The Way to Paradise Page 4

  He went to have a drink at a bar on the port. Barely a year after his arrival, he had decided to return to Paris. He wouldn’t change his mind, but he didn’t feel at ease with himself. Plainly speaking, it was an escape, forced by defeat. With the mad Dutchman in Arles; in Brittany; in Paris with Bernard, Morice, and good old Schuff—in all his conversations and dreams about the need to seek a still-virgin world that had not yet been captured in European art, a central consideration had also been escape from the cursed daily quest for money, the everyday struggle to survive. The urge to live in nature, off the land, like primitive man—the healthiest of peoples—had inspired his adventures in Panama and Martinique, and later had led him to investigate Madagascar and Tonkin before deciding on Tahiti. But despite your dreams, here you couldn’t live “in nature” either, Koké. One couldn’t subsist solely on coconuts, mangoes, and plantains, the only things graciously offered on tree branches. Then, too, the red plantains grew only in the mountains, and one had to scale steep slopes to gather them. You’d never learn to farm the land, because those who farmed dedicated the kind of time to their labor that you needed for painting. Which meant that here too, despite the landscape and the natives—a pale reflection of what was once the fertile Maori civilization—money ruled people’s lives and deaths, and condemned artists to enslave themselves to Mammon. If you didn’t want to die of hunger, you had to buy canned food from the Chinese merchants, and spend, spend a kind of money that you, misunderstood and rejected by the despicable snobs who dominated the art market, didn’t have and never would have. But you had survived, Koké; you had painted; you had enriched your palette with the colors of the island; and living by your motto—“the right to dare anything”—you had risked all, like the great creators.

  Only at the last minute would you confess to Teha’amana your plans to return to France. That was over, too. You should be grateful to the girl. Her young body, her languid ease, her alertness, had given you pleasure, rejuvenated you, at times made you feel like a true primitive. Her natural liveliness, her diligence, her docility, her companionship, made life bearable for you. But love had to be excluded from your existence; it was an insurmountable obstacle to your mission as an artist, since it made men bourgeois. Now, with that seed of yours inside her, the girl would begin to swell up, would become one of those monstrous lumbering natives toward whom you would feel repulsion instead of affection and desire. Better to terminate the relationship before it ended badly. And the son or daughter you would have? Well, it would be one more bastard in a world of bastards. Rationally, you were sure you were doing the right thing in returning to France. But something inside you didn’t believe it, because for the next eight months, until you finally embarked in June 1893 for Noumea on the Duchaffault, the first stage of your return trip to Europe, you felt uneasy, upset, afraid you were making a serious mistake.

  He did many things in those eight months, but one of the times he thought he might paint a second Tahitian masterpiece, he was mistaken. He had traveled from Mataiea to Papeete to see if he had received any letters or money, and in the city there was a commotion at the house of his friend Aristide Suhas, whose young son, a year and eight months old, was dying from an intestinal infection. Koké arrived just after the boy expired. Upon seeing the dead child, the sharp little face, the cerulean skin, he felt a tickle of excitement. Without hesitation, and feigning a sorrow he didn’t feel, he embraced Aristide and Madame Suhas, and offered to paint a portrait of the dead child and give it to them as a gift. Husband and wife looked at each other with tears in their eyes and agreed: it would be another way of keeping their son by their side.

  He made a few sketches immediately, and others during the wake. He then painted the portrait on one of his last canvases, with great caution and attention to detail. He carefully studied the face, which expressed the precise instant of the child’s passing, its eyes closed and its hands clasping a rosary. But when he delivered the painting, instead of thanking him for the gift, Madame Suhas was furious. She would never allow the portrait into her house.

  “But what’s wrong with it?” asked Koké, not entirely displeased by her reaction.

  “That isn’t my child. That’s a little Chinaman, one of those yellow people who’re overrunning the island. What have we done to you to make you mock our pain by giving our angel the face of a Chinaman?”

  Koké couldn’t contain his laughter, and the Suhases threw him out of the house. On his way back to Mataiea, he looked at the portrait with new eyes. Yes, without realizing it you had orientalized him. Then you rebaptized your newest creation with a mythical Maori name: Portrait of Prince Atiti.

  Some time later, upon noticing that Teha’amana’s belly wasn’t growing, although four months had passed since she had announced that she was pregnant, he noted the fact.

  “I bled and I lost it,” she said, without interrupting her mending. “I forgot to tell you.”

  3

  BASTARD AND FUGITIVE

  DIJON, APRIL 1844

  Instead of going directly from Auxerre to Dijon as planned, Flora made two stops, spending one day each in Avallon and Semur. She left copies of The Workers’ Union and posters in the bookshops of both towns. And in both, since she had no letters of introduction or referrals, she went to seek out workers in the bars.

  On the central square of Avallon near the church, whose gaudily painted saints and virgins reminded her of the Indian chapels of Peru, there were two taverns. She went into L’Étoile du Jour at nightfall. The fire in the hearth reddened the faces of the patrons and filled the cramped room with smoke. She was the only woman. Loud talk gave way to whispers and laughter. Through the white clouds of pipe smoke, she could make out winking eyes and leering faces. A hissing noise followed her as she made her way through the sweaty crowd, which parted to let her pass and closed behind her.

  She felt perfectly at ease. When the owner of the establishment, a short man with an unctuous manner, came up to ask who she was looking for, she answered him brusquely: no one.

  “Why do you ask?” she inquired in turn so that everyone could hear. “Aren’t women allowed here?”

  “Decent women are,” exclaimed a drunken voice from the bar. “Harlots aren’t.”

  He’s the poet of the place, thought Florita. “I’m not a prostitute, gentlemen,” she explained, without losing her temper, imposing silence. “I’m a friend of the workers. I’ve come to help you break the chains of exploitation.”

  Then, by their faces, she saw that they no longer took her for a harlot but a madwoman. Refusing to give up, she kept talking. They listened out of curiosity, as one listens to the song of a strange bird, without paying much attention to what she was saying, more aware of her skirts, her hands, her mouth, her waist, and her breasts than her words. They were tired men with defeated faces, men who wanted only to forget the life they led. After a while, their curiosity satisfied, some started up their conversations again, forgetting her. At the second nightspot of Avallon, La Joie, a small refuge with blackened walls and a fireplace in which a few last embers were dying, the six or seven patrons were too drunk for her to waste time talking to them.

  She returned to the inn with the acid taste in her mouth that from time to time plagued her. Why, Florita? Was it because you had squandered time in this town of ignorant peasants? No. It was because your tavern visits had stirred up old memories and now you were smelling the winy exhalations of the dens full of drunks, gamblers, and lowlifes on the place Maubert and the surrounding streets, where you spent your childhood and adolescence—and your four years of marriage, Florita. How frightened you were of the drunks! They swarmed in the neighborhood around the rue du Fouarre, in the doorways of taverns and on corners, sprawled in entryways and alleys, belching, vomiting, snoring, uttering indecencies in their sleep. Her skin crawled as she remembered her walks home in the dark from André Chazal’s engraving and lithography workshop, where her mother had managed to get her hired as an apprentice colorist sho
rtly after she turned sixteen.

  At least you were able to make use of your talent for drawing. In other circumstances you might been a painter, Andalusa. But she didn’t regret having been a wage earner in her youth. At first it seemed wonderful to her, liberating, not to have to spend days shut up in the squalid hovel on the rue du Fouarre, to leave the house very early and work twelve hours at the workshop with the twenty women Master Chazal employed. The place offered a true university education in what it meant to be a working woman in France. Of the master, she was told by the girls in the shop that he had a famous brother, Antoine, a painter of flowers and animals in the Jardin des Plantes. But André Chazal liked to drink, gamble, and spend his time in taverns. When he had had a few drinks, and sometimes when he hadn’t, he would take liberties with the girls. And so it was to be. The very day he interviewed you to see if he would accept you as an apprentice, he examined you from head to foot, brazenly resting his vulgar gaze on your breasts and hips.

  André Chazal! What a poor devil you were sent by fate, or maybe God, to lose your virginity to, Florita. A tall, somewhat stooped man, with hair like straw, a very broad forehead, bold and roguish eyes, and a protuberant nose that constantly monitored the smells around him. You seduced him at first sight with your big deep eyes and curly black hair, Andalusa. (Was André Chazal the first to call you that?) He was twelve years older than you and his mouth must have watered as he dreamed of the forbidden fruit represented by such a child. Under the pretext of teaching you the trade, he would stand close to you, take your hand, put his arm around your waist. This is how you mix the acids, this is how you change the inks, careful putting your finger there or you’ll burn yourself—and instantly he was all over you, rubbing your leg, your arm, your shoulders, your back. Your fellow workers joked, “You’ve won the boss’s heart, Florita.” Amandine, your best friend, predicted, “So long as you don’t give in, so long as you resist, he’ll marry you. Because you’re driving him mad, I swear it.”

  Yes, you were driving him mad—André Chazal, engraver-lithographer, taverngoer, gambler, and drinker—so mad that one day, reeking of cheap wine and with his eyes starting out of his head, he went so far as to paw at your breasts with his big hands. Your slap knocked him backward. Pale-faced, he stared at you in astonishment. Later, instead of dismissing her, as Flora feared, he appeared, contrite, at the hovel on the rue du Fouarre with a little bunch of daisies in his hand, to present his excuses to Madame Tristán. “Madame, my intentions are honorable.” This made Madame Aline so happy that she burst out laughing and embraced Flora. It was the only time you ever saw your mother so joyful and affectionate. “How lucky you are,” she kept repeating, gazing at you tenderly. “Give thanks to God, my girl.”

  “Lucky because Monsieur Chazal wants to marry me?”

  “Lucky because he’s willing to marry you even though you’re a bastard. Do you think there are many others who would? Give thanks on your knees, Florita.”

  The marriage was the beginning of the end of her relationship with her mother; from that moment on, Flora began to love her less. She had known that because her parents’ marriage ceremony, performed by the French priest in Bilbao, wasn’t valid under civil law, she was an illegitimate child, but only now did she become conscious that as a bastard she bore a guilt as terrible as original sin. That André Chazal, a man of means, practically bourgeois, was willing to give her his name was a blessing, a piece of luck for which she should have been thankful with all her heart. But instead of making you happy, Florita, the whole affair left you with the same disagreeable taste in your mouth that now you were trying to wash away by gargling with mint-water before bed in the inn at Avallon.

  If what you felt for Monsieur Chazal was love, then love was a lie. It was nothing like love in novels, that delicate sentiment, that poetic exaltation, those burning desires. When, in his office at the shop after the other workers had left, André Chazal, not yet your husband and still your master, made love to you on the chaise longue with squeaky springs, it didn’t seem romantic or beautiful or poignant. Rather, it was painful and repellant. The heavy body stinking of sweat, the viscous tongue tasting of tobacco and alcohol, the feeling that she was being mauled from thighs to belly, made her ill. And still, idiot Flora, foolish Andalusa, after that disgusting rape—which is what it was, wasn’t it?—you wrote André Chazal the letter that the wretch would make public seventeen years later, in a Paris courtroom. A stupid, lying note, full of everything a girl is supposed to tell her lover after surrendering her virginity. And riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes! How ashamed you must have felt hearing it read, hearing the titters of the judges, the lawyers, the spectators. Why did you write it if you rose sick with disgust from that chaise longue? Because it was what the heroines of novels did when they were deflowered.

  They were married a month later, on February 3, 1821, at the municipal hall of the eleventh arrondissement, and thereafter lived in a little apartment on the rue des Fossés in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. When, huddled in her bed at the inn in Avallon, she realized that her eyes were damp, Flora made an effort to put those unpleasant memories out of her head. The important thing was that, instead of destroying you, your setbacks and disappointments had made you stronger, Andalusa.

  In Sêmur things went better than in Avallon. A few steps away from the famous towers of the Duke of Burgundy, for which she felt not the slightest admiration, there was a tavern where during the day people came to eat. A dozen farm laborers were celebrating someone’s birthday, and some barrel makers were there too. It wasn’t hard for her to strike up a conversation with the two groups. She explained why she was touring France, and they looked at her with respect and apprehension, although, Flora thought, without understanding much of what she was telling them.

  “But we are farm laborers, not workers,” said one of them, by way of excuse.

  “Peasants are workers too,” she explained. “And craftsmen and servants. Anyone who isn’t a master is a worker; all those who are exploited by the bourgeoisie. And because you are the largest group and suffer the most, you will save humanity.”

  They exchanged glances, taken aback by this declaration. At last they worked up the courage to ask her questions. Two of them promised to buy The Workers’ Union and join the organization when it was established. So as not to hurt their feelings, she had to have a few sips of wine before she left.

  She arrived in Dijon at dawn on April 18, 1844, with strong pains in her uterus and bladder. The pain had begun en route, perhaps because of the jolting of the stagecoach and the irritation produced in her bowels by the dust she had swallowed. She spent her whole week in Dijon bothered by this discomfort in her lower abdomen, which made her horribly thirsty—she took frequent swallows of sugared water—but in good spirits because she was busy every minute in this clean, pretty, friendly city of thirty thousand. Dijon’s three daily papers had announced her visit, and she had many meetings planned in advance thanks to her Saint-Simonian and Fourierist friends in Paris.

  She was excited to meet Mademoiselle Antoinette Quarré, the Dijon dressmaker and poet whom Lamartine had called “a model for women” in one of his poems, praising her artistic talent, her ability to overcome obstacles, and her passion for justice. But after exchanging a few words with her at the offices of the Journal de la Côte d’Or, Flora realized that Mademoiselle Quarré was vain and stupid. Hunched and twisted front and back, she was also enormously fat and practically a dwarf. She had been born into a very humble family, and now her literary triumphs made her feel she was bourgeois.

  “I don’t think I can help you, madame,” she said rudely, waving her little hand, after listening impatiently. “From what you’ve just said, your message is intended for the workers. I don’t mix with the townspeople.”

  Of course not, you’d scare them to death, thought Madame-la-Colère. She made her farewells briskly, neglecting to give Mademoiselle Quarré the copy of The Workers’ Union that she had intended as
a gift.

  The Saint-Simonians were well established in Dijon. They had their own meetinghouse. Alerted by Prosper Enfantin, they received her in a solemn session on the afternoon of her arrival. From the entrance to the building, next door to the museum, Flora saw them and took their measure in just a few seconds. These were the usual sort of bourgeois socialists and impractical dreamers—amiable and ceremonious Saint-Simonians who worshiped the elite and were convinced that by controlling the budget they would revolutionize society. Just like the Saint-Simonians in Paris, Bordeaux, or anywhere else, they were professionals and government officials, property owners and men of independent means, well educated and well dressed, believers in science and progress, critical of the bourgeoisie but bourgeois themselves and distrustful of working men.

  Here too, as at the meetings in Paris, they had put an empty chair on the stage, symbolizing their wait for the arrival of the Mother, the Woman-Messiah, the superior female who would join in sacred intercourse with the Father (Prosper Enfantin, since the founder, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, had died in 1825) to form the Supreme Couple. Together, Mother and Father would precipitate the transformation of humanity, which would lead to the emancipation of women and workers from their current servitude, and to the dawning of an era of justice. What were you waiting for to go and sit in that empty chair, Florita, and surprise them by announcing, as dramatically as the actress Rachel, that their wait was over, that the Woman-Messiah was before their eyes? She had been tempted to do it in Paris. But she was restrained by the growing differences she had with the Saint-Simonians over their idolatry of a select minority, which they wanted to bring to power. Also, if they accepted her as Mother, she would have to mate with Father Enfantin. You weren’t willing to do that, even if it was the price of freeing humanity from its chains, though Prosper Enfantin was said to be a handsome man and many women sighed over him.