The Way to Paradise

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Pale as death, his eyes red, Vincent stared at him, saying nothing. For some time now he had been shaving his head like a recruit or a Buddhist monk, and when he was overcome by sadness or rage, as he was now, his cranium seemed to quiver, like his temples and chin.

  Paul left, and outside—you remembered it very clearly—the winter cold chilled him to the bone. On his walk through the walled city he heard families singing carols in some of the houses. He was on his way to the Station, a modest hotel whose owner he knew. As he was crossing the little place Victor Hugo, he heard footsteps very close behind him. A foreboding made him turn, and there, a few feet away, barefoot and with a razor in his hand, was Vincent, glaring at him with terrible eyes.

  “What are you doing? What is the meaning of this?” Paul shouted.

  The Dutchman turned and ran. Was it wrong of you not to immediately warn the gendarmes about the state your friend was in? Of course it was. But how the devil were you to imagine that poor Vincent, after his frustrated attempt to stab you, would slice off half his left ear and take the piece of bloody flesh, wrapped in newspaper, to Rachel, Madame Virginie’s skinny little whore? And then, as if that weren’t enough, he had to lie down in his own bed with his head wrapped in towels, which, when you entered the Yellow House the next morning—the place surrounded by policemen and gawkers—you would see drenched in blood, like the sheets, walls, and paintings. It seemed the mad Dutchman had not only cut off his ear in some barbaric ritual but also baptized the whole scene of his mutilation with blood. And those wretches, those fops in Paris, blamed you for Vincent’s tragedy. Because after his terrible act, the Dutchman was scarcely heard from again. First, he was shut up in the Hôtel Dieu of Arles; then, for nearly a year, in a sanatorium at Saint-Rémy, and finally, in the last month of his life, in the little town of Auvers-sur-Oise, where he finally shot himself in the stomach, so clumsily that he lay dying for a whole day, in hideous pain. The Paris idlers who never bought any of Vincent’s paintings while he was alive had declared post mortem that he was a genius. And you, because you failed to save him that Christmas Eve, were his executioner and destroyer. Bastards!

  Would they discover that you, too, were a genius after your death, Paul? Would your paintings begin to be sold at the same high prices as the mad Dutchman’s? You suspected not. And besides, you cared less than you once had about being recognized, famous, one of the immortals. It would never happen. Atuona was too far from Paris, where artistic reputations and fashions were decided, for the triflers there to take an interest in what you had done. And what obsessed you now wasn’t painting but the unspeakable illness, which, in the fourth month of your stay in Hiva Oa, attacked again, fiercely.

  The sores were eating up his legs, and they soiled his bandages so fast that he finally lost the will to change them. He had to do it himself, because Vaeoho refused, repulsed, threatening to leave him if he made her nurse him. He kept the dirty bandages on for two or three days, until they stank and were covered in flies, which he grew tired of shooing away, too. Dr. Buisson, Hiva Oa’s medical officer, whom he had met in Papeete, gave him morphine injections and laudanum. They eased the pain but kept him in a state of mindless somnambulism, a sharp foretaste of the rapid mental deterioration to come. Would you be like the mad Dutchman in the end, Paul? In June of 1902 the pain in his legs made it almost impossible for him to walk. There was hardly any money left from the sale of his house in Punaauia. He invested his last savings in a little pony cart, in which, every afternoon, dressed in a green shirt, blue pareu, and Parisian cap, and with a new wooden staff carved once again with an erect phallus, he drove past the Protestant mission and Pastor Vernier’s lovely tamarind trees, toward the Bay of Traitors. At that hour it was always crowded with boys and girls swimming in the sea or riding bareback on the little wild horses, which whinnied and leaped defiantly over the waves. Across the bay, the deserted island of Hanakee seemed a sleeping giant, one of the great whales that were once hunted by the North American ships that so terrified the natives. As they told it, the crews of these ships would ply the native women with drink and then kidnap them, taking them away and making them their slaves. It was an incident involving one of the whaling ships that had given the bay its terrible name. Tired of the kidnappings, the natives of Hiva Oa received the ship’s crew with celebration, dances, and feasts of raw fish and wild pig. And in the middle of the feasting, they slit all the sailors’ throats. “Admit that they ate them!” Koké bellowed, beside himself, each time he heard this story. “Bravo! Well done! They did right!” Just before the sun set, Koké would return to the House of Pleasure, taking a detour down Atuona’s only street. He drove along it very slowly, reining the pony in, from the harbor to the boardinghouse of the Chinese Maori Matikana, waving ceremoniously at everyone, although he could no longer really see who most people were.

  Upon his arrival, because they had heard talk of him as the editor of Les Guêpes, the island’s Catholics welcomed him as one of their own. But his dissipated way of life, his bouts of drunkenness, his intimacies with the natives, and the shocking tales about everything that went on at the House of Pleasure had made them come to see him as a reprobate. The Protestants, whom he had attacked so viciously in Les Guêpes, observed him from a distance, resentfully. But the abrupt departure of Dr. Buisson, transferred to Papeete in the middle of June, drove him to approach the Protestant pastor, Paul Vernier, whom he had attacked personally in the magazine. Ky Dong and Tioka took him to see Vernier, saying that he was the only person on Atuona who had any knowledge of medicine and could help him. The pastor, a mild-mannered, generous man, welcomed Paul without a hint of reproach for past insults, and did try to help him, giving him painkillers and salves for his legs. They had some effect, because in July of 1902 he was able to take a few small steps on his own feet.

  To celebrate his momentary improvement, and because Paul was an artist, the gendarme Désiré Charpillet had the idea of naming him judge of the traditional July 14 contest between the choirs of the island’s two schools, Catholic and Protestant. The rivalry between the missions manifested itself in the most insignificant matters. Trying not to poison the relationship further, Paul made a Solomonic judgment: he declared a tie between the competitors. But the verdict left both churches unsatisfied, and angry at him. He had to retreat to the House of Pleasure in the midst of recriminations and general hostility.

  But when the pony cart reached his house, he had a pleasant surprise. There, waiting for him, was his neighbor, Tioka, the white-bearded Maori. With great seriousness, he said that he had known Paul long enough now to consider him a true friend. He had come to propose that they celebrate a friendship ceremony. It was very simple. They would exchange their respective names, without giving up their own. This they did, and from that day on his neighbor was Tioka-Koké, and he was Koké-Tioka. Now you were a full-fledged Marquesan, Paul.

  17

  WORDS TO CHANGE THE WORLD

  MONTPELLIER, AUGUST 1844

  Flora had promised herself that in Montpellier, where she arrived from Nîmes on August 17, 1844, she would do nothing but rest. She needed to recover her strength; she was exhausted. Her dysentery had persisted for two months now, and each night she could feel stabbing pains in her chest where the bullet lay next to her heart. But fate had other plans for her. The Hôtel du Cheval Blanc, where she had a room reserved, shut its door in her face upon discovering that she was traveling alone. “Like any decent establishment, we admit ladies only when they come with their fathers or husbands,” the manager admonished her.

  She was about to reply, “Well, in Nîmes I was told that the Hôtel du Cheval Blanc was little better than the brothel of Montpellier,” when a traveling salesman who had arrived at the same time stepped in, offering to vouch for the lady. The hotelkeeper hesitated. Flora was touched, until she realized that the gallant gentleman insisted on taking a single room for the two of them. “Do you think me a whore?” she cried, turning and dealing him a ringing slap.
The wretch was left speechless, rubbing his face. Carrying her bags, she went out into the streets of Montpellier to look for a place to stay. It was noon by the time she found one—the Hôtel du Midi, a small establishment in the midst of reconstruction, at which she was the only guest. In the seven days she spent in the city she lived with the constant bustle and clamor of the builders and laborers who, swinging from the scaffolding, were repairing and enlarging the place. So tired was she that, despite the oppressive noise, she gave up looking for another inn.

  In the first four days she held no meetings with workers or any of the local Saint-Simonians or Fourierists for whom she had letters of introduction. But they were not days of rest. She was so tormented by her bloated belly and cramps that she had to see a doctor. Dr. Amador, recommended by the hotel, happened to be Spanish, and Flora was happy to be able to practice with him the language she had scarcely had a chance to speak since her return from Peru ten years ago. Dr. Amador, a fanatic believer in homeopathy—which, raising his eyes to heaven, he called the “new science”—was a gracious, well-educated man in his fifties, dark and long-limbed. He had Saint-Simonian sympathies, and was convinced that Saint-Simon’s “theory of fluids,” the key to understanding history’s progress, also explained the workings of the human body. “The technical and economic sciences will transform society, Doña Flora,” he told her, in his baritone voice. It was pleasant talking to him. Faithful to the homeopathic belief that like is cured by like, he prescribed a preparation of arsenic and sulfur, which Flora drank nervously, afraid of being poisoned. But after her second day of taking the strange potion, she noticed a considerable improvement.

  This attentive, respectful man, who listened to you deferentially even though the two of you often disagreed, was like the first “modern men” you met, thanks to your boldness and determination, in Paris at the beginning of 1835, upon your return from Peru, after that infernal voyage on which you were nearly raped by a shameless, degenerate passenger, Mad Antonio. Did you remember, Florita? At night he tried to force the door of your cabin, and the ship’s captain refused to call him to order; he must have been used to seeing his passengers assault women traveling on their own. You reproached him for it, and Captain Alencar, to excuse himself, responded with this instructive bit of nonsense: “In my thirty years at sea you are the first woman I’ve seen traveling alone.” Quite a horrific little voyage your return trip to France proved to be, thanks to your seasickness and Mad Antonio!

  But what did that disagreeable experience matter to you those first few months in Paris, in the little apartment you rented on the rue Chabanais? Your modest income from Uncle Pío Tristán permitted you to live decently. Brimming with enthusiasms and dreams after your year in Peru, which had taught you more than you might have learned in five years at the Sorbonne, you returned to France resolved to be a different person, to cast off your chains, to live fully and freely, to repair the gaps in your understanding, to cultivate your intelligence, and, above all, to do things—many things—to make the lives of women better than yours had been.

  It was in this state of mind, soon after returning to France, that you wrote your first book—or rather, your first booklet, a brief pamphlet: On the Need to Give a Warm Welcome to Foreign Women. Now you were ashamed by the naïveté of that sentimental, romantic, well-intentioned text, addressing the silent or hostile reception that foreigners received in France. Imagine, to have proposed the founding of a society that would help foreign women settle in Paris, find them lodgings, provide them with introductions, and assist any who were in need! A society whose members would take an oath, write an anthem, and wear an insignia inscribed with the group’s three mottos: Virtue, Prudence, and Propaganda Against Vice! Seized by laughter—how silly you were then, Florita—she stretched in her tiny room at the Hôtel du Midi. Even you hadn’t been able to resist the mania for forming societies that had taken hold in France.

  The booklet was a youthful effort, and revealed your lack of schooling; the manuscript had so many spelling mistakes that the owner of the Delaunay press, near the Palais Royal, had to correct it from beginning to end. Wasn’t there anything worth salvaging from it, despite how much you had matured since then? There were a few things, yes. For example, your profession of faith—“The love of humanity is a belief more beautiful and holy than any other, a religion”—and your attacks on nationalism: “The universe should be our nation.” The founding of societies was the obsession of the Saint-Simonians and Fourierists. Did that mean you were already in contact with them when the pamphlet was published?

  Only through your reading. You read a great deal in your little flat on the rue Chabanais, and then in the one on the rue du Cherche-Midi, in 1835, 1836, and 1837, despite all the headaches André Chazal was causing you. You were trying to absorb the ideas, philosophies, and doctrines of modernity, which you saw as the most effective tools for achieving women’s emancipation. From the Saint-Simonian journal Le Globe to the Fourierist La Phalange, and on through all the pamphlets, books, articles, and lectures you could lay your hands on, you wanted to read everything. You spent hours and hours scribbling in margins, filling notecards, and writing summaries, at home or in the two reading rooms you joined. How enthusiastically you sought to associate yourself with the Saint-Simonians and Fourierists, the two schools that at the time—you had yet to learn of the ideas of Étienne Cabet or the Scotsman Robert Owen—seemed closest to achieving your goal: equal rights for men and women.

  The Comte de Saint-Simon, a philosopher and economist who envisioned a “frictionless society in which all are productive,” had died in 1825, and his heir, the slim, elegant, refined, and enlightened Prosper Enfantin, was still the leader of the Saint-Simonians. Enfantin was one of the first to whom you sent your little book, with a worshipful inscription. He invited you to a meeting of his followers in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Did you remember how dazzled you were to clasp the hand of that charismatic lay priest, a ready talker who made the ladies of Paris swoon? He had been imprisoned after the first experiment in Saint-Simonian society in Ménilmontant, where, to foster solidarity among his companions and abolish individualism, he had designed fantastic uniforms: tunics that buttoned in the back and could only be fastened with the help of another person. Enfantin had traveled to Egypt in search of the Woman-Messiah who, according to the movement’s doctrine, would be the savior of humankind. He hadn’t found her there, and he was still looking for her. The feminist frenzy of the Saint-Simonians now seemed to you lacking in seriousness, an extravagant, frivolous game. But in 1835 it touched your soul, Florita. Reverently, you stared at the empty chair that presided over Saint-Simonian meetings next to Father Prosper Enfantin. How could you fail to be moved upon discovering that you weren’t alone, that in Paris there were others like you who found it intolerable that women were considered inferior beings with no rights of their own, second-class citizens? Before the empty chair at the ceremonies of Saint-Simon’s disciples, you began to repeat to yourself secretly, like a prayer, “It’s you who’ll be the savior of humanity, Flora Tristán.”

  But in order to be the Saint-Simonian Woman-Messiah, it was necessary to become a couple—to go to bed, plainly speaking—with Prosper Enfantin. Many Parisian women were tempted by the prospect. You weren’t. Your reformist zeal went only so far.

  If the Comte de Saint-Simon had been dead for some time, Charles Fourier was still alive in 1835. He was sixty-three years old when you met him, Andalusa, two years before his death. And nine years later, despite your scorn for his disciples, those theory-obsessed and ineffectual Fourierists, you always remembered him with admiration—and filial affection, though you had few dealings with him. Fourier was the first to receive a copy of On the Need to Give a Warm Welcome to Foreign Women, and you offered him your assistance in exalted language. “In me, Master, you will find a strength uncommon among those of my sex, an urgent desire to do good.” And, to your great surprise, the noble, immaculate little old man, with his neatly presse
d frock coat and kindly blue eyes, appeared in person at number 42, rue du Cherche-Midi, to thank you for the book and congratulate you on your innovative ideas and your passion for justice. It was one of the happiest days of your life, Florita!

  You had great difficulty understanding some of his theories (that there existed a social order equivalent to the physical order of the universe discovered by Newton, for example, or that humanity had to pass through eight stages of savagery and barbarism before reaching Harmony, where it would attain happiness); you read The Theory of the Four Movements, The New Industrial World, and countless articles in La Phalange and other Fourierist publications. But it was above all the generous sage himself—the resplendent moral purity that emanated from his person, the frugality of his life (he lived alone, in a modest little flat crammed with books and papers on the rue Saint-Pierre in Montmartre, where one day you brought him an hourglass as a present), his kindness, his horror of all forms of violence, and his staunch confidence in the essential goodness of humankind—who, between 1835 and 1837, made you consider yourself a disciple.

  Like you, Fourier was opposed to the unfortunate institution of marriage, believing that it turned women into objects, without dignity or freedom. At first you were enthralled by his theories, and you shared Fourier’s assurance that a society’s level of civilization was directly proportionate to the degree of independence enjoyed by women. But some of his other assertions puzzled you, like his absolute certainty that the world would last exactly eighty thousand years, and his precise calculations about the transmigration of souls. Didn’t these pronouncements seem closer to superstition than to science?

  Fourier’s disciples, beginning with Victor Considérant, the head of La Phalange, didn’t think so. Nor did they doubt his faith in the phalanstery as the seed of humanity’s future happiness. Even now, in 1844, they managed to believe, as Fourier had, that there were capitalists capable of magnanimous acts. Magnanimous? Suicidal was more like it. Because in the hypothetical case of the triumph of Fourierism, capitalism would vanish from the world. But such a thing would never happen, and you, Florita, despite your meager learning, understood very well why not. Capitalists might be wicked and selfish, but they knew their own interests. They would never finance a gallows on which they themselves would hang. That was why you no longer believed in the Fourierists, why you regarded them with pity. Nevertheless, you had maintained a good relationship with Victor Considérant, who, since 1836, had published letters and articles written by you in La Phalange that were often very critical of the journal itself. And despite being aware that you were no longer one of them, he gave you letters and introductions for your tour around France.