Flora could contain herself no longer. She exclaimed that slavery was an aberration, a crime against civilization, and that sooner or later, it would be abolished in Peru as it had been already in France.
Señor Lavalle stood looking at her in puzzlement, as if he had discovered a different person beside him.
“Look at what’s been happening in the old French colony of Santo Domingo since they freed their slaves,” he replied at last, uncomfortably. “Absolute chaos and a return to barbarism. The blacks there are devouring each other.”
And to demonstrate the extremes to which such people would go, he took her to the plantation’s dungeons. In a shadowy cell, its floor covered in straw—it looked like the den of some beast—he showed her two young black women, completely naked, chained to the wall.
“Why do you think they are here?” he asked, with a glimmer of triumph. “These monsters killed their own newborn daughters.”
“I understand them very well,” replied Flora. “If I were in their place, I would have paid a daughter of mine the same favor. Even if it meant killing her, I would free her from living a life in hell, as a slave.”
Was it there you began your career as an agitator and rebel, Florita, on that sugarcane plantation outside of Lima, before the feudal, Frenchified slaveowner? Whatever the case, if you hadn’t traveled to faraway Peru and had the experiences you had there, you wouldn’t be what you were now. What were you now, Andalusa? A free woman, yes. But a failed revolutionary from start to finish. Or at least here in Nîmes, this city of pious fools reeking of incense. On August 17, the day of her departure for Montpellier, when she took stock of her visit, the results couldn’t have been more pathetic. Only seventy copies of The Workers’ Union sold; she had to leave the other hundred that she had brought with Dr. Pleindoux. And she wasn’t able to form a committee. At the four meetings she held, none of those present could be persuaded to campaign for the Workers’ Union. No one, of course, came to see her off at the station on the morning she left.
But a few days later, in Montpellier, a frightened missive from the manager of the Hôtel du Gard informed her that someone had been interested in her in Nîmes after all, although happily only after her departure. The local commissioner, accompanied by two policemen, had arrived at the establishment with an order signed by the mayor of Nîmes, ordering her immediate expulsion from the city “for inciting the workers of Nîmes to demand an increase in wages.”
The news made her laugh, and put her in a good humor all day. Well, well, Florita. So you weren’t a complete failure as a revolutionary after all.
16
THE HOUSE OF PLEASURE
ATUONA (HIVA OA), JULY 1902
On the morning of September 16, 1901, when La Croix du Sud dropped anchor just off Atuona, on the island of Hiva Oa, and Paul, from the ship’s bridge, spotted the cluster of people waiting for him at the little port—a gendarme in white uniform, missionaries in long robes and straw hats, a cluster of half-naked native children—he felt great happiness. At last his dream of reaching the Marquesas Islands had come true, and at last the horrible crossing of six days and six nights from Tahiti on that filthy, sweltering little ship was over. In all his time at sea he had scarcely been able to sleep a wink, because he was forever killing ants and cockroaches and driving away the rats that came prowling around his cabin in search of food.
No sooner had he disembarked in the tiny town of Atuona—a settlement of a few thousand people, surrounded by forested hills and two steep mountains crowned with foliage—than he actually met a prince, on the very dock! This was Ky Dong, an Annamite who went by the nom de guerre he had taken when he decided to give up his career in the French colonial administration of his native Vietnam to dedicate himself to political agitation, the anticolonialist struggle, and even terrorism, it seemed. That, at least, was the verdict of the Saigon court, which ruled that he was a subversive and sentenced him to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, in remote Guiana. Before baptizing himself Ky Dong, Prince Nguyen Van Cam had studied literature and science in Saigon and Algeria. From Algeria he returned to Vietnam, where he was forging a splendid bureaucratic career for himself before he abandoned it to fight the French occupation. How had he ended up in Atuona? Thanks to the bête noire of Les Guêpes, ex-governor Gustave Gallet, who met the Annamite in Papeete on a stopover of the ship that was carrying him to serve out his sentence on Devil’s Island. Impressed by Ky Dong’s sophistication, intelligence, and polished manners, the governor saved his life: he made him an officer at Atuona’s medical outpost. That was three years ago. The Annamite had accepted his fate with oriental equanimity. He knew he would never leave here, unless it were to be taken to the hell of Guiana. He had married a Marquesan woman from Hiva Oa, spoke fluent Maori, and was liked by all. Small, discreet, possessed of a rather sinuous natural elegance, he faithfully performed his duties as medical officer and, in this limbo of ignorant folk, did everything he could to preserve his sense of intellectual inquiry and discrimination.
He knew that the new arrival from Papeete was an artist, and he offered to help him settle in and inform him about the place where (“rashly,” he said) Monsieur Gauguin had decided to bury himself. And so he did. His friendship and advice were invaluable to Paul. From the port Ky Dong led him to the hut of Matikana, a Chinese Maori friend of his who rented rooms, at the end of Atuona’s single little dirt road, which was nearly swallowed up by brush. He kept Koké’s chests and bags at his own house until the artist could buy a piece of land and build a place to live. And he introduced him to the people who would henceforth be his friends in Atuona: the American Ben Varney, an ex-whaler who was stranded on Hiva Oa in a fit of drunkenness and now managed the general store, and the Breton Émile Frébault, farmer, businessman, fisherman, and inveterate chess player.
Buying property in this tiny place surrounded by forests was extremely difficult. All the land in the area belonged to the bishopric, and fearsome Bishop Joseph Martin—stubborn, despotic, and locked in a desperate struggle to rescue the native population from the grip of alcohol—would never sell a plot to a foreigner of questionable morals.
Adopting the strategy devised by Ky Dong—whose wide reading, good humor, and grace of spirit made him an excellent companion—Paul attended Mass daily, starting the day after his arrival in Atuona. At church, he could always be spotted in the front row, following the service devotedly, and he frequently confessed and took communion. Some afternoons he went to hear the rosary said, too. His pious, proper behavior in those first days in Atuona convinced Monsignor Joseph Martin that Paul was a respectable person. And the bishop, in a gesture he would bitterly regret, agreed to sell him, for a modest sum, a lovely plot of land on the outskirts of Atuona. At its rear was the Bay of Traitors, a name the Marquesans hated but used nonetheless for the beach and the harbor, and to the front were the two proud peaks of Temetiu and Feani. Along one side ran the Make Make, one of the twenty or so streams into which the island’s waterfalls flowed. From the moment he was faced with the magnificent sight, Paul thought of Vincent. My God, this was it, Koké; this was it. The place the mad Dutchman dreamed of in Arles, the primitive, tropical spot he talked of ceaselessly while you were living together in the fall of 1888, the place where he wanted to establish the Studio of the South, the community of artists where you would be master, and everything would belong to everyone, since money and its corrupting influence would be abolished. In this studio artists would live in brotherhood in a setting of matchless freedom and beauty, devoted to the creation of an immortal art: canvases and sculptures whose vitality would endure for centuries. How you would shout with glee, Vincent, if you could see the light here, even whiter than the light in Provence, and the explosion of bougainvillea, ferns, acacias, coconut palms, climbing vines, and breadfruit trees!
As soon as he had signed the contract of sale with the bishop, and was the owner of the land, Paul gave up going to Mass and to hear the rosary. Struggling with an ever-growing
number of ailments—pains in his legs and back, difficulty walking, poor vision that grew worse every day, and palpitations that made it hard for him to breathe—he threw himself body and soul into the building of the Maison du Jouir—House of Pleasure—the name he and the mad Dutchman had given the imaginary Studio of the South of their daydreams fifteen years ago in Arles. Working side by side with him were Ky Dong, Émile Frébault, a white-bearded native called Tioka who from now on would be his neighbor, and even the island’s gendarme, Désiré Charpillet, with whom Koké got along marvelously.
The House of Pleasure was finished in six weeks. It was built of wood, matting, and woven straw, and like his little houses in Mataiea and Punaauia, it had two floors. The bottom floor, two parallel cubes separated by an open space that would be his dining room, housed the kitchen and the sculpture studio. Above, under a conical straw roof, were the painting studio, the small bedroom, and the bathroom. Paul carved a wooden panel for the entrance with the name of the house, and two big vertical panels flanking the sign, with naked women in voluptuous poses, stylized animals and plants, and invocations that caused an uproar at both the large Catholic and smaller Protestant missions of Hiva Oa: Soyez mystérieuses (Be Mysterious, O Women) and Soyez amoureuses et vous serez heureuses (Fall in Love, O Women, and You Will Be Happy). From the moment he learned that Paul had had the audacity to decorate his house with these obscenities, Bishop Joseph Martin became his enemy. And when he learned that, besides a harmonium, guitar, and mandolin, forty-five pornographic photographs depicting outrageous sexual poses were displayed on the walls of Paul’s studio, he denounced the artist in one of his Sunday sermons as a force for evil, someone the Marquesans should avoid.
Paul laughed at the bishop’s rantings, but the Annamite prince warned him that it was dangerous to make an enemy of Monsignor Martin, because he was a man who carried a grudge, and he was powerful and indefatigable. They met every afternoon, at the House of Pleasure, which Koké had stocked well with food and drink bought at the only store in Atuona, owned by Ben Varney. He hired two servants, Kahui, a half-Chinese cook, and a Maori gardener, Matahaba, who was given precise instructions on how to grow sunflowers, as Koké had done himself in Punaauia. In the end, those sunflowers brightened the garden of the House of Pleasure. The memory of the mad Dutchman almost never abandoned you in your first few months in Atuona—why, Koké? You had managed to erase him from your mind for almost fifteen years, and that was probably a good thing, since the thought of Vincent made you uneasy, disturbed you, and might have disrupted your work. But here in the Marquesas, whether because you were painting very little, or because you felt tired and ill, you were no longer able to keep the image of good Vincent, poor Vincent, unbearable Vincent, with his obsequiousness and his fits of madness, from bursting constantly into your consciouness. Nor could you keep from reliving the events, stories, yearnings, and dreams of those eight weeks of difficult cohabitation in Provence fifteen years ago more clearly than you remembered things that had happened just a few days ago, which you often completely forgot. (For example, you made Ben Varney repeat twice in the same week the tale of how, after a spell of hard drinking, he woke up in the Bay of Traitors and discovered that his whaling ship had sailed away and he was stranded without a cent, or even any papers, and without speaking a word of French or Marquesan.)
Now you felt pity for the mad Dutchman, and even remembered him with affection. But in October of 1888, when, after giving in to his pleading and Theo van Gogh’s pressure on you to accept his brother’s invitation, you went to live with him in Arles, you came to hate him. Poor Vincent! He had placed such hopes in your arrival, believing the two of you would be the pioneering members of the artists’ community of his dreams—a true monastery, a miniature Eden—that the failure of his project drove him mad and killed him.
Among the nightmarish trips that Paul had taken in his life, one of the worst was the fifteen-hour journey, with six changes of train, that it took him to get from Pont-Aven in Brittany to Arles in Provence. He was sorry to leave Pont-Aven. Remaining behind were not only several painter friends who considered him their master but also, above all, Émile Bernard and his sister, the gentle Madeleine. Exhausted, he arrived at the station in Arles at five in the morning on October 23, 1888. In order not to wake Vincent so early, he sought refuge in a neighboring café. To his surprise, the owner recognized him as soon as he came in. “Ah, Vincent’s artist friend!” The mad Dutchman had showed him Paul’s self-portrait, in which he appeared as Jean Valjean, the hero of Les Misérables. Helping him to carry his valises and bags, the café’s owner led him to the place Lamartine outside the city’s walls, very near the Cavalry Gate, which was one of the entrances to the old city, not far from the Roman amphitheater and coliseum. On the corner of the place Lamartine closest to the banks of the Rhône was the Yellow House that the mad Dutchman had rented a few months before, in anticipation of Paul’s arrival. He had painted it, furnished it, decorated the rooms, and hung the walls with paintings, working day and night and worrying obsessively over every detail so that Paul would feel at ease in his new home, and in the proper mood to paint.
But you didn’t feel comfortable in the Yellow House, Paul. You didn’t like the riot of blinding, dizzying colors that leaped out at you wherever you turned your gaze, and Vincent’s fawning welcome and flattery discomfited you as he showed you around the house he had arrayed to please you, anxious for your approval. In fact, the house made you feel wary, and somehow oppressed. Vincent was so excessively friendly and agreeable that from the very first day you began to feel that living with such a man would curb your freedom, that you’d have no life of your own, that Vincent would invade your privacy, become a fulsome jailor. The Yellow House could be a prison for a man as free as you.
But now, at a distance, remembered from your House of Pleasure with its majestic views, the mad Dutchman—overexcited, childlike, as solicitous of you as a sick man of the doctor charged with saving his life—seemed to you an essentially good and defenseless person, infinitely generous and free of envy, resentments, and pretentions, devoted body and soul to art, living like a beggar and not caring in the least, hypersensitive, obsessive, inoculated against any sort of happiness. He clung to you like a drowning man to a scrap of wood, believing that you were wise and strong enough to teach him to survive in the wild world. The responsibility he heaped on you, Paul! Vincent, who understood art, colors, and canvases, understood absolutely nothing about life. That was why he was always unhappy, why he went mad, and why he finally shot himself in the stomach at the age of thirty-seven. How unjust it was that those frivolous magpies, those idle Parisians, should blame you now for Vincent’s tragic end! Instead it was you who were nearly driven mad by the Dutchman, and even came close to losing your life in the two months you spent with him in Arles.
There was trouble from the start at the Yellow House. The first problem was disorder, which Paul hated but which was Vincent’s natural element. They agreed on a strict division of labor: Paul would cook, the Dutchman would shop, and both would clean, on alternate days. In reality, Paul did the cleaning, and Vincent the cluttering. Their first argument arose over the basket of spending money. In a test of the collective property system to be instituted in the Studio of the South, the future artists’ colony that they planned to found in some exotic country, they set up a common fund, where they deposited the money sent to them from Paris by Theo van Gogh. A little notebook and a pencil were provided for each to record how much they had taken. In the end, Paul complained: Vincent was taking the lion’s share, especially for what he euphemistically noted as “hygienic activities”: his dalliances with Rachel, a stick-thin young prostitute, at Madame Virginie’s brothel, not far from the Yellow House, on one of the little streets issuing from the place Lamartine.
The bawdy houses of Arles were another source of disagreement. Paul reproached Vincent for making love only with prostitutes; he preferred to seduce women rather than paying for their at
tentions. And he was having a fairly easy time of it with the women of Arles, who loved his good looks, clever talk, and easy confidence. Vincent assured him that before Paul’s arrival he had visited Madame Virginie’s only a few times a month; now, however, he was going twice a week. This new sexual ardor distressed Vincent; he was convinced that the energy he expended in “fornicating” (which, as an ex-Lutheran preacher, was what he called it) was subtracted from his work as an artist. Paul mocked the puritanical prejudices of the ex-pastor. In his case, nothing made him more eager to take up his brush than having first satisfied his cock.
“No, no,” the mad Dutchman exclaimed in exasperation. “My best work has always been done in periods of total sexual abstinence. My spermatic painting! I did it by spilling all my sexual energy onto the canvas instead of wasting it on women.”
“What foolishness, Vincent. Or perhaps I simply have sexual energy to spare, for my paintings and my women.”
The two of you disagreed more often than you agreed, and yet sometimes—when you heard your friend speak so candidly and hopefully about his longed-for community of artist-monks in retreat from the world, settled in a distant, primitive country with no links to materialist civilization, dedicated body and soul to painting, and engaged in a brotherhood untouched by shadow—you let yourself be swept away by his dream. It was exciting, of course it was! There was something beautiful, noble, selfless, generous, in the Dutchman’s yearning to found that small society of pure-minded artists, creators, dreamers, secular saints, all pledged to art as medieval knights pledged themselves to fight for an ideal or a lady. Perhaps it was not unlike the dreams that spurred on your own grandmother, as, near death, she traveled France trying to recruit disciples for the revolution that would put an end to all society’s ills. Grandmother Flora and the mad Dutchman would have understood each other, Koké.
The Way to Paradise Page 29