The Way to Paradise Page 3

  “It’s me, it’s me—Koké,” he said soothingly, going to her. “Don’t be afraid, Teha’amana.”

  She broke into tears, sobbing hysterically, and in her incoherent murmuring he caught several times the word tupapau, tupapau. It was the first time he had heard it, though he had read it before. As he held Teha’amana on his knees, cradled against his chest while she recovered, he was immediately reminded of the book he had borrowed from Goupil, Travels to the Islands of the Pacific Ocean, written in 1837 by a French consul to the islands, Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout, in which there appeared the strange word that Teha’amana was now repeating in a choked voice, scolding him for leaving her there with no oil in the lamp, knowing how afraid she was of the dark, because it was in the dark that the tupapaus came out. That was it, Koké: when you entered the dark room and lit the match, Teha’amana mistook you for a ghost.

  So those spirits of the dead did exist, evil creatures with hooked claws and fangs, things that lived in holes, caves, hidden places in the brush, and hollow trunks, and came out at night to frighten the living and torment them. Moerenhout’s book was meticulous in its descriptions of the disappeared gods and demons that existed before the Europeans came and eradicated the Maori beliefs and customs. And perhaps they even made an appearance in that novel by Loti, the novel Vincent liked so much and which first put the idea of Tahiti in your head. Not all was lost, after all. Something of that lovely past still beat beneath the Christian trappings the missionaries and pastors had forced on the islanders. It was never discussed, and every time Koké tried to get something out of the natives about their old beliefs, about the days when they were free as only savages can be free, they looked at him blankly and laughed—what was he talking about?—as if what their ancestors used to do and love and fear had disappeared from their lives. It wasn’t true; at least one myth was still alive, proved by the fretting of the girl you held in your arms: tupapau, tupapau.

  He felt his cock stiffen. He was trembling with excitement. Noticing, the girl stretched out on the mattress with that cadenced, slightly feline slowness of the native women that so seduced and intrigued him, waiting for him to undress. He lay down beside her, his body on fire, but instead of climbing on top of her, he made her turn over and lie facedown in the position in which he had surprised her. He was still seeing the indelible spectacle of those buttocks tightened and raised by fear. It was a struggle to penetrate her—she purred, protested, shrank, and finally screamed—and as soon as he felt his cock inside her, squeezed and painful, he ejaculated with a howl. For an instant, while sodomizing Teha’amana, he felt like a savage.

  The next morning he began to work at first light. The day was dry and there were sparse clouds in the sky; soon a riot of colors would erupt around him. He went for a brief plunge under the waterfall, naked, remembering that shortly after he had arrived, an unpleasant gendarme called Claverie had seen him splashing in the river with no clothes on and fined him for “offending public morality.” Your first encounter with a reality that contradicted your dreams, Koké. He went back to the hut and made a cup of tea, tripping over himself. He was seething with impatience. When Teha’amana woke up half an hour later, he was so absorbed in his sketches and notes, preparing for his painting, that he didn’t even hear her say good morning.

  For a week he was shut away, working constantly. He only left his studio at midday to eat some fruit in the shade of the leafy mango tree that grew beside the hut, or to open a can of food, and he persisted until the light faded. The second day, he called Teha’amana, undressed her, and made her lie on the mattress in the position in which he had discovered her when she mistook him for a tupapau. He realized immediately that it was absurd. The girl could never reproduce what he wanted to capture in the painting: that religious terror from the remotest past that made her see the demon, that fear so powerful it materialized a tupapau. Now she was laughing, or fighting to hold back laughter, trying to make herself look frightened again as he begged her to do. Her body lacked the right tension, too, the arch of the spine that had lifted her buttocks in the most arousing way Koké had ever seen. It was stupid to ask her to pose. The raw material was in his memory, the image he saw every time he closed his eyes, and the desire that drove him those days while he was painting and reworking Manao tupapau to possess his vahine every night, and sometimes during the day, too, in the studio. Painting her he felt, as he had only a few times before, how right he had been in Brittany at the Pension Gloanec when he assured the young men who listened ardently to him and called themselves his disciples, “To truly paint we must shake off our civilized selves and call forth the savage inside.”

  Yes, this was truly the painting of a savage. He regarded it with satisfaction when it seemed to him that it was finished. In him, as in the savage mind, the everyday and the fantastic were united in a single reality, somber, forbidding, infused with religiosity and desire, life and death. The lower half of the painting was objective, realist; the upper half subjective and unreal but no less authentic. The naked girl would be obscene without the fear in her eyes and the incipient downturn of her mouth. But fear didn’t diminish her beauty. It augmented it, tightening her buttocks in such an insinuating way, making them an altar of human flesh on which to celebrate a barbaric ceremony, in homage to a cruel and pagan god. And in the upper part of the canvas was the ghost, which was really more yours than Tahitian, Koké. It bore no resemblance to those demons with claws and dragon teeth that Moerenhout described. It was an old woman in a hooded cloak, like the crones of Brittany forever fixed in your memory, timeless women who, when you lived in Pont-Aven or Le Pouldu, you would meet on the streets of Finistère. They seemed half dead already, ghosts in life. If a statistical analysis were deemed necessary, the items belonging to the objective world were these: the mattress, jet-black like the girl’s hair; the yellow flowers; the greenish sheets of pounded bark; the pale green cushion; and the pink cushion, whose tint seemed to have been transferred to the girl’s upper lip. This order of reality was counterbalanced by the painting’s upper half: there the floating flowers were sparks, gleams, featherlight phosphorescent meteors aloft in a bluish mauve sky in which the colored brushstrokes suggested a cascade of pointed leaves.

  The ghost, in profile and very quiet, leaned against a cylindrical post, a totem of delicately colored abstract forms, reddish and glassy blue in tone. This upper half was a mutable, shifting, elusive substance, seeming as if it might evaporate at any minute. From up close, the ghost had a straight nose, swollen lips, and the large fixed eye of a parrot. You had managed to give the whole a flawless harmony, Koké. Funereal music emanated from it, and light shone from the greenish-yellow of the sheet and the orange-tinted yellow of the flowers.

  “What should I call it?” he asked Teha’amana, after considering many names and rejecting them all.

  The girl thought, her expression serious. Then she nodded, pleased. “Manao tupapau.” It was hard for him to tell from Teha’-amana’s explanation whether the correct translation was “She is thinking of the spirit of the dead” or “The spirit of the dead is remembering her.” He liked that ambiguity.

  A week after he had finished his masterpiece he was still giving it the final touches, and he spent whole hours standing in front of the canvas, contemplating it. You had succeeded, hadn’t you, Koké? The painting didn’t look like the work of a civilized man, a Christian, a European. Rather, it seemed that of an ex-European, a formerly civilized man, an ex-Christian who, by force of will, adventure, and suffering, had expelled from himself the frivolous affectations of decadent Paris and returned to his roots, that splendid past in which religion and art and this life and the next were a single reality. In the weeks after finishing Manao tupapau Paul enjoyed a peace of mind he hadn’t known for a long time. In the mysterious way they seemed to come and go, the sores that had appeared on his legs shortly after he left Europe a few years ago had disappeared. But as a precaution, he kept applying the mustard plasters and banda
ging his shins, as Dr. Fernouil had prescribed in Paris, and as he had been advised by the doctors at the Vaiami Hospital. It had been a while since he’d hemorrhaged from the mouth as he had when he first came to Tahiti. He kept whittling small pieces of wood, inventing Polynesian gods based on the pagan gods in his collection of photographs, and sitting in the shade of the big mango tree, he sketched and started new paintings only to abandon them almost as soon as they were begun. How to paint anything after Manao tupapau? You were right, Koké, when you lectured in Le Pouldu, in Pont-Aven, at the Café Voltaire in Paris, or when you argued with the mad Dutchman in Arles, that painting wasn’t a question of craft but of circumstance, not of skill but of fantasy and utter devotion: “Like becoming a Trappist monk, my friends, and living for God alone.” The night of Teha’amana’s fright, you told yourself, the veil of the everyday was torn and a deeper reality emerged, in which you were able to transport yourself to the dawn of humanity and mingle with ancestors who were taking their first steps in history, in a world that was still magical, where gods and demons walked alongside human beings.

  Could the circumstances in which the bounds of time were transgressed, as they were the night of the tupapau, be artificially produced? In an attempt to find out, he planned the tamara’a on which he would spend, in one of those unthinking acts that punctuated his life, a good part of an important remittance (eight hundred francs) sent to him by Daniel de Monfreid, product of the sale of two of his Brittany paintings to a Rotterdam shipowner. As soon as he had the money in hand, he explained his plan to Teha’amana: they would invite many friends, and they would sing, eat, dance, and drink for a whole week.

  They paid a visit to the grocer in Mataiea, a Chinese man named Aoni, to pay off the debt they had accumulated. Aoni, a fat Oriental with the drooping eyelids of a turtle, was fanning himself with a piece of card; he gazed in astonishment at the money he no longer expected to be paid. In a show of extravagance, Koké bought an impressive array of canned food, beef, cheeses, sugar, rice, beans, and drink: liters of bordeaux, bottles of absinthe, flasks of beer and rum made in the island’s distilleries.

  They invited a dozen native couples from around Mataiea, and some friends from Papeete, like Jénot, the Drollets, and the Suhas, functionaries in the colonial administration. The courteous and amiable Jénot arrived, as always, loaded down with foodstuffs and drink that he had bought at cost from the army commissary. The tamara’a—a dish of fish, potatoes, and vegetables wrapped in banana leaves and baked underground with hot stones—was delicious. When they finished eating it, night was falling, and the sun was a ball of fire sinking behind the blazing reefs. Jénot and the two French couples took their leave, since they wanted to return to Papeete that same day. Koké brought out his two guitars and his mandolin and entertained his guests with Breton songs, and others that were popular in Paris. Better to be left with the natives. The presence of Europeans was always an impediment, preventing the Tahitians from giving free rein to their instincts and truly enjoying themselves. He had discovered this in his first days in Tahiti, at the Friday dances in Market Square. The fun really began only when the sailors had to return to their ships and the soldiers to their barracks, and the crowd that was left behind was almost entirely free of popa’a. His Mataiea friends were drunk, men and women alike. They were drinking rum mixed with beer or fruit juice. Some danced and others sang aboriginal songs, in unison and to a steady beat. Koké helped light the bonfire not far from the big mango tree; through its tentacular branches, heavy with greenery, the stars twinkled in an indigo sky. He could understand quite a bit of Tahitian Maori now, but not when it was sung. Very near the fire, dancing with feet planted, hips undulating, and skin incandescent with the reflection of the flames, was Tutsitil, owner of the land where Koké had built his hut, and Tutsitil’s wife, Maoriana, still young and slightly plump, her elastic thighs showing through her flowered pareu. She had the typical column-like Tahitian legs, ending in big flat feet that seemed to merge with the earth. Paul desired her. He brought the couple beer mixed with rum and drank and toasted, his arms around them, humming along with the song they were singing. The two islanders were drunk.

  “Let’s take off our clothes,” said Koké. “Are there mosquitoes, do you think?”

  He took off the pareu that covered the lower part of his body and stood naked, with his half-erect cock very visible in the watery light of the fire. No one imitated him. They looked at him with indifference or curiosity, but no sense of involvement. What were they afraid of, zombies? No one answered him. They kept dancing, singing, drinking as if he weren’t there. He danced beside his neighbors, trying to imitate their movements—that impossible roll of the hips, the rhythmic little leap on both feet with the knees hitting each other—without succeeding, though he was filled with euphoria and optimism. He had wedged himself between Tutsitil and Maoriana, and now he was pressed against the woman. He held her around the waist and pushed her slowly with his body, moving her away from the circle illuminated by the fire. She offered no resistance, and the expression on her face was unchanged. She seemed not to notice Koké’s presence, as if she were dancing with the air, or a shadow. Struggling a little, he made her slide to the ground, neither of them uttering a word. Maoriana let him kiss her but she didn’t kiss him back; she sang softly to herself through her teeth as he opened her mouth with his. He made love to her with his senses roused by the chanting of the guests who were still on their feet, in a circle around the fire.

  When he awoke a day or two later—impossible to be sure exactly—with the sun stabbing at his eyes, he was covered with insect bites, and suspected that he had somehow found his own way to his bed. Teha’amana, half her body uncovered by the sheet, was snoring. His breath was heavy and acrid from the mix of drinks, and he felt generally unwell. “Should I stay or go back to France?” he wondered. He had been in Tahiti for a year and had finished nearly sixty canvases, as well as innumerable sketches and drawings and a dozen wood carvings. And most important of all, a masterpiece, Koké. To return to Paris and exhibit the best of a year’s work from Polynesia—wasn’t it tempting? The Parisians would be flabbergasted by the explosion of light, of exotic landscapes; by the world of men and women in their natural state, proud of their bodies and their feelings. They would be overwhelmed by the bold shapes and daring color combinations, which made the impressionists’ games seem like child’s play. Would you do it, Koké?

  When Teha’amana got up and went to make a cup of tea, he was lost in a waking dream, his eyes wide open, savoring his triumphs: the glowing reviews in newspapers and magazines; the gallery owners full of glee at seeing collectors fighting over the paintings, offering insane prices that not even Monet, Degas, Cézanne, the mad Dutchman, or Puvis de Chavannes had ever commanded. Paul would graciously enjoy the glory and fortune that France grants the famous, without letting it go to his head. He would refresh the memory of those colleagues who had doubted him: “I told you my method; don’t you remember?” And he would help the young with recommendations and advice.

  “I’m pregnant,” said Teha’amana, when she came back with the steaming cups of tea. “Tutsitil and Maoriana came to ask whether, now that you have money, you’ll return what they loaned you.”

  He paid them and some other neighbors what he owed them, but then he discovered that all he had left from Daniel de Monfreid’s remittance was one hundred francs. How long could they eat on that? He was almost out of canvas and stretchers, his heavy paper had been used up, and he had only a few tubes of paint. Should you return to France, Paul? In the state you were in, and with the dismal future that awaited you here, was Tahiti still worthwhile? But if you wanted to return to Europe, it was necessary to act immediately. There wasn’t the slightest chance you could pay for your own ticket. The only way out was to get yourself repatriated. You had the right, according to French law. But since it was one thing to say so and another to make it happen, it was urgent that Monfreid and Schuffenecker, in Paris, shoul
d start proceedings at the ministry. It would take six or eight months at least for them to act and for the official response to reach you. To work, then, without a moment’s delay.

  That same day, his body still aching from what he had drunk at the tamara’a, he wrote to his friends urging them to plead his cause at the ministry so that the minister of fine arts (was it still Monsieur Henri Roujon, who had given him letters of introduction when he came to Tahiti?) would agree to repatriate him. He also wrote a long letter to Roujon, justifying his request on grounds of ill health and total insolvency, and finally, a letter to his legitimate wife, Mette, in Copenhagen, telling her that he would see her in a few months because he had decided to return to France to show the results of his work in the South Seas. Without telling Teha’amana his plans, he got dressed and left for Papeete to mail his letters. The post office, on the capital’s main street—rue de Rivoli, lined with tall fruit trees and the mansions of Papeete’s leading citizens—was about to close. The oldest employee (was his name Foncheval or Fonteval?) told him that his letters would be sent off soon along the route to Australia; the Kerrigan was preparing to set sail. Although that way was longer, it was safer than the San Francisco route, because there weren’t as many transfer points at which the mail could be lost.