The Way to Paradise

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  When Dr. Amador, the Montpellier homeopath whom Flora saw several times that week, heard her sharply criticize the Fourierists and Saint-Simonians, accusing them of being “weak” and “bourgeois,” he laughed at her for her “fiery nature.” As he spoke, the Spaniard smoothed the neat gray sideburns that grew down to his chin, and Flora felt certain that he was attracted to her. He was always complimenting you, Andalusa. And yet your cordial relationship came to a rather abrupt end the day you learned, from Dr. Amador himself, that in his classes at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Montpellier he didn’t teach homeopathy, which was not accepted by the academy, but rather the conventional allopathic medicine, which—he had told her in no uncertain terms—he scorned as old and outmoded.

  “How can you teach something you don’t believe in, and be paid for it, too?” sputtered a shocked Madame-la-Colère. “It makes no sense; it’s wrong.”

  “There now, don’t judge me so harshly,” he replied, startled by her fierce reaction. “My friend, I have to live. One cannot be absolutely consistent and ethical in life, unless one feels the call of martyrdom.”

  “I must feel it,” said Madame-la-Colère. “Because I always try to behave honorably, in keeping with my convictions. My tongue would fall out of my head if I had to teach things I didn’t believe in, just to earn a salary.”

  It was the last time they saw each other. And yet, although Flora’s criticisms had surely stung him, Dr. Amador sent a carpenter to the Hôtel du Midi to see her. André Médard proved to be a keen, agreeable young man. He had formed a workers’ mutual aid society, which he invited her to visit.

  “Why have you decided not to speak in Montpellier, madame?”

  “Because I was told I wouldn’t find a single intelligent worker here,” said Flora, to provoke him.

  “There are four hundred of us, madame,” he said, laughing. “I’m one of them.”

  “With four hundred intelligent workers I could wage revolution all over France, my boy,” Flora retorted.

  The meeting that André Médard organized for her was a great success. The sixteen men and four women who attended were uninformed, but curious and eager to listen, and they showed interest in the Workers’ Union and the Workers’ Palaces. They bought some books and agreed to form a committee of five members—one woman among them—to promote the movement in Montpellier. And they told Flora things that surprised her. Beneath the calm semblance of a prosperous bourgeois city, Montpellier, according to them, was a powder keg. There was no work, and many of the unemployed roamed the streets in defiance of the authorities, sometimes stoning the carriages and houses of the rich, of whom there were many in the city.

  “If the Workers’ Union doesn’t hasten to bring about peaceful change, France and maybe even all of Europe will explode,” Flora declared, at the end of the meeting. “The carnage will be terrible. To work, my friends!”

  Unlike her first leisurely days in Montpellier, the last three were packed with activity, thanks to Dr. Amador’s homeopathic remedy, which made her feel euphoric and full of energy. She tried unsuccessfully to visit the prison, and made the rounds of the city’s bookshops, leaving copies of The Workers’ Union. Finally, she met with twenty local Fourierists. As always, they disappointed her. They were professionals and bureaucrats incapable of moving on from theory to action, with an innate distrust of the workers, whom they seemed to see as a threat to their peaceable bourgeois existences. When it came time for questions, a lawyer, Maître Saissac, managed to infuriate her by chiding her for “exceeding the duties of a woman, who should never give up the care of the home for politics.” In turn, the lawyer was offended when she called him “a caveman, an uncivilized brute, a social troglodyte.”

  Maître Saissac bore a certain resemblance to André Chazal as he had looked in 1835, 1836, and 1837, his sallow, crumpled face aged by poverty, bitterness, and rancor. Flora was forced to see him several times and confront him; the souvenir of her war with him was the bullet she carried in her chest, which the good doctors Récamier and Lisfranc hadn’t been able to remove. Between 1835 and 1837, Chazal kidnapped poor Aline three times (and Ernest-Camille twice), making the girl the sad, melancholic, shy creature she was now. And each time, the nightmarish judges whom Flora petitioned to demand custody of her two children settled in Chazal’s favor, even though he was a derelict, a drunk, a pervert, a degenerate, a miserable creature who lived in a rank hovel where the children could only lead an unhappy life. And why? Because André Chazal was the husband, the one with all the power and rights, although he was a piece of human filth, a man capable of seeking pleasure in his own daughter’s body. You, on the other hand, who by dint of your own efforts had managed to educate yourself, publish your writings, and live decorously; you, who could assure your two children a good education and a decent life, were always eyed suspiciously by the judges, who were convinced that all independent women must be sluts. Wretches!

  How were you able to write Peregrinations of a Pariah at such a frantic time, Florita, while you were fighting André Chazal in court and in the streets? The memoir of your trip to Peru appeared in two volumes in Paris at the beginning of 1838, and in just a few weeks you were famous in French literary and intellectual circles. It was your indomitable energy that made it possible, the energy that only in the last few months had begun to fail you, on this tour.

  The book was written in fits and starts, between mad dashes to police stations at the order of examining magistrates, and police summonses to respond to Chazal’s wild accusations. As Chazal himself confessed before the judge who tried him for attempted murder, what he really wanted wasn’t to wrest custody of his children away from Flora, but to have his revenge, to wreak vengeance upon the woman who, despite being his lawful wife, had dared to abandon him and flaunt her shameless deeds before the whole world in articles and books—telling how she ran away from home, traveled to Peru as an unmarried woman, and allowed herself to be courted by other men—maligning him all the while by presenting him before public opinion as brutal and abusive.

  And in the end, André Chazal got his revenge—to begin with, by raping poor Aline, knowing that his crime would hurt the mother as well as the daughter. Once again Flora felt the dizziness that overcame her that April morning in 1837, when Aline’s little letter reached her hands. The girl had given it to an obliging water carrier, who in turn personally delivered it to Flora. At her wit’s end, she flew to rescue her children, and reported Chazal to the police for rape and incest. Before being taken into custody, he accosted her in the street. The incredible thing was—wasn’t it, Florita?—that thanks to the rhetorical skills of Chazal’s lawyer, Jules Favre, instead of revolving around her husband’s crimes, the trial was made to turn on the deviant character, doubtful virtue, and reprehensible behavior of—Flora Tristán! The judge declared that the rape “was not proved,” and ordered that the children be sent to a boarding school where their parents could visit them separately. This was the sort of justice women could expect in France, Florita—and it was the reason you were on this crusade.

  The appearance of Peregrinations of a Pariah brought her literary renown and some money (two editions quickly sold out) but also problems. The scandal the book caused in Paris—no woman had ever exposed her private life so frankly, or laid claim so proudly to the status of pariah, or declared her rebellion against society, conventions, and marriage as you had—was nothing compared to the scandal it provoked in Peru when the first copies reached Lima and Arequipa. You would have liked to have been there to see and hear what the furious gentlemen who could read French had said upon seeing themselves portrayed so unflatteringly. It amused you to learn that the Lima bourgeoisie had burned you in effigy at the Central Theater, and that your uncle Don Pío Tristán had presided over a ceremony in Arequipa’s Plaza de Armas in which a copy of Peregrinations of a Pariah was set symbolically ablaze for vilifying Arequipan society. It was less amusing when Don Pío cut off the small allowance you had been l
iving on. Emancipation didn’t come cheap, Florita.

  The book almost cost you your life. André Chazal never forgave you the merciless portrait you painted of him. For weeks and months he brooded over his revenge. Sketches of tombstones and epitaphs featuring the “Pariah” were later found in his room in Montmartre, dating from the publication of Peregrinations. In May of that year he bought two pistols, fifty bullets, powder, lead, and cartridges, without bothering to destroy the receipts. After that, he often boasted at the bar to his engraver friends that he would soon administer justice himself, punishing “that Jezebel” with his own hand. Some Sundays, he took little Ernest-Camille along to watch him practice target-shooting with his pistols. All through August you saw him prowling around the building where you lived on the rue du Bac, and although you alerted the police, they did nothing to protect you. On September 10, André Chazal left his squalid quarters in Montmartre and coolly went to have lunch at a small restaurant a few hundred feet from your house. He ate in leisurely fashion, absorbed in a book of geometry, in which, according to the restaurant’s owner, he was making notes. At three-thirty in the afternoon, you spotted Chazal from the distance as you walked home in the stifling summer heat. You watched him approach, and you knew what was about to happen. But dignity or pride kept you from running, and you walked on, your head held high. When he was twenty feet away, Chazal raised one of the two pistols he was carrying and fired. You fell to the ground, the bullet having entered your armpit and lodged in your breast. As Chazal aimed the second pistol, preparing to shoot again, you managed to rise and run to a nearby store, where you fainted. Later you learned that Chazal, the coward, never shot the second pistol, and gave himself up to the police without a struggle. Now he was serving a sentence of twenty years of hard labor. You had freed yourself of him, Florita—forever. The law even allowed you to change Aline and Ernest’s last name from Chazal to Tristán. Though belated, it was a true reprieve. But Chazal left you a souvenir, that bullet in your chest which might kill you at any moment if it shifted even slightly toward your heart. Dr. Récamier and Dr. Lisfranc, despite all their efforts and the many instruments with which they probed you, were unable to remove the missile. The assassination attempt made you a heroine, and during your convalescence the little flat on the rue de Bac became a fashionable spot. Many Paris celebrities dropped by to inquire about your health, from George Sand to Eugène Sue, Victor Considérant to Prosper Enfantin. You became more famous than a singer at the Opéra or a lady acrobat at the circus, Florita. But the death of little Ernest-Camille, as sudden and cruel as an earthquake, darkened what had seemed to be the end of your misadventures and the start of a period of peace and success.

  Dr. Récamier and Dr. Lisfranc were so kind to you and so devoted that before setting out on your journey to promote the Workers’ Union, you drafted a holographic will, donating your body to them in the case of your death, so that they might use it in their clinical research. Your head you bequeathed to the Phrenological Society of Paris, in memory of the sessions you had attended there, which left you with a very favorable impression of the new science of phrenology.

  Despite the doctors’ recommendations that you lead a quiet life, mindful of the cold metal in your breast, as soon as you were able to get up and go out, your life achieved a hectic pace. Since you were famous now, the salons competed for your presence. Just as you had been in Arequipa, you were drawn into the social whirl of Paris, attending receptions, galas, teas, salons. You even let yourself be dragged to the masked ball at the Opéra, which astonished you with its magnificence. That night you met a thin woman with penetrating eyes, a beauty with classic features who kissed your hand and said, in charmingly accented French, “I admire you and envy you, Madame Tristán. My name is Olympia Maleszewska. May we be friends?” You would indeed be friends—very close friends—a little while later.

  If you had been a different sort of person, Florita, you might have become a grande dame, with the popularity you enjoyed for a while thanks to Peregrinations of a Pariah and the assassination attempt. By now you’d be like George Sand, an admired and much-praised woman of the world with an intense social life, who also happened to denounce injustice in her writings. A respected salon socialist, in other words. But for good or for ill, you weren’t that person. You had understood at once that a siren of the Paris salons would never be capable of changing social reality one jot, or of exercising any sort of influence on political affairs. It was necessary to act. But how?

  At the time, you thought writing was the way, that ideas and words would be enough. How wrong you were. Ideas were essential, but if they weren’t accompanied by decisive action on the part of the victims—women and workers—those lovely words would vanish like smoke and never be heard outside the drawing rooms of Paris. But eight years, nine years ago, you believed that words in print denouncing the world’s wrongs would be enough to set social change in motion. And so you wrote urgently, passionately, on every conceivable subject, straining your eyes in the light of an oil lamp in your little flat on the rue du Bac, from the windows of which you could make out the square towers of Saint-Sulpice and hear the ringing of its bells, which made the windowpanes of your bedroom vibrate. You composed a plea titled Abolition of the Death Penalty, which you caused to be printed and then personally delivered to the Chamber of Deputies, without its having the slightest effect on the parliamentarians. And you wrote Méphis, a novel about the social oppression of women and the exploitation of workers, which few people read and the critics judged dreadful. (Maybe it was. You didn’t care: what mattered was not an aesthetic that lulled people into pleasant slumber, but rather the reform of society.) You wrote articles in Le Voleur, L’Artiste, Le Globe, and La Phalange, and you gave talks, condemning marriage as the purchase and sale of women and demanding the right to divorce. Your words were ignored by politicians and provoked the indignation of Catholics.

  When the English social reformer Robert Owen visited France in 1837, you went to see him, though you had scarcely heard of his New Lanark, Scotland, experiments in cooperativism and the regulation of industrial and agricultural society by scientific and technical methods. You questioned him at such length about his theories that he was amused—and he returned the visit, knocking at the door of your little flat in the rue du Bac, as Fourier had come to visit you on the rue du Cherche-Midi. Owen, sixty-six, was less of a sage and a dreamer than Fourier, more pragmatic; he had the air of someone who put his plans into action. The two of you argued, then found common ground, and he encouraged you to come to New Lanark to see the workings of his little society with your own eyes. There, by encouraging solidarity instead of greed, promoting free education without corporal punishment for children, and establishing cooperative stores for the workers where products were sold at cost, he was forging a community of healthy, happy people. The idea of returning to England, a country you remembered with aversion ever since your days as a maid with the Spence family, attracted and terrified you. But the possibility kept tugging at your mind. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go, make a study, and find out everything about social issues there, as you had in Peru, and then pour it all into an accusatory volume that would shake the British empire—that society riddled with hypocrisy and lies—to its foundations? Hardly had you conceived the project when you began to seek a way to put it into practice.

  Alas, Florita, it was a pity that because of your body, your spirit was no longer as resilient as it was seven years ago, when you could undertake many tasks at once, giving up eating or sleeping if necessary. Now, the labors you imposed on yourself required you to exert immense willpower to overcome your exhaustion, a numbing elixir that seemed to dissolve your bones and muscles, obliging you to lie down in bed or rest in an armchair two or three times a day, feeling that your life was slipping away from you.

  She felt that kind of weariness after her second meeting with a group of Fourierists from Montpellier, held at their request. She arrived at the appointed time, intrigu
ed. They had taken up a small collection, and they gave her twenty francs for the Workers’ Union. It wasn’t much, but something was always better than nothing. She joked and chatted with them until a sudden wave of fatigue made her bid them farewell and return to the Hôtel du Midi.

  There were two letters waiting for her. The one she opened first was from Eléonore Blanc. Loyal Eléonore, always so loving and energetic, gave her a detailed account of the activities of the committee in Lyon: new members, meetings, money raised, sales of Flora’s book, efforts to attract workers. The other letter was from her friend the artist Jules Laure, with whom she was very close. In the salons of Paris it was said that they were lovers, and that Laure supported her. The first assertion was false, since when Laure, after painting her portrait four years ago, declared his love, Flora rejected him with brusque frankness. She told him categorically that he must not insist: her mission, her struggle, were incompatible with passionate love. In order to devote herself entirely to reforming society, she had renounced affairs of the heart. As incredible as it seemed, Jules Laure understood. Since they couldn’t be lovers, he implored her to let them be friends, brother and sister, partners. And that is what they were. In the painter, Flora had found someone who respected and loved her, a confidant and an ally who offered her friendship and support in her moments of need. Laure was financially well-off, too, and sometimes helped her out of material difficulties. He had never spoken to her of love again, or even tried to take her hand.