The Way to Paradise Read online

  Most depressing had been the blunt way in which Camille Pissarro, your old teacher and friend, had summarily dismissed your Tahitian theories and paintings. “This art isn’t yours, Paul. Go back to being what you used to be. You are a creature of civilization, and it is your duty to paint harmonious things, not to imitate barbarous cannibal art. Listen to me. Turn back now; stop pillaging from the savages of Oceania and be yourself again.” You hadn’t argued. You had just said goodbye with a bow. Not even the affectionate gesture of Degas, who bought two paintings, could lift your spirits. Many artists, critics, and collectors shared Pissarro’s harsh opinions: What you had painted while you were away in the South Seas was a cheap imitation of the superstitions and idolatry of primitive beings, light years away from civilization. Was that what art was supposed to be? A return to the scrawls, blots, and magic of cave dwellers? But it wasn’t just a rejection of the new themes and techniques of your painting, acquired with so much sacrifice over the last two years in Tahiti. It was also a stifled, murky, twisted rejection of you personally. Why? Because of the mad Dutchman, no less. After the tragedy at Arles, Vincent’s stay in the Saint-Rémy madhouse, and his suicide—and especially after the death of his brother, Theo van Gogh, also at his own hand—Vincent’s paintings (which no one was interested in while he was alive) began to attract notice, to sell, to rise in value. A morbid fashion for van Gogh was born, and with it everyone in the painting community began to retroactively reproach you for having been incapable of understanding and helping the Dutchman. Bastards! Some added that you might even have provoked the mutilation in Arles, with your proverbial lack of tact. You didn’t need to hear them to know that they were pointing at you and whispering behind your back at parties, social gatherings, galleries, cafés, salons, and studios. The calumnies filtered through in magazines and newspapers, in the oblique way in which the Paris press generally commented on the news of the day. Not even the providential death of your father’s brother, Uncle Zizi, a bachelor in his eighties in Orléans, who left you several thousand francs, which arrived in time to rescue you for a while from poverty and debts, could revive your enthusiasm. How long would you continue in this state, Paul?

  Until the morning that Annah from Java, with that picturesque sign around her neck, and with Taoa, her scampering, sarcastic-eyed monkey on a leather leash, came swaying like a palm to share the exotic, light-filled retreat into which Paul had converted the studio he rented on the second floor of an old building in a corner of Montparnasse. Ambroise Vollard had sent her to be his servant. That was what Annah had been before in an opera singer’s house. But that same night, Paul made her his lover. She soon became his companion in games, fantasies, and pranks, and finally his model. Where was she from? Impossible to say. When Paul asked her, Annah told him a story riddled with so many geographic contradictions that doubtless it was all a fabrication. Maybe the poor girl didn’t even know and was inventing a past as they spoke, revealing her prodigious ignorance of the planet’s countries and continents. How old was she? She said seventeen, but he calculated that she was younger, perhaps only thirteen or fourteen, like Teha’amana; at the age—which so aroused you—when the early-blooming girls of primitive countries enter adulthood. Her breasts were developed and her thighs firm, and she was no longer a virgin. But it wasn’t the clean-limbed little body of the companion he was vouchsafed by ungrateful Paris—a slip of a thing, a perfect miniature, beside the bulk of forty-five-year-old Paul—that immediately seduced him.

  It was her dark, ashy mixed-blood face; her fine, sharp features—the little turned-up nose, the thick lips inherited from her Negro ancestors—and the liveliness and insolence of her eyes, which showed unrest, curiosity, mockery of everything she saw. She spoke a foreigner’s French, exquisitely flawed, with such vulgar utterances and expressions that Paul was reminded of the port-city brothels of his sailor youth. Despite having absolutely nowhere to go, not knowing how to read or write, and possessing nothing but her monkey Taoa and the clothes on her back, she exhibited a regal arrogance in her self-possession, her posturing, and the sarcastic remarks she made about everyone and everything, as if nothing deserved her respect and society’s conventions did not apply to her. When she didn’t like something or someone, she would stick out her tongue and make a face that Taoa imitated, screeching.

  In bed, it was hard to tell if she was enjoying herself or pretending. In any case she gave you pleasure, and she entertained you at the same time. Annah gave you back what you were afraid you had lost since your return to France: your desire to paint, your sense of humor, your will to live.

  The day after Annah appeared in his studio, Paul took her to a shop on the boulevard de l’Opéra and bought her clothes, which he helped her to choose. They bought boots, too, and half a dozen hats, which Annah loved. She even wore them inside, and they were the first thing she put on when she got out of bed. Paul would shake with laughter when he saw her dancing naked toward the kitchen or the bathroom with a stiff canotier on her head.

  Thanks to Annah’s gaiety and inventiveness, the studio on the rue Vercingétorix became a place for gatherings and festivities on Thursday afternoons. Paul would play the accordion, sometimes dressing in a Tahitian pareu and covering his body with fake tattoos. Old friends came to the soirees with their wives and lovers: Daniel de Monfreid and Annette, Charles Morice with a daring countess who was sharing his poverty, the Schuffeneckers, the Spanish sculptor Paco Durrio, who sang and played the guitar, and a pair of neighbors, two Swedish expatriates—the sculptor Ida Molard and her husband, William, a composer—who sometimes brought along a countryman of theirs, a half-mad playwright and inventor called August Strindberg. The Molards had an adolescent daughter, Judith, a restless, romantic girl who was fascinated by the painter’s studio. Paul had hung yellow wallpaper, painted the window frames in shades of amber, and crowded the room with his Tahitian paintings and sculptures. Spikes of vegetation, bright blue skies, emerald seas and lagoons, and voluptuous naked bodies seemed to leap from the walls. Before Annah appeared, Paul had kept a certain distance from his Swedish neighbors’ daughter, amused by her obvious infatuation and never touching her. But since the arrival of exotic Annah, who roused his senses and fantasies, he began to play teasingly with Judith, too, when her parents were nowhere near. He would catch her around the waist, brush her lips, and squeeze her budding breasts, whispering, “This will all be mine, won’t it, young lady?”

  Terrified and pleased, the girl would nod. “Yes, yes, all yours.”

  And so it occurred to him to paint the Molards’ daughter nude. He proposed it to her, and Judith, white as a sheet, didn’t know what to say. Nude, entirely nude? Of course—weren’t artists always painting and sculpting nude models? No one would know because, after completing it, Paul would hide the painting until Judith grew up. Only when she was a full-grown woman would he show it. Would she accept? In the end, she did. They had only three sessions, and the adventure almost ended in disaster. Judith would come up to the studio when her mother, Ida, who nourished a charitable passion for animals, went out with Annah on expeditions around Montparnasse in search of sick or hurt abandoned dogs and cats, which they would bring home, care for, cure, and find adoptive parents for. The girl, naked on some brightly colored Polynesian blankets, never lifted her eyes from the floor; she shrank and curled into herself, trying to make herself as invisible as possible to the eyes probing her secrets.

  By the third session, when Paul had sketched Judith’s spindly silhouette and little oval face with big frightened eyes, Ida Molard burst into the studio shrieking like a player in a Greek tragedy. It was hard work to calm her down, to convince her that your interest in the child was purely aesthetic (was it, Paul?), that you had respected her, that your desire to paint her nude was thoroughly innocent. Ida would be pacified only when you swore that you would abandon the project. In front of her you drenched the unfinished canvas with turpentine and scraped it with a palette knife, obliterating the image
of Judith. Then Ida forgave you and you had tea together. Sulky and scared, the girl listened in silence as they talked, without joining in their conversation.

  When, some time later, Paul decided to do a nude portrait of Annah, he had a brilliant idea: he would superimpose the image of his lover over the unfinished study of Judith. And so he did. The painting took him a long time because of the incorrigible Annah. She was the fidgetiest and most unmanageable model you would ever have, Paul. She was always moving, changing her pose, or, when she was bored, pulling faces to try to make you laugh—the favorite Thursdayevening game, along with spiritism—or, tired of posing, she would simply get up, toss on some clothes, and run outside, as Teha’amana would have done. There would be nothing else to do but put your brushes away and stop work until the next day.

  Painting this portrait was your response to the offensive reviews and talk about your Tahitian paintings that you had been reading and hearing everywhere since the Durand-Ruel exhibition. It was a canvas painted not by a civilized man, but by a savage, by a wolf on two feet, without a collar, only passing through the prison of cement, asphalt, and prejudices that was Paris before returning to your true home in the South Seas. The refined artists of Paris, its finicky critics, its polite collectors, would feel their sensibilities, their moral standards, their tastes assaulted by this frontal nude of a girl who not only was not French, European, or white but also had the gall to show her breasts, navel, mound of Venus, and tuft of pubic hair as if defying anyone to confront her, to face her with a life force, exuberance, or sensuality as strong as hers. Annah hadn’t asked to be what she was; she didn’t even realize the incandescent power she derived from her origins, her blood, the untamed forests where she was born, just like a panther or a cannibal. How superior you were to ossified Parisian women, Annah!

  It wasn’t only the body gradually appearing on the canvas—the head darker than the burnished ocher and gold of the torso and thighs, and the big feet with nails like the claws of a beast—that was provocative; it was also the surroundings, as inharmonious as it was possible to imagine, with Annah arranged in a sacrilegious and obscene pose in a Chinese armchair of blue velvet. The wooden arms of the chair were two Tahitian idols you had invented, one on each side of Annah, like an abjuration of the West and its insipid Christian religion in the name of lusty paganism. And there was the unexpected presence, on the green cushion where Annah’s feet rested, of those luminous little flowers that had been straying into your paintings ever since you discovered Japanese prints, when you first began to paint. Studying the symbolism and subtlety of those prints, you had had your first inkling of what you now saw clearly at last: that European art was ailing, infected by the consumption that killed so many artists, and that only a revitalizing bath in the primitive cultures not yet exterminated by Europe, where an earthly paradise still existed, would rescue it from decadence. The presence on the canvas of Taoa, the red monkey looking half pensive and half lackadaisical at Annah’s feet, reinforced the nonconformity and stifled sexuality that suffused the whole painting. Even the apples floating on the pink background over Annah’s head skewed the symmetry, conventions, and logic fervently worshiped by the artists of Paris. Bravo, Paul!

  Though it proceeded extremely slowly because of Annah’s tendency to wander, the work was stimulating. It was good to paint with conviction again, knowing that you were painting not only with your hands but also with your memories of the landscapes and people of Tahiti—you missed them terribly, Paul—with their ghosts, and, as the mad Dutchman liked to say, with your phallus, which sometimes, in the middle of a session, would swell at the sight of the naked girl and compel you to take her in your arms and carry her to bed. Painting after making love, with the smell of semen in the air, made you feel young again.

  Since coming back from Tahiti, he had written to tell the Viking that as soon as he sold a few paintings and had enough money for the ticket, he would travel to Copenhagen to see her and the children. Mette answered with a letter in which she declared herself surprised and hurt that he hadn’t rushed to see his family as soon as he set foot in Europe. Inertia got the better of him each time a picture of his wife and children came to his mind. That again, Paul? You, a family man again? The legal proceedings required to claim the small inheritance from Uncle Zizi, the appearance of Annah in his life, and the desire she awakened in him to paint again made him keep postponing the family reunion. When spring came, he decided impetuously to take Annah to Brittany, to his old retreat of Pont-Aven, where he had spent so many seasons and had begun to be an artist. It wasn’t just a return to his origins. He wanted to reclaim the works painted there in 1888 and 1890, left with Marie Henry in Le Pouldu in exchange for room and board; since he was always penniless, he had invariably paid late, only in part, or never. Now, thanks to Uncle Zizi’s francs, he could settle his debt. You remembered those canvases with apprehension, because you were a more mature painter now than the simpleton who went to Pont-Aven believing that in the depths of mysterious, religious, tradition-bound Brittany he would find the roots of the primitive world dessicated by civilized Paris.

  His arrival in Pont-Aven caused true commotion, not so much on his account but because of Annah and the capering and shrieks of Taoa, who had learned to leap from her mistress’s arm to Paul’s shoulder and back, waving her arms. As soon as he arrived, he learned that Charles Laval—his companion on his adventures in Panama and Martinique—had died in Egypt, and that his wife, the beautiful Madeleine Bernard, was very ill. This news depressed you, as did memories of your old friends, the artists with whom you had lived out your Brittany dreams years ago: Jacob Meyer de Haan, a recluse in Holland where he was devoted to mysticism; Émile Bernard, also in retreat from the world, immersed in religion and now speaking and writing against you, and good old Schuff, back in Paris, spending his days arguing with his wife instead of painting.

  But in Pont-Aven he met new friends, young painters who knew and admired him for his paintings and his fame as an explorer of the exotic who had left Paris to seek inspiration in far-off Polynesia: Armand Seguin, Émile Jourdan, and the Irishman Roderic O’Conor, who, like their lovers and wives, received him with open arms. They vied to pay him compliments, and they were as obsequious with Annah as they were with Paul. In contrast, Marie Henry—Marie the Doll—from the inn at Le Pouldu, stood firm, despite having greeted him affectionately: the paintings were not on loan or pawned. They had been given in payment for room and board. She would not return them. Though it was said now that they weren’t worth much, in the future they might be. There was nothing to be done.

  As the days went by, the cordial welcome that Paul and Annah had received from the townspeople of Pont-Aven gradually shifted to reticence and then mute hostility. This was because of the childish antics, the mischief making, and the sometimes astonishingly tasteless pranks with which O’Conor, Seguin, Jourdan, and some of the other young artists living in Pont-Aven amused themselves, egged on by Annah, who was delighted by the excesses of her bohemian companions. They got drunk and went out into the streets to torment the local women; they invented ridiculous plays in which Annah was always the heroine. Her shameless poses, silly grimaces, and torrential laughter stunned the townspeople, who scolded the group from their windows at night for their behavior, ordering them to be quiet. Paul participated from a distance in these farces, as a passive spectator. But his presence was a silent endorsement of his disciples’ misbehavior, and the people of Pont-Aven considered him responsible, as the oldest and most important.

  Most notorious was the chicken scandal, conceived by the incorrigible Annah. She convinced Paul’s young disciples—that was what they called themselves—to sneak into old man Gannaec’s henhouse, the best stocked in the region, and replace the chicks’ water with cider to make them drunk. Then they dripped paint on the birds, opened the henhouse door, and shooed them toward the main square, where, as the town band played its Sunday concert, there burst an incredible stream of multic
olored fowl that cackled raucously and turned in circles or fell over, discombobulated. The villagers’ indignation was immense. The mayor and the parish priest presented their complaints to Paul, and urged him to rein in his rash friends. “Any day now this will come to a bad end,” the priest declared.

  And so it did. Weeks after the episode of the drunken, paints-pattered chickens, on the sunny day of May 25, 1894, the whole group—O’Conor, Seguin, Jourdan, and Paul, as well as their respective lovers and wives and Taoa—took advantage of the beautiful weather to walk to Concarneau, an ancient fishing port twelve kilometers from Pont-Aven, where the old walls and stone houses of the medieval quarter were still preserved. From the moment they stepped onto the seaside promenade along the port, Paul had the feeling that something unpleasant was going to happen. The taverns were full of fishermen and sailors who, sitting outside in the splendid sunlight, lowered their mugs of cider and beer in astonishment at the sight of the outlandish group—long-haired men in garish attire and flamboyant women, among whom, strutting like a circus performer, was a black woman leading a screeching monkey on a string and baring her teeth at them. There were exclamations of surprise and disgust, and the group noticed threatening gestures. “Begone, clowns!” Unlike the residents of Pont-Aven, the people of Concarneau weren’t used to artists. And much less to a tiny black woman making faces at them.

  Halfway down the promenade a cloud of children surrounded them, staring curiously, some smiling and others saying things in their crusty Breton that didn’t sound very friendly. All at once, they began to throw little stones, pebbles they took from their pockets. They aimed especially at Annah and the monkey, which huddled against its mistress’s skirts, frightened. Paul saw Armand Seguin move away from the group, catch up with one of the stone throwers, and seize him by the ear.