Paul and Vincent even disagreed about the Studio of the South. One night, at a café on the symmetrical place du Forum, where they often sat and drank an absinthe after dinner, Vincent proposed that they invite the painter Seurat to join the artists’ community.
“That dot-maker who calls himself a creator?” exclaimed Paul. “Never.” He proposed that instead of the pointillist they take Puvis de Chavannes, whom Vincent hated as much as Paul detested Seurat. The argument went on until dawn. You forgot disputes quickly, Paul; not Vincent. For days he would be pale, distraught, turning the matter over in his head. For the mad Dutchman nothing was insignificant or banal; everything touched a central nerve of existence, was linked to larger themes: God, life, death, madness, art.
If the mad Dutchman deserved your gratitude in any way, it was for being the first to whet your appetite for Polynesia, thanks to a little novel that fell into his hands, and which he loved: The Marriage of Loti by an officer of the French merchant marine, Pierre Loti. The book was set in Tahiti, and it described an earthly paradise before the Fall, where nature was bounteous and beautiful, and the natives free, healthy, and without prejudice or guile, abandoning themselves to life and pleasure with naturalness and spontaneity, full of primitive vigor and enthusiasm. Life was full of paradoxes, wasn’t it, Koké? It was Vincent who dreamed of fleeing decadent, money-mad Europe for an exotic world, seeking the elemental, religious force obliterated in the West by civilization. But he never escaped his European jail. It was you, in the end, who reached Tahiti, and now even the Marquesas, trying to make reality of what the Dutchman dreamed.
“I did what you wanted, I made your dream come true, Vincent,” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Here it is, your House of Pleasure, the House of the Orgasm you tormented me with in Arles. It didn’t turn out the way we thought it would. You realize that, don’t you, Vincent?”
There was no one nearby, no one who could answer. Only the cat and dog you had just brought to live with you at your new house in Atuona were there, watching you attentively, as if they understood the meaning of your bellows into nothingness, which were surely frightening the chickens, cats, and little horses that ran wild in the forests of Hiva Oa.
They had spent plenty of time in Arles talking and arguing about religion, too. There was such a difference between a Protestant, puritan upbringing like Vincent’s and the Catholic education you received in the ten years between 1854 and 1864 that you spent in the small seminary of Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, near Orleáns, under the spiritual guidance of Bishop Dupanloup. Which was the better preparation for life, Koké? Vincent’s was more intense, more austere, stricter, colder, more honest, and also more inhuman. Catholicism was more cynical, more accommodating to man’s corrupt nature, richer and more creative from a cultural and artistic point of view, and probably more human, closer to reality, to life as it was truly lived. Did you remember the night it rained and the mistral blew, when the two of you were shut up in the Yellow House and the mad Dutchman began to talk about Christ as an artist? Not once did you interrupt him, Paul. Christ was the greatest of artists, Vincent said. But he scorned marble, clay, and paint, preferring to cast his works in the living flesh of human beings. He didn’t make statues, paintings, or poems. He created immortal beings, forging the tools for men and women to make perfect, exquisite works of art of their lives. He spoke for a long time, taking swallows of absinthe, and sometimes saying things you couldn’t quite make out. But what you heard him declare at dawn, practically roaring, with tears in his eyes, you did understand, and would never forget.
“I want my paintings to be of spiritual comfort to human beings, Paul, the way the word of Christ was a comfort to them. In classical painting, the halo signified the eternal. It’s that halo I’m trying to replace now with the radiation and vibration of color in my paintings.”
After that, Paul, though you could never muster much enthusiasm for the spectacles of blinding light and fireworks that were Vincent’s paintings, you regarded his violent, extravagant colors with more respect than before. The mad Dutchman seemed drawn to martyrdom in a way that sometimes made a shiver run up your spine.
Although he didn’t feel well, his move to Atuona, the construction of the House of Pleasure, and his new friends all cheered Koké. He was happy the first few weeks in his new home, full of plans. Nevertheless, he had gradually if grudgingly come to realize that while the Marquesas might once have been Paradise, they were, like Tahiti, Paradise no longer. Still, the Marquesan women were beautiful, even more beautiful than the women of Tahiti. Or so they seemed to him, though Ky Dong, the gendarme Désiré Charpillet, Émile Frébault, and his neighbor Tioka laughed, telling him that his poor eyesight was fooling him, since many of the lively, friendly Marquesan women who came to the Maison du Jouir to be shown his pornographic photographs—his collection had become famous all over Hiva Oa—and let themselves be photographed and fondled in front of their husbands, weren’t the attractive girls he believed them to be, but ugly old women, some with faces and bodies disfigured by elephantiasis, leprosy, or syphilis, diseases ravaging the native population. Bah, you didn’t care. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve. It was true that your poor eyes could see less and less. But hadn’t you long been saying that the true artist seeks his models in the memory rather than the outside world: in the private, secret sphere of the mind’s eye, which in your case was in better shape than your physical eyes? The time had come to test your theory, Koké.
This had been a cause for bitter argument with Vincent in Arles. The mad Dutchman declared himself a realist painter and said that artists must go out into the open, setting up their easels in the middle of nature and seeking inspiration there. To keep the peace, Paul humored him the first few weeks he was in Arles. Morning and afternoon, the two friends went with their easels, palettes, and paints to Les Alyscamps, Arles’s big Roman and early Christian necropolis, and each did several paintings of the great avenue of tombs and sarcophagi flanked by rustling poplars that led to the little church of Saint-Honorat. But the mistral rains and gusts soon made it impossible to continue working outside, and they had to shut themselves up in the Yellow House, working from memory or the imagination instead of the natural world, as Paul preferred.
What pained you most was having to accept that in the Marquesas, or on this island at least, not a single trace was left of cannibalism. It was a practice you considered not savage and reprehensible, but virile and natural—hearing you, your new friends looked at you in horror—the sign of a vigorous, creative young culture in a state of constant self-renewal, not yet contaminated by conformism and decadence. In Atuona, no one believed there were any Marquesans who still ate human flesh, on this or any other island; in the remote past, maybe, but not anymore. His neighbor Tioka assured him this was true, and it was corroborated by all the natives he questioned, among them a couple from the island of Tahuata, where there were many redheads. Tohotama, wife of Haapuani—he was called the Witch Doctor—was one of them. Her long hair flowed down her back to her waist, and when the sun was bright, it gave off a rosy glow. Tohotama became his favorite model in Atuona. He even preferred her to Vaeoho, a girl of fourteen—the age you liked your lovers, Koké—who became his wife in his third month in Hiva Oa.
Obtaining Vaeoho required an inland excursion to the valley of Hanaupe, the only trip Koké was able to take on Hiva Oa, with his body so battered. He was accompanied by Ky Dong, an expert on island customs, and Tioka, who was perfectly bilingual. Their hazardous six-mile ride on horseback through dense, damp forests—full of wasps and mosquitoes that raised welts all over his skin—nearly destroyed Paul. The girl was the daughter of the local chieftain of a small native village, Hekeani, and the bargaining with him took several hours. In the end, to get the girl, he agreed to pay for a list of gifts that cost him more than two hundred francs at Ben Varney’s store. He didn’t regret it. Vaeoho was beautiful, hardworking, and cheerful, and she agreed to give him lessons in M
arquesan, since the Maori that was spoken here was different from Tahitian. Although he sometimes asked her to pose for him, Koké preferred the redheaded Tohotama as a model; her ample breasts, broad hips, and heavy thighs aroused him, which was something that didn’t happen as often as it once had. With Tohotama, it did. When she came to pose, he always found some way to caress her, which she endured unenthusiastically, with an air of boredom. At last, well fortified with absinthe one afternoon, he maneuvered her to the studio bed. As he made love to her, he heard Vaeoho and the witch doctor Haapuani, Tohotama’s husband, laughing and whispering, amused by the spectacle.
The Marquesans were more free and spontaneous than the Tahitians in sexual matters. Married or single, the women mocked the men and brazenly approached them, despite the constant campaigns of the Catholic and Protestant missions to make them obey the norms of Christian decency. The men were still mostly recalcitrant. And some, like Tohotama’s husband, didn’t hesitate to defy the churches by dressing as mahus, men-women, with knots of flowers in their hair, and feminine ornaments on their ankles, wrists, and arms.
Another of Paul’s disappointments in his new land was learning that the art of tattooing, for which the Marquesans were renowned throughout Polynesia, was disappearing. The Catholic and Protestant missionaries were fighting fiercely to bring an end to it, as a manifestation of barbarism. Few natives living in Atuona tattooed themselves any longer, for fear of incurring the wrath of priests and pastors. It was still done in the island’s interior, in tiny villages lost in the depths of those tangled forests, but the calamitous state of your health unfortunately prevented you from going to see for yourself. The frustration, Koké! To know there were tattooists just a few miles away, and to be unable to go and meet them. He couldn’t even visit the ruins of Upeke and its giant tikis, or stone idols, in the valley of Taaoa, because the two times he had tried to climb there on horseback, his fatigue and pain had made him lose consciousness. To be here, so close to the hidden places where the stunning art of the tattoo still survived—the secret codified lore of the Maori people, in which each figure was a palimpsest to be deciphered—and to be unable to reach them because of the unspeakable illness, kept him awake at night in frustration; some nights he even wept.
Sadly, decadence had reached the island, too. Bishop Joseph Martin, convinced that the illnesses and plagues rampant among the natives were caused by alcohol, had prohibited it. Ben Varney’s store sold wine and spirits only to whites. But the cure was worse than the disease. Since they weren’t allowed wine, the Marquesans of Hiva Oa set up clandestine stills to turn oranges and other fruits into liquors that corroded their insides. Indignant, Koké fought the prohibition by filling the House of Pleasure with demijohns of rum, which he gave away to all the native women who came to visit him.
He felt very tired, and for the first time in his life since he had discovered that painting was his calling, when he was still working on the stock exchange in Paris, he had no desire to take up his brushes and sit in front of an easel. It wasn’t only his physical ailments—the burning of the sores on his legs, his failing eyesight, and his palpitations—that kept him idle, sipping from a glass of absinthe and water, in which he dissolved a cube of sugar. It was a sense of futility, too. Why work so hard, pouring all the little energy you had left into canvases that, when they were finished and, after a lengthy voyage, had reached France, would languish in Ambroise Vollard’s storeroom, or Daniel de Monfreid’s attic, waiting for some shopkeeper to spend a few francs on one to adorn his new home?
One day, after a lesson in Marquesan, Vaeoho said something half in French and half in Maori that he didn’t understand. Or did you not want to understand, Koké? He made her repeat it several times until he hadn’t the slightest doubt what it meant. “Every day you’re older. Soon I’ll be a widow.” He went to the mirror and stared at himself until his eyes hurt.
Then he decided to paint his last self-portrait, as a testament to his decline in this forgotten corner of the world, surrounded by Marquesans who, like him, were sinking into ruin, lethargy, degradation, and despair. He set the mirror next to his easel and worked for more than two weeks, trying to transfer to the canvas the picture that his failing eyes glimpsed with difficulty. It seemed to slip away, evaporate: a man defeated but not yet dead, contemplating the inevitably approaching end with serenity and a kind of wisdom pooled in his gaze, which contained, behind a humiliating pair of spectacles, the summary of an intense life of adventures, folly, searches, failures, struggles. A life that was coming to a close at last, Paul. Your hair was short and white, and you were thin, quiet, waiting with tranquil courage for the final onslaught. You weren’t sure, but you sensed that, of the innumerable self-portraits you had done of yourself—as a Breton peasant, a Peruvian Inca on the curve of a pitcher, Jean Valjean, Christ on the Mount of Olives, a bohemian, a romantic—this, your farewell portrait, of the artist at the end of his journey, was the one that captured you best.
Painting the self-portrait reminded you of the portrait of Vincent painting sunflowers you did in the weeks you were confined by the rain and mistral winds to the Yellow House in Arles. The Dutchman had been obsessed with those flowers; he painted them ceaselessly, and often referred to them when he was expounding his theories on painting. They followed the movement of the sun neither by chance nor in blind obedience to physical laws. No, they themselves possessed some of the fire of that heavenly orb, and if one observed them as devotedly and stubbornly as Vincent, one realized that there were halos encircling them. In painting them, while preserving their true nature, he tried to make them torches or candelabras, too. Madness! Upon showing you the Yellow House for the first time, the mad Dutchman proudly pointed out the sunflowers, literally blazing with molten, fiery gold, that he had painted over your bed. You were scarcely able to suppress an expression of distaste. This was why you had painted him surrounded by sunflowers. The portrait was deliberately lacking the vibrant light that Vincent gave his canvases. On the contrary, there was something flat and opaque about it, and in it, the outlines of the flowers as well as the painter were smudged, blurred. Rather than a distinct and coherent human being, Vincent was a shape, a stuffed, rigid mannequin under unbearable strain, at the point of cracking or exploding: a volcano-man. The rigidity of his right arm, especially, which held his brush, revealed the superhuman effort he had to make to keep painting. And all of this was concentrated in his contorted face and dazed expression, which seemed to say, “I’m not painting, I’m immolating myself.” Vincent didn’t like the portrait at all. When you showed it to him, he spent a long time looking at it, turning very pale and biting his lower lip, which was a tic he had at his worst moments. At last he murmured, “Yes, it is I. But mad.”
Weren’t you, though, Vincent? Of course he was. Paul gradually became convinced of it; he noted the abrupt mood changes that afflicted his friend, the swiftness with which Vincent could shift from sickening, overwhelming flattery to aggression and absurd arguments, to scolding him for some trifle. After each altercation he fell into a deathly stupor, an immobility that Paul, alarmed, had to shake him from with cajolery, absinthe, or by dragging him to Madame Virginie’s to go to bed with Rachel.
Then you made your decision: it was time to leave. This experiment in living together would end badly. Tactfully, you tried to prepare him, dropping hints in your conversations after dinner that, for family reasons, you might have to leave Arles before the year you had agreed to spend together was up. It would have been better if you hadn’t, Paul. The Dutchman realized at once that you had already decided to leave, and was plunged into a state of nervous hysteria, of mental collapse. He was like a lover in despair because his beloved is leaving him. With tears in his eyes and his voice breaking, he begged you, implored you, to stay the full year; alternately, he wouldn’t speak to you for days but only stared at you with hatred and resentment, as if you had done him irreparable harm. Sometimes you felt infinite pity for him, seeing him as a helpless
being who was unfit to face the world and who clung to you because he sensed you were strong, a fighter. But other times you were outraged: didn’t you have problems enough without being saddled with the mad Dutchman’s?
Things came to a head a few days before Christmas Eve, 1888. Paul awoke suddenly in his room at the Yellow House, with a feeling of dread. In the faint light that came in through the window, he discerned Vincent’s silhouette at the foot of the bed, watching him. He sat up, frightened. “What is it, Vincent?” Without a word, his friend slipped out like a shadow. The next day, he swore he didn’t remember having gone into Paul’s room; he had been sleepwalking, perhaps. Two days later, on the day before Christmas, at the café on the place du Forum, Paul announced that, to his great sorrow, he had to leave. Family business required his presence in Paris. He would leave in a few days, and if everything could be taken care of, he might come back sometime in the future and stay again for a while. Vincent listened silently, nodding exaggeratedly from time to time. They continued to drink, without speaking. Suddenly, the Dutchman picked up his half-empty glass and hurled it at Paul’s face, furiously. Paul managed to duck it. He got up, strode back to the Yellow House, put a few essential things in a bag. As he was leaving, he collided with Vincent, who was just coming in, and he told him he was going to a hotel and would be back the next day to pick up the rest of his things. He spoke without rancor.
“I’m doing it for both of us, Vincent. The next glass you throw might really hit me. And I don’t know whether I’d be able to contain myself, as I did tonight. I might leap on you and wring your neck. That would be no way for our friendship to end.”
The Way to Paradise Page 30