“As far as I know, the legal proceedings are stalled.” Paul spat toward the nearby palm trees. “Maybe their files were lost or destroyed in the gale. They can’t touch me now. Nature, defending art against priests and gendarmes! The cyclone was my salvation, Ben!”
In July of 1884, Mette Gad boarded a ship in the harbor of Rouen and sailed for Denmark with three of the children, leaving Paul in the Norman capital with Clovis and Jean in his care. In Copenhagen, matters improved for the Viking. Her family found her work as a French teacher. And then—dreaming, Koké, always dreaming—you decided to follow her and conquer Denmark for impressionism.
“What is impressionism?” Ben wanted to know.
They were drinking brandy, and the shopkeeper was already tipsy. Paul, however, was perfectly sober, although he had drunk more than his friend. From the hill of the Catholic mission behind them, the wind carried the sound of the choir at the school of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny. They always practiced at this hour, singing hymns that no longer seemed religious, infused as they were with the joy and sensual rhythms of Marquesan life.
“An artistic movement that no one in Paris remembers anymore, I imagine,” said Koké, shrugging his shoulders. “And now, Ben, one last toast. If night comes, I won’t be able to find my way home with my eyes the way they are now.”
Ben Varney helped him down the stairs, across the fenced-in yard, and into his little trap. As soon as the pony felt him climb in, it started off. It knew the way by heart, and trotted along carefully in the dim evening light, avoiding the obstacles in its path. Happily, you didn’t have to guide it, Paul; you wouldn’t have been able to. In the dusk, your eyes, weakened by the unspeakable illness, couldn’t see the dips or bumps in the road. You felt good. Blind and contented, Koké. The air was warm and soothing, and a soft breeze scented with sandalwood blew. That had been a difficult test of your pride, having to live at 29 Frederiksbergalle, Mette’s mother’s house, supported and snubbed by your mother-in-law and your wife’s uncles, aunts, sisters, brothers, and even cousins. None of them could understand, much less accept, that you had given up a bourgeois life and the world of finance to be a bohemian, which in their minds was synonymous with being an artist. They banished you to the attic, where, because of your shabby and eccentric appearance—which you exaggerated to spite your in-laws, of course, by wearing an Indian feather headdress—you had to stay hidden away while Mette taught French to young men and women of the Danish upper class, since there was the risk that the girls would be upset and the boys offended by your unsuitable appearance, and thus abandon their classes. Things didn’t improve when, thanks to the sale of a painting from your collection of impressionist works, you, Mette, and the children left your mother-in-law’s to live in a little house at 51 Norregada, in a seedy neighborhood of Copenhagen, which gave Mette new cause to rage at you and lament her fate.
This new test you passed, too. Humiliated and lonely in a country whose language you didn’t speak, and where you had no friends or purchasers for your paintings, you worked constantly and furiously. You painted skaters in snowy Frederiksberge Park, the trees of East Park, your first self-portrait; you made ceramic pieces, wood carvings, drawings, countless sketches. One of the few Danish artists who was interested in what you were doing, Theodor Philipsen, came to look at your paintings. For an hour, you talked. Suddenly, you heard yourself telling the Dane that for you, feelings were more important than reason. Where did that theory come from? You were inventing it as you went along. Painting should be the expression of the whole human being: his intelligence, his skill as a craftsman, his culture, but also his beliefs, instincts, desires, hatreds. “Like primitive man.” Philipsen didn’t attach the slightest importance to what you were saying; he was amiable and dull, like all Scandinavians. But you did. You had spoken without thinking; later, upon reflection, you would discover that those words summed up your artistic credo. And still did today, Koké. Because behind your infinite statements and denials, in speech and in writing, on artistic matters over all these years, the fixed nucleus was still the same: Western art had deteriorated because of its alienation from the totality of existence manifested in primitive cultures. In them, art—inseparable from religion—was part of everyday life, like eating, dressing, singing, and making love. You wanted to recapture that tradition in your paintings.
It was dark when he arrived at the House of Pleasure, which, because of the cyclone, was no longer surrounded by forest but by thin ranks of trees and fallen trunks. This was one of Hiva Oa’s traits: darkness fell in an instant, like a curtain dropping and hiding the scenery. A pleasant surprise—there were Haapuani and his wife, Tohotama, sitting beside the caricatures of Father Lechery and Teresa, which had survived the hurricane. They had just come from Tahuata, the island of redheaded Maori like Tohotama. To what did he owe this happy visit?
Haapuani hesitated and exchanged a long look with his wife, before responding flatly, “I accept your proposal. Necessity has convinced me, Koké.”
Ever since he met him, shortly after arriving in Atuona, Paul had wanted to paint Haapuani. The man’s character intrigued him. He had been the native priest of a Maori village on Tahuata, before the arrival of the French missionaries. Now no one knew for sure whether he lived on Hiva Oa or his native island, or traveled back and forth between the two. He would disappear for long periods of time and, upon returning, say nothing about where he had been. The natives of Hiva Oa believed he had ancient knowledge and powers because of his former practices, which, according to Ky Dong, he still continued in secret, away from the scrutiny of Bishop Martin, Pastor Vernier, and the gendarme Claverie. Koké admired him for his daring: sometimes, despite his years (he must have been in his fifties), Haapuani appeared at the House of Pleasure dressed and adorned like a mahu, a man-woman. Although the other Maori took no notice of this, it would have provoked the wrath of the two churches and the civil authority if they found out. Haapuani had no objections to the beautiful, muscular Tohotama posing—she had done so many times—but he would never agree to let Koké paint him. Each time you proposed it, he got angry. The cyclone had made him change his mind, because if it had caused damage on Hiva Oa, it had brought devastation to Tahuata, destroying homes and farms and leaving dozens dead, among them several relatives of the erstwhile witch doctor. Haapuani confessed: he needed money. Judging by his tone and expression, it must have cost him a great effort to take this step.
Would your miserable eyes allow you to paint him?
Without a second thought, Koké accepted, delighted. They immediately made a formal agreement, after which Paul advanced Haapuani some money. He was so excited by the prospect of painting this new work that he spent much of the night awake, tossing and turning in bed as he listened to the wild cats yowl and watched the moon appear and disappear in a cloudy sky. Haapuani knew much more than he was willing to admit. Koké had tested him when he came with Tohotama, as she posed. He would never reveal anything about his past as a Maori priest, and he always denied that cannibalism was still practiced on some of the far-flung islands of the archipelago. But Koké, obsessed, wasn’t convinced by these denials. And sometimes he was able to overcome Haapuani’s resistance and make him talk about the art of tattooing. Bishop Martin and Pastor Vernier thought they had abolished it, but it was still alive in lost villages and forests all over the Marquesas, preserving—on the brown skin of Maori men and women—the ancient wisdom, faith, and traditions condemned by the missionaries. On his only trip to the interior of Hiva Oa, to the village of Hanaupe, in the valley of Hekeani, to bargain for the purchase of Vaeoho, Koké confirmed it: the villagers displayed their tattoos freely. And through an interpreter he talked with the village tattooist, a smiling old man who showed him how he imprinted those symmetrical, labyrinthine drawings on human skin, with an artist’s finesse and assurance. Haapuani, who grew skittish whenever Koké questioned him about his Marquesan beliefs, was sometimes inspired to reveal the meanings of different tat
toos to him. One day, drawing on a sheet of paper with the skill of an expert, he even explained the tangle of references contained in certain designs. The ones he sketched were the most ancient, he said: those serving to protect warriors in battle, to impart strength to resist the wiles of evil spirits, and to guarantee purity of spirit.
The witch doctor appeared the next morning at the House of Pleasure, soon after the sun had risen. Koké was waiting for him in his studio. The sky was clear over Atuona, though out to sea, toward the deserted Sheep’s Island, a mass of dark clouds and red flashes of lightning heralded a storm. When he made Haapuani stand where the early-morning light would strike him best, Koké’s heart sank. The pity of it! You could see little more than a shape, blurred at the edges, and patches of different shades and depths. That was how your eyes saw colors now: as smudges, fogs. Wasn’t it pointless to attempt it, Koké?
“No, damn it, no,” he muttered, coming up very close to the witch doctor, as if he were about to kiss him or bite him. “Even if I go completely blind or die of rage, I’ll paint you, Haapuani.”
“It’s best to stay calm, Koké,” the Maori advised him. “Since you’re always so eager to know what the Marquesans think, that is our principal belief: never be angry, except when your enemy is before you.”
Tohotama, who was there somewhere—you hadn’t heard her arrive—giggled, as if this were all a game. Mette also had that irritating habit of trivializing important matters by making a joke and laughing. Although they never became friends, the Danish painter Philipsen was very good to you. After he visited the house at 51 Norregada to see your paintings, he prevailed on his acquaintances to convince Denmark’s Society of the Friends of Art to sponsor an exhibition of your paintings. It opened on May 1, 1884, with a small but distinguished crowd in attendance. Gentlemen and ladies, attentive and polite, seemed to interest themselves in the paintings, and asked you questions about them in courtly French. Still, no one bought anything; no reviews, favorable or hostile, appeared in the Copenhagen press; and five days later the exhibition closed. You would later boast that the authorities, conservative and traditionalist, had ordered it to be shut down, scandalized by your aesthetic daring. But that wasn’t the case. In truth, it was because no one went to see it and it was a commercial failure that your only exhibition while you were living in Copenhagen ended so soon.
The worst thing wasn’t your frustration; it was how angry Mette’s family was at you for the fiasco. So! The outlandish bohemian gives up his position in society and his respectable job as a stockbroker for art—and this is what he paints! Countess Moltke let it be known that if this grotesquely attired, redskin-imitating, effeminate person stayed in Copenhagen, she would stop paying the tuition of the Gauguins’ oldest son, Emil, a charitable duty she had assumed six months before. And the Viking, pale and sniveling, dared to tell you that if you didn’t leave, the young diplomats to whom she taught French had threatened to find another teacher. And then she and the children would starve. They kicked you out of Copenhagen like a dog, Koké! You had no alternative but to return to Paris, in a third-class train carriage, taking six-year-old Clovis with you, thus relieving Mette of one mouth to feed as she scraped to support the rest of the family. Your parting, at the beginning of June 1885, was a tour de force of hypocrisy. The two of you pretended to be undergoing a temporary separation demanded by the circumstances, telling each other that you would be reunited as soon as matters improved. Yet deep down you knew very well, and perhaps Mette did too, that you would be apart for a long time, perhaps forever. Were you right, Koké? Well, up to a certain point. Although you’d seen each other only once for a few days in the last eighteen years—and then she wouldn’t let you touch her—legally, the Viking was still your wife. How many months had it been since Mette wrote you, Koké?
He arrived in Paris without a cent in his pocket and with a child in tow, and went to stay with good old Schuff, in his apartment on the rue Boulard, from whose windows he could see the tombstones of the Montparnasse cemetery. You were thirty-seven years old, Koké. Had you begun to be a real painter? You were still struggling. Since there was no room in the flat to work, you drew and painted in the streets—next to a chestnut tree in the Luxembourg Gardens, on park benches, on the banks of the Seine—in notebooks and on canvases that your friend Schuff gave you. Without letting his wife, Louise, know, Schuff also sometimes slipped a few francs into your pocket so that at midday you could sit for a while on the terrace of a café. Was it in that summer of 1885 that you sometimes couldn’t sleep at night, thinking that everything you were doing might be a huge mistake, an act of madness you would come to regret? No, the period of extreme desperation came later. In July, after selling another piece from your collection of impressionist paintings (there were very few left, and they were all in Mette’s possession), you left for Dieppe. Spending the summer there was a colony of painters with whom you were acquainted, among them Degas. They gathered in an extraordinarily gaudy, peculiar house, the Chalet du Bas-Fort-Blanc, owned by the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche. You went to visit them, thinking they would receive you with open arms; but you were told they weren’t in, and as the butler sent you away, you spotted Degas and Blanche peeping at you through the curtains. After that, both avoided you as if you were an undesirable. You were, Koké. Lonely, you wandered along the harbor and the cliffs with your easel, paints, and paper, painting bathers, sandy beaches, tall reefs. The paintings were bad. You felt like a mangy dog. It was only natural that Degas, Blanche, and the other Dieppe painters should steer clear of you: you were dressed like a tramp because that was what you were now.
The worst was yet to come, Koké. It arrived with the winter, when you returned to Paris, penniless again. Your sister, María Fernanda, turned over Clovis, whom she had grudgingly cared for while you were in Dieppe. The Schuffeneckers could no longer lodge you. You rented a miserable room on the rue Cail, near the Gare de l’Est, unfurnished. In a junk shop, you found a little bed for Clovis. You slept on the floor, shivering under a single blanket. You had only summer clothing, and Mette never sent you the winter things you had left in Copenhagen. Those last months of 1885 and first months of 1886 were bitterly cold, with frequent snowfalls. Clovis caught chicken pox, and you couldn’t even buy him medicine; likely he survived only because he had your strong constitution and rebellious spirit, which made you thrive in adversity. You fed him handfuls of rice, and many days you yourself ate little more than scraps. Then—desperation, Koké—you had to stop painting so that you and the boy wouldn’t die of hunger. Just when you thought the solution might be to throw yourself from a bridge into the icy waters of the Seine with the child in your arms, you found work: as a bill poster in the stations of Paris. Congratulations, Koké! It was hard outdoor work and left you smeared all over with paste, but after a few weeks you had saved enough to put Clovis into a very modest boarding school in Antony, just outside of Paris.
Was the winter of 1885–86 the worst moment of your life, the point at which you nearly gave up? No. That was now, although you had a roof over your head and—thanks to Daniel de Monfreid and the dealer Ambroise Vollard—a bit of income which, although minimal, was enough so you were able to eat and drink. Nothing, not even that horrible winter eighteen years ago, could compare to the impotence you felt every day, trying, little better than gropingly, to commit to the canvas the colors and shapes suggested to you by Haapuani’s presence—his presence, because almost all you could see of him was a faceless silhouette. That didn’t matter so much to you. You still had a clear picture in your head of Haapuani’s face, attractive despite his years, and you also had an idea what the painting should be. A handsome witch doctor who is also a mahu; a coquettish and distinguished figure with little flowers in his long, silky feminine hair, wrapped in a big red cape flaming at his shoulders, with a leaf in his right hand that stands for his secret knowledge of the world of plants—love philters, healing potions, poisons, magical concoctions—and behind him, as always
in your paintings (why, Koké?), two women buried in a leafy glade—real or maybe fantastic, bundled in monkish, medieval hooded robes—watching him, captivated or frightened by his aura of mystery and ambiguity, and his insolent freedom. At the sorcerer’s feet would be a dog, of strange bone structure, perhaps hailing from the Maori underworld, and a black rooster. A whitish-blue river and the evening sky would be visible through the trees of the forest in the background. You could see it very well in your mind, but to transfer it to the canvas, you needed to constantly ask the advice of Haapuani himself, or Tohotama, or Tioka, who sometimes came to watch you work, questioning them about the colors, and about the mixes you made essentially by instinct, without being able to check the results. They were more than willing, but they didn’t have the words or the understanding to answer properly. It tormented you to think that their inexact information might ruin your work. The painting went extremely slowly. Were you moving forward or backward? There was no way to know. When your helplessness made you groan, or fall to weeping and cursing, Haapuani and Tohotama remained by your side, motionless, respectful, waiting for you to grow calm and take up your brush again.
Then Paul remembered that when he was hanging posters in the railway stations of Paris in that cruel winter eighteen years ago, fate delivered into his hands a little book that he found, forgotten or tossed aside by its owner, on the chair of a café next to the Gare de l’Est, where he went to have an absinthe at the end of the day. Its author was a Turk, the artist, philosopher, and theologian Mani Velibi-Zumbul-Zadi, who united all three disciplines in his essay. Color, according to him, was something deeper and more subjective than could be found in the natural world. It was a manifestation of human sentiments, beliefs, fantasies. All the spirituality of an age, and all its people’s angels and demons, were expressed in the values given to different colors, and the way color was used. That was why real artists shouldn’t feel themselves bound to literal representation when faced with the natural world: green forest, blue sky, gray sea, white clouds. It was their obligation to use colors in accordance with their innermost compulsions, or simply their private whim: black sun, fiery moon, blue horse, emerald waves, green clouds. Mani Velibi-Zumbul-Zadi also said—how appropriate these teachings were now, Koké—that artists, in order to preserve their authenticity, should give up using models and paint exclusively from memory. If they did, their art would better represent their secret truths. Your eyes had obliged you to do precisely that, Koké. Would The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa be your last painting? The question made you retch with sadness and rage.
The Way to Paradise Page 38