Now she moved through the crowds and entered the cavernous, domed market place, carefully stepping over a shrieking piglet trussed at the entrance. She went to the bread stall, where her friend the Chinese baker had this morning saved her, out of sight, a loaf as long as her arm. Under its iron crust, she knew, beat a yielding heart of moist bread, every molecule bursting with a million calories. She did not care: it looked as if she would soon lose it all again, sailing west.

She found a table in Patisserie Pam Pam, on the Rue Jeanne d’Arc, where she nibbled a croissant and waited routinely for Jean-Paul and Mahura.

Outside, les trucs began to line up for a post-market exodus to the outlying districts. She studied one in bright crimson. It was bound, according to a sign painted on its wooden body, for Papeari, down the coast. A full load of passengers was already squeezed onto the wooden benches placed on either side. On its roof was a huge new washtub, an immense slab of melting ice, and a crate of breadfruit. From its rear hung a string of yams, two stalks of bananas, and a flopping chicken. On the rear step teetered a case of Hinano beer. A dented milk container and a carton of Kellogg’s cornflakes was tied on top. From every rung of the steel ladder which rose to the bus’s roof hung a string of fish: little red iihi and bonitas and a black fish Jean-Paul said gave you nightmares.

The truc seemed burdened past all further insult, but as she watched, a giant Tahitian woman waddled grinning to the steps at the rear. She wore a flowered dress, squeaky-clean like all Tahitian clothes from a river washing along the coastal road. Sweat poured from her shining face. Her right leg was grotesque with elephantiasis. She slung a panier of long French loaves blindly into the crowd in the truc. She was clutching a monstrous tuna, which dragged on the street: someone tied that to a rung of the ladder. Two men jumped from the rear and took position behind her, one to each fabulous buttock.

The giantess and everyone else howled with laughter as they strained. They stuffed her, finally, into the bus like a mainsail into a sailbag. The truc sagged on its springs, started with a roar, and moved irresolutely into traffic, honking hopefully.

“C’est drôle, n’est-ce pas?” Jean-Paul murmured into her ear. “And that leg like an elephant, that is part of the scene, OK? It makes it all the more colorful, and if it actually pained her, how could she laugh so?”