Southern Cross, courtesy of Sydney Observatory |
When my husband and I flew to Tahiti in 2007, I was
eagerly anticipating seeing the night sky in a whole new way. I’d never been
south of the Equator but had read many times about how strange it is for
northern dwellers to see the familiar constellations turned on their heads. Even
the man in the moon hangs upside down above the planet’s south side, his
smiling face just an illusion. Above all I wanted to see the Southern Cross,
that beacon of the southern hemisphere sky. We’d travelled a long way in search
of an ancient story and seeing the Southern Cross would be a symbol of how far
we’d come.
I had in my mind a scene from a book by the 19th
century French author Julian-Marie Viaud who wrote under the pen name of Pierre Loti. In 1872, he had spent some months in Tahiti as a young naval officer and
later wrote about his experiences in a semi-autobiographical novel called The Marriage of Loti.
One night he played the piano at a ball held by Queen
Pomare in the unfinished palace that the French administration was building for
her. The Queen sat on her gilt throne above the throng of dancers, tapping her
satin laced boot to the music, a tray of native cigarettes by her side. Her
ladies sat in a row near her, all “princesses or chiefs in their own right.” There were the Queen’s two daughters-in-law, Princess
Ariitéa and the lovely Queen Moe, first cousin to the Salmons. And then there
was “the splendid Ariinoore [Moetia Salmon] in a tunic of cherry-colored satin and
a garland of peia.” And her sister,
Titaua Brander, in “a constellation of splendid pearls” and her two daughters, Margaret
and Marion, just returned from school in England, “as handsome as their mother.”
Titaua Brander (aged 30) and Moetia Salmon (24) drawn from life by Pierre Loti, 1872 |
The walls of the ballroom were open to the air, and as
Loti played for the dancers he looked out at the Tahitian night:
“...In broad
candle-light rose the mountain peaks, dark in the transparent atmosphere of the
Oceanian night, sharply outlined against the starry sky; and in the foreground
the picturesque mass of a clump of bananas with their enormous leaves and
bunches of fruit, looking like colossal candelabra ending in great black
flowers. As a background to the trees the nebulae of the southern hemisphere
spread a sheet of blue light, and in the middle blazed the Southern Cross.
Nothing could be more ideally tropical than this far-away perspective. The air
was full of that exquisite fragrance of orange-blossom and gardenia which is
distilled by night under the thick foliage; there was a great silence,
accentuated by the bustle of insects in the grass and that sonorous quality,
peculiar to night in Tahiti, which predisposes the listener to feel the
enchanting power of music.”
That was the scene I had in mind when my husband and I set off one night
from Papeete in our rental car to try to escape the city lights and see the southern stars. We were
visiting in the rainy season when the tops of Tahiti’s mountains were always
shrouded in cloud, even on the sunniest of days, and that night the sky was
murky and unsettled. As we drove, I was hearing the Crosby, Stills and Nash
song Southern Cross over and over in
my head.
When you see the Southern Cross for the first
time
You understand now why you came this way.
'Cause the truth you might be runnin' from is so small.
But it's as big as the promise - The promise of a comin' day.
You understand now why you came this way.
'Cause the truth you might be runnin' from is so small.
But it's as big as the promise - The promise of a comin' day.
When we pulled off the main highway beyond the town of Paea, the roads
seemed deserted. Roadside businesses were shuttered and dark. We turned off randomly
onto a quiet side road up a valley till the mountains rose on either side of us,
almost invisible in the night, and just as I began to feel nervous and too far
from civilization, we realized there were houses behind the walls that ran all
the way down the dirt road. We could see through gateways into yards with
lights on and dogs lying on the steps. A girl walked in her yard next to our
car, talking quietly into her cell phone and paying us no attention at all, and
we began to hear the sounds of a merry group of people socializing on someone=s patio beyond the houses closest to us.
Despite the houses it was dark enough to see the sky.
The grey clouds shifted and crossed over each other against the blackness, giving
only glimpses of the new crescent moon lolling on its back. That was my first
disappointment. We were only on the island for 9 days and the Tahitian moon
would not be full until after we’d boarded our plane back to L.A. We were
anxious about having enough gas in the car to make it back to Papeete and found
it hard to focus on what we’d come out to see. Craning our necks impatiently we
waited again for the clouds to clear like curtains, parting just long enough to
show a swathe of indistinguishable stars before rolling back in again. I tried
looking in a different direction and just for a moment the sky cleared just
long enough for me to catch sight of Orion standing on his head, with its
brightest star – Betelgeuse – on the low right instead of the high left.
But still no Southern Cross. It was getting late and
we had a lot of ground to cover the next day so we reluctantly got back in the
car and headed back to the main road.
I had so wanted to feel the exoticism of being thousands
of miles from home, on the island I'd been immersed in reading about for years. There had already been many frustrations – my difficulties with
speaking and understanding French, the intense heat and humidity, the
extraordinarily high prices. I felt out of my depth, foolish and presumptuous
for thinking I could write the story of people for whom this place was in their
blood. Discouraged, I leaned close to the open window as our little rented Kia
sped along the well-lit highway back to Papeete.
But as we passed the edge of the
town of Punaauia, a glorious cloud of fragrance engulfed the car and I saw that
the high walls next to the road were covered with a vast flowering mass of gardenia
and night-scented jasmine.
And suddenly it didn’t matter that I hadn’t seen the Southern
Cross. I was breathing in the same sweet fragrance that had entranced Pierre
Loti 150 years before as he sat under the “a star-sown” Tahitian sky among the very
people whose story I had been called to tell.