The Way to Paradise

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  On the very night Flora arrived in Carcassonne, she had an unpleasant encounter with the local Fourierists, who, led by a Monsieur Escudié, had arranged her visit. They had reserved a room for her at the Hôtel Bonnet, beneath the city walls. She was already in bed when a knock at the door of her room awakened her. The hotel manager begged her pardon a thousand times: some gentlemen insisted on seeing her. It was very late; they should return tomorrow. But since they were so adamant, she threw a robe over her shoulders and went out to meet them. The dozen local Fourierists who had come to welcome her were drunk. She felt ill with disgust. Did these bohemians pretend to make revolution on champagne and beer? To one of them, a man with slurred speech and glassy eyes who insisted that she dress so they could show her the churches and medieval walls in the moonlight, she replied, “What do I care about old stones, when there are so many human beings with problems to be solved! Just so you know, I wouldn’t hesitate to give the most beautiful church in Christendom for one intelligent worker.”

  Seeing how irritated she was, they left.

  The week she spent in the city, the Fourierists of Carcassonne—lawyers, agriculturalists, doctors, journalists, pharmacists, and officials, who called themselves chevaliers—turned out to be a permanent source of trouble. Hungry for power, they were planning an armed insurrection across the whole French Midi. They said that many officers were with them, and even whole garrisons. From her first meeting, Flora criticized them vehemently. In the best of cases, she told them, their radicalism would lead to the replacement of a few bourgeois members of government with new ones, and in the worst it would provoke a bloody repression that would destroy the emerging workers’ movement. The important thing was social revolution, not political power. Their conspiracy plans and violent fantasies only confused the workers, and would distance them from their goals and use up their energies. Such purely political subversion might lead to their decimation by the army, a sacrifice that would be of no use to the cause. The chevaliers had influence in workers’ circles, and they attended Flora’s meetings at the spinning mills and textile factories. Their presence intimidated the poor, who hardly dared speak before them. Instead of explaining the possibilities of the Workers’ Union, you had to spend hours and hours in exhausting political arguments with these schemers, who rallied the workers with their plans for armed uprisings, speaking of the many rifles and barrels of powder they had hidden in strategic places. The seductive idea of seizing power by force inflamed many workers.

  “What would the difference be between a Fourierist government and the one that now exists?” shouted Madame-la-Colère, enraged. “What do the workers care who exploits them? It’s not a question of seizing power by any means, but of ending exploitation and inequality once and for all.”

  At night she returned to the Hôtel Bonnet as exhausted as she had been in London in the summer of 1839, at the end of crowded days spent studying everything in that monster city of two million inhabitants, capital of the planet’s biggest empire, and headquarters of its most booming factories and largest fortunes. With Olympian disregard for medical advice, she worked from dawn until dusk to show the world that, behind the facade of prosperity, luxury, and power, there lurked the most abject exploitation, the worst evils, and a suffering humanity enduring cruelties and abuse in order to make possible the dizzying wealth of a handful of aristocrats and industrialists.

  The difference, Florita, was that in 1839, despite the bullet by then lodged in your chest, you were refreshed after a few hours of sleep and ready for another thrilling day in London, venturing into slums that drew no tourists, that were in fact invisible in travelers’ accounts, which delighted in describing the glories of drawing rooms and clubs, the well-kept parks, the gas lamps of the West End, and the charms of the dances, banquets, and dinners at which the parasites of the nobility disported themselves. Now, when you got up you were as tired as you were when you went to bed, and during the day you had to fall back on the blind stubbornness that fortunately you still preserved intact in order to follow the schedule you had set for yourself. It wasn’t the bullet that troubled you most; it was the pains in your stomach and your uterus, against which tranquilizers no longer had any effect.

  Despite all the hatred you had come to feel for England since you lived there in your youth, working for the Spences, you had to admit that without it and its English, Scottish, and Irish workers, you would probably never have come to realize that the only way to achieve emancipation for women and win them equal rights was by linking their struggle to that of the workers, society’s other victims, the downtrodden, the earth’s immense majority. The idea came to her in London, inspired by the Chartist movement, which demanded the adoption into law of a People’s Charter establishing universal suffrage, voting by ballot, yearly elections for Parliament, and salaries for members so that workers could campaign for seats. Although it had existed since 1836, the Chartist movement was at its height when Flora arrived in London in June of 1839. She followed news of its demonstrations, meetings, and campaigns to collect signatures, and she learned about its excellent system of organization, with committees in villages, cities, and factories. You were impressed. The old excitement kept you awake now, remembering those marches of thousands and thousands of workers through the streets of London. A true civil army. If all the poor and exploited peoples of the world were organized like the Chartists, who could stand against them? Women and workers together would be invincible, a force capable of revolutionizing human existence without firing a single shot.

  When she heard that the National Convention of the Chartist movement was then being held in London, she discovered where they met. Boldly, she appeared at Doctor Johnson’s Tavern, a seedy-looking bar in a dead-end alleyway off Fleet Street. Into a vast, damp, smoky, ill-lit room smelling of cheap beer and boiled cabbage, some hundred Chartist foremen were packed, among them the main leaders, O’Brien and O’Connor. They were discussing whether it was a good idea to call a general strike in support of the People’s Charter. When they asked you who you were and what you were doing there, you explained, in a steady voice, that you brought greetings from the workers and women of France to their British brethren. They looked at you with surprise, but they didn’t make you leave. A handful of female workers were there too, and they eyed your bourgeois clothing suspiciously. For several hours, you listened to them argue, exchange proposals, vote on motions. You were rapt. This force, if multiplied all over Europe, would change the world, would bring happiness to the disinherited—you were sure of it. When, at one point in the session, O’Brien and O’Connor asked if the French delegate wanted to address the assembly, you didn’t hesitate for a second. You climbed up to the speakers’ platform and congratulated them in your wobbly English, encouraging them to continue providing an example of organization and struggle to all the world’s poor. You ended your brief speech with a call to arms that left your listeners, believers in peaceful means of action, completely taken aback. “Let’s burn the castles, brothers!”

  Now you laughed remembering your words, Florita. Because you didn’t believe in violence. You had made that incendiary appeal in order to express with a dramatic image the overpowering emotion you felt. What a privilege it was to be there, among fellow members of the exploited classes who were beginning to show their strength. You were in favor of love, ideas, and persuasion, and against bullets and the gallows. That was why you were exasperated by the bloodthirsty bourgeois of Carcassonne, who thought everything could be resolved by mobilizing regiments and erecting guillotines in public squares. What could one expect from such fools? There was no hope for the bourgeoisie; their egotism would always prevent them from seeing the larger truth. You, on the other hand, were sure you were on the right path, now more than ever. Bringing women and workers together, organizing the two groups into an alliance that would transcend boundaries and could not be crushed by any police brigade, army, or government. Then, heaven would no longer be an abstraction, and, libera
ted from the sermons of priests and the credulity of believers, it would become history, the reality of everyday life and all mortals. “I admire you, Florita,” she exclaimed, enthused. “O God, if you would only send ten women like me to this world, justice would reign on earth.”

  Among the Fourierists of Carcassonne, the most flamboyant was Hugues Bernard. A militant in secret societies in France and a member of the Carbonarists in Italy, he wanted civil war at any cost. He was eloquent and seductive, and the workers listened to him spellbound. Flora confronted him; she called him a “snake charmer,” a “conjuror,” a “corruptor of the workers with your demagogic drivel.” Instead of being offended, Hugues Bernard followed her back to her hotel, wearying her with his flattery: she was the most intelligent woman he had ever met, the only one he might have married. If he weren’t sure of being rejected, he would try to woo her. In the end, Flora had to laugh. But because he was so flirtatious, she decided to keep her distance from him. Monsieur Escudié, the leader of the chevaliers, tried to win her friendship, too. He was a mysterious, gloomy man, dressed in mourning and gifted with flashes of genius.

  “You would make a good revolutionary, Escudié, if you weren’t so driven by your appetites, and let love rule you instead.”

  “You’ve hit the nail on the head, Flora,” agreed the lean, cadaverous Fourierist, in a serious tone, a Mephistophelian expression on his face. “My appetites, the temptations of the flesh, are my greatest trial.”

  “Forget about the flesh, Escudié. To make revolution all you need is the proper spirit, the idea. Flesh is a hindrance.”

  “That’s easier said than done, Flora,” said the Fourierist mournfully, with a look in his eye that alarmed her. “My flesh is a compound of all the legions of hell. You, who seem so pure—if you could see into the world of my desires, you would die of horror. Have you read the Marquis de Sade, by chance?”

  Flora felt her legs tremble. She managed to steer the conversation in another direction, afraid that Escudié, once started down that path, would reveal his secret nether world, the lewd depths of his soul where many demons must dwell, to judge by the evil spark in his eye. Yet, on a rare impulse, she suddenly found herself confiding in the lugubrious Fourierist. She was a free woman, and in her forty-one years she had more than proved that she didn’t fear anyone or anything. But despite her fleeting adventure with Olympia, sex continued to arouse a vague uneasiness in her, because time and again life had shown her that while carnal desires might lead to passion and pleasure, they were also a slope down which men slid rapidly into bestiality, toward the most savage forms of cruelty and injustice to women. She had been aware of it since her youth, because of André Chazal, who violated his wife and then his own daughter, but she had witnessed it fully on her trip to London in 1839, and the horror would never be erased from her memory. So shameful were some of the scenes she observed that the editors of Walks in London made her soften them, and once the book was published, not a single critic dared discuss them. Unlike Peregrinations of a Pariah, which was praised everywhere, her denunciations of the blighted London metropolis were silenced by the cowardice of the Paris intelligentsia. But what did you care, Florita? Wasn’t that a sign that you were on the right path? “Yes, most definitely,” Escudié encouraged her.

  It was soon after she arrived in London that she was given the idea of dressing as a man, by an Owenist friend who saw how upset she was to learn that women weren’t allowed into the British Parliament. A Turkish diplomat helped her, providing her with her disguise. She had to adjust the baggy trousers and the turban, and stuff the slippers with paper. Although she felt nervous crossing the threshold of the imposing building on the Thames, heart of British imperial power, she completely forget her borrowed identity upon hearing the representatives’ speeches. The parliamentarians’ vulgarity, and their crude way of sprawling in their seats with their hats on, disgusted her. But when she heard Daniel O’Connell, the leader of the Irish independents, the first Irish Catholic to occupy a seat in the House of Commons and the designer of a strategy of nonviolent struggle against English colonialism, she was moved. He was an ugly man, with the look of a coachman in his Sunday best, but when he spoke—advocating universal suffrage and the abolition of slavery—he became beautiful, radiating decency and idealism. He was such a brilliant orator that everyone listened attentively. Hearing O’Connell, Flora came up with the idea of the People’s Defender, which she made part of her proposal for the Workers’ Union: the women’s and workers’ movement would send a spokesman to Congress, paying him a salary to defend the interests of the poor.

  In those four months she often dressed as a man. She had set herself the task of giving an account of the life led by the hundred thousand prostitutes who were said to roam the streets of London, as well as observing what happened in the city’s brothels, and she could never have explored those low haunts without disguising herself in trousers and a man’s frock coat. Even so, it was dangerous to venture into certain neighborhoods. The night she walked Waterloo Road, from its start in the slums to Waterloo Bridge, the two Chartist friends who accompanied her carried staffs to discourage the myriad pickpockets and petty thieves who swarmed among the madams, pimps, and whores. They crowded the pavement, block after block, and in the absence of the police, assaulted lone clients in full view of everyone. The merchandise was shamelessly offered to passersby who came along on foot or horseback or in carriages, inspecting the goods for sale. In theory, the minimum age for human commerce was twelve. But Flora could have sworn that among the dirty, made-up, half-naked little skeletons that the procuresses and pimps touted, there were girls and boys of ten and even eight, tiny creatures with dazed or stupid stares, who seemed not to understand what was happening to them. The brashness and obscenity with which their services were offered (“You can bugger this little doll, sir,” “My cherub is willing to be whipped, and she’s an expert cock-sucker, master”) made waves of hatred rise in her. She was on the verge of fainting. Walking along the interminable street, in shadows that were interrupted every so often by the dangling red lamps of the little bawdy houses, and hearing the disgusting exchanges, the braying voices of drunks, you had the sense of having wandered into a macabre phantasmagoria, a medieval witches’ Sabbath. Wasn’t this the closest thing on earth to hell? Could there be anything more accursed than the fate of these girls and boys, offered for pennies to sate the appetites of loathsome men?

  There could, Florita. Worse than the stretch of whorehouses in the East End, full of girls and boys often kidnapped in villages or the countryside and sold to London brothels and houses of assignation by gangs specializing in the trade, were the West End “finishes,” in central London, district of elegant entertainments. There, Florita, you reached the pinnacle of evil. The finishes were tavern-brothels, bar-whorehouses, where the rich and the aristocratic, the privileged members of England’s society of masters and slaves, went to “finish” their nights of revelry. You visited them dressed as a fop, with a young man from the French legation who had read your books and who loaned you men’s clothing, though he first tried to dissuade you, assuring you that the experience would horrify you. He was absolutely right. You, who thought you had seen human brutality in all its incarnations, had not yet witnessed the extremes to which the humiliation of women could be taken.

  The girls at the finishes were not the starving, tubercular prostitutes of Waterloo Road. They were well-dressed courtesans in brightly colored clothing, bejeweled and garishly made up. After midnight, standing in a line like music-hall chorus girls, they greeted the wealthy gentlemen who had been out dining or at the theater or a concert, and had come to end the evening in one of these luxurious hideaways. The men drank and danced, and some went to private rooms on the upper floors with one or two girls to make love, and to beat them or let themselves be beaten, which in France was called le vice anglais. But at the finishes, the real entertainment wasn’t the bed or the whip, but exhibitionism and cruelty. It began a
t two or three in the morning, when lords and men of means removed their jackets, ties, vests, and suspenders, and the challenges began. They offered the women—girls, adolescents, children—shining gold guineas to down the drinks they prepared for them. Gleefully, they made them fill up their stomachs, cheering one another on in circles rocked by laughter. At first they gave them gin, cider, beer, whiskey, cognac, and champagne, but soon they began mixing the alcohol with vinegar, mustard, pepper, and worse, to watch the women swallow the contents of the glasses, then fall to the floor grimacing in revulsion, writhing, and vomiting—all to pocket a few guineas. Then, amid applause, the drunkest or most depraved, egged on by their fellows, unbuttoned their flies and pissed on the women, or, if they were particularly audacious, masturbated over them, streaking them with their sperm. At six or seven in the morning, when the revelers, tired of entertainment and sated with drink and cruelty, had fallen into the idiot stupor of the inebriated, their footmen came in and dragged them out to their fiacres and berlins, to take them home to their mansions to sleep off their drunkenness.

  Never had you wept so much, Flora Tristán. Not even when you learned that André Chazal had raped Aline did you weep as you did after those two nights in the London finishes. It was then that you decided to end things with Olympia in order to devote all your time to the revolution. Never had you felt such pity, such bitterness, such rage. Awake in Carcassonne, you experienced the same feelings again, thinking about the thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old courtesans—one of whom might have been you had you been kidnapped while you were working for the Spences—gagging down those concoctions for a guinea, letting the liquid poison destroy their insides for a guinea, allowing themselves to be spat upon, pissed upon, and spattered with semen for a guinea, all to provide the rich men of England with a momentary thrill in their empty, meaningless lives. For a guinea! God, God, if you existed, you could not be so unjust as to take Flora Tristán’s life from her before she set in motion the worldwide Workers’ Union that would put an end to the evils of this vale of tears. “Give me five more years, eight more. That’s all I need, God.”