The Fruit Hunters Read online

  Renowned throughout the Seychelles as a palm reader, Kanti’s quite the multihyphenate, as I learn when he hands me his CV. “I’m a guru, I’m a cook, I’m a sculptor and I’m also a shah,” he says with a strong Indian accent. His sparse, wiry white hairs flutter in the breeze, giving him a hint of amiable lunacy. “I’m a priest. I’m a stamp designer. I’m a healing medicine man. I do many things.”

  Moments after I arrive, an Italian tourist pops into Kanti’s shop. They start talking about traditional Creole architecture. “I’m elected to the International Society of Architects,” Kanti points out, winking. An Iranian honeymooner leafs through Kanti’s photo album and asks how he happened to invite Empress Farah Pahlavi over to his house for dinner. “She invited herself because I’m a hell of a guy,” he replies. “I used to throw big parties for all the top guys in the world.”

  A self-proclaimed master in the art of harnessing the energy of crystals, Kanti says he is also a respected numismatist (a student of money), chromotherapist (a color healer) and conchologist (a shell collector). “I work in mother-of-pearl like nobody. I design according to the zodiac. I’m a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. I’m a Jain. I never go to a restaurant.”

  “You sure seem busy,” says the Italian architecture student.

  I try to steer the conversation back to the coco-de-mer. Kanti says he’s written about the fruit, but gives up on finding the article after pushing around a few stacks of yellowing papers. “It’s such a mess here, I can’t find anything,” he says. “I do too many bloody things. I’m on every damn committee. I’m the treasurer of the alliance française.”

  “Look, Hindu holy men have used it for centuries as a begging bowl,” he explains, flipping through a scrapbook of his exploits, which include lending swords to Roman Polanski, acting opposite Omar Sharif and inspiring Ian Fleming’s character Mr. Abendana in For Your Eyes Only. “The fruit is a symbol in tantra, a devotional cult object. It is venerated as the yoni, a symbol of creation and fertility.”

  Although the coco-de-mer still has all sorts of medicinal and mystical properties attached to it today, Kanti dismisses claims for its supposed aphrodisiacal properties. “It’s all in the mind,” he scoffs. “The dried kernel irritates your bladder so you’ll have an erection. You know what it’s like at four in the morning when your bladder is full? It’s the same bloody feeling.”

  LEAVING JIVAN IMPORTS, I head to a nearby gift shop to pick up my own sustainably harvested fruit shell. The boutique’s back wall is stacked to the ceiling with coco-de-mers. Some are huge, some are small. No two are alike. I pick up ones that are rounder, slimmer, more bulbous, flatter. It seems impossible to chose. “What do you like in a woman?” asks the shopkeeper, fondling a svelte Kate Moss-like beauty. “That’s the way to pick a coco-de-mer. I personally like slender women, so I would choose this one.”

  As the shopkeeper hands me the proper certificates and permits, I ask him if he’s ever tasted the fruit. Yes, he says, several times, when he was younger. “It’s a taste of wilderness,” he says. “It’s out of the ordinary, kind of like a minty sperm.”

  Remembering Chong-Seng’s advice, I’m hailing cabs as often as possible. The first driver can’t help. In fact, he recently retired as a policeman, and has been involved in sting operations to capture coco-de-mer poachers. Another driver offers to climb a palm and harvest one for five hundred dollars. Although tempting, the whole scheme is beyond my moral, legal and financial comfort zone. Another suggests that I head to the beach, where “touts and beach boys” sometimes sell stolen coco-de-mers by the spoonful. The lifeguard on duty, however, informs me that the practice tapered off years ago. “They’d be better off carrying a bag of dope,” he says. “They wouldn’t last two seconds.”

  On the way back from the beach, my taxi driver is a Rastafarian who says he eats coco-de-mers all the time. I ask him how they taste. He pauses.

  “Have you ever tasted breast milk?” he asks.

  “Um … not since I was a child,” I answer.

  “Well, the taste of the fruit is quite raw,” he continues. “It’s very … personal. It tastes like mother’s milk straight from the breast.”

  The Rasta agrees to meet me later that afternoon to discuss procuring a taste of the coco-de-mer. I meet him at a bar overlooking a white sand ocean as the sun is setting. The water looks like molten golden butter. Large crabs scamper up regular coconut trees, cut the nuts off with their pincers, and whisk back down to eat the fallen fruits. Fruit bats the size of seagulls circle close above.

  At first, he’s adamant that I won’t be able to taste it. “We’d both be shot,” he says. “It’s totally illegal.” I point out that paying for it may be a crime, but all we need to do is find someone willing to share it with me, rather than sell it to me. After a few drinks, he softens: “Well, it can always be tried.” He starts making some phone calls, speaking a rapid Creole. Hanging up, he smiles widely. “I’m 80.56 percent sure we can get some.”

  AS MUCH AS I’ve learned about the lady fruit, it’s still as enigmatic as it was when Am first described it to me. That ponderous, subpendulous male catkin. Those female breast flowers that ooze nectar at the nipple. The heart-shaped exterior. The bum-shaped nut, which resembles kidneys when opened. The vaginal umbilical cord. Its genetic similarities to humans seem so overt, yet perhaps it’s merely an elaborate evolutionary coincidence. Although it may not be the fruit from which women originate, certain parallels may emerge once its DNA is mapped. All species share a common ancestor, so the possibility of an overlap isn’t totally preposterous. After all, the same substance—lutein—found in human retinas, is also found in green plants.

  While awaiting word from the Rasta, my final afternoon in Praslin is spent with John Cruise-Wilkins, a fifty-year-old history teacher who believes he’s close to finding a treasure buried by the pirate Olivier Levasseur in the eighteenth century.

  Just before being hung from a tamarind tree on Réunion Island in 1730, Levasseur flung a parchment bearing a cryptogram into the crowd of onlookers. In 1949, this coded message came into Cruise-Wilkins’s father’s possession. He spent sixteen-hour days trying to decipher it, and finally came to believe that the note contained directions on performing a series of tasks influenced by the twelve labors of Hercules. Completing these tasks would lead to discovering further clues. Over the last twenty-seven years of his life, his father excavated extensively, and unsuccessfully, in the beach across from his home, using custom-made pumping machinery now rusting nearby.

  John Cruise-Wilkins shows me the clues they’ve found so far: a rock that sort of looks like a woman’s head that supposedly represents a waterlogged sarcophagus of Aphrodite’s torso at low tide, a rusting horn symbolizing the cornucopia, shards of pottery marked with something resembling a fleece, and a stone shaped like a sandal (“It’s the sandal of Jason!”). As he pokes through cabinets in his ramshackle bungalow, a red bird flies in, flutters around freely and then zips back out the window. His father was a big-game hunter before getting treasure fever, and the walls are decorated with antlers, skulls and other trophies. The family’s most persuasive clue is a boulder in the shallow tide with a slit carved down the middle. Leading me out to the beach, John says it represents a key. To me, it resembles a giant, granite coco-de-mer.

  Burly and intense, Cruise-Wilkins has the cloudy, pale blue eyes of a believer. As he reveals a particularly convoluted clue—a piece of rock that resembles the skeleton of Pegasus—the left side of his mouth curls up ever so softly. His cheeks lift as though pulled up by some invisible pulley system, and the wrinkles streaming from his eyes tighten. His face brightens for just an instant! And then … Then, the eyebrows descend like thunder as the inescapable realization crushes him yet again, the same relentless search that haunted his father now tormenting him.

  “We’re on the verge of discovering the treasure—as you can see, the evidence is overwhelming,” he says, picking up a piece of fossilized coral in the s
hape of the letter Y. Everything seems impregnated with significance. As we head back toward his home, a vivid rainbow spans the sky, landing on a red house in the hills across the bay. “Yes,” says Wilkins. “It’s a good sign of the covenant between Noah and God.” We stroll on in silence for another moment, ensconced in the human need to find patterns, to make sense of all the fragmentary details.

  He stops on the side of the road. “People in authority say ‘You’re a dreamer, Wilkins.’ That may be, but I’m a practical dreamer with my feet on the ground. People tease me. They mock me, but I know this is true. I’ll prove my father was right.”

  As we leave, my taxi driver shakes his hands and says, “Never give up hope.” Cruise-Wilkins’s eyes flash. “It’s not about hope,” he says acidly. “It’s about reality based on historical archeological evidence.”

  BACK IN MY HOTEL room at the Lemuria, a luxury resort that is a far cry from Nirav’s Thai beach hut, the phone rings. The Rastafarian taxi driver tells me that Les Rochers restaurant has some coco-de-mer palms in the yard. I’m to show up there for dinner and “everything will be arranged.” Although somewhat dubious legally, it seems like a fair exchange—I buy dinner, they share a taste of the fruit. I’ll finally be able to sample a coco-de-mer. Throwing on a raincoat, I race out into heavy showers.

  By the time I arrive at the beachfront restaurant, the downpour has tapered off. Unfortunately, the owner explains that he hasn’t been able to pick a coco-de-mer because of all the rain. “It’s impossible to send anyone up the palm because when it’s wet it becomes very slippery and dangerous,” he says apologetically.

  As I eat, it hits me that I’ve come all the way here to the other side of the world and I haven’t managed to taste the elusive billionaire’s fruit. Perhaps it was an unreasonable expectation. But as I finish up my octopus curry, I start wondering whether any other restaurants might have coco-de-mer palms. I think back to a lunch spot, Bon Bon Plume, where I noticed a grove of palm trees in the backyard.

  As soon as I get back to my hotel, I make a call. The restaurant owner, Richelieu Verlazque, picks up. Explaining that it’s my last night in the Seychelles, I ask if he might be interested in offering a journalist a sample of coco-de-mer. Verlaque says that he’s been planning to eat one the following morning and that he’d be happy to give me a taste. He suggests I arrive at 6:30 A.M. so that I’ll be able to make my departing flight at 9:30 A.M.

  “Are you sure it isn’t illegal?” I ask.

  “I can do whatever I want on my property,” he booms. “And if I want to give you a taste of coco-de-mer that’s my business.”

  “What about all the rain?”

  “That isn’t a problem over here. The fruits grow on a dwarf coco-de-mer tree. To harvest one I just reach out and cut it off. In fact, there is a fruit that is perfectly ripe right now.”

  I LEAVE MY HOTEL before dawn. After driving around the darkened island for forty-five minutes, I arrive at Bon Bon Plume shortly after sunrise. It’s already scorchingly hot. Richelieu Verlaque greets me at the door, and we walk out to the backyard together. We pass a giant tortoise in a sandbox next to the restaurant. The tortoise moves very slowly, but cranes its serpentlike head out of its shell when I crouch down to greet it. It looks up at me with tears in its eyes.

  Verlaque, ushers me toward a picnic table, sweeping his arm over a platter of sliced lady fruit. I pick up a piece, noting the thin golden band indicating ripeness. The fruit’s innards are transluscent, almost like a silicone gel implant but with a softer, shaky-pudding texture more akin to a real breast. I bite into the gelatinous flesh. It has a mild citruslike quality. refreshing and sweet with earthy, spunky notes. It tastes like coconut flesh, only sexier.

  “So you are one of the rare few who has tasted the forbidden fruit,” declares Verlaque triumphantly. “Adam has tasted Eve.”

  Sitting at the table, we chat about the political climate, and what the assault on the opposition leader could mean for the country’s future. We eat some more coco-de-mer, cool in the heat of this sunny Sunday morning. Henry André, Verlaque’s eight-year-old son, comes over and eats a few slices with us.

  “What do you think it tastes like?” I ask him.

  He replies immediately, as though it were obvious: “It tastes like coco-de-mer!”

  8

  Seedy: The Fruitleggers

  Crates of melons on sidewalks, bananas coming off

  elevators, tarantulas suffocating in the new crazy air,

  chipped ice in the cool interior snow of grape tanks …

  All of it insane, sad, sweeter than the love of mothers,

  yet harsher than the murder of fathers.

  —Jack Kerouac, Jazz of the Beat Generation

  PERHAPS the only thing more complicated than tasting a coco-de-mer is bringing one home. Customs and immigration forms require that all fruits, food, plants or plant parts be declared. Importing an endangered species, even a sustainably harvested one, is a process fraught with preemptory guilt. As the plane descends into Montreal’s airport, a bubble-butt of a coco-de-mer throbbing in my checked luggage, I take a deep breath, trying to steady my mildly irregular heartbeat.

  Staring at the declaration form, I consider lying. In the event of a search, I reason, I could try to convince them that it’s a sculpture—some sort of exotic erotic folk craft. I then realize that the permits would inculpate me were the nut to be unwrapped. So I check the box, still uncertain what to say.

  Arriving at the interrogation booth, the customs agent glances at my form and immediately asks what foods or plants I’m bringing in. I start listing the goods I picked up on my stopover in Paris: apples, dried apricots, a couple of bottles of wine.

  The agent writes them down: “Anything else?”

  “Well, I have …

  This is it—I’m one wrong move away from a cavity search.

  … some nuts.”

  That’s it—NUTS! Oh, sweet nuts of truth. It comes in a flash, but it’s technically accurate. After all, I have some trail mix in my backpack, and that unholy coco-de-mer—why, it’s just another nut, legitimately declared, so what seems to be the problem, Officer? The agent scribbles the word “nuts” at the bottom of the grocery list, adds some secret codes and waves me on.

  Pulling my suitcase from the carousel, I’m feeling poised, even though I haven’t broken on through to the other side quite yet. I’m merely in a twilight zone of duty-freedom. I still have to hand my declaration form to the next level of agents who will instantly recognize the ciphers scrawled over it in red ink.

  When my turn comes, the bored officer holds his hand out. High on the brazenness of nuts, I disdainfully submit my form and breeze past him. I’m about eight seconds away from the exit. I don’t hear any protestations, so I keep on going. “Free,” trills my heart, “I’m free!’

  Six seconds to go.

  And then: “Mister? Excuse me, mister!”

  I keep on walking, pretending not to hear. Without wavering in velocity, I attempt to convey the countenance of a corporate type with massive fiscal responsibilities.

  Four seconds.

  “EXCUSE ME,” comes the voice, again. I continue forward. A muscle spasm ripples across my back. A bead of sweat appears at my temple and squiggles away.

  Two seconds.

  The sliding doors open.

  Footsteps pound behind me on the terrazzo. “Stop right there!” yells the officer.

  “Who, me?” I ask, craning my neck around and feigning befuddle-ment.

  “Yes, you,” he replies sternly. “You can’t bring any apples into the country. Step this way.”

  I start rehearsing as I head toward the inquisition zone. “Well, actually, I did declare all my nuts, including that one … Anyways, it’s just a sculpture.” My blood is so overheated that I can feel the wax melting in my ear canals.

  Remembering that the customs official had mentioned apples, I take the sack of French heirloom apples out of my backpack. With tremb
ling hands, the first thing I do is hand them over to the agent sitting at a polished aluminum counter, hoping to distract him with my openness. “I was told you were going to confiscate my apples,” I say jauntily, but with a hint of irritation (the better to confound him with my naturalness). Does he realize I’m hyperventilating? The agent takes the apples and, stifling a yawn, points at a doorway. What’s this? The frisking chamber? I push open the door, and find myself in the arrivals area, surrounded by smiling families milling about and greeting their loved ones.

  IN AUGUST 2005, fifty-seven-year-old farmer Nagatoshi Morimoto was convicted of smuggling 450 illegal citrus cuttings into California from Japan. Boasting to associates that “nobody’s gonna catch it,” he placed the bud wood in boxes marked as containing candy and chocolate. He was wrong: the stash was intercepted at customs. Under the Plant Protection Act, Morimoto was served with a five-thousand-dollar fine and sentenced to thirty days in jail. He also had to perform community service—handing out brochures informing farmers about the dangers of smuggling.

  Because fruit-fly infestations are a major threat to agricultural systems, it’s imperative that certain fruits be kept out. Morimoto’s “candies and chocolate” contained citrus canker, a disease that could cost California up to 890 million dollars in the event of an outbreak. A medfly plague would be even worse: if Mediterranean fruit flies were to take hold in California and continental America, it is estimated that they would cause 1.5 billion dollars in damages annually. No wonder border guards are so stringent about screening fruits.