The Way to Paradise Read online

  Then everything happened so fast that Paul would later remember it as vertiginous. Some fishermen from the nearest tavern got up and came running toward them. A few seconds later, Armand Seguin was flailing, shoved repeatedly by a big man in clogs and a sailor’s cap who roared: “Only I am allowed to hit my son.” Stumbling and falling, Armand was pushed back, back, and finally tumbled into the foamy sea that beat against the parapet. In a youthful impulse, Paul swung his fist at Armand’s attacker and watched him collapse, bellowing, with both hands over his face. It was the last thing he saw, because seconds later, a windmill of men in clogs threw themselves at him, hitting and kicking from every direction all over his body. He defended himself as well as he could, but he slipped and felt his right ankle, crushed and cut open, buckle under him. The pain made him lose consciousness. When he opened his eyes, women’s cries sounded in his ears. Kneeling at his feet, a medic showed Paul his naked leg—he had slit his trousers to examine it—where a splintered bone showed through the bloody flesh. “They’ve broken your tibia, sir. You’ll have to spend a long time in bed.”

  Dizzy, in pain, nauseated, he remembered the return to Pont-Aven in a horse-drawn carriage like a bad dream, each pothole or bump making him howl. To help him sleep, he was given little swallows of a bitter cordial, which scratched his throat.

  He spent two months in bed at the Pension Gloanec, in a little room with a very low roof and pygmy windows, which was turned into an infirmary. The doctor’s verdict was disheartening: with his tibia broken, it was out of the question to return to Paris, or even to try to stand. Only with complete bed rest would the bone return to its proper place and knit; in any case, he would always limp and in the future he would have to use a cane. For the rest of your life you would remember the pains you felt in those eight weeks spent motionless in bed, Paul. Or rather, the single pain, blind, intense, animal, that drenched you in sweat or made you shiver, sob, and rave, certain that you had lost your mind. Tranquilizers and painkillers didn’t help at all. Only alcohol, which you drank almost ceaselessly, numbed you and afforded you brief intervals of peace. But soon not even alcohol could ease the torment, which made you beg the doctor when he came each week, “Cut off my leg, please!” Anything to put an end to your infernal sufferings. The doctor decided to prescribe laudanum. The opium made you drowsy; in your stupor, that slow, spinning calm, you forgot your ankle and Pont-Aven, the Concarneau affair, and everything else. Only a single thought occupied your mind: “This is a sign. Leave as soon as possible. Return to Polynesia and never come back to Europe again, Koké.”

  After an unfathomably long time, and after a night in which he at last slept without nightmares, he awoke one morning with a clear head. The Irishman O’Conor was on guard beside his bed. Where was Annah? He had the feeling it had been many days since he had seen her.

  “She went back to Paris,” the Irishman told him. “She was very sad. She couldn’t stay here after the neighbors poisoned Taoa.”

  That, at least, was what Annah assumed had happened—that the villagers of Pont-Aven, who hated Taoa as much as they hated her, had prepared the mess of bananas that gave Taoa the stomachache that killed her. Instead of burying her, Annah gutted the monkey with her own hands, sobbing, and took the remains away with her to Paris. Paul remembered that Titi Little-Tits, when she grew bored of Mataiea, had left him to return to the exciting nightlife of Papeete. Would you ever see naughty Annah again? Not a chance.

  When he could get up—he did limp, and couldn’t move without a cane—he had to attend several police hearings about the fight in Concarneau before he returned to Paris. He expected nothing from the judges, fellow countrymen of the attackers, and probably just as hostile as the fishermen toward bohemians who disturbed the peace. The fishermen were acquitted, of course, in a sentence that was an insult to common sense, and made to pay only a symbolic sum in damages, which didn’t cover even a tenth of the cost of his care. Away, away, as soon as possible. Away from Brittany, France, Europe. This world had turned against you, and if you didn’t hurry, it would be the death of you, Koké.

  The last week in Pont-Aven, as he was learning to walk again—he had lost twenty-five pounds—Alfred Jarry, a young poet and writer from Paris, came to visit him. Jarry called him maestro and made him laugh with his drolleries. He had seen Paul’s paintings at Durand-Ruel’s and in the homes of collectors, and he was extravagantly admiring, reading aloud several poems he had written about them. He listened raptly to Paul’s rantings about French and European art. Paul invited him and the other Pont-Aven disciples, who saw him off at the station, to follow him to Oceania. Together they would form the Studio of the Tropics that the mad Dutchman had dreamed of in Arles. Working in the open air, living like pagans, they would revolutionize art, restoring to it the strength and daring it had lost. They all swore they would come. Together, they would travel to Tahiti. But on the train back to Paris, he suspected that they, like his old friends Charles Laval and Émile Bernard, would fail to keep their word. You’d never see your new Pont-Aven friends again, either, Paul.

  In Paris, everything went from bad to worse. It seemed impossible that things could deteriorate even further after those months of convalescence in Brittany. In the art world, because of despicable politics, suspicion and uncertainty ruled. Since the assassination of President Sadi Carnot by an anarchist, the climate of repression, the denunciations, and the persecutions had led many of his acquaintances and friends (or ex-friends) who sympathized with the anarchists (like Camille Pissarro), or who opposed the government (like Octave Mirbeau), to leave. There was panic in artistic circles. Would you have problems because you were the grandson of revolutionary and anarchist Flora Tristán? The police were so stupid they might have you classified as a hereditary subversive.

  Quite a surprise awaited him upon his return to number 6, rue Vercingétorix. Not content with moving away and leaving him half dead in Brittany, Annah, that devil in skirts, had ransacked the studio, taking furniture, rugs, curtains, clothing, jewelry, and keepsakes that she had surely already auctioned off at the flea market and in the dens of Paris usurers. But—the supreme humiliation, Paul!—she hadn’t taken a single painting, drawing, or notebook. She left them behind as useless junk in the otherwise empty room. After a burst of rage and cursing, Paul began to laugh. You felt no hostility toward that magnificent savage. She really was one, Paul. A true savage to the marrow, in body and soul. You still had much to learn before you could match her.

  In those last few months in Paris, while preparing for his definitive return to Polynesia, he missed the little whirlwind who called herself Javanese but might have been Malaysian, Indian, or anything at all. To console himself for her absence, he had his nude portrait of her, which he devoted himself to retouching until he felt that it was finished, as Judith, the Molards’ daughter, watched in a state of trance.

  “Do you see yourself there, Judith, in the background, showing through that pink wall, like Annah’s white and blond double?”

  No matter how hard she stared, or how long she studied the canvas, Judith couldn’t distinguish the silhouette behind Annah that Paul pointed out to her. But you weren’t lying. The outline of the girl, which you had erased with turpentine and scraped away with a palette knife to pacify her mother, Ida, hadn’t entirely disappeared. It showed through briefly, like magic, a fleeting apparition, at certain hours of the day, in a certain light, charging the painting with secret ambiguity, a mysterious undercurrent. He painted the title over Annah’s head around some floating fruits, in Tahitian: Aita tamari vahine Judith te parari.

  “What does that mean?” the girl asked.

  “The woman-child Judith, still untouched,” translated Paul. “You see, although at first glance this seems to be a portrait of Annah, you’re the real heroine of the painting.”

  Lying on the old mattress that the Molards had lent him so he wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor, he said to himself many times that the canvas would be the only goo
d memory of his return to Paris, so pointless, so painful. He had finished the preparations for his departure to Tahiti, but he had had to postpone the trip because—“It never rains but it pours,” his mother used to say in Lima, when she lived on the charity of the Tristán family—his legs were covered with eczema. The burning and itching tormented him, and the blotches turned into a solid expanse of pus-filled sores. He had to spend three weeks on the infectious disease ward at La Salpêtrière. Two doctors confirmed what you already knew, although you never accepted the truth. The unspeakable illness, again. It would retreat from time to time, giving you respites of six or eight months, but beneath the surface it continued its deadly work, poisoning your blood. Now it manifested itself on your legs, stripping the skin from them, making them erupt in bloody craters. Later, it would move up to your chest, your arms, your eyes, and leave you in shadows. Then your life would be over, even if you were still alive, Paul. The cursed thing wouldn’t stop there, either. It would continue until it had penetrated your brain, robbed you of your senses and memory, driven you mad—until you were a contemptible ruin, at whom people would spit, from whom all would shrink. You would become a mangy dog, Paul. To ward off his depression, he secretly drank the alcohol brought to him in coffee jugs or soda bottles by chivalrous Monfreid and generous Schuff.

  When he left La Salpêtrière, his legs were dry, although they were crisscrossed with scars. His clothes hung on him, he was so thin. With his long chestnut hair, now liberally streaked with gray and held back by a big astrakhan hat; his jutting broken nose above which his blue eyes twitched, in perpetual agitation; and the goatee on his chin, he was still imposing, and so were his movements and gestures and the profanities with which he salted his talk when he met his friends at their houses or on the terrace of some café, since he could no longer receive anyone in his empty studio. People turned to stare at him, and point, because of his appearance and his eccentricities: the reddish black cape that he wore flying behind him, his shirts in Tahitian colors and his Breton vest, his blue velvet trousers. They thought him a magician, an ambassador from an exotic country.

  The inheritance from Uncle Zizi was much reduced by the cost of hospital stays and doctors, so he bought himself a third-class ticket on the Australian, which, setting sail from Marseille on July 3, 1895, would cross the Suez Canal and arrive in Sydney at the beginning of August. From Sydney he would take a connection to Papeete, via New Zealand. Before he left, he tried to sell his remaining paintings and sculptures. He held an exhibition in his own studio, to which, with the help of his friends and a cryptic invitation composed by the Swede August Strindberg, whose plays were now very popular in Paris, he managed to attract some collectors. Sales were meager. An auction of all his remaining work held at the Hôtel Drouot was somewhat more successful, although it didn’t live up to his expectations. He was in such a hurry to reach Tahiti that he couldn’t hide his eagerness. One night, at the Molards’, the Spaniard Paco Durrio asked him why he was nostalgic for a place so terribly far from Europe.

  “Because I am no longer a Frenchman or a European, Paco. Although my appearance might suggest otherwise, I am a tattooed native, a cannibal, a black islander.”

  His friends laughed, but he was telling them something true, though exaggerating as usual.

  While he was preparing his baggage—he had bought an accordion and a guitar to replace those taken by Annah, many photographs, and a good stock of canvases, stretchers, brushes, and paint—he received a furious letter from the Viking, in Copenhagen. She had learned of the public sale of his paintings and sculptures at the Hôtel Drouot, and she was claiming her share. How could he treat his wife and five children so unnaturally, children whom she, working miracles—teaching French, translating, begging for help from her relatives and friends—had spent so many years supporting? It was his obligation as father and husband to help them, by sending them money from time to time. Now he was in the position to do so, selfish beast.

  Mette’s letter exasperated and saddened him, but he didn’t send her a cent. Stronger than the remorse that sometimes assaulted him—especially when he thought of his daughter Aline, a sweet and delicate girl—was his overpowering desire to go away, to get to Tahiti, which he should never have left. Hard luck, Viking. He needed the little money he had made at the public sale to return to Polynesia; he wanted his bones to be buried there, not on this continent of freezing winters and frigid women. Let her get by with the paintings of his that she still had, and let her be consoled by her belief —it wasn’t yours, Paul—that the sins her husband had committed by neglecting his family he would pay for by burning in hell for all eternity.

  On the eve of his voyage there was a going-away party at the Molards’ apartment. They ate and drank, and Paco Durrio danced and sang Andalusian songs. When Paul forbade his friends to accompany him to the station the next morning, where he would take the train to Marseille, little Judith burst into tears.

  7

  NEWS FROM PERU

  ROANNE AND SAINT-ÉTIENNE, JUNE 1844

  The sky was full of stars and a richly scented summer breeze was blowing the night that Flora arrived in Roanne from Lyon, on June 14, 1844. At her boardinghouse, unable to sleep, she sat staring out the window at the blazing firmament, but her thoughts were all of Eléonore Blanc. If every poor woman were as energetic, intelligent, and thoughtful as the little Lyonnais worker of whom she had grown so fond, the revolution would be over in a matter of months. With Eléonore on it, the Workers’ Union committee would function perfectly as the engine of the great workers’ alliance of the south of France.

  You missed the girl, Florita. On this calm and starry night in Roanne, you would have liked to hold her tight and feel her slender body again, as you felt it the day you went looking for her at her wretched hovel on the rue Luzerne, and found her crying.

  “What’s wrong, my child? Why are you crying so?”

  “I fear not being strong or worthy enough to do everything you expect of me, madame.”

  Hearing the girl talk like that, stricken with emotion, and seeing the affection and reverence in her gaze, Flora had to make a great effort not to cry, too. She threw her arms around her and kissed her on her forehead and cheeks. Eléonore’s husband, a dye worker with stained hands, understood nothing.

  “Eléonore says you’ve taught her more in these last few weeks than she’s learned in her whole life so far. And instead of being happy, she cries! Who’s to understand her!”

  Poor girl, married to such a fool. Would she be destroyed by marriage, too? No, you would make sure to protect and rescue her, Andalusa. She imagined a new kind of human relationship, in a society transformed by the Workers’ Union. Marriage as it existed—the buying and selling of women—would give way to the free choice of partners. Two people would be united because they loved each other and had common goals; if they came to disagree, they would separate on friendly terms. Sex would not dominate, as it did even in Fourier’s concept of Phalansteries; it would be moderated, held in check by the love for humanity. Desires would be less selfish, since couples would devote much of their affection to others, to the improvement of life in common. In such a world, you and Eléonore could live together and love each other like mother and daughter, or two sisters, or lovers, united by a single cause and by solidarity with your fellow human beings. And your relationship would not have the exclusivist and egotistic slant that your affair with Olympia had had (which is why you ended it, giving up the only pleasurable sexual experience of your life, Florita); on the contrary, it would be sustained by a shared love for justice and social action.

  The next morning she began her work in Roanne, setting out very early. The journalist Auguste Guyard—a liberal and a Catholic but an admirer of Flora, whose books on Peru and England he had reviewed enthusiastically—had organized two meetings for her of thirty workers each. They weren’t very successful. Compared to the shrewd and restless canuts of Lyon, the Roannais seemed exceedingly passive. But aft
er visiting three cotton textile factories—the major local industry, which employed four thousand workers—Flora was surprised that the wretches weren’t even more backward, given the conditions in which they worked.

  Her worst experience was in the textile workshops of a former laborer, Monsieur Cherpin, who was now one of the region’s richest men and an exploiter of his erstwhile brethren. Tall, strong, hairy, vulgar, with coarse manners and an odor from his armpits that made her head swim, he greeted her with a mocking stare, looking her up and down without bothering to hide his disdain—he, after all, was a successful man and she was an insignificant woman committed to the unnecessary salvation of humanity.

  “Are you sure you want to go down there?” He gestured toward the basement workshop. “You’ll regret it, I warn you.”

  “We’ll speak later, Monsieur Cherpin.”

  “If you come out alive,” he chuckled.

  Eighty unfortunates were squeezed into a stifling cave crowded with three rows of looms, in which it was impossible to stand upright because the roof was so low, or to move because it was so cramped. A rathole, Andalusa. She thought she was going to faint. The fiery heat of the furnace, the pestilence, and the deafening noise of eighty looms working at once made her ill. She could barely form questions to put to the half-naked, dirty, skeletal beings crouched over their looms, many of whom barely understood her since they spoke only the Burgundian dialect. A world of ghosts, apparitions, the living dead. They worked from five in the morning until nine at night, and the men made two francs a day, women eighty centimes, and children (under the age of fourteen) fifty centimes. She returned to the surface drenched in sweat, her temples throbbing, and her heart racing, clearly feeling in her breast the chill of her uncomfortable lodger. Monsieur Cherpin handed her a glass of water, laughing obscenely all the while.