The Way to Paradise Page 2

  “But that would be revolution,” the priest sputtered, letting fall a fine rain of saliva.

  “On the contrary,” Flora corrected him. “The Workers’ Union is conceived to avoid revolution, so that justice may triumph without the least bit of bloodshed.”

  Otherwise, there might be more deaths than in 1789. Didn’t the priest, from hearing confession, know the sufferings of the poor? Didn’t he realize that hundreds of thousands, millions of human beings, worked fifteen, eighteen hours a day, like animals, yet didn’t earn enough even to feed their children? Wasn’t he, who saw women and spoke with them every day at church, aware of how they were humiliated, mistreated, exploited, by their parents, their husbands, their children? Their fate was even worse than that of the workers. If nothing changed, there would be an explosion of hatred in society. The Workers’ Union was created to prevent this. The Catholic Church should help it in its crusade. Didn’t Catholics want peace, compassion, social harmony? In this the Church and the Workers’ Union thoroughly concurred.

  “I may not be a Catholic, but Christian philosophy and morality guide my actions, Father,” she assured him.

  When he heard her say that she wasn’t Catholic, although she was Christian, Father Fortin’s round face grew pale. Giving a little jump, he wanted to know whether this meant the lady was Protestant. Flora explained that she wasn’t: she believed in Jesus but not in the Church, because in her judgment Catholicism’s hierarchical structure suppressed human freedom. And its dogmatic beliefs stifled intellectual life, free will, and scientific endeavors. Also, its teaching that chastity was a sign of spiritual purity strengthened the prejudices that had made women little more than slaves.

  The priest passed from pallor to near apoplexy. He blinked rapidly, flustered and alarmed. Flora fell silent when she saw him brace himself against his worktable, shuddering. He seemed ready to collapse.

  “Do you realize what you are saying, madame?” he stammered. “For these ideas you’ve come to ask the help of the Church?”

  Yes, precisely. Didn’t the Catholic Church claim to be the church of the poor? Wasn’t it opposed to injustice, the spirit of lucre, the exploitation of human beings, greed? If so, then the Church had the obligation to support a project that proposed to bring justice to this world in the name of love and brotherhood.

  Flora tried a good while longer to make herself understood, but it was like talking to a wall, or a mule. Impossible. The priest wouldn’t even argue with her. He gazed at her with fear and repugnance, not bothering to disguise his impatience. At last he muttered that he couldn’t promise to help her, since that would depend on the bishop of the diocese. She should go to the bishop and explain her proposal—although, he warned her, it was unlikely that any bishop would sponsor a social initiative that was openly anti-Catholic. And if the bishop prohibited it, no churchgoer would help her, since the Catholic flock obeyed its shepherds.

  And, thought Flora as she listened to him, according to the Saint-Simonians, the principle of authority must be reinforced in order for society to function properly. The same respect for authority that makes Catholics into automatons, like this wretch.

  She tried to take her leave of Father Fortin in a friendly manner, offering him a copy of The Workers’ Union.

  “Read it at least, Father. You’ll see that my project is full of Christian sentiments.”

  “I won’t read it,” said Father Fortin, shaking his head vigorously without taking the book. “It’s clear from what you’ve told me that this book is unclean. That it was inspired, perhaps without your knowing it, by Beelzebub himself.”

  As she returned the little book to her pocket, Flora began to laugh. “You’re one of those priests who would build bonfires in every square again to burn all the free and intelligent people in the world, Father,” she said as she left.

  In her room at the inn, after some hot soup, she took stock of her day in Auxerre. She wasn’t discouraged. Chin up, Florita. Things hadn’t gone well, but they hadn’t gone badly either. Putting yourself at the service of humanity was hard work, Andalusa.

  2

  THE SPIRIT OF THE DEAD WATCHES

  MATAIEA, APRIL 1892

  He owed his nickname, Koké, to Teha’amana, who was his first wife on the island, since Titi Little-Tits, the New Zealander–Maori chatterbox he lived with for his first few months in Tahiti—in Papeete, then Paea, and finally Mataiea—wasn’t his wife, properly speaking, just a lover. In the beginning, everyone called him Paul.

  He had arrived in Papeete at dawn on June 9, 1891, after a journey of two and a half months from Marseille, with stops at Aden and Noumea, where he had to change ships. When he set foot in Tahiti at last, he had just turned forty-three. He had brought all his belongings with him, as if to show that he was finished forever with Europe and Paris: one hundred yards of canvas, paints, oils, and brushes, a hunting horn, two mandolins, a guitar, several Breton pipes, an old pistol, and a bundle of old clothes. He was a man who seemed strong—but your health was already secretly undermined, Paul—with prominent, darting blue eyes, a straight-lipped mouth generally curled in a disdainful sneer, and a broken nose like a hawk’s beak. He had a short, curly beard and long brown hair, shading to red, that he cut shortly after coming to this city of barely three thousand souls (five hundred of them popa’a, or Europeans), because Lieutenant Jénot, of the French navy, one of his first friends in Papeete, told him that his long hair and little Buffalo Bill cowboy hat made the Maori think he was a mahu, or a man-woman.

  He arrived full of expectation. Breathing the warm air of Papeete, dazzled by the brilliant light shining from the bluest of blue skies, and feeling all around him the presence of nature in the explosion of fruit trees that sprang up everywhere and filled the dusty little streets of the city with smells—orange, lemon, apple, coconut, mango, exuberant guava, nutritious breadfruit—he was seized by a desire to work that he hadn’t felt in a long time. But he couldn’t start immediately, because he had gotten off on the wrong foot in the land of his dreams. A few days after his arrival, the capital of French Polynesia buried the last Maori king, Pomare V, in an impressive ceremony that Paul observed with pencil in hand, filling a notebook with sketches and drawings. A few days later, he thought he was about to die too. At the beginning of August 1891, just as he was beginning to adapt to the heat and the penetrating fragrances of Papeete, he suffered a violent hemorrhage and a racing of the heart that made his chest rise and fall like a bellows and left him gasping for breath. The helpful Jénot took him to the Vaiami Hospital, named for the river flowing by on its way to the sea, a vast complex of buildings with coquettish wooden railings and windows screened against insects, its gardens riotous with mango trees, breadfruit trees, and royal palms with lofty topknots where songbirds clustered. The doctors prescribed a digitalis-based medicine for his weak heart, mustard plasters to treat the sores on his legs, and the application of cupping glasses to his chest. And they confirmed that this attack was yet another manifestation of the unspeakable illness with which he had been diagnosed months before in Paris. The Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny who ran the Vaiami Hospital scolded him, half in jest and half seriously, for swearing like a sailor (“That’s what I was for many years, Sister”), for smoking his pipe ceaselessly despite his ill health, and for demanding with brusque gestures that his cups of coffee be dosed with splashes of brandy.

  As soon as he left the hospital—the doctors wanted him to stay, but he refused, since the twelve francs a day that they charged wreaked havoc on his budget—he moved to one of the cheapest boardinghouses he could find in Papeete, in the Chinese quarter behind the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, an ugly stone building erected just a few feet from the sea. He could see the cathedral’s reddish-shingled wooden steeple from the boardinghouse. Concentrated in the neighborhood, in wooden shacks ornamented with red lanterns and inscriptions in Mandarin, were many of the three hundred Chinese who had come to Tahiti as agricultural laborers but, becau
se of the poor harvests and the ruin of some of the colonial estates, had migrated to Papeete, where they devoted themselves to running small businesses. Mayor François Cardella had authorized the opening of opium dens in the neighborhood; only the Chinese were allowed to visit, but shortly after moving in, Paul managed to sneak into one and smoke a pipe. The experience didn’t seduce him; the pleasure of narcotics was too passive for him, possessed as he was by the demon of action.

  He was able to live cheaply in the Chinatown boardinghouse, but the cramped quarters and pestilence—there were pigpens in the area, and the slaughterhouse, where all kinds of animals were killed, was nearby—diminished his desire to paint and forced him out onto the street. He would go and sit at one of the little portside bars and spend hours playing dominoes over a sugary absinthe. Lieutenant Jénot—slender, elegant, gracious, very well bred—let him know that living among the Chinese in Papeete would ruin his reputation among the colonists, which Paul was happy to hear. What better way of becoming the savage he had long dreamed of being than to be shunned by the popa’a of Tahiti?

  He didn’t meet Titi Little-Tits in any of Papeete’s seven little port bars, where sailors passing through went to get drunk and look for women, but rather in the big Market Square, an open space around a railed-off square fountain from which issued a languid trickle of water. Bordered by the rue Bonard and the rue des Beaux Arts, and adjacent to the gardens of City Hall, Market Square was the central place for selling food, household goods, and cheap wares from dawn until midafternoon; at night, however, it became the Meat Market, as it was called by the Europeans of Papeete, whose terrifying visions of the place were associated with licentiousness and sex. Swarming with roving vendors of oranges, watermelon, coconuts, pineapples, chestnuts, syrupy sweets, flowers, and trinkets, it was the site of festivities and dances that ended in orgies in the pale glow of oil lamps, drumbeats echoing in the dark. It wasn’t just the natives who took part; there were also some Europeans of dubious reputation: soldiers, sailors, traveling merchants, vagabonds, nervous adolescents. The freedom with which love was bargained for and practiced there, in scenes of true collective abandon, thrilled Paul. When it became known that the Parisian painter who lived among the Chinese in Papeete was also an assiduous visitor to the Meat Market, his reputation touched bottom among the families of colonial society. Never again was he invited to the Military Club, where he had been taken by Jénot shortly after he arrived, or to any ceremony presided over by Mayor Cardella or Governor Lacascade, who had received him cordially upon his arrival.

  Titi Little-Tits was at the Meat Market that night, offering her services. She was a woman of mixed New Zealander and Maori blood, friendly and talkative, who must have been beautiful in a youth spent early in rough living. Paul agreed with her on a modest fee, and brought her back to his boardinghouse. But the night they spent together was so pleasant that Titi Little-Tits refused to take his money. Enamored of Paul, she moved in with him. Although she looked older than she was, she was a tireless lover and in those first months she helped him stave off his loneliness and adjust to his new life in Tahiti.

  Soon after they began living together, she agreed to accompany him to the interior of the island, far from Papeete. Paul explained that he had come to Polynesia to live the life of the natives, not a European life, and that to do so it was necessary for him to leave the Westernized capital. They lived for a few weeks in Paea, where Paul never felt quite comfortable, and then in Mataiea, some sixty-five miles from Papeete. There, he rented a hut on the bay, from which he could bathe in the sea. Across the bay was a small island, and behind the hut rose a steep wall of sharp mountain peaks, dense with vegetation. As soon as they were established in Mataiea, he began to paint, with true creative fury. And in the hours spent smoking his pipe and sketching, or standing in front of his easel, he lost interest in Titi Little-Tits, whose incessant talk distracted him. After painting he would strum his guitar or sing popular tunes, accompanying himself on his mandolin, so that he wouldn’t have to talk to her. When will she leave? he wondered, curiously observing Titi Little-Tits’s evident boredom. It wasn’t long before she did. When he had finished some thirty paintings and had been in Tahiti for exactly eight months, he woke up one morning and discovered a farewell note. It was a model of concision: “Goodbye and no hard feelings, dear Paul.”

  He didn’t mourn her much; really, once he was painting seriously, she had become more of a nuisance than good company. She plagued him with her chatter; if she hadn’t left, he would probably have had to throw her out. At last he could concentrate and work in peace. After illnesses, difficulties, and missteps, he began to feel that his coming to the South Seas in search of the primitive world hadn’t been in vain. Not in vain at all, Paul. Since burying yourself in Mataiea, you had produced thirty paintings, and although none might be masterpieces, your painting was freer, bolder because of the wild world around you. But were you happy? No, you weren’t.

  A few weeks after the departure of Titi Little-Tits, he began to crave a woman. His Mataiea neighbors, almost all Maori, with whom he was friendly and whom he sometimes invited to his hut to drink rum, advised him to search for a companion in the villages on the east coast, where there were many girls eager to be married. In the end, it was easier than he had supposed. He went on a horseback expedition that he dubbed “in search of the Sabine,” and in the tiny settlement of Faaone, at a shop by the side of the road where he stopped for a drink, the woman serving him asked what he was looking for there.

  “A girl who’d like to live with me,” he joked.

  The woman, broad in the hips but still pretty, studied him for a moment before speaking again, scrutinizing him as if she were trying to read his soul.

  “Maybe my daughter would suit you,” she proposed at last, very serious. “Do you want to see her?”

  Taken aback, Paul agreed. Moments later, the woman returned with Teha’amana. She said that the girl was only thirteen, despite her developed body, with its firm breasts and thighs, and fleshy lips that parted over a set of bright white teeth. Paul moved closer to her, somewhat flustered. Would she like to be his wife? The girl nodded, laughing.

  “You aren’t afraid of me, even though you don’t know me?”

  Teha’amana shook her head.

  “Have you ever been sick?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know how to cook?”

  Half an hour later, he set out home for Mataiea, followed on foot by his brand-new acquisition, a local beauty who spoke charming French and was carrying all her belongings on her shoulder. He offered to sit her on the horse’s rump, but the girl refused, as if he had proposed some sacrilege. From that day on, she called him Koké. The name spread rapidly, and soon all the residents of Mataiea—and later all Tahitians and even many Europeans—would call him that.

  Many times he would recall those first months of conjugal life with Teha’amana in the hut in Mataiea in the middle of 1892 as the best he had known in Tahiti, and maybe the world. His little wife was an endless source of pleasure. Willingly, without reservations, she gave herself to him when he asked, and loved him freely, with gratifying delight. She was a hard worker, too—so different from Titi Little-Tits!—and she washed clothes, cleaned the hut, and cooked with as much enthusiasm as she made love. When she swam in the sea or the lagoon, her inky skin was dappled with reflections that moved him. On her left foot she had seven toes instead of five; two were fleshy growths that embarrassed the girl. But they amused Koké, and he liked to stroke them.

  Only when he asked her to pose did they quarrel. It bored Teha’-amana to stay still in a single position for a long time, and sometimes she would simply walk away with a scowl of annoyance. If it hadn’t been for his chronic problems with money, which never arrived in time and slipped through his fingers when it did arrive—the remittances sent by his friend Daniel de Monfreid from the sale of paintings in Europe—Koké would have said that in those months happiness was at last catchi
ng up with him. But when would you paint your masterpiece, Koké?

  Later, with his habit of turning minor incidents into myths, he would tell himself that the tupapaus destroyed the sense he had in the early days with Teha’amana of nearly being able to touch Eden. But it was to those demons of the Maori pantheon that you owed your first Tahitian masterpiece, too: you couldn’t complain, Koké. He had been on the island for almost a year, and still he knew nothing about the evil spirits that rise from corpses to poison the lives of the living. He learned of them from a book he was loaned by Auguste Goupil, the richest colonist on the island, and this—what a coincidence—at almost the same time that he had proof of their existence.

  He had gone to Papeete, as he often did, to see if there was any money from Paris. These were journeys that he tried to avoid, because a round trip on the public coach cost nine francs, and there was the bone-jarring torment on the wretched road, too, especially if it was muddy. He had left at dawn in order to return by afternoon, but a downpour had washed out the road and the coach let him off in Mataiea after midnight. The hut was dark. That was odd. Teha’amana never slept without leaving a small lamp burning. His heart skipped a beat: might she have left him? Here, women changed husbands as easily as they changed clothes. In that respect at least, the efforts of missionaries and ministers to get the Maori to adopt the strict Christian model of the family were quite futile. In domestic matters the natives had not entirely lost the spirit of their ancestors. One day, a husband or wife would simply decide to move out, and no one would be surprised. Families were made and unmade with an ease unthinkable in Europe. If she had gone, you would miss her very much. Yes, Teha’-amana you would miss.

  He entered the hut and, crossing the threshold, felt in his pockets for a box of matches. He lit one, and in the small bluish-yellow flame that flared between his fingers, he saw a sight he would never forget, and would try to rescue over the next days and weeks, painting in the feverish, trancelike state in which he had always done his best work. As time passed, the sight would persist in his memory as one of those privileged, visionary moments of his life in Tahiti, when he seemed to touch and live, though only for a few instants, what he had come in search of in the South Seas, the thing he would never find in Europe, where it had been extinguished by civilization. On the mattress on the ground, naked, facedown, with her round buttocks lifted and her back slightly arched, half turned toward him, Teha’amana stared at him with an expression of infinite horror, her eyes, mouth, and nose frozen in a mask of animal terror. He was frightened himself, and his palms grew wet, his heart beating wildly. He had to drop the match, which was burning the tips of his fingers. When he lit another, the girl was in the same position, with the same expression on her face, petrified with fear.