“You, married?” Ky Dong asked, surprised. “In the full legal sense, Koké?”
In the full legal sense, and much more than that. Had you really fallen so deeply in love with Mette Gad, Paul, that willowy, well-educated young Dane, a Viking with long blond hair who had come to spend time in Paris in the winter of 1872? You didn’t remember at all. But you must have fallen in love with her, because you took her out, courted her, declared your love, and formally asked for her hand in marriage, something to which Mette’s horrible, extremely bourgeois family in Copenhagen finally consented after much hesitation and after conducting a painstaking investigation of her suitor. To satisfy those stuffy Scandinavians, it was a proper wedding, at the mayor’s office in the ninth arrondissement and at the Lutheran church of Paris, with champagne, an orchestra, many guests, and generous gifts from your guardian, Gustave Arosa, and your boss, Paul Bertin. And then, after a short honeymoon in Deauville, the two of you moved into the flat on the place Saint-Georges, where you hung the ancient Peruvian cloak that your sister, María Fernanda, and her Colombian fiancé, Juan Uribe, had given you. You did everything that a young stockbroker with a brilliant future should do. That was what you were then, Paul. You worked hard, you made a good living—in 1873 you were awarded a three-thousand-franc bonus, a larger sum than any of your colleagues at the Bertin agency received—and Mette, happy, decorated the flat and burned with impatience to begin having children. In 1874, when your first son was born and baptized Emil (for his godfather, good old Schuff, although without the final e, in acknowledgment of the child’s Nordic ancestors), you received another bonus of three thousand francs. A small fortune, which Mette Gad gaily set about squandering on purchases and entertainments, never suspecting that the enemy was already within. Her diligent and affectionate husband was secretly sketching, and had begun to take classes in drawing and painting with Schuff at the Colarossi Academy. When she found out, they no longer lived on the place Saint-Georges, but in an even more elegant neighborhood, the sixteenth arrondissement, in a magnificent flat on the rue de Chaillot that Paul had resigned himself to renting to satisfy Mette’s delusions of grandeur, though he warned her that it was more than they could afford on his salary.
The Viking discovered your secret vice from another important person in your life at the time: Camille Pissarro. Born on the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas, where he became an outcast after he supported a slave uprising, Pissarro came to Europe and continued imperturbably to pursue his career as an artist of the avant-garde, along with a group of friends known as the impressionists, without troubling himself in the least about the scarcity of buyers for his paintings. He associated with anarchist intellectuals like Kropotkin, who paid him visits, and he called himself a “harmless anarchist, one who doesn’t blow things up.” Paul met him at the home of Gustave Arosa, who had bought a landscape from Pissarro, and after that, they saw each other often. Paul bought a painting from him, too. Because Pissarro made very little money, he couldn’t live in Paris. He had a small house in the country, near Pontoise, where—a biblical patriarch with the patience of Job—he raised his seven children, who adored him, and endured his wife, Julie, a former maid with a domineering nature. She railed at him before his friends, berating him for his failure to make a good living. “You only paint landscapes, which no one likes,” she scolded him in front of Paul and Mette, who were often invited to spend weekends in Pontoise. “Paint portraits instead, or picnics, or nudes, like Renoir or Degas. They’re doing better than you, aren’t they?”
One Sunday, as they were drinking cups of chocolate, Camille Pissarro mentioned, in a tone of seeming sincerity, that Paul had a “truly artistic temperament.” Mette Gad was surprised. What did he mean?
“Is it true what Pissarro said?” she asked her husband, when they were on their way back to Paris. “Are you interested in art? You never told me you were.”
The shock and sensation of guilt were like a shiver running straight through you, Paul. No, my dear, it’s merely a hobby, something healthier and more stimulating than wasting my nights in bars or cafés, playing dominoes with friends. Wouldn’t you agree, Viking? She said yes, of course, with an uneasy scowl. Women’s intuition, Paul. Did she guess that dissolution had already crept into her home, and that the intruder would ultimately destroy her marriage and her dreams of becoming a rich and worldly bourgeoise in the City of Light?
After this episode, you felt curiously liberated, with the right to flaunt your new vice before your wife and friends. Why shouldn’t a successful trader on the Paris stock exchange have the right to openly dabble in art in his spare time, as others played billiards or rode horses? In 1876, in a daring move, you borrowed Landscape at Viroflay, the painting you had given your sister and her new husband as a wedding present, and submitted it to the Salon. Out of thousands of entries, it was accepted. Happiest to hear this was Camille Pissarro, who began to bring you with him as his disciple to the café La Nouvelle Athènes in Clichy, his friends’ general headquarters. The impressionists had just held their second group exhibition. While the imposing Degas, bad-tempered Monet, and merry Renoir talked to Pissarro—a barrel-shaped man with a white beard, unfailingly good humored—you sat in silence, ashamed to be no more than a stockbroker in the company of these artists. When Édouard Manet, the creator of Olympia, appeared one night at La Nouvelle Athènes, you turned pale, as if you were about to faint. Overcome by emotion, you scarcely managed to stutter a greeting. How different you were then, Koké! How far you still were from becoming your present self! Mette couldn’t complain, because you continued to make good money. In 1876 you received a bonus of thirty-six hundred francs, in addition to your salary, and the next year, when Aline was born, you moved. The sculptor Jules-Ernest Bouillot rented you a flat and a small studio in Vaugirard. There you began to model in clay and chisel marble under the direction of your landlord. The head of Mette that you worked so hard to sculpt—was it an acceptable piece? You couldn’t remember.
“Living a double life like that must have been difficult,” Ky Dong observed. “Stockbroker for hours every day, and then, in your little bits of free time, painting and sculpture. It reminds me of my years as a conspirator in Annam. By day, a circumspect employee of the colonial administration, and by night, insurrection. How did you do it, Paul?”
“I didn’t,” said Paul. “But what choice did I have? I was a man of principle. How could I simply say to hell with all my responsibilities—my wife, my children, my security, my good name? Luckily, I had the energy of ten men. Four hours of sleep were enough for me.”
“Now that I’m drunk, I have to give you some advice,” Ben Varney interrupted, changing the subject abruptly. His voice was unsteady now and his eyes, especially, revealed that he was inebriated. “Stop fighting with the authorities in Atuona, because you won’t win. They’re powerful, and we aren’t. We won’t be able to help you, Koké.”
Paul shrugged his shoulders and took a sip of absinthe. It cost him an effort to detach himself from the man he had been at thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, back in Paris, torn between his family obligations and the belated passion for art that had taken root inside him with the voracity of a tapeworm. What was Varney talking about? Oh yes, your campaign to stop the Maori from paying the highway tax. Your friends had been alarmed, too, when you explained to the natives that if they lived a long way from Atuona, they weren’t required to send their children to the mission school. And what had happened to you then? Nothing.
The storm had swallowed up the landscape. The neighboring sea, the roofs of Atuona, the cross atop the hillside cemetery, had disappeared behind a gauzy whiteness that was growing thicker by the second. They were already sealed off. The swollen Make Make began to overflow, tumbling the boulders in its path. Paul thought of the thousands of birds, feral cats, and crowing roosters of Hiva Oa that the storm must be killing.
“Since Ben has raised the matter, let me venture to give you some advice, too,” said Ky Do
ng, tactfully. “When you went out to the Bay of Traitors at the beginning of the school year to tell the Maori who were bringing their children to the priests and nuns that they weren’t obliged to do so if they lived far away, I warned you, ‘This is serious.’ Because of you, the number of students in the schools has been reduced by a third, maybe more. The bishop and the priests will never forgive you for it. But this business with taxes is even worse. Don’t do anything rash, my friend.”
Tioka emerged from his stern immobility and laughed, something he rarely did. “The Maori families who had to come halfway across the island to bring their children to school are grateful to you for telling them about that exemption, Koké,” he whispered, as if celebrating some mischievous act. “The bishop and the gendarme lied to us.”
“That’s what priests and policemen do—lie,” Koké said, laughing. “My teacher, Camille Pissarro, who despises me now for living among primitives, would be happy to hear me say so. He was an anarchist. He hated men in robes or uniform.”
A long burst of thunder, hoarse and rumbling, prevented the Annamite prince from saying what he intended to say. Ky Dong sat with his mouth open, waiting for the sky to quiet. Since it didn’t, he spoke loudly to make himself heard above the storm.
“This tax business is much worse, Paul. Ben is right—you’re being unwise,” he insisted, in his smooth, feline, purring way. “Counseling the natives not to pay taxes is mutiny, subversion.”
“You’re against subversion? The man sentenced to Devil’s Island for wanting to free Indochina from France?” Paul laughed.
“I’m not the only one who thinks so,” replied the ex-terrorist, very seriously. “Many in the village are saying the same thing.”
“I’ve heard the new gendarme say it, in those precise words,” Frébault interjected, waving his paw of a hand. “He has his eye on you, Koké.”
“Claverie, that son of a bitch? What a shame they’ve replaced our friend Charpillet with a witless brute like that.” Paul pretended to spit. “Do you know when he first started to hate me? When he caught me swimming naked in the river in Mataiea, the first month I lived in Tahiti. The bastard made me pay a fine. The worst thing wasn’t the fine, but the way he shattered my dreams—Tahiti, it was clear, wasn’t an earthly paradise after all. There were men in uniform there who prevented human beings from living a life of freedom.”
“We’re serious,” cut in Ben Varney. “We aren’t saying this to make you angry or to meddle. We’re your friends, Paul. You could be in trouble. The school affair was serious enough. But this tax business is worse.”
“Much worse,” echoed Ky Dong. “If the natives listen to you and stop paying their taxes, you’ll go to jail as a subversive. And who’s to say you’ll be as lucky as I was? You’ve hardly been here a year and you’ve already made enemies. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life on Devil’s Island, do you?”
“Maybe that’s where everything is that I’ve been looking for and haven’t been able to find yet—in Guiana,” Paul mused, turning solemn. “Let’s drink, friends, and not worry about the future. Anyway, all signs up there indicate that this is the beginning of the end of the world for the Marquesas.”
The thunder had resumed its deafening concert, and the whole House of Pleasure shook and danced, as if the torrents of water and raging gusts of wind would uproot it and carry it away at any minute. The overflowing waters of the river began to swamp the yard. They were your friends, Paul. They were worried about what might happen to you. They were telling the truth: you were no one, just an apprentice savage without money or reputation, whom priests, judges, and gendarmes could trample whenever they wanted. The gendarme Claverie, who was also Hiva Oa’s judge and chief political authority, had warned you. “If you keep encouraging the natives to mutiny, the full weight of the law will fall on you, and your poor bones won’t withstand it; let this be a warning.”
Very well; thank you for the warning, Claverie. Why were you embroiling yourself in new messes and predicaments, Koké? Wasn’t it stupid? Maybe. But it wasn’t fair to collect a highway tax from the miserable inhabitants of a little island where the state hadn’t built a foot of roads, paths, or streets, and where leaving Atuona meant being faced on all sides with impenetrable, steeply rising forest. You had confirmed it yourself on that nightmarish trip by mule to Hanaupe to negotiate your marriage with Vaeoho. It was because of the lack of roads that you couldn’t leave Atuona, Koké, and you hadn’t been able to visit the valley of Taaoa to see the ruins of the tikis of Upeke, something you were so eager to do. A swindle, that tax. Who was pocketing the money that wasn’t invested here? One or more than one of those repulsive parasites working for the colonial administration in Polynesia, or back in France. Fuck them. You would keep advising the Maori to refuse to pay it. To set them an example, you had written to the authorities explaining why you wouldn’t pay either. Well done, Paul! Your ex-teacher, anarchist Camille Pissarro, would approve of your actions. And far away, in heaven or in hell, Grandmother Flora, that agitator in skirts, would be applauding.
Camille Pissarro had read some of Flora Tristán’s books and pamphlets, and spoke of her with such respect that he made you interested for the first time in your grandmother on your mother’s side, about whom you knew nothing. Your mother had never said anything to you about her. Did she hold some grudge against her? As well she might have: Grandmother Flora neglected her daughter, leaving her living with wet nurses while she waged revolution. In the end, you read very little of what your grandmother had written. During the day, you had no time for anything but chasing after the agency’s clients and informing them of the state of their stocks, and all your free moments—especially those blissful weekends in Pontoise with the Pissarros—were spent painting, painting furiously. In 1878 the Museum of Ethnography opened, in the Trocadero Palace. You remembered it well, because it was seeing the ceramic figurines there crafted by ancient Peruvians—with such mysterious names: Mochica, Chimú—that you had the first hint of what years later would become an article of faith: those exotic, primitive cultures possessed a power, a spiritual vigor, that had vanished in contemporary art. You particularly remembered a mummy that was more than a thousand years old, from the valley of Urumbamba, with long hair, very white teeth, and blackened bones; you called her Juanita. Why did that withered relic so bewitch you, Paul? You went many times to see her, and one afternoon, when the guard wasn’t watching, you kissed her.
The funny thing was—wasn’t it, Paul?—that just then, when painting had come to matter to you more than anything else, the bosses of the world of the exchange were fighting over you, as if you were a premium stock. In 1879, you accepted an offer to change jobs, and at the new agency you did so well that your bonus that year was a fortune: thirty thousand francs! Mette was ecstatic. She immediately decided to reupholster the furniture and repaper the drawing room and dining room. That year, Camille Pissarro arranged for you to present a marble bust of your son Emil at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition. The sculpture was nothing spectacular, but after that everyone—public and critics—considered you part of the group. Were you happy with the progress you had made, Paul?
“I didn’t have time to be happy, with the frenetic life I was leading,” said Koké. “But I was certainly busy. I spent as much of that fabulous bonus as the Viking would let me get my hands on in buying my friends’ paintings. My house filled up with Degases, Monets, Pissarros, and Cézannes. The most exciting day that year was the day Degas proposed that we exchange a painting. Imagine, he was treating me as an equal!”
It was that year, too, that Clovis, your third child, was born. In 1880 you contributed eight paintings to the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition. And that same year, Édouard Manet complimented you for the first time, in a roundabout way. “I’m just an amateur, who studies art on nights and holidays,” you said, in La Nouvelle Athènes. “No,” Manet corrected you, energetically. “Amateurs are those who paint badly.” You were stunned and hap
py. In 1881, good old Schuff, who had invested his inheritance and savings in an obscure business exploiting a new technique for treating gold, began to make lots of money; then, he married the beautiful and penniless Louise Monn, who imagined she was doing well for herself. She wasn’t wrong. Good old Schuff gave up the exchange to dedicate himself to art. This frightened Mette: you weren’t dreaming of doing anything so foolish, were you, Paul? They began arguing every day.
“Why did you lie to me, and hide your interest in painting?”
“Because I was hiding it from myself, too, Mette.”
In the little studio rented from the painter Félix Jobbé-Duval, you stubbornly sculpted, carved, and painted, stealing time away from the exchange. The stories Jobbé-Duval told about his homeland, Brittany, and the Bretons, a primitive, traditional people faithful to their past, who resisted “cosmopolitan industrialization,” awakened your interest. Then you began to dream of fleeing the megalopolis of Paris for a land where the past was part of the present, and art hadn’t yet become divorced from everyday life. In that same studio you painted works that you were still proud of today: Interior of the Artist’s House, Rue Carcel; Nude Study, Suzanne Sewing, which you exhibited in the impressionist show; and best of all, The Little Dreamer: Study. In 1881, when Mette gave birth to your fourth child, Jean-René, the Durand-Ruel gallery bought three paintings from you for fifteen hundred francs, and a famous writer, Joris-Karl Huysmans, wrote a piece praising you. Fortune was smiling on you, Paul.
“Yes, yes, and best of all, the businesses and banks were beginning to collapse,” he bellowed, impassioned, trying to make himself heard over the thunder. “France was going bankrupt, my friends. The exchanges, one after the other, were closing down, too. Thanks be to God! My problem was solved!”
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