The Way to Paradise

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Are you trying to seduce me, you poor fool?” asked Madame-la-Colère in a very loud voice, cutting him short. “Have you never looked in a mirror, wretch?”

  She got up and left, slamming the door. Your rage subsided as you remembered—the best redress, Florita—how your intemperate reaction left Riberol speechless and openmouthed, his leathery face flushed in shame, amid the laughter of his colleagues.

  In Agen, where she spent four days, things went no better than in Toulouse, again because of the police. In the city there were many workers’ mutual aid societies, which had been advised of her arrival by the obliging Agricol Perdiguier, the Good Man of Avignon: a magnanimous soul, he disagreed with Flora’s ideas yet had helped her more than anyone else. Perdiguier’s friends had arranged meetings for her with various guilds, but only the first took place. The meeting brought together some fifteen carpenters and typographers, two of whom were particularly bright and expressed their intentions of forming a committee. They accompanied her to visit the local celebrity, the poet-hairdresser Jazmin, of whom Flora expected great things. But of course the praises of the bourgeoisie had turned the former people’s poet into another stuck-up fool. It was a fate no poet escaped, it seemed. He no longer wanted to be reminded of his proletarian origins, and he struck Olympian poses. Round, soft, coquettish, and affected, he bored Flora by telling her how warmly he had been received by eminences like Nodier, Chateaubriand, and Sainte-Beuve in Paris, and how he had been overcome by emotion as he recited his “Gascogne poems” before Louis Philippe himself. His Majesty, moved, had shed a tear. When Flora explained the reason for her visit and asked for his help with the Workers’ Union, the poet-hairdresser grimaced in horror: never!

  “I will never support your revolutionary ideas, madame. Too much blood has been shed already in France. For whom do you take me?”

  “For a worker faithful to his ideals and loyal to his brethren, Monsieur Jazmin, but I see I was wrong. You are nothing but a prancing little monkey, one more puppet among the buffoons of the bourgeoisie.”

  “Out, out of my house.” The rotund bard showed her the door. “Wicked woman!”

  That same afternoon, the commissioner came to Flora’s hotel to inform her that she wasn’t allowed to hold any meetings in the city. She decided to defy the prohibition, and appeared at an inn on the rue du Temple, where forty workers of different occupations, mostly shoemakers and cutters, were waiting for her. She had scarcely been speaking for ten minutes when the inn was surrounded by twenty sergeants and fifty soldiers. The commissioner, a big, strong man armed with a ridiculous speaking-horn, deafeningly ordered those in attendance to come out one by one and register their names and addresses. Flora asked them to stay where they were. “Brothers, we must make the police come and remove us by force; let there be a scandal so the public learns of this outrage.” But almost all of them, afraid of losing their jobs, obeyed the commissioner’s order. They left in single file, with their caps in their hands, their heads bowed. Only seven remained, surrounding her. Then the sergeants came in and beat them, shouting abuse and shoving them out. But they didn’t touch Flora or respond to her vehement protests. “Hit me, too, you cowards!”

  “The next time you disobey the prohibition, you’ll be thrown in jail with the thieving women and prostitutes of Agen,” the commissioner threatened her in his booming voice; he waved his horn about like the ringmaster in a circus. “Now you know where you stand, madame.”

  The incident struck fear into Agen’s mutual aid societies and guilds, which all canceled their scheduled meetings. No one accepted her suggestion that they organize secret gatherings of just a few people. The ban meant that Flora’s last days in Agen were lonely, boring, and frustrating. She was angrier at the workers for their cowardice than at the commissioner and his masters. At the first threat from above, they turned tail and ran!

  On the day before she left for Bordeaux, something odd happened. In the writing desk in her room at the Hôtel de France, she found a lovely little gold watch, left behind by some guest. As she was about to take it to the manager, a temptation seized her: “What if I keep it?” The impulse sprang not from covetousness, which at this stage in her life she lacked completely, but from the desire for knowledge: how did thieves feel after committing their misdeeds? Did they experience fear, happiness, remorse? What she felt, in the next few hours, was anxiety, distaste, surges of terror, and a sense of ridiculousness. She decided to turn it in when she left, but she couldn’t even wait that long. After seven hours, her distress was so great that she went down to deliver the watch into the hands of the hotel management, lying and saying that she had just found it. You wouldn’t have made a good thief, Andalusa.

  Upon reflection, Florita, your tour hadn’t been such a failure. This rallying of commissioners and prefects in the last few weeks to prevent you from meeting with the workers—didn’t it indicate that your ideas were taking root? Maybe you were winning more converts than you suspected. The ripples you had left in your wake would continue to widen until sooner or later they spread into a great movement: French, European, universal. After only a year and a half on this crusade you were already an enemy of power, a threat to the realm. Remarkable success, really, Florita! There was no reason for you to be discouraged; on the contrary. You had made amazing progress since that meeting in Paris on February 4, 1843—organized by Gosset, the magnificent Father of Blacksmiths—where you spoke for the first time to a group of Parisian workers about the Workers’ Union. A year and a half wasn’t much. But from the weariness in your bones and muscles, it seemed an age.

  You had forgotten many of the things that happened during the past eighteen months, so rich in events, enthusiasms, and also failures, but you would never forget the first time you appeared in public to present your ideas before that workers’ mutual aid society sponsored by Gosset. Achille François, patron saint of the Paris tanners, presided. You were so nervous that you wet your drawers, though luckily no one noticed. They listened to you, they asked you questions, an argument broke out, and at the end a committee of seven was formed as the organizational nucleus of the movement. How easy everything seemed to you then, Florita! It was an illusion. At the next meetings, your work with the committee was poisoned by the criticisms they made of your still-unpublished text, The Workers’ Union. Their first objection was to your reference to the “shameful material and moral state” of the workers of France. They thought it was defeatist and demoralizing, even though it was true. When Gosset, Father of Blacksmiths, heard you call your critics “ignorant brutes who don’t want to be saved,” he taught you a lesson you would never forget.

  “Don’t let your impatience get the better of you, Flora Tristán. You’re new to this fight. Learn from Achille François. He works from six in the morning until eight at night to feed his family, and then from eight at night until two in the morning for his fellow workers. Is it right to call him an ignorant brute simply because he permits himself to disagree with you?”

  The Father of Blacksmiths was certainly neither brutish nor ignorant. Rather, he was a font of wisdom who stood behind you like no one else in those first weeks of your ministry in Paris. You came to consider him a teacher, a spiritual guide. But Madame Gosset didn’t understand your sublime camaraderie. One night, enraged and in her cups, she appeared at Achille François’s house, where a meeting was under way, and flew at you like a Greek fury, bombarding you with insults. Spraying saliva and sweeping her witchlike hair from her face, she threatened to report you to the police—if you persisted in your treacherous schemes to steal her husband! Old lady Gosset thought you were seducing the grizzled workers’ leader. Could anything be more comical, Florita? But this episode of proletarian vaudeville showed you that nothing was easy, particularly not the struggle for justice and humanity. And it made you realize, too, that despite being poor and exploited, in certain ways the workers were very like the bourgeoisie.

  That concert by Liszt in Bordeaux at the end of Septe
mber 1844, which you attended more out of curiosity than fondness for music (what would he be like, the pianist whose path you had crossed so many times on the roads of France?) ended like another vaudeville act: you dropped to the floor of your box at the Grand Théâtre in a sudden swoon, drawing the gazes of everyone in the theater, including the furious glare of the interrupted pianist. And your collapse became the stirring finale of a story by a harebrained reporter, who used it to portray you as a worldly sylph. “Admirably lovely, slender and elegant in physique, proud and spirited in bearing, eyes full of the fire of the Orient, long black hair draping about her like a shawl, beautiful olive skin, fine white teeth, Madame Flora Tristán, the writer and social reformer, daughter of turmoil and strife, last night suffered a fainting spell, perhaps as a result of the trance into which she was sent by the superb arpeggios of Maestro Liszt.” You blushed to the roots of your hair upon reading that foolish nonsense when you awakened in your soft bed. Where were you, Florita? The elegant room, with its scent of fresh flowers and its fine linen curtains that let in the light, was nothing like your modest little hotel room. You were at the house of Charles and Elisa Lemonnier, who had insisted on bringing you home with them the night before, when you collapsed at the Grand Théâtre. Here you would be better cared for than at the hotel or in the hospital. And so you were. Charles was a lawyer and a professor of philosophy, and Elisa was an advocate for trade schools for children and youths. Fervent Saint-Simonians, friends of Father Prosper Enfantin, idealistic, cultured, generous, they devoted their lives to working for universal brotherhood and the “new Christianity” preached by Saint-Simon. They held no grudge against you for the way you had snubbed them the year before by refusing to meet them. They had read your books, and they admired you.

  The couple’s treatment of Flora over the next weeks could not have been more solicitous. They gave her the best room in the house, called a distinguished doctor from Bordeaux, Dr. Mabit, Jr., and hired a nurse, Mademoiselle Alphine, to watch over her day and night. They bore the cost of the doctor’s visits and medicaments, and wouldn’t even let Flora speak of paying them back.

  Dr. Mabit said that it might be cholera. The next day, after another examination, he changed his mind, indicating that it was more likely typhoid fever. Despite the patient’s state of total prostration, he declared himself optimistic. He prescribed a healthy diet, absolute rest, body rubs and massages, and a restorative tonic to be taken day and night, every half hour. For the first two days, Flora reacted favorably to the treatment. On the third day, however, she suffered a congestion of the brain, with a very high fever. For hours she remained in a state of semiconsciousness, delirious. The Lemonniers called a conference of doctors, headed by a local eminence, Dr. Gintrac. The physicians, after examining her and talking privately, confessed to a certain perplexity. Nevertheless, though her condition was certainly serious, they thought she could be saved. No one should lose hope, or permit the patient to realize the state she was in. They prescribed bleedings and cupping, as well as new drafts, now to be taken every fifteen minutes. To help the exhausted Mademoiselle Alphine, who had been caring for Flora with religious devotion, the Lemonniers hired another nurse. When Flora’s hosts, in one of their guest’s moments of lucidity, asked whether Flora didn’t want a family member to come and be by her side—perhaps her daughter, Aline?—she didn’t hesitate. “Eléonore Blanc, from Lyon. She is my daughter, too.” The arrival of Eléonore in Bordeaux—that beloved face, so pale, so tremulous, inclining full of love over the bed—restored Flora’s confidence, her will to fight, her love of life.

  At the beginning of her campaign for the Worker’s Union a year and a half ago, La Ruche Populaire treated her very well, unlike the other workers’ paper, L’Atelier, which first ignored her and then ridiculed her, calling her a “would-be O’Connell in skirts.” La Ruche, in contrast, organized two debates, at the end of which fourteen of the fifteen audience members voted in favor of an appeal to the workingmen and workingwomen of France, written by Flora and printed in the paper, inviting them to join the future Workers’ Union. Although she soon overcame her initial fear of speaking in public—she was relaxed and confident, and an excellent debater—she was continually beset by frustration because women rarely participated in the meetings, no matter how often she urged them to attend. When she managed to get some of them to come, they were so cowed and intimidated that instead of being angry, she felt sorry for them. They hardly ever dared open their mouths, and when one did, she glanced first at the men present, as if asking their consent.

  The publication of The Worker’s Union in 1843 was quite a feat. Even now, in the brief moments in which you emerged from the state of suffering and confusion into which your illness had plunged you, you felt proud of your little book. That it had already gone through three printings and reached the hands of hundreds of workers was a triumph of spirit over adversity, wasn’t it, Andalusa? All the publishers you knew in Paris refused to print it, making trifling excuses. The reality was that they were afraid of bringing themselves trouble with the authorities.

  Then one morning, seeing from your little balcony on the rue du Bac the massive towers of the church of Saint-Sulpice—one of them unfinished—you remembered the history (or legend, Florita?) of the priest Jean-Baptiste Languet de Geray, who one day proposed to build one of the most beautiful churches in Paris, relying solely on charitable donations. And straightaway, he began to beg from door to door. Why shouldn’t you do the same in order to publish a book that might become the new gospel for women and workers all over the world? Hardly had you conceived the idea when already you were composing an “Appeal to All People of Intelligence and Resolve.” You headed it with your signature, followed by those of your daughter Aline, your friend the painter Jules Laure, your maid Marie-Madeleine, and the water-carrier Noël Taphanel, and without wasting a minute, you set it circulating among all your friends and acquaintances, to persuade them to assist in financing the book. How strong and healthy you still were then, Flora! You could rush all over Paris for twelve, fifteen hours, delivering and retrieving your petition; you brought it to more than two hundred people. In the end, it rallied the support of figures as renowned as Béranger, Victor Considérant, George Sand, Eugène Sue, Pauline Roland, Fréderick Lemaître, Paul de Kock, Louis Blanc, and Louise Collet. But many other important personages shut their doors in your face, like Delacroix, David d’Angers, Mademoiselle Mars, and of course Étienne Cabet, the Icarian communist, who wanted a monopoly on the struggle for social justice in the universe.

  That year, the social range of people who came to visit her at her little flat on the rue du Bac changed radically. Flora was home to visitors on Thursday afternoons. Previously, her guests had been professionals with inquiring minds, journalists, and artists; beginning in 1843, they were mostly the heads of mutual aid associations and workers’ societies, and some Fourierists and Saint-Simonians who tended to be very critical of what they considered Flora’s excessive radicalism. It wasn’t only Frenchmen who made their appearance at the cramped little flat on the rue du Bac, drinking the cups of steaming chocolate that Flora offered her guests, lying and saying that it was from Cuzco. Sometimes there might also be an English Chartist or Owenist visiting Paris, and one afternoon there was a German refugee living in Paris, the socialist Arnold Ruge. He was a serious and intelligent man who listened to her attentively, taking notes. Impressed by Flora’s belief in the need to establish a great international movement that would unite all the workers and women of the world in order to end injustice and exploitation, he asked her many questions. He spoke impeccable French, and he requested Flora’s permission to return the next week and bring with him a German friend, like himself a refugee, a young philosopher called Karl Marx. They would get along splendidly, he assured her, because Marx’s ideas about the working class were similar to hers; he, too, believed that its role was to redeem the whole of society.

  Arnold Ruge did return the following week, wit
h six German comrades, all of them living in exile; among them was the socialist Moses Hess, celebrated in Paris. None of them was Karl Marx, who had been detained by the preparation of the next issue of a journal that he published with Ruge: the Franco-German Annals. Nevertheless, you met Marx soon afterward, in colorful circumstances, at a small press on the left bank of the Seine, the only place willing to print The Workers’ Union. You were overseeing the printing of the volume on its old pedal press, when an angry young man with several days’ growth of beard, sweaty and red-faced with annoyance, began to complain in atrocious, guttural French, his tirade punctuated by gobs of spit. Why was the press violating its agreement with him and delaying the printing of his journal to attend to “the literary preenings of this lady who has just come in”?

  Naturally, Madame-la-Colère rose from her chair and strode up to him.

  “Literary preenings, did you say?” she exclaimed, her voice as loud as the angry young man’s. “I’ll have you know, sir, that my book is called The Workers’ Union, and that it may change the course of human history. What right have you to screech like a capon?”

  The blustering fellow muttered in German, and then confessed that he didn’t understand the expression. What was a “capon”?

  “Go look it up in the dictionary and improve your French,” Madame-la-Colère advised him, laughing. “And while you’re at it, shave off that hedgehog beard, which makes you look like a tramp.”

  Flushed with linguistic impotence, the man said that he didn’t understand “hedgehog” either, and that under the circumstances there was no sense in continuing the conversation, madame. He took his leave, with a surly bow. Later, Flora learned from the owner of the press that the irritable foreigner was Karl Marx, Arnold Ruge’s friend. She amused herself by imagining how startled he would be if Ruge brought him along to one of her Thursday gatherings on the rue du Bac, and Flora, holding out her hand before they could be introduced, said, “The gentleman and I are old friends.” But Ruge never brought him.