The Way to Paradise

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Had you put all that drama, with its tincture of Grand Guignol, in your Portrait of Aline Gauguin, Paul? You weren’t sure. You wanted the canvas back so that you could find out. Was it a masterpiece? Maybe it was. In it, you remembered your mother’s shy gaze burning dark and steady, gleaming blue, piercing the spectator and losing itself at some indeterminate point in space.

  “What are you looking at in my painting, Mother?”

  “My life, my poor wretched life, my son. And yours, too, Paul. I would have liked your life to be different—not like your grandmother’s or mine or that of your poor father, who died at sea and was buried at the ends of the earth, but the life of someone normal, settled, safe; a life without hunger, fear, flight, or violence. It wasn’t to be. I bequeathed you my bad luck, Paul. Forgive me, son.”

  When, some time later, Koké’s sobs awakened Pau’ura and she asked him why he was crying, he lied to her.

  “My legs are burning again, and the ointment is all used up.”

  It seemed to you that the moon—radiant Hina, goddess of the Arioi, the ancient Maori—was sad, too, motionless in the sky of Punaauia, shining through the leaves intertwined in the square of the window.

  Now there was hardly a cent left of the inheritance from Uncle Zizi, and the money Paul had brought from Paris. Neither Monfreid, nor Schuff, nor Ambroise Vollard, nor the other dealers with whom he had left paintings and sculptures in France showed any signs of life. His most faithful correspondent, as always, was Daniel de Monfreid. But Monfreid couldn’t find a buyer for a single canvas or sculpture, not even a miserable sketch. Food grew scarce, and Pau’ura complained. Paul proposed an exchange to the Chinese owner of the only shop in Punaauia: he would give drawings and watercolors in return for food for himself and his vahine until he received money from France. At last, the grocer grudgingly agreed.

  A few weeks later, Pau’ura told him that the Chinaman, instead of keeping the drawings, hanging them on the wall, or trying to sell them, was using them to wrap his wares. She showed him what was left of a scene of Punaauia mango trees, stained, wrinkled, and spotted with fish scales. Limping, leaning on the cane that he now needed to move anywhere at all, even inside the hut, Paul went to the shop and berated the owner for his lack of sensitivity. He was so loud that the Chinaman threatened to go to the police. From then on, Paul’s hatred of the Punaauia shopkeeper began to extend itself to all the Chinese living in Tahiti.

  Ill health and lack of money were not the only things that kept him in a state of frustration, always on the verge of exploding in rage. There was also his obsessive preoccupation with his mother and her portrait, lost without a trace. Where was it? And why was it the disappearance of that particular canvas—you had lost so many, without blinking an eye—that plunged you into depression, filling you with foreboding? Were you going mad, Paul?

  For a while he stopped painting, instead just sketching in his notebooks and sculpting small masks. He worked without conviction, distracted by his worries and his physical ills. His left eye became infected and was always weeping. The Papeete druggist gave him some drops for conjunctivitis, but they had no effect at all. When the vision of the infected eye began noticeably to deteriorate, he was frightened: were you going blind? He went to the Vaiami Hospital, and the physician, Dr. Lagrange, made him stay. From the hospital, Paul wrote a letter full of bitterness to the Molards, his old neighbors on the rue Vercingétorix, in which he told them, “Ever since my infancy misfortune has pursued me. Never any luck, never any joy. Everyone always against me, and I exclaim: God Almighty, if You exist, I charge You with injustice and spitefulness.”

  Dr. Lagrange, who had lived in the French colonies for a long time, never liked him. He was a man in his fifties, too bourgeois and formal—with his little bald spot, rimless spectacles pinching the end of his nose, stiff collar and bow tie despite the heat of Tahiti—to be friendly with a bohemian of outrageous habits who mingled with the natives, and about whom the worst kind of stories circulated around Papeete. But he was a conscientious professional, and he submitted him to a rigorous examination. The diagnosis came as no surprise to Paul. His eye infection was another manifestation of the unspeakable illness, which had moved into a more serious stage, as the rash and suppurating sores on his legs indicated. Would it keep getting worse, then? How much longer, Dr. Lagrange?

  “It is an illness of long duration, as you know,” said the doctor, evading the question. “You must continue to adhere strictly to the treatment. And be careful with the laudanum; don’t exceed the dosage I’ve prescribed.”

  The doctor hesitated. He wanted to add something but didn’t dare, doubtless fearing your reaction, since in Papeete you had become known for your temper.

  “I’m the kind of man who can stand bad news,” Paul encouraged him.

  “You know, too, that this is a very contagious illness,” murmured the doctor, wetting his lips with the tip of his tongue. “Especially if one has sexual intercourse. In that case, the transmission of the malady is inevitable.”

  Paul almost responded with a crude remark, but he restrained himself in order not to aggravate the problems he already had. After he had been in the hospital for eight days, the administration presented him with a bill for 118 francs, warning him that if he didn’t pay at once, his treatment would be suspended. That night he climbed out a window and jumped the hospital gate to reach the street. He returned to Punaauia in the public coach. Pau’ura announced that she was four months pregnant. She also told him that the Chinese grocer, in retaliation for his shouting, had started a rumor in the village that Paul had leprosy. The neighbors, alarmed by the idea of such a horrifying illness, were uniting to petition the authorities to make him leave town, shut him up in a leper colony, or rule that he keep away from the populated places of the island. Father Damian and Reverend Riquelme were backing them up because, although they probably didn’t believe the Chinaman’s gossip, they were happy to seize the chance to free the village of a lecher and a heathen.

  None of this frightened or worried him much. He spent most of the day dozing in the hut, his mind emptied of all memories and longing. Since his only source of provisions had dried up, he and Pau’ura ate mangoes, bananas, coconuts, and breadfruit, which she picked nearby, and the fish that the girls who had befriended him sometimes brought, behind their families’ backs.

  Around this time, Paul finally began to forget the portrait of his mother. Another obsession replaced Aline Gauguin: his conviction that the Arioi secret society still existed. He had read about it in Moerenhout’s book about ancient Maori beliefs, lent to him by the colonist Auguste Goupil. And one day he set out to prove that the natives of Tahiti were keeping the existence of this mythical society hidden, guarding it jealously from foreigners, European or Chinese. Pau’ura told him that he was imagining things; the Maori villagers who still came to visit him assured him that he was mad. Most of them had never even heard of the secret society of the Arioi, gods and lords of the ancient Tahitians. And the few who had heard of it swore that no natives believed in such antiquated notions anymore, that they were beliefs lost in the mists of time. But Paul, stubborn and single-minded, persisted day and night for several months on the subject of the Arioi. And he began to paint canvases and carve idols and wooden statues inspired by the imaginary beings. The Arioi made him want to paint again.

  They’re lying to me, you thought; they still see me as a European, a popa’a, not the barbarian I have become inside. A few dozen years of French colonization couldn’t have wiped out centuries of beliefs, rituals, myths. In order to defend their religious traditions, the Maori must surely have hidden them away in a holy place, out of reach of the Protestant ministers and Catholic priests, enemies of their gods. The secret society of the Arioi, foundation of the most glorious phase of Maori life on all the islands, was still alive. Its members probably met in the depths of the forest to perform the old dances and sing; the permanent expression of their beliefs was in their tattoos. Thoug
h prohibited, and not as elaborate and mysterious as those of the Marquesas, tattoos flourished in Tahiti, hidden under pareus. To those who knew how to read them, they revealed the position of the individual in the Arioi hierarchy. When Paul began to claim that sacred prostitution, anthropophagy, and human sacrifices were still practiced in the brooding silence of the forests, the word spread in Punaauia that although it might not be true that the painter had leprosy, he had probably lost his mind. In the end, people laughed at him when he asked them, sometimes imploring, sometimes furious, to reveal the secret of the tattoos and to initiate him into the society of the Arioi: Koké had paid his dues, Koké was a Maori now.

  A letter from Mette ended this ominous stage with a final blow. Written two and a half months previously, it was dry and cold: his daughter Aline, just twenty, had died that January of pneumonia, which she had caught after being exposed to the cold as she returned from a dance in Copenhagen.

  “Now I know why I’ve been troubled by the memory of my mother and her portrait ever since I came back from Europe,” Paul told Pau’ura, with Mette’s letter in his hand. “It was a sign. My daughter was named Aline after my mother. She was delicate, too, a little shy. I hope she didn’t suffer as much in her childhood as the other Aline Gauguin.”

  “I’m hungry,” Pau’ura interrupted him, touching her stomach with a comical expression on her face. “No one can live without food, Koké. Haven’t you noticed how thin you are? You have to do something so we can eat.”

  9

  THE CROSSING

  AVIGNON, JULY 1844

  As she was packing her bags to travel from Saint-Étienne to Avignon, at the end of June 1844, an unpleasant event obliged Flora to change her plans. A progressive Lyon newspaper, Le Censeur, accused her of being a “secret government agent” sent to the south of France with the mission of “castrating the workers” by preaching pacifism and informing the monarchy about the activities of the revolutionary movement. The page of slander included a boxed editorial by the paper’s publisher, a Monsieur Rittiez, exhorting workers to redouble their vigilance so as not to be deceived by “the pharisaic trickery of false apostles.” The committee of the Lyon Workers’ Union asked her to come in person to refute these falsehoods.

  Flora, incensed by the indignity, did so at once. In Lyon she was received by the full committee. Distressed though she was, it was wonderful to see Eléonore Blanc, who trembled in her arms, her face bathed in tears. At the inn, Flora read and reread the outrageous accusations. According to Le Censeur, her duplicity had been discovered when the objects confiscated at the Hôtel de Milan by Monsieur Bardoz, Lyon’s commissioner, reached the hands of the King’s Counsel; among them was a copy of a report sent by Flora Tristán to the authorities about her meetings with the leaders of the workers’ movement.

  So shocked and angry was she that she couldn’t sleep all night, despite the orange-blossom water that Eléonore Blanc made her sip in bed. The next morning, after a quick cup of tea, she stationed herself at the door of Le Censeur, demanding to see the publisher. She asked her friends on the committee to let her go alone, because if Monsieur Rittiez saw that she had come accompanied, he would surely refuse to meet with her.

  Monsieur Rittiez, whom Flora had met in passing on her previous stay in Lyon, made her wait outside for nearly two hours. Out of prudence or cowardice, he received her in the company of seven writers, who remained in the crowded and smoky room throughout the interview, supporting their employer in such servile fashion that Flora felt ill. And these poor wretches were the pens of Lyon’s progressive paper!

  Did Rittiez, diligent former pupil of the Jesuits, who wriggled like an eel out of answering Flora’s questions about the lying reports, believe that he could intimidate her by surrounding himself with thugs? She had the urge to tell him straight away that eleven years ago, when she was an inexperienced young woman of thirty, she had spent five months on a ship alone with nineteen men, without being discomfited in the least by so many trouser wearers. She was hardly intimidated now by seven cowardly, calumny-slinging intellectual lackeys; rather, their presence filled her with fighting spirit.

  Instead of responding to her protests (“From where does the monstrous lie come that I am a spy?” “Where is this proof allegedly found among my papers by Commissioner Bardoz, when it appears nowhere on the list of everything that was confiscated from me and later returned by the police—a list signed by the commissioner himself?” “How dare your newspaper cast such aspersions on someone who devotes all her energies to fighting for the workers?”), Monsieur Rittiez just kept repeating the same thing over and over again like a parrot, behaving as if he were in Parliament. “I don’t publish slander. I simply take issue with your ideas, because pacifism disarms the workers and delays the revolution, madame.” And every so often he attacked her with another lie, saying that she was a Fourierist, and as such preached a collaboration between masters and workers that only served the interests of capital.

  You would later remember those two hours of absurd debate, Florita—a dialogue of the deaf—as the most depressing episode of your entire tour of France. It was very simple. Rittiez and his entourage of hacks hadn’t been taken unawares or tricked; they had concocted the false information, possibly out of envy, because of the success you had had in Lyon, or because discrediting you by accusing you of being a spy was the best way to vanquish your revolutionary ideas, with which they disagreed. Or did they hate you because you were a woman? They couldn’t stand to see a woman set out to save mankind, which seemed to them an exclusively male endeavor. And the perpetrators of such villainy called themselves progressives, republicans, revolutionaries. In two hours of argument, Flora never managed to get Monsieur Rittiez to tell her where the specious information spread by Le Censeur had come from. She left in disgust, slamming the door behind her and threatening to bring a libel suit against the newspaper. But the Workers’ Union committee dissuaded her: Le Censeur, newspaper of the opposition to the monarchy, had prestige, and a legal suit against it would hurt the popular movement. Better to counter the false information with public denials.

  That was what she did in the following days, giving talks in workshops and meeting halls, and visiting all the other newspapers until two, at least, published letters of rectification. Eléonore didn’t leave her side for an instant, showing such love and devotion that Flora was deeply moved. How lucky she had been to meet her, and how fortunate it was that the Lyon Workers’ Union could count on such an idealistic and determined young woman.

  The uproar and unpleasantness did their part to weaken her physically. From the second day of her return to Lyon, she began to feel feverish, her stomach queasy and her body racked by shivers that tired her enormously. But she refused to slacken her frenetic pace. Wherever she went, she accused Rittiez of sowing discord in the popular movement from his paper.

  At night, the fever kept her awake. It was strange. You felt just as you had eleven years ago, in your five months aboard the Mexicain, the ship commanded by Captain Zacharie Chabrié on which you crossed the Atlantic. Rounding Cape Horn and sailing up the coast toward Peru, toward the meeting with your father’s family, you hoped that not only would they welcome you with open arms and give you a new home, they would turn over to you a fifth part of your father’s fortune. Then all your money problems would be solved, you would no longer be poor, you could educate your children and lead a peaceful life free of want and risk, and never again fear falling into the clutches of André Chazal. Of those five months at sea—in the tiny cabin in which you could barely stretch your arms; surrounded by nineteen men (sailors, officers, the cook, the cabin boy, the ship’s owner, and four passengers)—you remembered your terrible seasickness. Like the stomachaches you were having now in Lyon, it sapped your energy, equilibrium, and ability to think logically, and plunged you into confusion and doubt. You were living now as you had then, certain that at any moment you might collapse, incapable of standing upright, of moving in step wit
h the irregular swaying of the floor beneath your feet.

  Zacharie Chabrié behaved like the perfect Breton gentleman Flora had guessed him to be the night they had met at that Paris boardinghouse. He waited on her assiduously, himself bringing to her cabin the herbal teas that were supposedly a remedy for nausea and ordering the construction of a small bunk on the deck, next to the chicken coops and crates of vegetables, because in the fresh air Flora’s seasickness subsided and she had brief periods of relief. It wasn’t only Captain Chabrié who showered her with attentions. The second in command—Louis Briet, another Breton—did too, and even the ship’s owner, Alfred David, who pretended to be a cynic and issued fierce denunciations of the human species and predictions of disaster, softened in her presence and became amiable and obliging. Everyone on the ship, from the captain to the cabin boy, from the Peruvian passengers to the Provençal cook, did all they could to make the crossing pleasant, despite the agonies of seasickness she suffered.

  But nothing happened as you expected it to on that journey, Florita. You weren’t sorry to have made it—on the contrary, it was as a result of that experience that you were what you were now, a fighter for the welfare of humanity. Your eyes were opened to a world where cruelty, evil, poverty, and suffering were infinitely worse than anything you could have imagined—you, who, because of your little marital troubles, believed you had known the depths of misfortune.

  After twenty-five days at sea, the Mexicain dropped anchor in the bay of La Praia, off the island of Cape Verde, to caulk the ship’s bilge, which had sprung a few leaks. And you, Florita, who had been so happy to hear that you would spend a few days on solid ground, not feeling everything moving under your feet, discovered that being in La Praia was even worse than being seasick. In that city of four thousand inhabitants, you saw the true, horrifying, indescribable face of an institution that you had only heard talked about before: slavery. You would always remember your first sight of La Praia, which the newly arrived passengers of the Mexicain reached by crossing a black, rocky stretch of ground and scaling the tall cliff along which the city spread. There, in the small main square, two sweaty soldiers, swearing between blows, flogged two naked black men tied to a post, amid swarms of flies, under a molten sun. The cries of the men and the sight of the two bloody backs stopped you in your tracks. You grasped Alfred David’s arm.