The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost Read Free Book Online Page B

crept in and leaves were left unswept. There were tall coconut palm trees, stately casuarina trees, and slender papaya trees and also ferns and a squat tree-bush that looked to produce dimpled potatoes. Inside the house, the floor was gray linoleum and there was simple cane furniture, but what was most striking was the view out back. Our backyard was the Pacific Ocean, which is regarded by many as a very large ocean and believed by many more to be misnamed, and I found its presence in our backyard intimidating. We were just a foot or so above sea level, and it wasn’t even high tide. From the house, the reef extended about a hundred yards, where it met the deep water, the swells that had traveled thousands of miles so that they could rise up into steep vertical masses and blast into our fragile little atoll. These were breakers, as apt and succinct a description as can be. A steady roar came into the house, as did a fine salt mist from the fracturing waves. In each room, the walls were ringed with spittles of rust sent hurtling by corroding ceiling fans.
    Kate had left several bottles of boiled water and a few cans of lemonade for us and as I satisfied my thirst I regretted every bad thought I’d had of her. She told us that we should boil our drinking water for twenty minutes on account of the rats in the gutter and god-knows-what parasites in the water tanks. There was a shower, but it had only cold water, and while normally I would find the lack of hot water immensely distressing, climatic circumstances were such that I was not troubled in the least. More worrisome was Kate’s claim that it hadn’t rained at all during the year she had lived on Tarawa and that, therefore, there was not likely to be much water in the tanks and that we should consider carefully every drop we might use.
    She also suggested we continue to employ her “housegirl.” I had a vision of a lithe, undulating young woman, possibly wearing a grass skirt, swaying about the house casting come-hither glances my way, and I became amenable to the idea for a few fleeting seconds until the absurdity of the prospect set in. We were in our mid-twenties, barely solvent, here to do good deeds, or at least one of us was here to do good deeds, and having a housegirl would only stoke our inner guilt. I smoothly expressed our reservations.
    “Bah,” I said. “We don’t need servants.”
    Kate went straight for the jugular. “All right then. I hope you don’t have a problem spending your days washing Sylvia’s clothes, by hand, and mopping the dust and sea spray that coats this house each day. Sylvia certainly won’t have any time.”
    Sylvia looked as if she was not entirely displeased by this possibility. “Make sure you separate the colors from the whites,” she grinned.
    Kate, thankfully, went on. “And I’m sure you won’t mind if yet another girl is pulled out of school because her mother can no longer afford the school fees.”
    Who was I to deny a child’s education? “So will she be coming once or twice a week?” I asked, silently noting that as the mother of schoolchildren, the housegirl was unlikely to be young and lithe, and she probably wouldn’t undulate either.
    Sylvia and Kate departed for the FSP office and I was left alone to ponder the immensity of the ocean and the giant sharks that were undoubtedly lingering behind the house waiting for some stupid foreigner to go for a swim. Probably tiger sharks. And black and white–tipped reef sharks, of course. Maybe hammerheads and blue sharks and bull sharks too, though it’s really the tiger sharks one needs to worry about. I wondered if sharks would swim over the reef. I scanned the water closely. I began to imagine things. Terrible things.
    But that water looked outrageously appealing. It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot. Staggeringly hot. The heat blasted from a contemptible sun; it came unbidden from the white coral sand; it floated