The Way to Paradise

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  The two weeks that Eléonore Blanc spent in Bordeaux, not moving from Flora’s side day or night, made the doctors think that their patient had begun a slow but steady recovery. She seemed to be in good spirits, despite her extreme thinness and her physical complaints. She had very strong pains in her belly and uterus, and sometimes in her head and back. The physicians prescribed small quantities of opium, which relaxed her and kept her in a state of torpor for hours at a time. In her intervals of clarity, she spoke with assurance, and her memory seemed to be in fine shape. (“Have you followed my advice always to ask yourself why things are the way they are, Eléonore?” “Yes, madame, I’m constantly doing it, and I learn so much from it.”) In one of these periods she dictated an affectionate letter to her daughter, Aline, who had written her a few heartfelt pages from Amsterdam upon being informed of her illness by the Lemonniers. Flora also requested detailed information from Eléonore about the Workers’ Union committee in Lyon, which, she insisted, must lead all the other committees established thus far.

  “What are the chances that she’ll survive?” Charles Lemonnier asked Dr. Gintrac, in front of Eléonore.

  “A few days ago I would have said very few,” murmured the doctor, polishing his monocle. “Now I feel more optimistic. Fifty percent, let us say. What troubles me is the bullet in her breast. Given her weakness, a foreign body like that might be displaced, which would be fatal.”

  After two weeks, Eléonore returned to Lyon, against her will. Her family and work were calling, and she was also needed by her companions in the Workers’ Union, of which she was, on Flora’s orders—she said so matter-of-factly—the driving force. She kept her composure upon bidding the patient farewell, promising to return in a few weeks. But as soon as she left the room she was taken by a fit of sobbing that all Elisa Lemonnier’s reasoning and kindnesses were unable to quiet. “I know I’ll never see her again,” she kept saying, her lips bloodless from being bitten so much.

  And indeed, immediately after Eléonore returned to Lyon, Flora’s condition worsened. She began to vomit up bile, which left a lingering stench in the room that only Mademoiselle Alphine, with her infinite patience—she cleaned up the messes and also took charge of freshening the patient morning and night—could bear. From time to time, Flora was seized by violent convulsions that thrust her from her bed, possessed by a strength disproportionate to her body, which every day shriveled a little more, until she was a thing of skin and bones, with sunken eyes and arms like twigs. The two nurses and the Lemonniers were barely able to hold her down during her spasms.

  And yet most of the time, under the influence of the opium, she was half-conscious, sometimes with her eyes wide open and lit with horror, as if she were seeing visions. Sometimes she delivered incoherent monologues, in which she spoke of her childhood, Peru, London, Arequipa, her father, and the Workers’ Union committees, or embarked on passionate debates with mysterious adversaries. “Don’t weep for me,” Elisa and Charles heard her say one day, as they were sitting at the foot of her bed, keeping her company. “Rather, follow my example.”

  After the appearance of The Workers’ Union, in June of 1843, Flora held daily meetings with workers’ societies in neighborhoods in the center of Paris or on the city’s outskirts. She no longer had to beg for their attention; she had become known in workers’ circles and was invited to speak by many guilds and mutual aid societies, as well as some socialist, Fourierist, and Saint-Simonian groups. A club of Icarian communists even paused in their efforts to collect money to buy land in Texas to listen to her theories. The meeting with the Icarians ended in a shouting match.

  What most disturbed Flora at these intense assemblies, which could go on well into the night, was that often, instead of debating the central tenets of her proposal—the Workers’ Palaces for the elderly, infirm, and injured; free education for all; the right to work; the People’s Defender—the attendees wasted time on trivialities and banalities, not to say stupidities. Almost inevitably, some worker would reproach Flora because her little book criticized workers who “go drinking at taverns instead of devoting the money they spend on liquor to buying bread for their children.” At a meeting in an attic on the cul-de-sac of Jean Auber, near the rue Saint-Martin, a carpenter called Roly spat out, “You’ve betrayed us; you’ve revealed the workers’ vices to the bourgeoisie.” Flora replied that the truth should be the main weapon of the working class, just as hypocrisy and lies were generally those of the bourgeoisie. In any case, no matter who was bothered by it, she would continue to call a drunk a drunk and a brute a brute. The twenty workers listening to her were not entirely convinced, but fearing one of the fits of rage that were already legendary in Paris, none of them challenged her, and they even rewarded her with strained applause.

  Did you remember, Florita, in the murky, London-like fog in which you were drifting, your mad idea for a Workers’ Union anthem to accompany your great crusade, as the Marseillaise had accompanied the great revolution of 1789? Yes, you remembered it vaguely, and also its grotesque, ridiculous outcome. The first person you asked to compose the Workers’ Union anthem was Béranger. The celebrated man received you at his house in Passy, where he was lunching with three guests. Half impressed and half mocking, the four listened as you insisted that in order to begin your peaceful social revolution, you urgently needed an anthem that would uplift the workers and move them to solidarity and action. Béranger refused, explaining that it was impossible for him to write on commission, without being inspired. And the great Lamartine also refused, saying that you were preaching what he had already anticipated in his visionary “Marseillaise of Peace.”

  Then, Florita, you foolishly decided to announce a contest for the best “hymn celebrating human fellowship.” The prize would be a medal offered by the always generous Eugène Sue. A grave mistake, Andalusa! At least one hundred proletarian poets and composers entered, determined to win the contest—and with it the medal and fame—by exercising their talent or, if they had none, by any means possible. You could never have imagined that vanity, which you naively believed was a bourgeois vice, could provoke so many intrigues, imbroglios, calumnies, and low blows among the contestants, who were intent on disqualifying one another and taking the prize. Seldom had you been driven into as many rages as you were by those poetasters and musicians, shouting until you were hoarse. On the day that the put-upon jury awarded the prize to M. A. Thys, it was discovered that one of the spurned contestants, a poet called Ferrand—a congenial fool who introduced himself, very earnestly, as “the Great Maestro of the Lyric Order of the Templars”—had stolen the medal and the books intended as the prize, upon discovering that someone else was the winner. Were you laughing, Florita? You couldn’t be so ill, then, if you were still strong enough to smile, even if it was in your sleep, and stimulated by those small doses of opium.

  You could hear voices faintly, but you weren’t able to concentrate or think clearly enough to know what they were saying. As a result, when a presumptuous censer-swinger of Catholicism, a man calling himself Stouvenel, appeared at Charles and Elisa Lemonnier’s house on November 11, 1844, accompanied by a priest and assuring the Lemonniers that you were a devout believer who had long ago requested last rites, you couldn’t defend yourself—Madame-la-Colère now voiceless, powerless, unconscious—or banish the impostor and priest from your room. Caught off guard and deceived, Elisa and Charles Lemonnier, tolerant of all beliefs, swallowed the falsehood and let them come in and do what they liked with your inert body. Later, when Eléonore Blanc, indignant, informed them that Madame Tristán would never have permitted an obscurantist bit of pantomime like that if she had been able to protest, the Lemonniers were filled with regret and outrage. But the false Stouvenel and the crowlike priest had already done as they pleased, and caused a rumor to run in the streets and squares of Bordeaux that Flora Tristán, champion of women and workers, had solicited the help of the Holy Church on her deathbed to enter eternal life at peace with God. Poor Flor
ita!

  As soon as she had the first samples of The Workers’ Union in her hands, Flora sent copies to all the guilds and mutual aid societies whose addresses she could find, and distributed a leaflet about the book in three thousand workshops and factories all over France. Did you remember how many letters you received from readers of your manifesto? Forty-three. All offered words of encouragement and hope, but some asked fearfully whether being a woman wouldn’t present a great obstacle. Had it, Florita? Not really. Somehow or other, you had been able to do a great deal to promote an alliance of workers and women in the past eight months, and you had established many committees. There was little more you could have done if you had been wearing trousers instead of a skirt. One of the letters you received came from an Icarian laborer in Geneva, who ordered twenty-five copies for his fellow workers. Another was from Pierre Moreau, a locksmith in Auxerre and an organizer of mutual aid societies, who was the first to urge you to leave Paris and begin a great circuit of France and all of Europe, propagating your ideas and setting in motion the Workers’ Union.

  You were convinced, and began your preparations immediately. It was a marvelous idea. As you explained to the excellent Moreau, to anyone else within earshot, and to yourself in those frenetic months of preparation, “There’s been plenty of talk in parliaments, pulpits, and meetings about workers, but no one has ever tried to talk to them. I’ll do it. I’ll go in search of them in their workshops, at their homes, in the taverns if necessary. And when I’m there, where I can see their suffering, I’ll awaken them to their fate, and make them escape despite themselves from the hideous poverty that degrades them and kills them. And I’ll convince them to unite with us, the women, and fight.”

  You had done it, Florita. Despite the bullet next to your heart, your ill health, your exhaustion, and the ominous, anonymous malady eroding your strength, for eight months you had done it. If you hadn’t had more success, it wasn’t for lack of effort, conviction, heroism, or idealism. It was because things never succeed as well in this life as they do in dreams. A pity, Florita.

  Because the pain, despite the opium, was making her toss and cry out, on November 12, 1844, the doctors ordered that poultices be applied to her abdomen and cupping glasses to her back. Nothing helped. Two days later, they announced that she was dying. After moaning and shrieking for half an hour in a state of feverish exaltation—the last battle, Madame-la-Colère—she fell into a coma. By ten o’clock that night, November 14, she was dead. She was fortyone years old, and she looked like an old woman. The Lemonniers cut two locks of her hair, one for Eléonore Blanc and the other for Aline.

  A brief dispute arose between the Lemonniers and Eléonore about Flora’s instructions for her burial, which all three had heard. In keeping with Madame Tristán’s last wishes, Eléonore believed that her head should be presented to the president of the Phrenological Society of Paris, and her body to Dr. Lisfranc so that he could perform an autopsy on it at the Hôpital de la Pitié before his students. Then what was left of her remains should be tossed into a common grave, with no ceremony whatsoever.

  But Charles and Elisa Lemonnier declared that Flora’s desires should not be heeded, for the sake of the cause that she had championed with such courage and generosity. Women and workers, today and in the future, should be able to kneel at her tomb to pay their respects. In the end, Eléonore gave in to their arguments. Aline was not consulted.

  The Lemonniers commissioned an artist from Bordeaux to make a death mask of Flora’s face, and they bought a plot in the old Carthusian cemetery to receive her remains. A vigil was kept over her for two days, but there was no religious ceremony and no priest was allowed entrance to the wake.

  The burial took place on November 16, just before noon. The funeral procession left the Lemonniers’ house on the rue Saint-Pierre, and wound its way slowly on foot along the streets of Bordeaux to the cemetery, under a gray and rainy sky. Among the mourners were writers, journalists, lawyers, a number of townswomen, and nearly one hundred workers. The latter took turns carrying the casket, which weighed almost nothing. The coffin cords were held by a carpenter, a stonecutter, a blacksmith, and a locksmith.

  During the funeral at the cemetery, the Lemonniers noticed the presence, on the fringes of the crowd, of Stouvenel, as he called himself, the person who had brought the priest into their house. He was a thin man, dressed all in black. Despite his visible efforts, he was unable to contain his tears. He seemed distraught, racked with grief. As those in attendance began to disperse, the Lemonniers went to confront him. They were struck by how haggard and drawn he seemed.

  “You lied to us, Monsieur Stouvenel,” Charles said, sternly.

  “That’s not my name,” he replied tremulously, breaking into a sob. “I lied to you to do her a good deed. The person I loved most in this world.”

  “Who are you?” asked Elisa Lemonnier.

  “My name isn’t important,” said the man, in a voice impregnated with suffering and bitterness. “She knew me by an ugly nickname, with which the people of this city used to mock me: the Holy Eunuch. You can laugh once my back is turned.”

  22

  PINK HORSES

  ATUONA, HIVA OA, MAY 1903

  He knew that his life had entered its final stretch when he realized, at the beginning of 1903, that he no longer needed tricks or flattery to coax the girls of the school of Saint Anne—run by six nuns from the order of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny, who crossed themselves in alarm whenever they encountered him in Atuona—to the House of Pleasure. Ever more frequently, and in ever greater numbers, they were escaping from school to pay him clandestine visits. They didn’t come to see you, of course, although they knew very well that if they entered the house and put themselves within arm’s reach, you—more for tradition’s sake than pleasure, now that you were an invalid and half blind—would stroke their breasts, buttocks, and sex, and urge them to undress. All of which made them run and squeal in gleeful excitement, as if this were a sport even riskier than plying the waters of the Bay of Traitors in a Maori canoe. What they really came for was to see the pornographic photographs. These must have become mythical objects, the very emblems of sin, in the eyes of the teachers and students at the Catholic mission schools and the little Protestant school, and all the other residents of Atuona. They also came, of course, to howl with laughter at the caricatures in the garden of Bishop Joseph Martin—Father Lechery—and his housekeeper and presumed lover, Teresa.

  Why would these girls come to the House of Pleasure so freely if they still considered you a threat, as they had in the first months—the first year—of your stay in Hiva Oa, Koké? In the pitiful state you were in now, you were no longer a danger: you weren’t about to deflower them or make them pregnant. You couldn’t have made love to them even if they had let you, because for some time now you hadn’t had an erection, or felt even a flutter of sexual desire. There was only the excruciating burning and itching of your legs, the stabbing pains, and the palpitations that made you gasp for breath.

  Pastor Vernier had persuaded him to stop injecting himself with morphine, at least for a while, because his body had grown so accustomed to the shots that they no longer had any effect against the pain. Obediently, he turned the syringe over to the shopkeeper Ben Varney so that he wouldn’t be tempted. But the plasters and rubbings with a mustard ointment he ordered from Papeete didn’t soothe the stinging of the sores on his legs, the stink of which also attracted flies. Only the little drops of laudanum calmed him, sending him into a vegetative state from which he barely emerged when one or another of his friends came to see him—his neighbor Tioka, who by now had rebuilt his house, the Annamite Ky Dong, Pastor Vernier, Frébault, Ben Varney—or when the girls from the school of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny burst in like a flock of birds to stare at the couplings of the erotic postcards from Port Said, bright-eyed and buzzing noisily.

  The presence of those impish, mischievous girls at the House of Pleasure was like a bre
ath of youth, something that distracted you for a while from your ailments and made you feel good. You let the girls wander into every room and poke through all your things, and ordered the servants to offer them food and drink. The nuns were educating them properly; as far as you could tell, none of your clandestine visitors had taken an object or a drawing as a souvenir of the House of Pleasure.

  One day, cheered by the good weather and a lessening of the burning of his legs, he made his two servants help him into his pony cart and went for a drive down to the beach. The sight of the setting sun glinting on the small neighboring island of Hanakee—that motionless and eternal whale—moved him to tears. And he longed for his lost health more keenly than ever. How you would have liked to be able to scale the steep, wooded slopes of the mountains of Temetiu and Feani, Koké, and explore their deep valleys, in search of lost villages where you could watch the secret tattooists at work and be invited to join them in some feast of rejuvenating anthropophagy. You were convinced: in the hidden depths of the forest, where the authority of Monsignor Martin, Pastor Vernier, and the gendarme Claverie didn’t reach, all those things still existed. As he returned along Atuona’s main street, his weak eyes glimpsed, in the field next to the buildings of the Catholic mission—the boys’ school, the girls’ school, the church, and Bishop Martin’s house—something that made him rein in the pony and move nearer. Ranged in a circle and watched over by one of the nuns, a group of the smallest girls were playing a game, amid happy shouts. It wasn’t the glare of the sun that blurred the students’ faces and the outline of their bodies, clad in missionary gowns, as the girl in the center of the circle approached one of her playmates to ask something and all the rest ran to change places; it was his failing sight that obscured his view of the game. What was the girl in the middle asking the other children in the circle as she went up to them, and what did they reply when they sent her on her way? It was clear that the exchange was a formula that all repeated in rote fashion. They weren’t playing in French, but in the Marquesan Maori that Koké found difficult to understand, especially in the mouths of children. But he immediately guessed what game it was, and what the girl in the middle asked as she skipped from one child to another in the circle, and was always rebuffed with the same refrain.