“After I finish this portrait I’ll never pick up a brush again, Haapuani.”
“Do you mean that by letting myself be painted I’m sending you to your grave, Koké?”
“In a sense, yes. You’ll send me to my grave, and meanwhile I will immortalize you. You’ll have the best of it, Haapuani.”
“Can I ask you something, Koké?” Tohotama had been so quiet and still all morning that Paul hadn’t noticed she was there. “Why have you put that red cape on my husband’s shoulders? Haapuani never dresses like that. And I don’t know anyone on Hiva Oa or Tahuata who does.”
“Well, that’s what I see on your husband’s shoulders, Tohotama.” Koké’s spirits rose upon hearing the girl’s deep, rich voice, so in keeping with her sturdy body and red hair, her generous breasts, her broad hips, and her heavy, smooth thighs, all those beautiful things that now he could only remember. “I see all the blood that the Maori have spilled throughout their history. Fighting among themselves, destroying one another for food and land, defending themselves against flesh-and-blood invaders or wraiths from the next world. The whole history of your people is in this red cape, Tohotama.”
“I only see a red cape that no person from here has ever worn,” she insisted. “And those hooded people? Are they two women, Koké? Or are they men? They can’t be Marquesans. I’ve never seen a woman or man on these islands put something like that on their heads.”
He felt the urge to caress her, but he didn’t try. You would reach out and touch empty air, because she could easily dodge you. Then you would feel ridiculous. But having desired her even for an instant made you happy, because one of the consequences of the advance of the unspeakable disease was the absence of desire. You weren’t dead yet, Koké. A little more patience and resolve and you would finish this cursed painting.
Maybe what Bishop Dupanloup liked to repeat when he extolled the heroes of Christianity in his religion classes at your childhood school in Orléans, the seminary of the Chapelle Saint-Mesmin, was true after all: it was when the sinner had fallen lowest that he was compelled to rise highest, like Robert the Devil, the arch-villain who became a saint. It happened to you after that horrendous winter of 1885–86 in Paris. Just when you felt yourself sinking in the mire, you began to rise little by little toward the surface, toward clean air. The miracle had a name: Pont-Aven. Many painters and amateur artists spoke of Brittany, drawn by the wild beauty of its landscape, its isolation, and its romantic storms. For you, Brittany was attractive for two reasons, one abstract and one practical. In Pont-Aven you would find an archaic culture still thriving, people who instead of renouncing their religion, beliefs, and customs, clung to them with supreme disdain for the efforts of the State and Paris to integrate them into modernity. And then, too, you could live very cheaply there. Although nothing went quite as you expected, your departure for Pont-Aven—thirteen hours by train, on the Quimperlé line—in that sunny July of 1886 was the best decision you had made in your life so far.
It was in Pont-Aven that you truly began to be a painter, even if you had already been forgotten by the snobs and dilettantes of flighty Paris. He remembered well his arrival, aching from his long trip, in the triangular little main square of the picture-postcard town in the middle of a fertile valley flanked by wooded hills and crowned by a forest dedicated to Love, to which the salty afternoon air brought a hint of the sea. On the square were the lodgings for the well-to-do, American and English travelers who came there in search of local color: the Hôtel des Voyageurs and the Lion d’Or. It wasn’t these hotels you were looking for, but the modest inn belonging to Madame Gloanec, who, fool or saint, welcomed needy artists and—magnificent woman—permitted those who didn’t have the money for their room and board to pay with paintings. The best decision you ever made, Koké! A week after you had moved into the Pension Gloanec, you were dressing like a Breton fisherman—clogs, cap, embroidered vest, blue smock—and you had become the leader of the half dozen young artists who were sheltered there, less because of your painting than because of your forceful manner, your exuberant talk, your outsize faith in yourself, and, doubtless, your age. At last you were out of the abyss, Paul. Now, to paint masterpieces.
Two or three days later, Tohotama interrupted Koké’s work again with some exclamations in Marquesan Maori that he didn’t understand, except for the word mahu, lost in the flow of sentences. In the world of shadows and contrasts of light and dark that he now inhabited, he realized that Haapuani had left the spot where he was posing and, curious, come to look at the painting and see what was so exciting Tohotama. On the canvas, instead of appearing with a pareu around his waist or naked, the witch doctor, under his red cape, was wearing a dress as tight as a glove on his slender body, a very short garment that left his shapely woman’s legs bare. Haapuani stood looking at the canvas for a long time without saying anything. Then, he went back to take up the pose Koké had requested.
“You haven’t said anything to me about your portrait,” Paul commented, after returning to his painstaking, impossible work. “What do you think of it?”
“You see mahus everywhere,” said the witch doctor, evading his question. “Where they exist, and also where they don’t exist. You don’t see the mahu as something natural, but as a demon. In that way you are like the missionaries, Koké.”
Was it true? Well, something odd had happened to you a few months ago, while you were painting The Sister of Charity, a painting for which Tohotama happened to have posed. In the end, you realized that its subject wasn’t the nun, but the man-woman standing before her, something you were scarcely conscious of while you were painting it. Why this obsession with mahus?
“Why don’t you tell me what you think of your portrait?” Koké persisted.
“The only thing I’m sure of is that the person in the painting isn’t me,” responded the Maori.
“He’s the Haapuani inside of you,” Koké replied. “The one who’s had to hide in order to keep from being discovered by the priests and gendarmes. Whether or not you believe me, I assure you that the man on the canvas is you. And not just you. It’s the true Marquesan, the one who is disappearing, of whom soon no trace will be left. In the future, people will consult my paintings to see what the Maori were like.”
Tohotama laughed, a frank, happy, carefree laugh that brightened the morning, and Haapuani laughed too, but grudgingly. That evening, when the couple was gone and Tioka had come over to talk—he stopped by the House of Pleasure a few times a day to see if Koké needed anything—the white-bearded Maori spent a long time looking at the canvas. To see it better, he brought over one of the pitch torches from the door. Paul asked him no questions. After a while, his neighbor, usually sparing of words, gave his opinion.
“In many paintings, you’ve painted the island women with muscles and men’s bodies,” he said, intrigued. “But in this one you’ve done the opposite: you’ve painted Haapuani like a woman.”
If what Tioka was saying was true, The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa looked more or less as you intended it to, although you had painted it almost entirely blind, except in brief intervals when the brightness of the day, your stubborn efforts, or a merciful god had cleared your sight, and for a few minutes you could correct details and brighten or soften the colors. It wasn’t just your sight that was failing you. It was your steadiness, too. Sometimes the tremor in your hand was so strong that you had to lie down on the bed for a while, until your body relaxed and the uncontrollable spasms stopped. Only your masterpieces had been painted in states of incandescence like this, Koké. Would The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa be a masterpiece? If you could get a full look at the canvas, even just for a few seconds, you would know. But you would always be left with the doubt, Koké.
At the next session, Tohotama talked to him about the painting. Why were you always so interested in mahus, in men-women, Koké? He gave her a silly explanation—“they’re picturesque, striking, exotic, Tohotama”—but the question nagged at him for the rest of the day, and
he kept turning it over in his head that night, in bed, after he had eaten a bit of fruit, changed the bandages on his legs, and taken a few drops of laudanum dissolved in water for the pain. Why, Koké? Maybe because in the evasive, semi-invisible, persecuted mahu, detested as a sinful aberration by priests and pastors, there survived the last untamed vestige of those Maori savages who, thanks to Europe, would soon cease to exist. The primitive people of the Marquesas would be swallowed up and digested by Christian and Western culture—the culture you had defended with so much brio and verbiage, so much exaggeration and slander, back in Tahiti, in Les Guêpes and La Sourire, Koké. Swallowed up and digested like the Tahitians before them, and corrected in matters of religion, language, ethics, and, of course, sex. In the very near future, things would be as clear-cut for Marquesans as they were for any bourgeois, churchgoing European. There were two sexes and that was enough—who needed more? Man and woman, male and female, penis and vagina: easy to tell apart, and separated by an unbridgeable gap. Ambiguity in matters of love and desire, as in matters of faith, was a sign of barbarism and vice, as degrading in the eyes of civilization as anthropophagy. The man-woman, the woman-man, were abnormalities to be extirpated the way God razed Sodom and Gomorrah. Poor mahus still left on these islands! The hypocritical colonists and colonial administrators sought them out to hire them as house servants, because they were known to be good at cooking, washing clothes, caring for children, and keeping house. But in order not to fall afoul of the priests and ministers, they forbade them to dress and array themselves like women. When the mahus twined flowers in their hair, wore bracelets on their wrists and bangles on their ankles, and dressed as girls, daring—surely with considerable misgivings and fear of being discovered—to fleetingly display themselves in such attire, they didn’t suspect that they were the last gasps of a culture, that primitive man’s healthy, spontaneous, uninhibited acceptance of everything inside him—his desires, his fantasies—was soon to be no more. The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa was a tombstone, Koké.
Despite what the blind old Maori woman said when she touched your hooded penis, you were closer to the islanders than to people like Monsignor Martin or the gendarme Jean-Pierre Claverie. Or to those colonists, made callous by ignorance and greed, whom you served as a mercenary in Papeete. You understood savages; you respected them; you envied them. Whereas you despised your supposed compatriots.
At least this much you were sure of, Koké. You didn’t paint like a modern, civilized European. No one could be fooled into thinking that. Although you had intuited it in a vague way before, it was in Brittany, first in Pont-Aven and then in Le Pouldu, that you understood it with complete certainty. Art had to break free from its narrow mold, from the tiny horizon to which it had been confined by the artists, critics, academics, and collectors of Paris; it had to open up to the world, mix with other cultures, expose itself to other winds, other landscapes, other values, other races, other beliefs, other ways of living and thinking. Only then would it recover the power that the soft, easy, frivolous, materialistic life of the Parisians had leached from it. You had done it, gone out into the world to seek, to learn, to drink deep of everything that was unknown or rejected in Europe. It had cost you, but you didn’t regret it, did you, Koké?
You didn’t. You were proud of having made it this far, even in the state you were in. Painting had a price, and you had paid it. When you returned to Paris to face the winter after those summer and autumn months spent in Pont-Aven, you were a different person. You had changed inside and out; you were euphoric, sure of yourself, wild with joy at having at last discovered your path. And avid for mischief and scandal. One of the first things you did in Paris was to attack the beautiful Louise, good old Schuff’s wife, with whom you had previously only allowed yourself to flirt. Now, in this new rebellious, bold, iconoclastic, anarchic mood, you seized the opportunity the first time you were alone—good old Schuff was giving his drawing classes at the academy—to launch yourself at Louise. Could it be said that you took advantage of her, Paul? That would be an exaggeration. At most, you seduced and corrupted her. Because Louise resisted only at first, more for appearances’ sake than out of conviction. And she never seemed to regret her indiscretion afterward.
“You’re a savage, Paul. How dare you lay your hands on me?”
“You said it yourself, my lovely. I’m a savage. I don’t follow the same rules as the bourgeoisie. My instincts guide my actions now. And this new philosophy will make me a great artist.”
A prophetic declaration of principles, Koké. Did good old Schuff ever find out how you betrayed him? If he did, he must have been able to forgive you. A superior being, that Alsatian. Much better than you, certainly, in terms of civilized morality. Which was doubtless why he always painted so badly.
The next day, after some final retouchings, Koké paid Haapuani the agreed sum. The painting was finished. Or was it? You hoped so. In any case, you no longer had the strength or the will to keep working on it.
21
THE LAST BATTLE
BORDEAUX, NOVEMBER 1844
When Flora Tristán arrived in Bordeaux on the ill-fated day of September 24, 1844, and accepted an invitation to occupy a box seat at the Grand Théâtre for a concert by the pianist Franz Liszt, she never suspected that that mundane event, where the ladies of Bordeaux came to parade their jewels and finery, would be her last public activity. The weeks remaining to her she would spend in bed, at the house of Elisa and Charles Lemonnier, two Saint-Simonians to whom she had refused to be introduced a year before because she considered them too bourgeois. Paradoxes, Florita, paradoxes, up until the very last day of your life.
She didn’t feel ill when she arrived in Bordeaux, just tired, irritated, and disappointed, because ever since leaving Carcassonne, the monarchy’s prefects and commissaries had made her life difficult, in Toulouse as well as in Agen, bursting into her meetings with workers, closing them down, and even dispersing the workers with cudgels. Her pessimism was occasioned not by her health but rather by the authorities, who were determined at all costs to prevent her from finishing her tour.
Five years ago, upon your return from London, when, consumed by the idea of forging a great alliance of women and workers for the transformation of humanity, you began the frenetic task of trying to make connections with the workers, how could you have imagined that in the end you would be harassed by a power that considered you subversive—you, a sworn pacifist? Back in Paris, you were not only full of hopes and dreams; you were also bursting with good health. You assiduously read the two main workers’ journals, L’Atelier and La Ruche Populaire (the only publications that praised your Walks in London), and you visited and read the writings of all the messiahs, philosophers, doctrinaires, and theorists of social change. This was ultimately more confusing and chaotic than instructive because, among socialist and anarchist reformers, there were many madmen and eccentrics who preached pure nonsense. There was, for example—remembering him made you laugh—the charismatic sculptor Ganneau, who looked like a gravedigger. He was the founder of Evadamism, a doctrine that was based on the idea of equality between the sexes and advocated women’s liberation. For a few weeks, you naively took him seriously, but the respect you had for that gloomy personage with fanatical eyes and elongated hands crumbled the day he explained to you that the name of his movement, Evadamism, was derived from the first couple—Eve and Adam—and that he was called Mapah by his disciples in homage to the family, since the word combined the first syllables of Mama and Papa. He was either an idiot or a lunatic.
The police harassment spoiled what might have been a productive visit to Toulouse for Flora, between September 8 and 19. The day after she arrived, she was meeting with twenty workers in the Hôtel des Portes, rue de la Pomme, when Commissioner Boisseneau charged into the room. Big-bellied, with a bushy mustache and a sour look on his face, he didn’t even greet her or take off his bowler hat before declaring, “You have no permission to come to Toulouse to preach revolu
tion.”
“I haven’t come to make a revolution but to prevent one, Mr. Commissary. Read my book first, before you judge me,” Flora replied. “Since when does a single woman frighten commissaries and prefects in the most powerful kingdom of Europe?”
The official departed with only a curt “You’ve been warned.”
Her efforts to talk to the prefect in Toulouse were in vain. The ban disheartened her contacts in the city. She managed to hold only one secret meeting, at an inn in the neighborhood of Saint-Michel, with eight tanners. Full of apprehension at the idea the police might discover them, they listened with terrified eyes, glancing constantly toward the door. Her visit to L’Émancipation, a newspaper that claimed to be democratic and republican, was another failure: the journalists looked at her as if she were peddling antidotes for nightmares and ill omens, and paid no attention to her detailed presentation of the objectives of the Workers’ Union. One asked her if she was a Gypsy. Her indignation reached its height when the most audacious of them, an editor called Riberol, thin as a broomstick and with a lecherous light in his eye, began to wink at her and whisper double entendres.
The Way to Paradise Page 39