The Way to Paradise Read online

  Despite the fact that what had happened made him feel closer to being the savage he had wanted to be for years, it still troubled him. You, Paul, a faggot? If someone had told you so years ago, you would have beat him senseless. Ever since he was a boy he had bragged of his manliness and defended it with his fists. He had done so often in his distant youth as a sailor in the holds and cabins of the Luzitano and the Chili, those merchant vessels aboard which he spent three years, and on the warship Jérôme-Napoléon, where he served another two years during the conflict with the Prussians. Who ever would have guessed then that you would end up painting and sculpting, Paul? Not once did it occur to you that you might be an artist. In those days you dreamed of a great shipboard career, visiting all the seas and ports of the world, every country, race, and landscape as you rose to captain. A whole ship and its vast crew at your command, Ulysses.

  From the beginning aboard the Luzitano, the three-masted ship on which he was accepted as an apprentice in December 1865, too old to be admitted to the Naval Academy, it was necessary to use his fists and feet, to bite and brandish his knife, to keep his ass intact. Some didn’t care. When they were drunk, many of his companions boasted of having endured that sailor’s rite of passage. But you did care. You would never be anyone’s faggot; you were a real man. On his first voyage as an apprentice—from France to Rio de Janeiro, three months and twenty-one days on the open sea—the other apprentice, Junot, a redheaded Breton covered in freckles, was raped in the boiler room by three stokers, who afterward helped him dry his tears, assuring him that he should feel no shame, that this was a common practice at sea, an initiation that no one could avoid and that, as a result, harmed no one, and in fact fostered fellowship among the crew. Paul did avoid it, which meant that he had to demonstrate to sailors desperate for lack of women that anyone who wanted to have his way with Eugène-Henri-Paul Gauguin had to be prepared to kill or die. His great strength and, above all, his determination and ferocity protected him. When he was released on April 23, 1871, after completing his military service on the Jérôme-Napoléon, his backside was as unscathed as it had been six years before. How your fellow sailors on the Luzitano, the Chili, and the Jérôme-Napoléon would have laughed if they had seen you in that forest stream, a grown man, the taata vahine of a Maori!

  Sex hadn’t been important to him at the time it most commonly is for ordinary mortals—in youth, the age of lust and ardor. In his six years as a sailor, he visited the brothels in every port—Rio de Janeiro, Valparaíso, Naples, Trieste, Venice, Copenhagen, Bergen, and others he scarcely remembered—more to accompany his friends, to avoid seeming odd, than to experience pleasure. It was hard for you to feel enjoyment in those squalid, stinking haunts crowded with drunks, fornicating with ruined, sometimes toothless women with dangling breasts, who yawned or dropped off to sleep from exhaustion as you mounted them. Only after several strong drinks could you manage one of those sad, hasty matings that left a taste of ashes in your mouth, a funereal melancholy. It was better to masturbate at night, on your pallet, rocked by the waves.

  Neither as a sailor nor afterward—when, with a recommendation from his guardian, Gustave Arosa, he began to work as a stockbroker in the offices of Paul Bertin on the rue Laffitte, planning to make a bourgeois living for himself on the Paris Stock Exchange—was Paul obsessively preoccupied with sex. This preoccupation came later, when he began to alter the course of his life, to abandon his prosperous, disciplined, routine existence as a good husband and family man—at an age when a man’s fate is usually settled—for that other, uncertain, adventurous life of poverty and dreams that had brought him to this place.

  Sex began to be important to him at the same time as painting, an activity that at first seemed a mere hobby, taken up at the urging of Émile Schuffenecker, his friend and colleague at the firm of Paul Bertin, who one day showed him a notebook full of charcoal sketches and watercolors, and confessed that it was his secret desire to be an artist. Good old Schuff, who painted in his free time when he wasn’t, like Paul, hunting down wealthy families who might entrust their investments in the Paris stock market to the wisdom of Paul Bertin, had encouraged him to take a night drawing class at the Colarossi Academy. Schuff was doing it, and it was great fun, more fun than playing cards or spending evenings at the tables outside the place Clichy cafés, nursing a glass of absinthe and trading theories on the rise and fall of stock prices. So began the adventure that had brought you to Tahiti, Koké. For good? Or for ill? Many times, in periods of hunger or distress, as in the days you spent in Paris caring for little Clovis, times of asking yourself how much longer you would go homeless, begging a bowl of soup from the nuns at the poorhouse, you had cursed good old Schuff for his advice, imagining how prosperous you would be now, and what a beautiful house you would have in Neuilly, in Saint-Germain, in Vincennes, if you had stayed on as a financial adviser on the Paris stock exchange. Perhaps by now you would be as rich as Gustave Arosa and, like your guardian, in the position of acquiring a magnificent collection of modern art.

  By then he had already met Mette Gad, the Viking, an imposing Danish woman with faintly masculine features—Paul! Paul!—and had already married her, in November 1873, in a civil ceremony in the ninth arrondissement, and in a service at the Lutheran Church of the Redemption. And they had embarked on a very bourgeois life, in a very bourgeois apartment, in a neighborhood that was the zenith of bourgeois existence: the place Saint-Georges. Sex still mattered so little to Paul then that in the early days of his marriage he didn’t mind complying with his wife’s prudishness and making love to her as Lutheran morality counseled, Mette wrapped in her long buttoned-up nightdresses and in a state of total passivity, never permitting herself the slightest display of daring, merriment, or seductiveness, as if being loved by her husband were an obligation to be endured in the same way that a patient suffering from constipation endures taking cod-liver oil.

  It was only some time later, when his mind began to churn out images suitable for painting and (without completely neglecting his work at the offices of Paul Bertin) he began to spend his nights drawing everything, in every sort of medium—pencil, charcoal, watercolors, oils—that he was suddenly racked at night by desire. Then he begged or ordered Mette to take liberties in bed that scandalized her, making her undress, pose for him, and let her jealously guarded private places be stroked and kissed. It had been the source of bitter conjugal disputes, the first shadow falling over a happy family that kept growing larger every year. Despite the Viking’s resistance, and the growing urgency of his sexual desire, he didn’t cheat on his wife. He had no lovers, he didn’t visit houses of ill repute, he didn’t rent flats for little seamstresses as his friends and colleagues did. None of the pleasures the Viking withheld from him were sought outside the marital bed. At the end of 1884, at the age of thirty-six, when his life had taken a Copernican turn and he had decided to be a painter, only a painter, never to return to business, and had begun his slow decline into poverty and bankruptcy, he was still faithful to Mette Gad. By then, sex had become a central preoccupation, a constant anxiety, a source of scandalous fantasies, of baroque exaggeration. As he gave up being bourgeois and began to lead the life of an artist—privation, informality, risk, creation, disorder—sex gradually came to dominate his existence, not only as a source of pleasure but also as a means of severing old ties and gaining new freedoms. Relinquishing bourgeois security caused you great hardship, Paul. But your life of the senses and spirit was the richer for it, more intense and luxuriant.

  Now you had taken a new step toward freedom—from life as a bohemian and artist to life as a primitive, pagan, savage. This was great progress, Paul. Sex for you was no longer a refined form of spiritual decadence, as it was for so many European artists, but a source of health and energy, a way of renewing yourself and restoring your enthusiasm, drive, and will, to create better and live better. Because in the world to which you were finally gaining access, living was a perpetual process of creation.<
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  Everything he had undergone had been necessary in order for him to conceive a painting like Pape moe. No reworking was needed. In the painting, Charles Spitz’s photograph sparkled and quivered; the androgynous figure and Nature weren’t two separate entities—they were integrated into a new form of pantheist life: water, leaves, flowers, branches, and stones pulsated, and the figure possessed the immutability of the elements. Skin, muscles, black hair, strong feet firmly set on rocks covered in dark moss, all signaled respect, reverence, love for that being of another civilization who, though colonized by the Europeans, preserved his ancestral purity in the hidden depths of the forest. It saddened you to have finished Pape moe. As always when you put the final touch on a good piece of work, you were beset by the question of whether this might be the beginning of your decline as an artist.

  Two or three nights later, there was a full moon. Enchanted by the soft light falling from the sky, he clambered over Teha’amana’s body—she was breathing deeply, snoring softly and regularly—and went down to the flat ground that surrounded the house, with Pape moe in his arms. He contemplated the painting bathed in the bluish-yellow glow that gave an enigmatic sheen to the pool, where tangled aquatic plants were growing, plants that might be mistaken for lights or reflections. Nature, too, was androgynous in the painting. You weren’t prone to sentimentality, which was something you had to immunize yourself against in order to transcend the limits of your degraded civilization and become part of the old traditions, but you felt tears come to your eyes. It was one of the best paintings you had ever done, Paul. It wasn’t quite a masterpiece, like Manao tupapau, but it was nearly as good. Something the mad Dutchman used to repeat over and over again with great conviction, back in Arles in those last fall days of 1888, before your friendship was overwhelmed by that mix of love and hysteria—the true revolution in painting would take place not in Europe but far away, in the tropics, where Rarahu, or The Marriage of Loti, the novel that had dazzled them both, had taken place—wasn’t it a resounding reality in Pape moe? There was a vigor in it, a spiritual strength that came from the innocence and freedom with which a primitive soul, unencumbered by western culture, saw the world.

  The night that Paul met the mad Dutchman, in the winter of 1887 at the Grand Bouillon, Restaurant du Chalet, in Clichy, Vincent didn’t even let Paul congratulate him on the paintings he was showing. “It is I who should congratulate you,” Vincent said, shaking Paul’s hand vigorously. “I’ve seen your Martinique paintings at Daniel de Monfreid’s. Astounding! Painted with the phallus, not the brush—paintings that are art and sin all at once.” Two days later, Vincent and his brother Theo came to Schuffenecker’s house, where Paul had been staying since his return from his adventures in Panama and Martinique with his friend Laval. The mad Dutchman examined the paintings from every angle and declared, “This is great painting, it comes from the guts, like blood, like sperm.” He embraced Paul, entreating him, “I want to paint with my phallus, too. Show me how.” And so began their ill-fated friendship.

  The mad Dutchman, in one of his brilliant intuitive leaps, hit the nail on the head before you, Paul. It was true. Over the course of that painful sojourn, first in Panama, then on the outskirts of Saint-Pierre, in Martinique, from May to October of 1887, you became an artist. Vincent was the first to realize it. Compared to that, what did it matter that you had suffered so terribly, laboring as a digger on the canal works of Monsieur de Lesseps, devoured by mosquitoes and on the brink of dying from dysentery and malaria in Martinique? It was true: in that painting of Saint-Pierre illuminated by the splendid sun of the Caribbean, in which the colors burst like ripe fruits and the reds, blues, yellows, greens, and blacks clashed with the ferocity of gladiators, battling for control of the painting, life erupted at last like a blaze on the canvas, purifying it, redeeming it from the cowardliness your painting and sculpting had shown up until then. On that trip, in fact, despite having come close to dying of hunger and sickness—puking your guts out in a little hut, the rain pouring through the palm-leaf roof—you began to wipe the cobwebs from your eyes and see clearly: the health of painting was abandoning Paris, in search of new life under other skies.

  Sex had burst into his life too, like the light in his paintings, with uncontainable belligerence, sweeping away all the scruples and prejudices that until then had kept it in check. Like his fellow shovel-wielders in the pestilent swamps where the locks of the future canal opened, he went in search of the mulattas and black women who flocked to the Panamanian camps. Not only could they be had for a modest sum, they could also be beaten while they were being fucked. If they cried and, frightened, tried to flee, what satisfaction, what cruel pleasure to fall upon them and subdue them, show them who was master. You never loved the Viking like that, Paul, not as you did those black women with enormous breasts, animal maws, and voracious sexes, who burned like braziers. That was why your painting had been so drab and stiff, so conformist and timid—because your spirit, your sensibility, your sex were. On one of those stifling nights in Saint-Pierre, when you could have had any of those hip-swaying black women who spoke impassioned Creole, you made yourself the promise—you wouldn’t keep it, Paul—that when you saw the Viking again, you would teach her a belated lesson. You said so to Charles Laval, one night when you were drunk on cheap rum.

  “The first time we’re together, I’ll do away with all the Nordic frigidity the Viking inherited at birth. I’ll beat her and tear her clothes off, bite her and hold her tight until she screams and struggles, until she writhes and fights to survive. Like a black woman. She’ll be naked and I’ll be naked, and in the battle she’ll learn to sin, to take pleasure, to give pleasure, to be ardent, submissive, and delectable like the bitches of Saint-Pierre.”

  Charles Laval stared at you, stunned, not knowing what to say. Koké laughed out loud, his eyes fixed on Pape moe, which was lit by the phosphorescent light of the moon. No, no. The Viking would never make love like a Martinican or a Tahitian; her religion and culture prohibited it. She would always be half human, a woman whose sex had withered before she was born.

  The mad Dutchman understood perfectly, from the very beginning. The canvases Paul had painted in Martinique looked as they did, not because of the outrageous colors of the tropics, but because of the freedom of mind and body achieved by an apprentice savage, a painter who was learning all at once to paint, to make love, to obey his instincts, to accept what there was in him of nature and the devil, and to satisfy his appetites like man in his natural state.

  Were you a savage when you returned from Paris after that unhappy trip to Panama and Martinique, still recovering from the malaria that whittled away your flesh, poisoned your blood, and robbed you of twenty pounds? You were beginning to be one, Paul. In any case, your behavior was no longer that of a civilized bourgeois. How could it be after you had sweated in the oppressive sun wielding your shovel in the jungles of Panama, and made love to mulattas and black women in the mud, the red earth, the dirty sand of the Caribbean? Then, too, you were carrying the unspeakable disease inside you, Paul, a mark of shame but also proof of your unbridled manhood. You didn’t know that you were infected, and you wouldn’t know for some time. But you were already a being freed of scruples, respectability, taboos, and conventions, proud of your impulses and passions. How else would you have dared to reach out and grope the breasts of the delicate wife of good old Schuff, your best friend, who was lodging you, feeding you, and even slipping you a few francs to buy absinthe at the café? Madame Schuffenecker paled, flushed, and fled, stammering a protest. But her modesty and shame were such that she never dared tell Schuff about the liberties taken by the friend he had helped so much. Or did she? Touching Madame Schuffenecker when circumstances left you alone with her became a dangerous game. You enjoyed it enormously, and it drove you to your easel, didn’t it, Koké?

  A small cloud dimmed the light of the moon, and Paul returned to the hut, carrying Pape moe very carefully, as if it might shatter. It wa
s a shame that the mad Dutchman would never see this canvas. He would have fixed it with the stunned gaze he acquired on important occasions, and then he would have embraced you and kissed you, exclaiming in a choked voice, “You’ve fornicated with the devil, my friend!”

  At last, in the middle of May 1893, the repatriation order sent by the government of France to the provincial government of French Polynesia arrived. It was Governor Lacascade himself who brought the news that, according to the instructions received—he read aloud the ministerial resolution—it had been agreed, in view of Paul’s insolvency, to award him a second-class ticket from Papeete to Marseille. That same day, after five and a half hours of jostling in the public coach, Paul returned to Mataiea and announced to Teha’amana that he was leaving. He talked for a long time, explaining in great detail the reasons he was compelled to return to France. Sitting on one of the benches under the mango tree, the girl listened without a word or a tear, and without any sign of reproach. With her right hand she mechanically caressed her left foot, the one with the seven toes. Nor did she say anything when Paul stopped talking. After smoking a last pipe, he went up to bed and found Teha’amana already asleep. The next morning, when Koké opened his eyes, his vahine had gathered up her things and left.