His letter brought bad news. The owner of her flat at number 100, rue du Bac, had evicted her for not paying her rent for several months in a row. Her bed and all her belongings had been tossed out into the street. By the time Jules Laure was informed and ran to retrieve them and put them into storage, several hours had gone by. He feared that many of her things had been stolen by the neighbors. Flora stood stupefied for a moment. Her heart beat faster, spurred by anger. With her eyes closed, she imagined the shameful scene, the men hired by that pig in a raincoat who always smelled of garlic, taking out furniture, boxes, clothing, papers, dropping them down the stairs, piling them up on the cobblestones. Only after a long while could she sob and vent her rage, insulting aloud the “miserable bastards,” “repugnant money-grubbers,” “filthy harpies.”
“We’ll burn all the landlords alive,” she shouted, imagining smoking pyres on every corner in Paris, where the wretches smoldered. Finally, when she had plotted enough evil, she began to laugh. Once again, her malevolent fantasies had calmed her: it was a game she had played since her childhood in the rue du Fouarre, and it always proved effective.
But immediately afterward, forgetting that she no longer had a home and had probably lost most of her meager possessions, she began to think how she might give her revolutionaries a minimum of security, providing them with sustenance and a place to sleep as they went about winning followers and preaching social reform. When midnight came she was still working in her little hotel room by the light of a sputtering oil lamp, on a project to establish shelters for revolutionaries that, like the Jesuit monasteries and houses, would always be waiting for them with beds and bowls of hot soup when they went out into the world to preach revolution.
18
THE LATE-BLOOMING VICE
ATUONA, DECEMBER 1902
Did you always want to be a painter, Paul?” the pastor, Paul Vernier, asked suddenly.
They had drunk, eaten the master of the house’s delicious runny omelet, and discussed the trouble that Paul would cause himself—in the judgment of Ben Varney and Ky Dong—by challenging the authorities again with his appeal to the Marquesans not to pay taxes. They had laughed and imagined the rage Bishop Martin would fly into upon learning that Koké had just erected two wooden figures in his garden designed to hit the prelate where it would hurt him most: the male figure, horned and praying, had the bishop’s face and was called Father Lechery, and the female figure, her big tits and hips thrust out obscenely, was called Teresa, after the servant who was the bishop’s lover, according to popular gossip in Atuona. They had discussed whether the mysterious ship they’d seen in the distance, sailing past the island in the rain and the fog, was one of the American whaling ships that were considered bad luck, distressing to the natives of Hiva Oa because they kidnapped people from the island, forcing them to join their crews. But, surrendering to Émile Frébault and Ben Varney’s argument that the whaling ships no longer came because there were no whales anymore, they had declared that the ship they spotted didn’t exist, that it was a ghost ship.
The Protestant pastor’s abrupt question disconcerted Paul. They were talking in the flooded garden of the House of Pleasure. Happily, it had stopped raining. The clouds, upon parting an hour ago, had unveiled a pure blue sky, and the sun was shining brightly. It had rained torrentially all week, and this interlude of good weather was making Paul’s five friends—Ky Dong, Ben Varney, Émile Frébault, Paul’s neighbor Tioka, and the head of the Protestant mission—very pleased. Only Pastor Vernier didn’t drink. The others were cradling glasses of absinthe or rum, and their eyes were merry.
“Did you feel called to be an artist ever since you were a boy?” insisted Vernier. “The subject of vocations, religious or artistic, is very interesting to me. Because I think the two have much in common.”
Pastor Vernier was a lean, ageless man, and he spoke softly, savoring each word. He had a passion for souls and flowers; his garden, spreading beneath the mission’s two lovely tamarind trees that Koké could see from his studio, was the best tended and most fragrant in Atuona. He blushed every time Paul or the others swore or mentioned sex. Now he was looking at Koké with real interest, as if the question of vocation truly mattered to him.
“Well, this vice of mine attacked me extremely late,” Paul reflected. “Until I was thirty I don’t think I made a single sketch. I thought artists were bohemians and faggots. I hated them. When I left the navy, at the end of the war, I didn’t know what to do with my life. The only thing that didn’t occur to me was being a painter.”
Your friends laughed, thinking you were making one of your usual jokes. But it was true, Paul, even if no one could understand it, least of all yourself. The great mystery of your life, Koké. You had pondered it a thousand times, without ever coming up with an answer. Had the urge been buried deep inside you since you were born? Was it just waiting for the right moment, the proper circumstances in which to show itself? That was what Ky Dong insinuated, looking narrow-boned in his flowered pareu.
“It’s impossible for a grown man to suddenly discover he’s a painter, Paul. Tell us the truth.”
It was the truth, even if your friends didn’t believe you. As far as you could remember, you hadn’t shown the slightest interest in painting or any other kind of art while you were sailing the seas in the merchant marine or, later, when you did your military service on board the Jérôme-Napoléon. Nor before, at Monsieur Dupanloup’s boarding school in Orléans. Your memory had been failing you lately, but of this much you were sure: neither as a schoolboy nor as a sailor did you ever try your hand at painting, visit a museum, or set foot in a gallery. And when you were released from service and went to live in Paris with your guardian, Gustave Arosa, you paid little attention to the paintings hanging on his walls; the only things your guardian owned that roused your curiosity were his fired-clay Inca figurines, but was it for artistic reasons or because they reminded you of the little figures on the pre-Hispanic cloaks that so intrigued you as a child in Lima, in your great-great-uncle Pío Tristán’s house?
“So what did you do between the ages of twenty and thirty, then?” asked Ben. The ex-whaler and owner of the general store in Atuona was red in the face and his eyes were bulging a little. But his voice wasn’t that of a drunk man yet.
“I was a stock trader, a financier, a banker,” said Paul. “And although you may not believe this either, I was good at it. If I’d kept on, I might be a millionaire now. A big cigar-smoking bourgeois, with two or three mistresses. Pardon me, pastor.”
They laughed at him. The chortle of the giant Frébault, whom Paul had dubbed Poseidon for his bulk and his love of the sea, was like the rumble of a landslide. Even the inscrutable Tioka, who stroked his big white beard as if mulling philosophically over everything he heard, laughed. You were such a savage that they couldn’t imagine you as a businessman, Paul. It was hardly surprising. By now even you couldn’t believe it yourself, though you’d lived it. But was it really you, that young man of twenty-three who listened as Gustave Arosa suggested, in an earnest conversation over cognac in his Passy mansion, that you should find work on the stock exchange, where there were fortunes to be made, as he had made his? You accepted the idea willingly, and you were obliged to him—you didn’t hate him yet; you still refused to believe that your mother had been his lover—when he got you a job in the offices of his associate, Paul Bertin, a well-known trader. How could that neatly dressed, polite, shy young man possibly have been you, arriving at the office with unhealthy punctuality and throwing himself wholeheartedly for hours on end—without becoming distracted for even an instant—into the difficult endeavor of finding clients willing to entrust the Bertin agency with their income and fortune, to be invested in the Paris stock market? Who among those who had known you in the last ten years could even imagine that in 1872, 1873, and 1874 you were a model employee, sometimes congratulated by Paul Bertin himself, your curt, remote boss, for your hard work and the orderly life you led, shu
nning the dissipation of the cafés and bars where your colleagues flocked when their offices closed. That wasn’t you. You, a responsible man, walked back to your rented room on the rue La Bruyère, and after dining frugally in a little neighborhood restaurant, actually sat down at your creaking, lopsided table to go over papers from the office.
“It seems impossible, Paul,” exclaimed Pastor Vernier, raising his voice as it was drowned out by distant thunder. “Was that what you were like as a young man?”
“A disgusting bourgeois in the making, pastor. I can’t believe it myself now.”
“And how did the change come about?” Frébault’s booming voice broke in.
“The miracle, you should say,” Ky Dong corrected him. The Annamite prince observed Paul with fascination, a doubtful expression on his face. “How did it happen?”
“I’ve thought a lot about that, and I believe I have a clear answer now.” Paul savored a sharp, sweet mouthful of absinthe, and pulled on his pipe before continuing. “The man who corrupted me, who buggered my career as a bourgeois, was good old Schuff.”
Slumped shoulders, hangdog look, weary shuffle, an Alsatian accent that made people smile: Claude-Émile Schuffenecker. Good old Schuff. When that timid, kind, shabby, pudgy man came to work at the Bertin agency—he was better prepared than you; he had studied business and wielded a diploma—how were you to imagine the influence he would have on your life? Your friendly, good-natured colleague, easily frightened and intimidated, looked up to you and admired your strength and determination. Blushing, he told you so. You became great friends. Only after several weeks would you discover that beneath his timid, reserved exterior, your unprepossessing colleague nourished two passions, which he gradually revealed to you as your friendship was cemented: art and Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, about which Schuff had read reams. Must he still dream of reaching nirvana? But it was the way he talked about painting and painters that surprised you, intrigued you, and, little by little, seduced you. As good old Schuff saw it, artists were another species, half angel and half demon, different in essence from ordinary men. A work of art constituted a reality apart, purer, more perfect, and more orderly than our dismal, vulgar world. To enter the orbit of art was to gain access to another life, in which not only the spirit but also the body was enriched and given pleasure through the senses.
“He was corrupting me and I didn’t realize it.” Paul raised his glass. “To good old Schuff! He dragged me to galleries, museums, artists’ studios. He made me visit the Louvre for the first time, to watch him copy the old masters. And one day, how or when I don’t know, in my free time and in secret, I began to draw. That’s how it started. My late-blooming vice. I remember the feeling I had that I was doing something bad, the same feeling I used to have as a child in Orléans at my uncle Zizi’s when I masturbated or spied on the maid getting undressed. Incredible, isn’t it? One day, Schuff made me buy an easel. The next, he showed me how to use oil paints. I had never held a brush in my hand before. He made me prepare the colors, mix them. He corrupted me, I tell you! With his innocent face, with that ‘Who me? Who am I?’ look of his, good old Schuff turned my life upside down. It’s that fat Alsatian’s fault I’m here at the ends of the earth.”
But rather than good old Schuff, wasn’t the decisive factor your visit to the gallery on the rue Vivienne where Édouard Manet’s Olympia was being shown?
“It was like being struck by lightning, like seeing a vision,” Paul explained. “Édouard Manet’s Olympia. The most impressive painting I had ever seen. I thought, To paint like this is to be a centaur, a god. I thought, I must be a painter, too. I can hardly remember now. But it was something like that.”
“A painting can change a man’s life?” Ky Dong looked at him skeptically.
Above their heads there was another shuddering blast of lightning and thunder, and a furious wind whipped the trees of Atuona. But the rain didn’t start again yet. A thick fog hid the sun, and the forested masses of Temetiu and Feani disappeared. The friends fell silent, until there was a new break in the storm and their voices could be heard.
“It changed me, it confounded me,” Paul declared, with sudden anger. “It confused me, it gave me nightmares. Suddenly, I didn’t feel sure of anything anymore, not even the ground I was walking on. Haven’t you seen the photograph of Olympia in my studio? I’ll show it to you.”
He tramped through the muddy yard and climbed up to the second floor of the House of Pleasure. The wind shook the outside staircase as if to tear it away. The yellowing and rather blurred photograph of Olympia presided over the series of plates and postcards from his old collection: Holbein, Dürer, Rembrandt, Puvis de Chavannes, Degas, some Japanese prints, a reproduction of the bas-relief of the Javanese temple of Borobudur. At the start of the downpour seven days ago, he had taken down the pornographic photographs and put them under the mattress to keep them safe from the rain, which came in through the bamboo and got the whole room wet. Many of the soaked pictures would now completely lose their already faded color. Olympia was the oldest. You had gone looking for it eagerly after that exhibition on the rue Vivienne, and you had never been without it since.
His friends examined it, passing it around. Upon seeing the luminous naked body of Victorine Meuret (Koké told them that he had met her, and that she wasn’t half as beautiful as she was in the painting; Manet had transformed her), challenging the whole world with the defiant, superior gaze of a free woman as her black maid handed her a bouquet of flowers, Pastor Vernier, of course, blushed deeply. Probably fearing that the nude was the beginning of worse things to come, he made his excuses.
“It will pour again any minute now,” he said, pointing up at the menacing formations of dark clouds advancing on Atuona. “I don’t want to have to swim back to the mission; there’s a service this afternoon. Although no one will come in this storm, I’m afraid. There must not be a single plant left standing in my garden. Goodbye, everyone. Delicious omelet, Paul.”
He left, slipping and sliding in the mud, and averting his eyes from the grotesque figures of Father Lechery and Teresa as he passed them. Tioka had his gaze fixed on the photograph, and after a long time, still stroking his snowy beard, he asked, in his slow French, “A goddess? A whore? Which is she, Koké?”
“Both, and many other things, too,” Paul said, not laughing like his companions. “That’s the extraordinary thing about that painting. She’s a thousand women at once, a thousand women in one. Something for every taste, every dream. She’s the only woman I’ve never tired of, my friends. Although now I can scarcely see her. But I carry her with me here, and here, and here.”
As he said this, he touched his head, his heart, and his cock. His friends greeted this with more laughter.
As Vernier had said it would, the sky rapidly grew darker. The cemetery hill had disappeared now, too, but they could hear the roar of the burgeoning Make Make. When the rain began to fall hard, they ran with their glasses in their hands to take shelter in the sculpture studio, drier than the rest of the House of Pleasure. Wet through, they huddled on the single bench and the sofa that was losing its stuffing. Paul filled their glasses again. As he did, he noticed that the pelting rain had destroyed the sunflowers in the garden, and he felt pity for them and for the mad Dutchman. Ky Dong said he was surprised not to have seen Vaeoho all day: where was she, in a storm like this? “She’s gone to stay with her family, in the village of Hanaupe.
She’s pregnant, and she wants to give birth there. The truth is, she’s using that as an excuse to abandon me. I don’t think she’ll be back. She’s tired of all this, and maybe she has good reason.”
His friends looked at one another uncomfortably. Tired of you and your sores, Paul. Your vahine couldn’t hide her distaste, and you didn’t need to be able to see her to realize it. Her face crumpled each time you tried to touch her. Oh well, poor girl. You had become a repulsive mess, a living ruin, Koké. But just now, feeling the warmth of the absinthe in your vein
s and talking to your friends, you wanted to feel well, despite the fury of the heavens. A few crushed sunflowers weren’t going to destroy your life any more thoroughly, Koké.
“In all the years I’ve lived here, I’ve never seen it rain like this,” said Ky Dong, indicating the sky: cascades of water shook the roof of bamboo and plaited palm leaves, and seemed about to wash it away. Bolts of lightning lit up the horizon for seconds at a time, and then all the mountains of Hiva Oa that surrounded them disappeared, obscured by black and thunderous clouds. Even Ben Varney’s store, so close by, couldn’t be seen. Behind them, the sea raged. Was it the end of the world, Koké?
“I’ve never been away from here and I’ve never seen it rain like this,” said Tioka. “Something bad is going to happen.”
“Worse than this deluge?” Ben Varney joked, stumbling over his tongue. And turning toward Paul, he resumed the conversation. “So you saw that painting and you gave up everything to devote yourself to art? You’re a madman, not a savage, Paul.”
The storekeeper was very comical, with his red hair plastered over his forehead in a fringe. He laughed, amused and incredulous.
“If only it had been that easy,” Paul said. “I was married, very much so. I had a bourgeois home, a wife who kept giving me more children. How could I give all that up from one day to the next? What about my responsibilities? And the ethics of it? And my reputation? Back then, I believed in those things.”
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