He didn’t remember the lines, only the refrain—“Nevermore”—and also the tale and the way it unfolded. It was if it had been written for you, Koké, as a Tahitian, at precisely this moment of your life. You felt yourself to be—you were—the student who, on that stormy midnight, absorbed in his reading and reflections, his heart broken by the death of his beloved Lenore, is interrupted by a raven. It bursts in through the window, blown by the gale or sent from some dark place, and perches on the white marble bust of Pallas that guards the door. You remembered with fervent clarity the poem’s melancholy and its macabre shadings, its allusions to death, horror, misfortune, hell (“night’s Plutonian shore”), darkness, the uncertainty of the beyond. To all the questions the student asks about his beloved and the future, the bird responds with its sinister croak (“Nevermore”) until an anguished consciousness of eternity, of time come to a standstill, is forged. And then come the final lines, when the tale abandons the student and his black visitor, condemned to sit face to face until the end of time.
You had to paint, Koké. The flicker deep inside that you hadn’t felt for so long was there again, urging you on, galvanizing you, making you incandescent. Yes, yes, of course you must paint. And what would you paint? Feverish, consumed by excitement and the rush of blood that lifted the hair on his skin, rose to his head, and made him feel confident, powerful, triumphant, he stretched a canvas and clamped it to the easel. He began to paint the dead child, trying to resuscitate her out of old Maori beliefs and superstitions, of which no trace remained, or which the present-day Maori kept so hidden, so secret, that they were veiled from you, Koké. He worked for whole days, morning and afternoon, with a break at midday for a short nap, reinventing the tiny body, the mottled face. At dusk on the third day, when he could no longer work comfortably in the fading light, he slashed a brushful of white paint across the image he had so carefully constructed. A livid disgust pulsed behind his ears and eyes—the kind of rage that possessed him when, after a fit of enthusiasm spurred him to work, he realized he had failed. What the canvas showed you was tripe, Koké. Then, in addition to his disappointment, frustration, and sense of impotence, he felt a sharp pain in his joints and bones. He left his brushes next to the palette and decided to drink himself senseless. As he was crossing the bedroom toward the front door and the cask of bordeaux, he saw, without seeing, Pau’ura lying naked on her side, her face turned toward the rectangular openings in the wall through which, in a cobalt blue sky, the first stars were showing. His vahine’s eyes rested on him for an instant, indifferent, and then turned back toward the sky, serenely or perhaps dully. There was something mysterious and hermetic about Pau’ura’s chronic disengagement, something that intrigued him. He stopped short, went to her, and stood there watching her. You had a strange feeling, a premonition.
What you were seeing was what you had to paint, Koké. That very instant. Without speaking, he went to his studio, retrieved his sketchbook and a few pieces of charcoal, returned to the bedroom, and sat down on the mat beside the bed, facing Pau’ura. She didn’t move or ask any questions as he, with a sure hand, made two, three, four sketches of the girl lying on her side. Every once in a while, Pau’ura closed her eyes, overwhelmed by sleepiness, then opened them again and rested them on Koké for a moment, without the least curiosity. Motherhood had made her hips broader and rounder, and lent her belly a majestic heaviness that made you think of the bellies and hips of Ingres’s languid odalisques, and the queens and goddesses of Rubens and Delacroix. But no, no, Koké. This marvelous body, the skin matte with golden highlights, the solid thighs extending into strong, well-shaped legs, wasn’t European or Western or French. It was Tahitian. It was Maori. This was evident in the carelessness and freedom with which Pau’ura lay, in the unconscious sensuality she exuded from all her pores, even her locks of black hair made blacker by the yellow cushion—its color a gold so rich that it made you think of the mad Dutchman’s intense golds, which the two of you spent so much time discussing in Arles. The air was thick with an arousing, inviting smell. At the sight of your vahine, naked, in the providential pose that had rescued you from depression, thick desire began to intoxicate you more than the wine you had been about to drink.
His cock stiffened, but he didn’t stop drawing. To interrupt his work now would be sacrilege; the same spell would not descend again. By the time he had what he needed, Pau’ura had fallen asleep. He felt drained, but possessed of a sense of well-being and great peace. Tomorrow you would begin the painting again, Koké, this time without hesitation. You knew exactly what you would paint. And you knew, too, that behind the golden nude lying on a bed, her head resting on a yellow cushion, there would be a raven. And the painting would be called Nevermore.
At noon the next day, his friend Pierre Levergos came up to the hut as he often did, to drink and talk. Koké dismissed him abruptly. “Don’t come back until I call you, Pierre. I don’t want to be interrupted, not by you or anyone.”
He didn’t ask Pau’ura to lie in the same position again; it would have been like asking the sky to reproduce the half-light in which he had seen his vahine, a light just beginning to dissolve and blur objects, plunging them into shadow, making them indistinct shapes. Never again would she fall into that spontaneous blankness, that absolute lassitude in which he had surprised her. The picture was so vivid in his mind that he was able to re-create it easily, without wavering for a second in sketching the outline of the figure. It was uncommonly difficult, however, to bathe her image in that fading, slightly bluish light, the eerie, magical, miraculous aura that you were convinced would give Nevermore its hallmark, its character. He worked the shape of the feet carefully, just as he remembered them, distended, terrestrial, the toes separated, conveying a sense of solidity, of always having been in direct contact with the earth, of carnal commerce with nature. And he labored over the bloody smudge of discarded cloth next to Pau’ura’s right foot and leg: a flickering flame, a clot trying to make its way through that sensual body.
He noticed that there was a close correspondence between this canvas and the one he had painted of Teha’amana in 1892, Manao tupapao, his first Tahitian masterpiece. This would be another masterpiece, Koké. Deeper, more mature than the first; colder, less melodramatic, perhaps more tragic. Instead of Teha’amana and her fear of the specter, here Pau’ura, after the ordeal of losing her daughter shortly after birth, lies passive and resigned in the knowing Maori attitude before fate, here represented by the crow without eyes, taking the place of the demon in Manao tupapao. When you painted that other canvas five years ago, you were still encumbered with much of the residue of the Romantic fascination with evil, the macabre, and the lugubrious, like Baudelaire, poet enamored of Lucifer, whom Baudelaire one night claimed to have recognized sitting in a Montparnasse bistro, striking up a conversation with him about aesthetics. Those Romantic-literary trappings had disappeared. The crow was tropicalized, turned a greenish color, with a gray beak and smoke-spotted wings. In this pagan world, the reclining woman accepted her limitations, knowing herself to be powerless before the secret, cruel forces that descend suddenly upon human beings to destroy them. Against such forces, primitive wisdom—the wisdom of the Arioi—doesn’t rebel, weep, or protest. It faces them philosophically, consciously, resignedly, as the tree and the mountain face the storm, and the sand on the beach confronts the sea that washes over it.
When the nude was finished, he furnished the surrounding space lavishly, making it rich in detail and using many different colors in subtle combinations. The mysterious, shifting evening light charged each object with ambiguity. All the motifs of your private world appeared, giving your personal stamp to a composition that was, nevertheless, unequivocally Tahitian. As well as the sightless crow in tropical colors, on different panels there were imaginary flowers, swollen tuberous shapes, plantlike ships with sails spread, a sky of floating clouds that might be painted on a canvas covering the wall, or might be the sky showing through an open window of
the room. The two women talking behind the reclining girl, one with her back turned, the other facing sideways—who were they? You didn’t know; there was something ominous and menacing about them, something that made them seem crueler than the shadowy demon of Manao tupapao, masked by the ordinariness of their appearance. It was enough to take a closer look at the reclining girl to realize that, despite the tranquillity of her pose, her eyes were slanted to the side: she was trying to listen to the conversation taking place behind her, a conversation that made her uneasy. The little Japanese flowers that had come automatically to your brush ever since you discovered the Japanese printmakers of the Meiji period appeared on different objects in the work: the cushion, the sheet. But now the secret ambiguities of the primitive world were expressed in those little flowers, too, since they changed depending on the viewer’s perspective, becoming butterflies, comets, drifting shapes. When he finished the painting—he spent nearly ten days polishing it and reworking the details—he felt happy, sad, empty. He called Pau’ura. After looking at it for a while in a blank way, she shook her head without much enthusiasm.
“I don’t look like that. That woman is old. I’m much younger.”
“You’re right,” he replied. “You’re young. That woman, she’s eternal.”
He slept for a while, and when he woke up, went looking for Pierre Levergos. He invited him to Papeete, to celebrate the masterpiece he had just completed. In the little port bars, they drank anything they could, all night without stopping—absinthe, rum, beer—until they both collapsed. They tried to go into an opium den near the cathedral, but the Chinese threw them out; they slept on the floor of a tavern. The next day, returning to Punaauia in the public coach, Paul’s guts churned; he retched, and the contents of his stomach were poisonously acidic. But even in this wretched state, he packed up the canvas carefully and sent it to Daniel de Monfreid, with a brief message: “Since this is a masterpiece, if you can’t get a good price for it, I’d prefer that you not sell it.”
When a response came four months later from Monfreid, saying that Ambroise Vollard had sold Nevermore for five hundred francs on the first day he showed the painting in his gallery, Paul had left Punaauia and was living in Papeete. He had found a job as an assistant draftsman in the colonial administration’s Department of Public Works, for which he earned 150 francs. It was enough for him to live on, modestly. He had stopped going around half naked, in just a pareu; now he dressed Western-style and wore shoes, like a functionary. Pau’ura had left him—she disappeared one day with her handful of things, without saying a word—and depressed by her departure and the death of his daughter, Aline, which troubled him more the more time passed, he had sold the house in Punaauia and sworn publicly, before a group of friends, that he would never paint so much as a stroke again, even on a scrap of paper, or sculpt anything, even from a breadcrumb. From now on, he would devote himself simply to surviving, without making any kind of plans. When they asked why he had made such a radical decision, not sure whether he was serious or whether this was alcohol-induced delirium, he replied that after Nevermore anything he could paint would be worthless. Nevermore was his swan song.
There then began a period of his life in which everyone in Papeete was always watching him, asking themselves how much longer his agonies would be prolonged; he seemed to have entered the final stage of his existence and to be doing everything possible to speed his death. He lived in a boardinghouse on the outskirts of Papeete, where the city disappeared, swallowed up by the forest. Each morning he left home very early on his way to the Department of Public Works; because of his limp, the trip took him twice as long as it would have taken a man walking normally. His work was little more than symbolic—Governor Gustave Gallet had hired him as a favor—since he drew the plans he was assigned so clumsily and with such lack of enthusiasm that they had to be redone. No one said anything to him. They all feared his temper, those fits of rage that now seized him not just when he was drunk but when he was sober, too.
He ate almost nothing, and grew very thin; there were purplish circles under his eyes, and his face was so haggard that his broken nose seemed even bigger and more crooked, like the noses of the idols he once liked to carve in wood, claiming that they were ancient gods of the Maori pantheon.
From work he proceeded directly to the little port bars, of which there were now twelve. He moved slowly alone along the wharf road, the quai du Commerce, limping, leaning on his cane, with clear evidence of physical suffering on his face, brooding, surly, never returning anyone’s greeting. He who had had periods of great sociability with the natives and colonists became withdrawn, remote. One day he would choose the tables of one bar, the next day another. He would drink a glass of absinthe, rum, wine, or beer, and after two or three swallows his eyes would turn glassy, he’d stumble over his words, and his gestures would become slow and clumsy, like those of a confirmed drunkard.
Then he would talk to the barmen, the prostitutes, the loafers, or the drunks around him, or to Pierre Levergos, who came from Punaauia to keep him company, pitying his loneliness. According to the ex-soldier, those who thought Paul was about to die were wrong. In his opinion, something even worse was happening to him: he was losing his mind; his thoughts were muddled. He spoke of his daughter, Aline, dead in Copenhagen at the age of twenty before he could even say goodbye to her, and he hurled vicious blasphemies and imprecations against the Catholic Church. He accused it of having exterminated the local gods, the Arioi, and of poisoning and corrupting the healthy, free, openhearted customs of the natives, imposing upon them the prejudices, prohibitions, and mental vices that had reduced Europe to its current state of decadence. His hatreds and rages had many targets. Some days he focused on the Chinese living in Tahiti, whom he accused of wanting to extend their yellow empire and eliminate the Tahitians and colonists. Or he became caught up in long, incomprehensible soliloquies on art’s need to exchange the Western model of beauty created by the Greeks, with its harmoniously proportioned white men and women, for the unharmonious, asymmetrical, and bold aesthetic values of primitive peoples, whose prototypes of beauty were more original, varied, and impure than European prototypes.
It didn’t matter to him whether anyone was listening or not, because if someone interrupted him with a question, he gave no sign that he had noticed, or silenced them with an obscenity. He remained immersed in his own world, becoming progressively less open to conversation with others. Worst were his rages, which led him to suddenly insult random sailors recently arrived in Papeete, or try to clout with a chair any unlucky patron who happened to glance his way. Then, the gendarmes would haul him off to the police station and make him sleep in a cell. Although those who knew him ignored his taunts, the same was not true of sailors passing through, who sometimes came to blows with him. And this time it was Paul who had the worst of it, his face bruised and his body battered. He was only forty-nine years old, but he was as ruined in body as he was in spirit.
Another of Koké’s obsessions was going to live in the Marquesas. Anyone who had been to those distant colonies, the nearest more than fifteen hundred kilometers from Tahiti, tried to dissuade him of the fantastic idea he had conceived of the islands, but soon gave up, realizing he wasn’t listening. His mind no longer seemed capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality. He said that everything that had been corrupted and annihilated in Tahiti and the other islands in the archipelago by Catholic priests and Protestant ministers, as well as French colonists and Chinese tradesmen, was still intact, virgin, pure, authentic in the Marquesas. There, the Maori people were still what they had always been: a proud, free, barbaric, hardy, primitive people living in harmony with nature and their gods, still innocently enjoying nudity, paganism, feasts, music, sacred rites, the art of communicating through tattoos, collective and ritual sex, and the life-giving practice of cannibalism. He had been seeking all this since he broke free of the bourgeois shell binding him since childhood, and he had spent a fruitless quarter of
a century on the trail of that earthly paradise. He had looked for it in tradition-bound, Catholic Brittany, proud of its faith and customs, but there it was already sullied by tourist painters and Western modernism. Nor had he found it in Panama, Martinique, or here in Tahiti, where the displacement of primitive culture by European ways had already dealt a death blow to the vital core of the island’s higher civilization, of which just a few miserable shreds remained. That was why he had to leave. As soon as he got some money together, he would buy a ticket for the Marquesas. He would burn his Western clothes, his guitar and accordion, his canvases and brushes. He would walk into the forest until he came to an isolated village, and there he would make his home. He would learn to worship the bloodthirsty gods who sharpened man’s instincts, dreams, imagination, and desires, who never sacrificed the body to reason. He would study the art of tattoo making, and master its labyrinthine system of symbols, the coded knowledge that preserved intact a marvelously rich cultural history. He would learn to hunt, dance, and pray in the elemental Maori language even older than Tahitian, and he would regenerate himself by eating the flesh of his fellow man. “I’ll never put myself within reach of your teeth, Koké,” said Pierre Levergos, the only person he allowed to joke with him.
Behind his back, everyone laughed at him. They repeated his mad ravings, and when they weren’t calling him “the Barbarian” or “the Cripple” they called him “the Cannibal.” The way he mixed things up when he set about recalling his past made it clear that he wasn’t quite right in the head anymore. He boasted of being a direct descendant of Moctezuma, the last Aztec emperor, and if anyone respectfully reminded him that a few days before he had claimed that he was descended in a straight line from a viceroy of Peru, he said it was quite true, that he had also had a grandmother, Flora Tristán, who was an anarchist in the days of Louis Philippe and that, as a boy, he helped her prepare the bombs and gunpowder for her terrorist attacks on bankers. He wasn’t afraid to make nonsensical claims or grossly anachronistic assertions; his memories were the momentary inventions of someone disconnected from reality, of a mind that had fabricated a past for itself because its real past was eroded by illnesses, remedies, madness, and drink.
The Way to Paradise Page 18