“I very much regret that you’ve destroyed the fondness I felt for you with this offense, Clemente,” she said. Then she slapped him, though without much force, barely turning his surprised, fair-skinned face.
“It is I who am sorry, Florita,” Althaus apologized, clicking his heels. “I swear on my honor, it will never happen again.”
He kept his word, and in all Flora’s remaining months in Arequipa, he never forgot himself or made an advance again, although sometimes she detected flickers of desire in his pale blue eyes.
A few days after the episode at the baths, she experienced the first earthquake of her life. She was in her dressing room, writing a letter, when she heard a terrible din of barking in the city—she had been told that the dogs were the first to feel what was coming—and a second later she saw her slave Dominga fall to her knees and, with her arms upraised and her eyes terrified, begin to pray aloud to the Lord of Earthquakes:
Have mercy on us, O Lord
Temper, O Lord, your wrath
your justice and your judgment
Sweet Jesus of mine
By your holy wounds
Have mercy on us, O Lord
The earth shook for two full minutes, with a deep, muffled rumbling, while Flora, frozen in place, forgot to run to the shelter of the doorway, as her relatives had taught her. The earthquake didn’t do much damage in Arequipa, but it destroyed two cities on the coast, Tacna and Arica. The three or four tremors that came later were insignificant compared to the quake. You would never forget the feeling of impotence and doom you had during that interminable shaking. Here in Marseille, eleven years later, it still sent a shiver up your spine.
She spent the rest of her time in the Mediterranean port in bed, oppressed by the heat, the pains in her stomach, her general weakness, and spells of neuralgia. Her impression of the workers of Marseille improved a little then. When they saw that she was ill, they did their utmost to care for her. They filed through the inn in small groups, bringing fruit and bunches of flowers, and they stood at the foot of the bed with their caps in their hands, attentive and shy, waiting to be asked to do something, eager to serve her. Thanks to Benjamin Mazel, she was able to form a Workers’ Union committee of ten people, all of whom were manual laborers except for the pamphleteer and agitator: a tailor, a carpenter, a bricklayer, two leather workers, two hairdressers, a seamstress, and even a longshoreman.
The meetings in her bedroom at the inn were informal. Because of her weakness and discomfort, Flora spoke little. But she listened carefully, and found herself amused by the naïveté and the enormous ignorance of her visitors, or angered by the bourgeois prejudices they had acquired. They believed Turkish, Greek, and Genoese immigrants were responsible for all thefts and crimes, for example, and they were unwilling to consider women as their equals, with the same rights as men. So as not to irritate her, they pretended to accept her ideas about women, but Flora saw by their expressions and the little glances they exchanged that she hadn’t convinced them.
At one of these meetings she learned from Mazel that Madame Victoire was not only a procuress but also a police informant, and that she had been inquiring about Flora for days in the gathering places of Marseille. So here, too, the authorities were on her trail. When he heard this, Salin, a carpenter who visited her every day, was alarmed, and feared that the police would arrest Madame Tristán and lock her up in a dungeon with prostitutes and thieves; he offered to dress her up in his National Guard uniform and hide her in a shepherds’ hut he knew of in the mountains. The proposal made everyone laugh. Flora informed them that she had already lived an adventure like the one Salin was proposing, and told them about her exploits in London five years before, where she had spent four months almost continually dressed as a man in order to move about freely and carry out her social research. As she was talking, her strength failed her and she fainted.
In Arequipa, you had dressed up as a man, too—as a hussar, with a sword, plumed helmet, boots, and mustache—at carnival time, to attend a costume ball. At night, the members of Arequipan society entertained themselves by pelting each other with confetti, streamers, and perfume, but during the day, they celebrated just like the common folk, with buckets of water and cascarones—eggshells full of colored water—in real street battles. From the roof terrace of Don Pío’s house, you watched the spectacle with all the fascination you felt for this strange land, so different from any other you had known.
Everything about Arequipa surprised you, disconcerted you, and sharpened your understanding of human beings, society, and life. There were the religious orders, for example, which had made a lucrative business out of selling their robes to the dying, since it was an Arequipan custom to bury the dead in religious garments. And there was the fact, too, that this worldly little city’s social life was more intense than that of Paris. Families paid and received visits all day, and at noon they ate the delicious cakes and sweets made by the cloistered nuns of Santa Catalina, Santa Teresa, and Santa Rosa, drinking chocolate from Cuzco, and smoking constantly—the women more than the men. Gossip, tittle-tattle, confidences, slander, and the indiscreet discussion of family secrets and scandal were the stuff of dinner conversation. At all of these gatherings, of course, everyone spoke nostalgically, enviously, and desperately of Paris, which for them was an outpost of Paradise. They devoured you with questions about life in Paris, and you, knowing less about it than they did, had to invent all kinds of stories in order not to disappoint them.
A month and a half into your stay in Arequipa, Uncle Pío was still in Camaná and showed no signs of returning. Was this prolonged absence a strategy to discourage your aspirations? Did Don Pío fear that you had brought fresh proof with you that would force the law to declare you a legitimate daughter and therefore the primary heiress of Don Mariano Tristán? She was absorbed in these reflections when it was announced that Captain Zacharie Chabrié, recently arrived in Arequipa, would come that afternoon to visit her. The appearance of the Breton seaman, whom she hadn’t thought of once since she said goodbye to him in Valparaíso, shook her like another earthquake. There was no doubt that he would insist upon marrying her.
The first day of her reunion with Chabrié was friendly, thanks to the presence in the drawing room of half a dozen relatives, which prevented the captain from discussing the passionate business that had brought him there. But his eyes told Flora what his words could not. The next day, he came in the morning, and Flora couldn’t avoid being left alone with him. On his knees, kissing her hand, Zacharie Chabrié begged her to accept him. He would devote the rest of his life to making her happy, and he would be a model father for Aline; Flora’s daughter would be his daughter, too. Overwhelmed, not knowing what to do, you almost told him the truth: that you were a married woman, not with a single daughter but with two surviving children, legally and morally barred from marrying again. But you were held back by the fear that Chabrié would betray you to the Tristáns in a fit of spite. What would happen then? The society that had opened its arms to you would expel you as a fraud and liar, a fugitive wife and heartless mother.
How to free yourself of him, then? In bed in Marseille, fanning herself against the heat of the October evening and listening to the buzz of the cicadas, Flora again felt an uneasiness in the pit of her stomach, a swelling of guilt and bad conscience. It always happened when she remembered the scheme she had employed to disappoint Chabrié and free herself from his hounding. Now you felt the cold metal of the bullet, too, close to your heart.
“Very well, Zacharie. If you truly love me, prove it to me. Get me an official document, a birth certificate, showing that I am my parents’ legitimate daughter. Then I’ll be able to claim my inheritance and with what I inherit we’ll be able to live safe and sound in California. Will you do it? You have acquaintances, influence in France. Will you get me a certificate, even if you have to bribe an official?”
Turning pale, the honest man and staunch Catholic stared wide-eyed at her, unable to
credit what he had just heard.
“But Flora, do you realize what you’re asking?”
“When true love is at stake, nothing is impossible, Zacharie.”
“Flora, Flora. Is this the proof of love you require? That I commit a crime? That I break the law? You ask me to do such a thing? To become a criminal to secure your inheritance?”
“I see. You don’t love me enough to be my husband, Zacharie.”
You watched as he grew even paler; then he turned so red he seemed apoplectic. He swayed where he stood, on the verge of collapse. Finally, he moved away, his back to you, dragging his feet like an old man. At the door, he turned and said, with one hand held high, as if exorcising you, “Know that now I hate you as much as I once loved you, Flora.”
What must have become of the noble Chabrié after you parted? You never heard from him again. Perhaps he read Peregrinations of a Pariah, and thus discovered the real reason for your ugly ruse to rebuff his love. Might he have forgiven you? Did he still hate you? What would your life have been like, Florita, if you had married Chabrié and buried yourself in California with him, never setting foot in France again? Peaceful and sheltered, no doubt. But then you never would have opened your eyes to the world, or written books, or become the standard-bearer of the revolution destined to liberate women from slavery and the poor from exploitation. In the end, you were right to make the poor man undergo that terrible ordeal in Arequipa.
When, somewhat recovered from her ailments, Flora was packing her bags to continue on to Toulon, the next stop on her tour, Benjamin Mazel brought her an amusing piece of news. The poet-bricklayer Charles Poncy, who had left her in the lurch with the excuse of a rest trip to Algiers, had never crossed the Mediterranean. He had boarded the ship, but before it set sail he was seized by terror at the prospect of shipwreck and suffered a nervous attack, blubbering, shouting, and demanding that they put down the gangway and let him ashore. The ship’s officials opted for the English navy’s method of curing recruits of their fear of the sea: they tossed him overboard. Mortally ashamed, Charles Poncy had been hiding in his little house in Marseille, waiting for time to pass so that everyone would think he was in Algiers, following his muse. A neighbor had given him away, and now he was the laughingstock of the city.
“Just like a poet,” said Flora.
12
WHAT ARE WE?
PUNAAUIA, MAY 1898
He arrived in Papeete early in the morning, before the heat grew too intense. The mail boat from San Francisco, announced the evening before, was in the lagoon now, and had docked. Drinking a beer at one of the port bars, he waited for the men from the post office to appear. He saw them pass along the quai du Commerce, in a carriage pulled by a weary horse, and the oldest of the postmen, Foncheval or Fonteval—you always got it wrong, Koké—nodded at him. Sitting quietly, speaking to no one, sipping the beer on which he had spent his last few cents, he waited until the two men were lost from sight beneath the royal poincianas and acacias of the rue de Rivoli. He whiled away the time calculating how long it would take them to sort the packages and letters spread out over the floor of the little post office onto shelves and into mailboxes. His ankle didn’t hurt, and he didn’t feel the burning itch of his shins that had kept him awake all night, in a cold sweat. You would have better luck now than you had with the boat a month ago, Koké.
He headed slowly toward the post office, not hurrying the pony that pulled his little cart. The sun, which he felt licking at his head, would blaze hotter and hotter as the minutes and hours passed, until the heat reached its intolerable height, between two and three in the afternoon. The rue de Rivoli was half-deserted, although some people were out in the gardens and on the balconies of its big wooden houses. Through the green of the tall mango trees, he glimpsed the tower of the cathedral in the distance. The post office was open. You were the first visitor that morning, Koké. Behind the counter, the two postmen were busying themselves filing letters and packages, already ranged in alphabetical order.
“There’s nothing for you,” Foncheval or Fonteval said to him in greeting, with an apologetic gesture. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing?” He could feel the scorching pain in his shins, the throbbing of his ankle. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sorry,” repeated the old postman, shrugging his shoulders.
He knew immediately what he had to do. Without haste, he returned to Punaauia, at the leisurely pace of the pony that pulled the little cart on which half was still owing, cursing the Paris gallery owners he hadn’t heard from in half a year at least. It would be more than a month before the next boat arrived from Sydney. What would you live on until then, Koké? The Chinaman Teng, the only storekeeper in Punaauia, had cut off his credit because it had been two months since he settled the debt he had run up for canned food, tobacco, and alcohol. That wasn’t the worst of it, Koké. You were used to owing money to half the world and still preserving your confidence in yourself and your love of life. But a feeling of emptiness, of exhaustion, had gripped you in the last three or four days, when you realized that your enormous painting, thirteen feet long and almost seven feet tall, the biggest you had ever painted and the one that took you the longest—several months—was finished at last. An extra brushstroke would spoil it. Wasn’t it a shame that you had painted the best work of your life on sackcloth that would soon rot in the damp and the rain? He thought, Does it matter whether it disappears before anyone sees it? No one will recognize that it’s a masterpiece anyway. No one would understand it. How could it be that even your loyal friend Daniel de Monfreid, whom you had begged for help three months ago with the desperation of a drowning man, hadn’t written you?
He arrived in Punaauia around midday. Fortunately, Pau’ura and little Émile weren’t home. Not because Pau’ura might have hindered your plans, for the girl was a true Maori, accustomed to obeying her husband no matter what he did or asked, but because you would’ve had to talk to her, answer her stupid questions, and just now you didn’t have the time or the patience for foolishness, much less for the child’s wailing. He remembered how intelligent Teha’amana had been. Talking to her had helped him endure hard times; talking to Pau’ura didn’t. He climbed the swaying outside staircase of the hut to the bedroom, in search of the bag of powdered arsenic he kept to rub on the sores on his legs. Picking up his straw hat and the staff with the head he had carved in the shape of an erect phallus, he left the house, without so much as a farewell glance at the mess of books, notebooks, clothes, postcards, glasses, and bottles, amid which the cat was dozing. He didn’t even look into his studio, where he had lived closeted in a state of incandescence for the last few weeks, working on the enormous painting that had consumed his entire existence. Without a glance he passed by the little school next door, from which came the sound of running and shouting, and he hurried across the orchard belonging to his friend, the ex-soldier Pierre Levergos. Wading across the stream, he set out along the valley of Punaruu, which threaded its way into the steep and densely forested mountains, leaving the coast behind.
By now it was very hot, the summer sun fierce enough to cause anyone foolish enough to spend long bareheaded to lose consciousness. In some of the few native huts he passed he heard laughter and singing. The New Year festivities, begun a week ago. And twice before he left the valley he heard someone shout in greeting, “Koké, Koké,” calling him by the nickname that was the Tahitian attempt to say his last name. He raised his hand in reply without stopping, trying to quicken his step, which aggravated the itching of his legs and the stabbing pains in his ankle.
In reality, he was moving very slowly, leaning on his staff, limping. Every so often, he wiped the sweat from his brow with his fingers. Fifty years old—a decent age to die. Would the posthumous glory you had trusted in so firmly when you were younger, in Paris, Finistère, Panama, and Martinique, be granted you? When the news of your death reached France, would Parisian whim serve to kindle an interest in your work and life? Would
your fate be the same as the mad Dutchman’s after his suicide? Curiosity, recognition, admiration, oblivion: none of it mattered to you in the slightest.
He had begun to climb the mountain along a narrow path, shaded by an intricate canopy of coconut palms, mango trees, and breadfruit trees half buried in the undergrowth. He had to beat his way through using his staff as a machete. I don’t regret anything I’ve done, he thought. Not true. You regretted having contracted the unspeakable illness, Koké. As the path became steeper, he climbed more slowly, shaken by the effort. The last thing you wanted was for your heart to fail you now. Your death would come as you had planned it, not when and where the unspeakable illness decided. Walking protected by the foliage of the mountain slopes was a thousand times preferable to walking through the valley under the sky’s skull-boring glare. He stopped several times to catch his breath before reaching the little plateau. He had climbed there a few months earlier, guided by Pau’ura, and had scarcely stepped onto that raised bit of earth—treeless but thick with ferns of all sizes, with a view of the valley, the white line of the coast, the clear blue lagoon, the rosy glow of the coral reefs, and beyond, the sea merging with the sky—when he decided, “I want to die here.” It was a beautiful spot, quiet, perfect, unspoiled—possibly the only place in all of Tahiti that still looked exactly like the refuge you had in mind seven years ago, in 1891, when you left France for the South Seas, announcing to your friends that you were fleeing European civilization and its corruption by the golden calf in search of a pure and primitive world, a land of skies without winter where art wouldn’t be just another business venture but a sacred, vital, and sporting task, and where to eat an artist would need only to raise his arm and pluck fruit from heavily laden trees, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Reality hadn’t lived up to your dreams, Koké.
The Way to Paradise Page 21