Pecked to death by ducks by Tim Cahill

alive!"
    As I pieced the story together, Edmundo hadn't been able to get to Puamau. He had a mild flu, and decided to put the trip off for a few days. He didn't want anyone to worry about him, so he'd called on the radio. In Marquesan, however, the word for sick is very similar to the one for dead. There had been some static on the radio. A mistake was made.
    But now that Edmundo was alive, we would feast this night. There was pork for roasting, there was chicken and passion fruit, fish from the sea, bottles of wine from France.

    In the Marquesas, hand gestures, body movements, and facial expressions often carry the weight of words, which are faulty in that they can sometimes kill living archeologists and bring them back to life in a matter of hours. Marquesans can talk to one another for minutes on end without even opening their mouths. Watch these two Marquesan fishermen coming into port in their boats, a pair of wheezing thirty-foot craft running diesel engines that routinely belch smoke. It is hot and the men waste no energy on conversation. They lift their chins to one another in greeting. One holds the position slightly longer. He is asking, "Did you catch any fish?"
    The second man smiles. He spreads the fingers of both hands and brings them together in front of his chest. "I caught a lot of fish." The first man cocks his head again. "Any big ones?" The second stretches his right arm straight out to the side. With his left hand he mimes flicking a fly off his right wrist. "I caught one so big," this gesture says, "that my arm isn't long enough to encompass its length."
    The two men regard one another gravely, then the successful fisherman cocks his head to ask, "How'd you do?" The first man replies with an abrupt masturbatory gesture. "Nothing," he means to say. "I was just wasting my time out there."
    Marquesan gestures have little of the anger or contempt implicit in the hand gestures of certain other cultures (various southern European countries spring to mind). People who have studied the Marquesans believe these gestured conversations are simply a way of conserving energy in a hot land. I don't know about that: It seems to me that a brief kahua (hello) wouldn't wear a guy down any more than a nod of the head.
    I like to think the tradition arises out of the physical beauty of the Marquesan people, that the simple grace of these gestures is the unspoken poetry of the islands.
    The Marquesas have never attracted tourists, a fact that has attracted artists. Robert Louis Stevenson and Herman Melville both spent time on the northern island of Nuku Hiva. The Belgian-born songwriter Jacques Brel died on Hiva Oa. In 1900 the

    French artist Paul Gauguin came to Atuona, on Hiva Oa, looking for inspiration in "unspoiled savagery." There was some tension between the artist and the local bishop regarding Gauguin's relations with various island women. Gauguin nailed obscene pictures to his door and called his place the House of Pleasure, using a word that, in French, has a sexual connotation. There were legal problems fueled by the bishop's rage. Gauguin died in 1903, and he is buried in a small graveyard above Atuona. His grave is neatly tended and much photographed. The bishop is buried there as well. You have to clear away the weeds to see his stone. On the spot where the House of Pleasure stood, there is a new wood-and-concrete bungalow erected by the mayor of Atuona where tourists may stay. Commercial hotels are rare in the Marquesas. The islands are so remote, so little visited, that one simply seeks out the mayor of the village, who makes it his business to provide lodging, usually in his own house. The mayor of Atuona, a rich man by Marquesan standards, had built three bungalows for such travelers. I was staying in the bungalow built on the site of the House of Pleasure. Alone.
    I stayed with the mayor and his wife in the village of Puamau. One day, not long after Edmundo's resurrection, I was walking back from the