Then a six-note bell sounded—what the crew call the “ding dong”—landing instructions followed, and, as usual, everyone headed for the boat deck, where they lined up in a narrow corridor, took blue horse-collar-shaped life vests from hooks, slipped them over their heads, and secured the waist straps. Filing out to the waiting Zodiacs, they passed a large wooden board holding numbered tags on metal hooks. Next to the board, a manifest listed each passenger’s name and its corresponding tag number. Whenever someone left the ship, they turned their number to the red side; returning, they turned the tag back to black. In that way, the staff knew who was on shipboard and whether or not someone was late on shore.
Though it was only 8:30 A.M., the same ferocious sun had begun to climb the sky by the time the Zodiacs set off down the main channel through the coral reef to a small protected cove. A dump truck waited at the base of the hill to take nonhikers to the village and then farther inland to a freshwater cave for a noon swim. Fifty-five people were already ashore, climbing into the truck, and walking along the trail. I had just started up the trail myself, when something made me turn to look back at the shore. There was no sound or alarm or anything out of the ordinary, just an invisible tugging at my mental sleeve. I saw a full Zodiac heading through the channel, its driver a length of orange standing at the rear beside the motor. Suddenly and inexplicably the Zodiac turned broadside to the beach, ran parallel for a few moments, then caught a wave underneath, skidded up in slow motion, and tumbled over in the surf, spilling the driver and twelve passengers into the violent water just outside the reef. My arm rose as if suddenly weightless, as if I could reach across space and grab them. Peter, one of the crew members, saw the same thing in that instant and we began running toward the water, where half a dozen men were already lunging out into a strong, heaving surf. A rescue Zodiac cut fast through the water and picked up most of the people—including two little girls and a woman in her late seventies who was badly cut around the head and neck. Meanwhile, Steve and Mike, two more crew members, hauled her husband out of the surf. He was naked from the waist down—the force of the water had sucked his clothes off—but he still wore his shirt and his blue life vest, from the straps of which hung a length of Zodiac rope. Perhaps he had tried in vain to hold on to the rope as the raft flipped over. Staggering in our arms, he was a man in his eighties, slightly potbellied with reddish hair plastered to his arms and legs; his skin was deathly white and covered with freckles. Blood trickled from a gash on his forehead. One eye was badly bruised and swelling. There was something appallingly human about his nakedness.
“I was in an amphibious unit during the war,” he said in a sort of walking faint, as we held him up and guided him toward the waiting arms of others near shore. “I remembered to hold my breath and swim for the surface … I knew what to do.”
“That’s right, that’s right, you did the right thing,” I said, trying quickly to assess his injuries, and hoping he wouldn’t ask about his wife, whom I had seen pulled, badly hurt, into the rescue Zodiac. It was good that his mind had snagged on this small precision. Fresh hands came to guide him, and we ran back toward the surf out of which Anna, the ship’s photographer, was walking all by herself with a zombielike stare. It was then, already minutes after the accident, that we saw an orange shape tumbling in the surf, and we ran to it, Peter, Steve, and I. The men pulled the figure out, lifted him by the arms and legs, and I stooped, trying to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as we hurried toward shore. Holding his nose closed with one hand, and his jaw down with the other, I forced my mouth onto his and blew hard into his chest, regularly, heavily, as best I could while he swung between the two men and the surf broke over us. At last we reached the overturned Zodiac in the shallows, and hoisted him on top of it. Peter straddled his waist and began CPR, and I kept forcing breath into him. It felt like screaming into a cave that had no echo. His sharp teeth sliced open my gums, and all the fluids in his stomach poured out through his mouth and nose. I washed them away quickly with the salt water, and kept breathing into him. I think it was then that Peter recognized the man as Tavita, a Philippine Zodiac driver he had worked with for years, and cried out his name with a combination of recognition and anguish. A white foam, a kind of lather, welled up from inside Tavita. Pulling back his eyelids, I saw large open pupils. There was no pulse. But I kept breathing hard into him. Peter was screaming at him not to go, calling him by name—”Tavita, my friend! Come back! come back!” Steve leapt on top of the raft to spell Peter, then me. The doctor, trembling and shaken as the rest of us, kept checking Tavita’s pulse, directing our movements. What a confused, strange horror it is to kiss a man with a fully open mouth as one would a lover, hold him in your arms, assume some of the gestures of passion, even exchange fluids with him—but all in the arena of death. As his jaws grew stiffer, his teeth felt sharper, and they lacerated the insides of my lips as I tried to force air deeper and deeper into him. In the end, an hour later, when at last we gave up, and he lay dead among us, my mouth was full of blood.
From both the shore and the ship, people watched the scene unfold, their tense faces frozen in the rictus of horror. Where was the oxygen we kept crying out for the ship to send? How soon could a helicopter arrive to carry the injured to Papeete? We laid Tavita on the ground against a sea wall, a striped T-shirt over his face. Next to him the red-haired man, a minister, sat stoically with a dislocated shoulder, a broken arm, and a gashed head; his wife had been taken to the ship, where she died. A crewman had face injuries a reconstructive surgeon would need to repair. Anna lay in a fetal position on the stone landing, putting on a brave face but complaining that she couldn’t move her hip. Lying crumpled on the ground, she looked frail and broken. Anna always wore a scopolomine patch behind one ear to ward off seasickness, a natural side effect of which was that it made her pupils huge. Now her pupils were small and tight; it was the first time I had ever seen them that way. Across the landing, at the loading dock, a crew member stood with her back turned to the passengers on shore and discreetly cried.
At last there was nothing more to do but things automatic and grim. A passenger and a crewman had died. Four others were injured. It was best to clear the area while the final details were attended to, so, incredibly, Peter led the ship’s passengers on the scheduled tour up the hill and through the village. In the context of all that had just happened, this seemed the impossible and unnatural event, this simple walk. I went, too, because my adrenaline was pounding; there was too much pent-up action and helplessness to stand still with; and there was nothing further I could do now. Indeed, what I really needed was to run until exhausted. An important battle had just been fought and lost, and I felt it. I cannot speak for the others. I only know that on a few occasions in my life I have found death unfolding in front of me, and I have always acted before I had time to think about it. I suppose, in retrospect, on all of those occasions, I acted fast and well. But one doesn’t think those things through on such a battleground. There is no pride or glory. There are no scorekeepers. One doesn’t even fight believing one will win. In the end, the victor is always the same. One fights in order to keep alive a necessary attitude about life. I knew Tavita only as an acquaintance, but I liked him. I had relied on his expertise on other sailings. He had a wife and children and many friends. He was forty-three years old.
Soon helicopters arrived from Papeete to lift the injured into the sky and spirit them off to the distant Oz of a hospital in Tahiti. The passengers returned to the ship, the captain lifted anchor, and we set sail by early afternoon. In the evening, the captain and staff gathered the passengers in the lounge, and tried to sum up the day’s events as best they could. Then the passengers went to dinner, talking quietly. The staff sat in the bar late into the night. How had it happened? A rogue wave? A misread signal from the local guide standing on shore? A failed motor? A lapse of attention? A cardinal rule of Zodiac driving is never to let your Zodiac run broadside to the waves. What had happened to cause Tav
ita, a senior driver with much experience, to make that fatal error? I did not know. No one knew. It was a freak accident. I went to my cabin and sat stupefied on the bed, rattled now that it was safe to feel at all, and trying to make peace with everything that had happened. A wiring problem made it impossible to turn the radio completely off, and so Vaughan Williams’s “Greensleeves” played quietly, almost below the range of hearing. It had always been one of my favorite pieces of music; now I found it mournful and lugubrious and knew I would never be able to enjoy it again.
In the days that passed, the passengers were taken ashore to see villages or to go snorkeling in lagoons, and the ship’s staff made a valiant effort to get them over the trauma and back on track with the cruise. But, behind the scenes, the ship was full of the chaos and unrest that death sets in motion. Life is process and has its own momentum, which continues for a while even after life stops. It is the way a broad jumper, straddling the air with open legs, lands hard, then continues to tumble forward even though the jump is finished. Halfway around the world, there was more than the usual red tape. There were the French Polynesian policemen to deal with. Autopsies had to be performed. Church services were held on an island in the Tuamotos. It was a beautiful, otherworldly service, with hymns sung in high, close harmony and flowers handed to the congregation. Tavita’s body was laid out in the crew’s quarters so that respects could be paid. There were many Filipino men and women working on board, and, superstitious about death, they insisted on an exorcism of the ship. While the passengers were sent on glass-bottom boat rides and to a resort for drinks and swimming, the police conducted interviews and the coffins were off-loaded. Sitting under a thatched hut at the end of a dock, I looked at the ship through my binoculars, and saw long orange boxes lifted out of a side door of the ship and arranged on a small yacht.
At every landing we made during the next week, island women greeted us with thick pungent leis of plumería and herbs. Within hours the flowers wilted, but that did not stop the locals from stringing the leis, or wearing them until they dried, or greeting strangers by garbing them, if only for a few hours, in the brief, extravagant, all-encompassing scent of their petals.
ON RELIGIOUS LOVE
San Xavier del Bac, the finest remaining example of the Spanish colonial missions that ruled frontier America, floats like a heat mirage outside Tucson, Arizona. The local Indians have many names for it, as their ancestors did: white dove of the desert, meringue wedding cake, a nun’s starched hat, where the waters gather. For, in the trumpeting desert sun, or even in the wet season when the rains are thick as jelly, it looks otherworldly and miraculous. Chalk white, embellished with huge lions and scrolls, it is the tallest structure for miles. Elaborate outside, ornate within, it stands against the backdrop of cactus, dust, and one-story reservation buildings like something dropped from outer space.
Coming from a distance almost as alien as space, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, a Jesuit from the Tyrolean Alps, arrived on the desolate spot in 1700, and decided to build his mission. The Indian name for the village was bac, “where water springs;” so he coupled that with the name of his patron saint, Francisco Xavier, and the result was something cross-culturally melodic: San Xavier del Bac. Although Father Kino laid the foundations for the church in 1700, it wasn’t really finished until 1797. For almost two hundred years, the church has figured in the lives of the Papago Indians.
The outside is plaster, paint, and lime mortar; hand-hewn mesquite beams, and sun-parched adobe. It twists and towers in the sun. There is an inner patio and cloisters, a fountain, grape arbor, corral, and tolling bells, and the overall apparition is ghostly. Inside, it’s even stranger: a bazaar of Byzantine, Moorish, and late Mexican baroque architecture, including trompe l’oeil, padlocked wooden doors that will never open, except to those who walk through walls or are on their way to Heaven. A giant red python, its scales painted a fierce red, sprawls beneath the windows. Dozens of rows of wooden benches are finished in carved half-moons, all looking front like a permanent congregation facing the altar. A crimson heart, nesting in a green-and-white garland, sits on one of the beams overhead, a crack through its center. Age has done this, not the pangs of brokenhearted-ness, but, to the believers, who can say? Rolling blue waves pour around the ceiling in a narrow frieze, over which runs a thin red vein. And the main altar! Encrusted with red and gold, baroque as watch-works, it towers high into the sanctuary. All the apostles are present, as well as God, Mary, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Xavier. The walls are six feet thick, like those of a grave, and the sanctuary’s columns of square, oblong, and inverted pyramids in eye-drenching gold make your ribs quiver. Today, right in front of the altar, a black dog paces like the devil on foot, while a tape plays a resounding mass conducted by the brothers of the monastery and the local Indians.
But what is especially startling and poignant is the display of angels, whose wings have realistic feathers. They are all blond European women wearing calicos, pastels, matching petticoats, collars, and elaborate lace cuffs. In their finest lace bodices and nipped waists, they tell you what heaven meant to those poor who worshiped here when the mission was being built. Where else can you find angels in calico skirts, Magritte-like false doors, and false picture frames painted on the whitewash? Two carved angels lean like figureheads from the bow of the sanctuary, looming out into the crowds of the faithful. The lions of Spain are present, too, for obeisance of a more earthly kind. Moorish tent drapes are pulled aside with blue cordons. Are we sailing through the desert, the ocean, or the waters of mortality?
In one alcove lies the tomb of Saint Francis, and supplicants have pinned macabre replicas of hands, legs, feet, arms, kneeling figures, as well as photographs and plastic hospital bracelets and other artifacts onto his white lace blanket. They hope he will cure their physical ills, as God will cure their spiritual ones. Votive candles thicken the air with a waxy vapor, and worshipers who sit on a bench close by look entranced by devotion and the lack of oxygen.
Little has changed since the first mass celebrated with music in the Southwest was held here in 1798. Not the building that stands like a frozen white garment in the scalding heat, not the angels with their Bo-Peep dresses, not the Indians, who come to worship among the cool confusion of architectural styles or to sell their wares across the street. Visitors often linger on benches in the courtyard, listening to the monumental silence of the desert, smiling about how heaven is patrolled by corseted angels, and marveling at the collision of cultures in San Xavier del Bac’s carnival in stone.
What are all these saints and angels doing here? The Christians borrowed cherished customs from the Greeks and Romans, including honoring people by turning them into gods. This was especially popular during the Middle Ages, when people wanted more than one deity to worship, and the Church obliged them by creating long lists of saints. Some were pagan gods given Christian names—Artemis was canonized as Saint Artemidos; the sun god Helios was canonized as Saint Elias; one of Aphrodite’s holy whores, “Love Feast,” was canonized as Saint Agape; the ewe-goddess Rachel was canonized as Saint Agnes, and so on. Others were made saints because of their martyrdom, or their miraculous acts. Even Buddha was canonized as Saint Josasphat (a mispronunciation of Bodhisat). Peopling heaven with familiar angels and saints who, like earthly folk, had specific features and areas of expertise, made a bridge between worshipers and God, a bridge they crossed more easily when propelled by love.
At its most soulful and mystical, religious love sounds much like erotic love. John Donne, a clergyman as well as a poet, wrote a sensuous poem in which he invited God to “batter” his heart, to go all the way and “ravage” him. Saint Catherine of Siena claimed that Jesus gave her his foreskin as a wedding ring, so that she became his bride “not with a ring of silver but with a ring of his holy flesh, for when he was circumcised just such a ring was taken from his holy body.” She also whipped herself three times a day—once for her own sins, once for the sins of living people, on
ce for the sins of the dead. The saints specialized in self-denial, self-torture, and feats of masochism as a way to achieve religious ecstasy. Monks, nuns, clergymen, and saints all write about “passion,” “ecstasy,” and “union” in language usually applied to the heights of eroticism. Consider how Saint Augustine describes the Crucifixion:
Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber, he went out with a presage of his nuptials…. He came to the marriage bed of the cross, and there, in mounting it, consummated his marriage,… he lovingly gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride, and he joined himself to the woman for ever.
To some, I suppose, such thoughts are blasphemy. In the West, we have separated Church and state, and Church and sex. According to the teachings of Christianity, Mary conceived the son of God without having sex at all. But, as noted, the oldest pagan religions simply worshiped the vulva or the penis. Many religions still revolve around powerful sexual myths, and require true believers to perform fertility rituals of one sort or another, sometimes in public. Circumcision, which began in the Mideast, was originally a male menstruation rite, which was performed on pubescent boys who were dressed up as girls. Strictly speaking, a boy should be willing to sacrifice even his virility to God. Cutting off the foreskin served as a symbol of that devotion.
Love itself was a religion to the Greeks, who worshiped Aphrodite as the feminine ideal, a queen of uninhibited sensuality.* She was supposedly born naked and fully formed from the frothing testicles of Uranus, which had been hurled into the sea. Botticelli paints her Standing demurely inside an oyster shell, whose halves are spread open like the bone-wings of a pelvis, and her pearly hand hides her genitals.