The Way to Paradise

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Her diatribes against money and commerce alarmed the workers. She noticed it in their looks of surprise and disapproval. And it seemed absurd to them that Flora should consider it wicked or shameful for men to have mistresses, visit prostitutes, or keep harems like a Turkish pasha. One of them dared to tell her so.

  “Maybe you don’t understand the needs of men, madame, because you are a woman. Women are happy with one husband, which is more than enough for them. But for us, having just one woman all our lives is dull. You may not realize it, but men and women are different. Even the Bible says so.”

  You felt ill when you heard these commonplaces, Florita. Nowhere had you seen such a cynical display of lust and sexual exploitation as in this city of merchants flaunting their wealth, or so many prostitutes so openly and shamelessly soliciting clients. Your attempts to talk to the whores on the narrow streets near the port crowded with little bars and brothels—less squalid than those of London, you had to admit—were a failure. Many didn’t understand you, since they were Algerians, Greeks, Turks, or Genoese who could speak barely a few words of French. All fled you, frightened, fearing that you were a proselytizer or a government agent. You would have had to disguise yourself as a man, as you did in England, to gain their trust. In your meetings with journalists, professionals with Fourierist, Saint-Simonian, or Icarian sympathies, and even with common workers, you thought you were dreaming when you heard them speak with open admiration of the bankers, shipowners, shipping agents, and tradesmen who took mistresses, about the houses they set up for them, the clothing they dressed them in, the jewels they adorned them with, and the way they pampered them. “Monsieur Laferrière keeps his mistresses in fine style.” “No one treats them as well as he does; he’s a wonderful man.” What kind of revolution could she undertake with such people?

  In their exhibitionistic displays of power and wealth, these merchants were less like the rich men of Paris or London than those of distant Arequipa. It was in Peru in September 1833, after her journey from Islay, that Flora learned for the first time what privilege and wealth meant—on a vertiginous scale—when a horseback procession of dozens of people, all dressed in the fashions of Paris, and almost all of them her relatives by blood or marriage (the principal families of Arequipa were biblical in their vastness, and all interrelated), came out to meet her at the Tiabaya heights. They escorted her to Don Pío Tristán’s house on Calle Santo Domingo, in the center of the city. She remembered that triumphal entrance into her father’s land as otherworldly: the green beauty of the valley watered by the Chili River, the flocks of llamas with their tall ears, and the three proud volcanoes crowned with snow at the foot of which were scattered the little white houses, made of the light-colored stone called sillar, of Arequipa, a city of thirty thousand. Peru had been a republic for some years, but everything about this city, where white men played at being lords and dreamed of truly attaining such status, spoke of colonial life. It was a city full of churches, convents, monasteries, barefoot Indians, and blacks. Down the middle of straight streets of chipped cobblestones there ran channels into which all threw their garbage, the poor pissed and defecated, and from which mules, dogs, and street children drank. Among wretched dwellings and hovels of rubbish, planks, and straw, great houses suddenly rose, majestic and palatial. Don Pío Tristán’s was one of them. He was away from Arequipa, at his Camaná sugar refineries, but the grand mansion faced in white sillar awaited Flora in full splendor, amid bursting fireworks. Pitch torches lit the great courtyard, and the entire household staff, servants and slaves, was grouped there to welcome her. A woman in a mantilla, wearing many rings and necklaces, embraced her. “I’m your cousin Carmen de Piérola, Florita—welcome home.” You couldn’t believe your eyes: you felt like a beggar in the midst of such luxury. In the grand reception hall, everything glittered; besides the immense crystal chandelier there were candelabra with colored candles all along the walls. Dazed, you moved from one person to the next, presenting your hand. The gentlemen kissed it, bowing gallantly, and the women embraced you in the Spanish fashion. Many spoke to you in French, and all asked for news of a France you had never known, a France of theaters, dress shops, horse races, balls at the Opéra. Also present were several Dominican monks in white habits, attached to the Tristán family—the Middle Ages, Florita!—and in the middle of the reception, the prior suddenly asked for silence in order to speak a few words of greeting to the recent arrival, praying that heaven bless her stay in Arequipa. Cousin Carmen had arranged a dinner. But you excused yourself, half dead of fatigue, surprise, and emotion: you were exhausted, you preferred to rest.

  Cousin Carmen—extremely cordial and effusive, with no neck and a face pitted with smallpox scars—led you to your chambers, in a back wing of the house: a spacious dressing room and a bedroom with a soaring ceiling. At the door she presented a little black girl with lively eyes, who was waiting for them still as a statue.

  “This slave is for you, Florita. She has prepared a bath of warm water and milk for you, to refresh you before you sleep.”

  Just like the rich of Arequipa, the merchants of Marseille didn’t seem to notice what an obscene spectacle of plenty they represented, surrounded by the destitute. It was true that the poor of Marseille were rich in comparison to the little Indians who begged in the doorways of the churches of Arequipa, huddled in their ponchos and raising their blind eyes or their crippled limbs to arouse pity; or those who trotted beside their flocks of llamas, bringing their produce to market on Saturdays beneath the arches of the Plaza de Armas. But here in Marseille many people were poverty-stricken too, almost all of them immigrants; and because they were immigrants, they were exploited in the workshops, at the port, and on the farms in the surrounding countryside.

  Not a week had passed since she came to Marseille, and she had already—despite feeling so unwell—held many meetings and sold fifty copies of The Workers’ Union, when she had an experience that she would later remember sometimes with a laugh, and sometimes indignantly. A woman who identified herself only as Madame Victoire stopped by to see her several times at the Spanish inn. The fourth or fifth time, they finally met. She was a woman of uncertain age, lame in her left foot. Despite the heat, she was dressed in dark clothing, with a scarf covering her hair; a big cloth bag dangled from her arm. She insisted so vehemently that they speak in private that Flora brought her into her room. By her accent, Madame Victoire seemed to be Italian or Spanish, though she might also have been from the countryside around Marseille, since its inhabitants spoke French in a way that Flora sometimes found incomprehensible. Madame Victoire praised her so lavishly—such jet black hair, those eyes must glitter like fireflies in the dark, what a fine profile, what tiny little feet—that Flora could not help but blush.

  “You are very kind, madame,” she interrupted. “But I have many engagements, and I can’t linger. What did you wish to see me about?”

  “To make you rich and happy,” said Madame Victoire, stretching her arms and eyes wide, as if encompassing a universe of luxury and good fortune. “This little visit of mine could change your life. You’ll never be able to thank me enough, my pretty.”

  She was a procuress. She had come to tell Flora that a very rich, generous, handsome man, of Marseillais high society, had seen her and fallen in love with her—the gentleman was a romantic soul, who believed in love at first sight—and was prepared to whisk her away from this dingy inn, set her up in her own house, and satisfy her every need and whim so that from now on she would lead a life befitting her beauty. Did you like the idea, Florita?

  Overcome with astonishment, Flora laughed so hard she choked. Madame Victoire laughed too, thinking the deal was done. Thus it came as a great surprise when Flora’s laughter turned to fury and she flew at the procuress, shouting insults and threatening to report her to the police if she didn’t leave immediately.

  Madame Victoire left, muttering that once she recovered she would regret her childish reaction. “You have to seize you
r chances, my pretty, because they won’t come twice.”

  Flora sat pondering this turn of events. Her indignation gave way to a sense of vanity, of secret coquetry. Who was it who aspired to be your lover and protector? A doddering old man? You should have faked interest, coaxing his name from Madame Victoire. Then you could have gone to see him and scolded him. But such a proposal, from one of the rich and lascivious men of Marseille, suggested that despite your many misfortunes, the relentless demands of your life, and your illnesses, you must still be an attractive woman, capable of beguiling men, of driving them to commit rash acts. Your forty-one years sat lightly on you, Florita. Hadn’t Olympia said to you more than once, at your moments of great passion, “I suspect you are immortal, my love”?

  In Arequipa, the young woman newly arrived from France was considered by all to be a beauty. She was told so from the very first day by her aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, and the tangled array of relatives of relatives, family friends, and inquisitive members of Arequipan society who came to pay her their respects in the first few weeks, bringing little gifts, and to satisfy the frivolous, gossipy, unhealthy curiosity that was an endemic affliction of fashionable society in Arequipa. How coolly and disdainfully you saw them now, all those people who were born and lived in Peru but dreamed only of France and Paris, those recently minted republicans who pretended to be aristocrats, those very respectable ladies and gentlemen whose lives could not have been more empty, parasitic, selfish, or shallow. Now you could make such stern judgments. Then, you couldn’t. Not yet. In those first few months in your father’s homeland you lived happily, flattered by all those rich bourgeois. With their kindnesses, invitations, affectionate gestures, and gallantries, those wealthy bloodsuckers made you feel rich, too, Florita, and respectable, bourgeois, aristocratic.

  They thought you were a virgin and unmarried, of course. No one suspected the dramatic married life you had fled. How wonderful it was to rise in the morning and be attended, to have a slave always awaiting your orders; never to worry about money, because so long as you lived in this house there would always be food, a roof over your head, affection, and a wardrobe that soon grew many times larger, thanks to the generosity of your relatives, and especially your cousin Carmen de Piérola. Did this treatment mean that Don Pío and the Tristán family had decided to forget that you were an illegitimate child and recognize your rights as a legitimate daughter? You wouldn’t know for sure until Don Pío returned, but the signs were encouraging. Everyone treated you as if you had never been separated from the family. Perhaps your uncle Pío’s heart had softened. He would recognize you as his brother Mariano’s legitimate daughter, and give you the part of your father’s and grandmother’s inheritance that you were due. You would return to France with an income permitting you to live the rest of your life like a bourgeoise.

  Alas, Florita! It was all for the best that it hadn’t happened, wasn’t it? You would have become one of those rich, stupid women you hated so much now. Better by far for you to have suffered that disappointment in Arequipa, and learned by dint of setbacks to recognize injustice, hate it, and fight it. You didn’t return a rich woman from your father’s homeland; instead, you became a rebel, an avenger, a “pariah,” as you would proudly call yourself in the book in which you decided to tell your story. In the end, you had many reasons to be grateful to Arequipa, Florita.

  The most interesting meeting in Marseille was held at a leather workers’ guild. Some twenty people were gathered in the hall, which was permeated with the smell of leather, dyes, and damp wood, when Benjamin Mazel, gallant and flamboyant disciple of Charles Fourier, suddenly appeared. He was a man in his forties, of exalted speech and boundless energy, wrapped in a cape spotted with stains and dandruff, with the unruly hair of a Romantic poet. With him he had brought a heavily annotated copy of The Workers’ Union. His opinions and criticisms won you over immediately. Gesticulating like an Italian, Mazel—who reminded you, with his big athletic body and irrepressible enthusiasm, of Colonel Clemente Althaus, of Arequipa—said that the Workers’ Union project of social reform was missing a key element, which should be included along with the right to work and the right to an education—the right to free daily bread. He expounded in detail on his idea, and in the process convinced the twenty leather workers, and Flora herself. In the society of the future, bakeries would all belong to the State, and would perform a public service, like schools and the police; they would no longer be profit-making institutions and would supply bread free to all citizens. The cost would be subsidized by taxes. Thus no one would die of hunger, no one would be idle, and all children and young people would receive an education.

  Mazel wrote pamphlets and had been running a little newspaper that was shut down for being subversive. Later, over tea and refreshments, Flora listened to him recount his political mishaps—he had been arrested several times as an agitator—and she couldn’t stop thinking of Clemente Althaus, who, along with La Mariscala, had impressed her most of all the people she met in Peru in 1833. Like Mazel, Althaus radiated energy and vitality from every pore of his body, and was the embodiment of adventure, risk, and action. But unlike Mazel, he cared nothing about injustice, nor that so many people were poor and so many rich, nor that the latter were so cruel to those who had nothing. Althaus’s only concern was that there be wars in the world so that he could take part in them, shooting, killing, giving orders, devising strategies and putting them into practice. Making war was his vocation and his profession. A tall, blond German with the body of an Apollo and eyes of blue steel, Althaus seemed much younger than his forty-eight years when Flora met him. He spoke French as well as he spoke German and Spanish. He had been a mercenary since adolescence, and he grew up fighting on battlefields from one end of Europe to the other in the ranks of the coalition forces during the Napoleonic wars. When these were over, he came to South America in search of other wars in which he could sell his services as a military engineer. Hired by the government of Peru and named colonel of the Peruvian army, he had spent fourteen years fighting in the civil wars that shook the young republic from the day of its independence, changing sides time and again according to the offers he received from the combatants. Flora would soon discover that from her uncle on down—Don Pío Tristán had been viceroy of the Spanish colony, and then president of the Republic—changing sides was Peruvian society’s most popular sport. The funny thing was that everyone boasted of it, as the sophisticated art of avoiding danger and exploiting the chronic state of armed conflict in which the country was sunk. But no one touted their lack of principles, ideals, and loyalties, or the pure quest for adventure and pay when it came time to decide whose side to join, with more wit and audacity than Colonel Clemente Althaus. He was in Arequipa—where he had first come when it was part of Simón Bolívar’s Greater Colombia—because it was in Arequipa that he had fallen in love with Manuela de Flores, Flora’s cousin and the daughter of a sister of Don Pío and Don Mariano, whom he had married. Since his wife was in Camaná with Don Pío and his court, Althaus became Flora’s constant companion. He showed her all the interesting places in the city, from its churches and centuries-old convents to the religious mystery plays that were performed outdoors in the Plaza de las Mercedes before a motley crowd that followed the miming and recitations of the actors for hours on end. He took her to see cockfights in Arequipa’s two coliseums, to bullfights in the Plaza de Armas, to the theater where anonymous farces or classic plays by Calderón de la Barca were staged, and to the very frequent processions that made Flora imagine this was what bacchanals and saturnalias must have been like: indecent buffoonery to entertain the common folk and keep them lulled. With bands of musicians preceding them, half-castes and blacks dressed as Pierrots, harlequins, fools, and in masks performed acrobatic feats and amused the plebes with their clowning. Next, wreathed in incense, came the penitents dragging chains, bearing crosses, and flagellating themselves, followed by an anonymous mass of Indians praying in Quechua and w
ailing. The men carrying the saint’s platform fortified themselves with hard liquor and a drink made of fermented corn—they called it chicha—and were thoroughly drunk.

  “These people are so superstitious they make the worst soldiers in the world,” said Althaus, laughing, and you listened, mesmerized. “Cowards, half-wits, dirty, undisciplined. The only way to keep them from fleeing combat is by terrorizing them.”

  He told you that he had managed to establish in Peru the German custom whereby the officers themselves, and not their subordinates, administered corporal punishment to the troops.

  “It’s the officer’s whip that makes a good soldier, just as the lion tamer’s whip makes the circus beast,” he continued, overcome by mirth.

  You thought, He’s like one of those German barbarians who trampled the Roman Empire.

  One day, when they had gone to Tingo with some friends to see the thermal baths (there were several in the countryside near Arequipa), she and Althaus went off on their own to visit some caves. All at once, the German took her in his arms—you felt as fragile and vulnerable as a bird caught in his grasp—caressed her breasts, and kissed her on the mouth. Flora had to make a real effort not to surrender to his touch, because he exercised a charm over her that she had never experienced with any other man. But the repugnance that she had conceived for sex ever since her marriage to Chazal prevailed.