn she sprinkled water on his face and cried, "You must get up and see the fish!"

She led him sleepily to a spot away from her house where she had a fresh tuna staked out and cleaned. "This is going to be the best dish you ever ate in your life," she assured him, "because it will be Bora Bora poisson cru. Watch me how I do it, so that when you are far away and went to remember me, you can make some and taste me in it."

She cut the fresh tuna into small fillets of about two inches in length and a quarter inch thick. These she placed in a large calabash, which she carried to the lagoon where no people came, and from the cold waters she dipped a few coconut shells full of fresh salt water which she tossed on the fillets. Then she took a club and knocked down three limes, which she cut in half and squeezed into the calabash. Carefully seeking a place where the sun shone brightest, she put the fish there to steam through the long, hot morning, cooking itself in the lime juice and sea water.

"Now comes the part where you must help me!” she cried merrily as she pointed to a sloping palm that bent over the water, holding in its crest a bundle of ripe nuts. "I shall climb up there, but you must catch the nuts for me," and before he could stop her, she had tied her sarong about her hips, had caught hold of the tree with her hands and feet, and had bent-walked right up the tree to where the nuts clustered. Holding on with her left hand, she used her right to twist free a choice nut. Then, with a wide side-arm movement, she tossed it inland, where Hoxworth caught it. "Hooray!" she cried in glee and pitched another.

When she returned to earth she found a stout stick, jammed it in the earth, and showed her partner how to husk a coconut, and when he had done so, she knocked the two nuts together until they cracked open and their juices ran into a second calabash. Then she jammed into the ground a second stick, this time at an angle, and against its blunt edge she began scraping the coconut slowly and 'rhythmically, until white meat, dripping with nectar, began shredding down onto taro leaves placed on the ground. As her golden shoulders swayed back and forth in the sunlight, she sang:

"Grating the coconut for my beloved,

Shredding the sweet meat for him,

Salting the fish,

Under the swaying breadfruit tree,

Under the rainless sky,

I shred the sweet meat for my beloved."

When she finished grating she ignored Hoxworth, as if he were not there, and carefully gathered the shredded coconut, placing half in the calabash to join the captured coconut water, half in a tangle of brown fiber from the coconut husks, which she now caught in her slim hands and squeezed over a third calabash. As she twisted the coarse fibers, a fine rich liquor was forced out, and this was the sweet coconut milk that would complete the dish she was preparing.

Again and again Tehani squeezed the grated coconut, softly chanting her song, though now she spoke of twisting the meat for her beloved instead of grating it, and as the palms along the shore dipped toward the lagoon, Hoxworth Hale had a strikingly clear intuition: "From now on whenever I think of a woman, in the abstract ... of womanliness, that is ... I'll see this brown-skinned Bora Bora girl, her sarong loosely about her hips, working coconut and humming softly in the shadowy