Borne on the soft breeze, an intense fragrance rose up to the little natural balcony suspended from the mountainside, the sort of fragrance that was given off by the foliage in the rainy season and that the Tahitians called noa noa. Inhaling with delight, for a few seconds he forgot his ankle and his legs. He sat on a patch of dry earth, at the foot of a clump of ferns that hid the sky. Coolly, his hand steady, he opened the bag and swallowed all the powdered arsenic, helping it down with saliva, and taking small pauses so he wouldn’t choke. He licked the last grains from the bag. It had an earthy taste, slightly acidic. Feeling no fear and not conjuring up any of his favorite gruesome scenarios, he waited with distant curiosity for the poison to take effect. Almost at once, he began to yawn. Were you going to fall asleep? Would you slip gently, unconsciously, from life to death? You had thought that death by poison would be dramatic, with horrific pains, convulsions, a cataclysm in your guts. Instead, you sank into a hazy world and began to dream.
He dreamed of that black woman in Panama, in April or May of 1887, with her red sex like a clot. At the door of her plank shack there was always a line longer than the line for any other Colombian prostitute in the camp. The workers on the canal under construction preferred her because of her perrito; it took Paul some time to learn that this was the benign Panamanian version of the terrifying, mythical vagina dentata. According to the canal laborers, this woman’s perrito didn’t castrate those who mounted her, but only nibbled at them affectionately; the startling tickle gave them pleasure. Curious, he stood in line on payday, just like the other diggers on his squad, but he didn’t notice anything special about her sex. You remembered the powerful scent given off by her sweaty body, the warm invitation of her belly, thighs, and breasts. Had she given you the unspeakable illness? The suspicion had plagued him ever since the raging fevers that nearly killed him in Martinique. Was it because of the black woman in Panama that your vision had weakened, your heart was failing, and your legs were covered in pustules? The thought made him sad, and suddenly he was weeping for his daughter, Aline: it had been so many years since you saw her, and you would never see her again, because she had died far away in Denmark, felled by pneumonia. Surely she had become a lovely young Danish lady who spoke French as badly as Pau’ura. Now you, too, were dying, on this faraway little South Seas island, Tahiti-nui. And then he dreamed of his companion and friend Charles Laval. You had met him when times were good in Pont-Aven, and together the two of you traveled to Martinique and Panama, in search of Paradise. It wasn’t there; instead, you and Charles walked straight into hell. Charles came down with yellow fever and tried to kill himself. But why grieve now for Charles Laval, Koké? Hadn’t he been cured of the pestilence? Hadn’t he survived his suicide attempt? Hadn’t he returned to France to tell of his deeds like a crusader home from Jerusalem? Hadn’t he achieved respectable success as a painter? And above all, hadn’t he married the beautiful, delicate, ethereal Madeleine, sister of Émile Bernard, whom you had been in love with back in Brittany? Abruptly, his dream became a nightmare. He was choking. Something thick and hot was rising up his esophagus and blocking his throat. He couldn’t spit it out. He lay this way for a long time, agonizing, choking, struggling, gripped by nausea. When he opened his eyes, he had vomited on himself, and a line of red ants was marching across his chest, around the vomit stains.
Were you alive? You were. But you were confused, dazed, and ashamed, without the strength even to lift your arms. It was evening, and in the distance the last light of day glowed. From time to time he lost consciousness, and a series of scenes paraded through his head. One especially kept recurring, in which he was on the deck of the Jérôme-Napoléon. An officer asked, “Where did you break your nose, Seaman Gauguin?” “It isn’t broken, sir; it was always that way. I may have blue eyes and a French last name, but I am an Inca, sir. My nose is the proof.” It was night now; when he opened his eyes he saw stars and shivered in the cold. He slept, awoke, fell asleep again, and suddenly he realized with utter clarity what title he should give the painting on which he had been working for the last few months, after half a year without touching a brush or making a single sketch in his notebooks. The certainty flooded him with soothing security and eclipsed the shame he felt at having failed to commit suicide, just as Laval had failed in the Caribbean in April or May 1887, when he was infected by the pox. With the first gleams of dawn he recovered the strength and presence of mind to get to his feet and stand. His legs trembled but they didn’t burn, and his ankle didn’t ache at all anymore. Before starting back, he spent a while brushing away the red ants that were crawling all over him. How frustrated they must be that you hadn’t died, Koké; what a feast they might have had on your rotting body. Rotting or not, it was so stubborn and stupid that it had insisted on staying alive.
Although he was tortured by thirst—his tongue was as petrified as a lizard’s—he didn’t feel bad, in body or spirit, as he headed down the mountain toward the valley; rather, he was filled with eager anticipation. You were anxious to be home, to plunge into the river in Punaauia where you bathed each morning before starting work, to drink plenty of water and some nice hot tea with a dash of rum (was there any rum left?). Then, lighting your pipe (was there any tobacco left?), you would go into the studio and immediately paint the title that had come to you thanks to your frustrated suicide attempt, in black letters in the upper-left corner of that thirteen-foot-long stretch of sackcloth to which you had been riveted these last few weeks. Was it a masterpiece? It was, Koké. In that upper corner, those tremendous questions would preside over the canvas. You hadn’t the slightest idea what the answers might be. But you were sure that anyone who knew how to look could find them in the painting’s twelve figures, which traced, in a counterclockwise arc, the human trajectory from the beginning of life in infancy to its end in ignominious old age.
Just before he reached the valley, he came upon a small waterfall flowing in a mossy crevice down the mountainside. He drank, happily. After wetting his face, head, arms, and chest, he rested, sitting on the edge of the path, his legs dangling in space, sunken in a pleasant daze. The rest of the way back he was drunk with fatigue, but in high spirits.
He arrived home around midday, as if he had just circled the earth. Little Émile was sleeping naked on his back in his cot, and Pau’ura, sitting on the mat on the floor with the cat curled around her legs, was trying to coax a melody from the guitar. She looked at him and smiled, still strumming the strings of an instrument she would never master. Every note was out of tune.
“I tried to kill myself and I didn’t succeed; I swallowed so much poison that it made me vomit, which saved me; but now I have no arsenic for my legs,” he said slowly, in French, which Pau’ura understood perfectly well, although she spoke it with difficulty. “I’m not only a failed artist and a penniless wretch, I’m also a failed suicide. Go on, make me a cup of tea.”
Pau’ura’s absent expression didn’t alter. Mechanically, she sketched a smile, while her hands kept up their attempt to pluck pleasant chords from the much-abused guitar.
“Koké,” she said, without moving. “A cup of tea.”
“A cup of tea!” he repeated, lying down on the bed and shooing her with his hands. “Now!”
Untangling herself from the cat, she left the guitar on the floor, and walked to the door, her hips gently swinging. She looked older than her sixteen or seventeen years. She was shapely and not very tall, with long blue-black hair that swept her shoulders, and silky skin that seemed to glow against her red pareu. A lovely girl, perhaps the prettiest vahine you had lived with since you came to Tahiti. She had given birth twice, and it hadn’t changed her body for the worse at all; her silhouette was still slender and youthful. You had been with her for years now, but you had never come to love her the way you loved Teha’amana, whom you still thought of sometimes with irrepressible longing. And why hadn’t you come to love her, Koké, since she was not only beautiful but also meek and obliging? Because she w
as too stupid. Recently, he had reduced his conversation with his Tahitian wife to the bare essentials. If Pau’ura was quiet, he was able to feel a certain fondness for her; she kept him company, she was a help, and when he was assailed by desire, which occurred less often than it once had, she was a firm, sensual young body. But when she opened her mouth to speak, in her poor French or in a Tahitian he couldn’t always understand, he was depressed by the banality of her questions and her inability to comprehend the explanations he tried to give her. But most of all he was exasperated by her utter apathy concerning anything spiritual, intellectual, artistic, or simply intelligent. Had she understood that you tried to kill yourself? She had understood it very well. But since everything her husband did was right, what could she possibly have to say about it? Did she have a voice or a vote in matters concerning her lord and master? She wasn’t a woman, Koké. She was a pretty little adolescent body, a cunt and breasts, nothing more.
He fell asleep. But not for long, because when he opened his eyes the cup of tea that Pau’ura had left for him beside the bed was still hot. He went looking for the last bottle of rum in the larder. It was almost empty, but the few drops he shook into his tea enlivened the drink. He sipped it slowly as he went fearfully into his studio and took a long look at the immense canvas on the easel that he had built especially for it, like the scaffolding of a building. Arrows of sunlight filtering through the bamboo set the painting in motion, creating a curious sense of vibration; a flurry of butterflies, as in the leafy glade of Punaruu on the hottest days of the year. Yes, Koké, the title was right. Taking up his palette and one of his finest brushes, he wrote in the upper-left corner: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Was this the work you intended to paint? Now, seeing it upon your return from the dead—a pretty phrase, Koké—with the perspective and serenity of having come back from the great beyond, you were no longer so sure. Was it Paradise as reinvented by a painter-savage settled on the island of Tahiti? That had been your vague original intention. Or rather, to paint a Garden of Eden that wasn’t abstract, European, or mystical but Maori, from the hell into which you had been plunged in these last months of unrelenting misfortune. A real-life Eden, incarnated here and now. But that wasn’t what you saw before you. Who was that big central figure in a white loincloth, plucking a fruit from the invisible tree over her head and dividing the canvas in two? Not Eve, surely. He wasn’t even certain it was a woman, because although something about the skin, waist, and arms could be considered feminine, the bulges that swelled the loincloth weren’t a woman’s: they were a goodly pair of testicles and a substantial phallus, possibly in the process of becoming erect.
He began to laugh. A taata vahine! A mahu! That was what you had painted, Koké: a man-woman. Seven years ago, upon arriving in Tahiti in June 1891, when Lieutenant Jénot (what must have happened to him?) told you that the natives thought you were a taata vahine, a mahu, because of your long, loose hair and your cowboy hat, it made you shudder. You, a man-woman? Hadn’t you given ample proof of your virility ever since you reached the age of reason? Uncomfortable, you cut your long hair and replaced the Buffalo Bill hat with a straw one. But later, upon discovering that Tahitians, unlike Europeans, considered a taata vahine as acceptable as an ordinary man or woman, you changed your mind. Now you were proud of having been mistaken for a mahu. It’s the one thing the missionaries haven’t been able to take away from them, he thought. Weren’t there taata vahines in the villages, and in the bosom of many families, despite the fierce preaching of priests and pastors determined to impose a strict sexual symmetry, with men on one side, women on the other, and everything ambiguous that lay in between eliminated? No one had yet been able to make the natives give up their sexual wisdom. Amused, he remembered his adventure with the woodcutter Jotefa, by the waterfall: it hadn’t been so long ago, yet it seemed centuries, Koké. Yes, there were still many taata vahines in Tahiti. Not in Papeete, but inland, where the European influence had come late, haphazardly, or never. Often he had seen the boys who wore flowers in their hair like women and cooked, wove, and cleaned house being fondled by men at gatherings when everyone was drunk, and sometimes being taken like women, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And in the same circumstances, he had also seen girls and women embracing and caressing one another, with no one seeming the least bit surprised. These were the last traces of the lost civilization you had come looking for in vain, Koké, the last gasp of that primitive, healthy, pagan, happy culture, unashamed of the body and untainted by the decadent notion of sin. It was all that was left of what had brought you to the South Seas, that wise acceptance of the need for unfettered love, love in all its incarnations, including hermaphroditism. It wouldn’t last much longer. Europe would eliminate the taata vahine, too, as it had eliminated the old gods, the old beliefs, the old customs, the old nudity, the tattoos, the anthropophagy, the healthy, joyful, vibrant civilization that had existed once upon a time. But it was still alive in the Marquesas. You had to go there, before you expired.
Without realizing or intending it, you had painted a taata vahine in the middle of your greatest work. An homage to what used to be, to what had been stolen from the Tahitians. In all your years here, you hadn’t found a single person who could remember what his people’s traditions, relations, and daily life used to be like. Even the splendid nudity in which they appeared in your paintings had been denied them. The missionaries had clad their copper bodies in gowns like religious habits. What a crime! Hiding those lovely ocher, ash-gray, or bluish-black forms that for centuries they must have proudly flaunted in the sunlight, with animal innocence. The gowns they were made to wear obscured their gracefulness, ease, and strength, branding them with the degrading mark of the serf. Koké, Koké: in order to make that vanished culture exist you had had to create it from scratch. Had there ever been Maori like the ones in your paintings? Creatures of nature, at one with their bodies, brother and sister to the trees that bestowed their fruits upon them, to the sea and the lagoon where they fished and bathed and where their swift canoes split the waters, protected from misfortune by the forbidding goddess, Hina, whom you had also had to invent for them, since no Tahitian could remember what it was like when their ancestors worshiped her. The missionaries had stolen their memory, made them into amnesiacs.
It had been a good idea to paint the upper corners that tarnished yellow, to suggest an ancient fresco whose borders were beginning to crumble with age. And the regular shading of the landscape was right, too, underlaid by the soft blue and Veronese green of the background, upon which dancing branches and trunks coiled like tentacles and snakes. The trees were the only aggressive beings in the painting. The animals, in contrast, were peaceful: cats, goat, dog, birds, all living in harmony with the humans. Even the old woman kneeling on the left, who was about to die or perhaps was already dead, and had assumed the pose of the Peruvian mummies that you had never been able to forget, seemed resigned to her demise.
And those two figures in pink robes in the middle ground, who were walking backward through time, from death to life, beside the tree of knowledge? While you were painting them, you thought they might be you yourself and the unfortunate Aline. But no—those whispering figures weren’t you and your dead daughter. They weren’t Tahitians, either. There was something sinister, sullen, scheming, hollow, in the way they exchanged confidences, the way they were absorbed in each other, uninterested in their surroundings. Closing his eyes, he searched the depths of his soul. What did those two represent, Koké? You didn’t know. You would never know. A good sign. It was not simply with your hands, your ideas, your fantasies, and your old skill that you had painted your greatest work, but also with the dark forces deep in your soul, the seething of your passions, the fury of your instincts, the urgency that surfaces in exceptional paintings. Paintings that never die, Koké. Like Manet’s Olympia.
He was immersed for a long time in the study of his painting, trying to fully under
stand it. When he came down from the studio, Pau’ura had prepared supper, and was waiting for him in the space below that was open to the elements on two sides and served as a dining room. She had Émile in her arms, and the child—for whom you had never come to feel the same fondness you felt for his sister who died soon after she was born—was silent and absolutely still, though his eyes were wide open. Just as well. There was a dish of fruit on the table, and the omelette you had taught your vahine to make the way you liked it: very soft and yielding, almost liquid. The pounding of the invisible sea could be heard close by.
“So Chinaman Teng gave us credit again,” he said, smiling. “How did you persuade him?”
“Koké,” she nodded. “Chinaman. Eggs. Salt.”
There was something calm, sweet, childish in her eyes that contrasted with the adult roundness of her body.
“If I love you tonight, I’ll feel truly resuscitated,” he said aloud, sitting down to eat.
“Truly,” said Pau’ura, pouting.
13
THE NUN GUTIÉRREZ
TOULON, AUGUST 1844
Flora’s first impression of Toulon, where she arrived at dawn on July 29, 1844, could not have been worse. “A city of soldiers and criminals. I’ll accomplish nothing here.” Her pessimism was inspired by Toulon’s dependence on the naval armory, where five thousand city workers were employed alongside prisoners sentenced to hard labor. Then, too, her stomach pains and neuralgia had given her no peace since Marseille.
Her hosts in Toulon were bourgeois Saint-Simonians, very modern so long as they were discussing technical matters, scientific progress, and the organization of the production of industrial goods, but terrified that Flora’s outbursts would bring them trouble with the authorities. Their leader, a foppish captain called Joseph Corrèze, wearied her with his counsels of prudence and moderation.
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