The Way to Paradise

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Is this the way to Paradise?”

  “No, miss, go and ask on the next corner.”

  A warm feeling invaded him. For the second time that day, his eyes filled with tears.

  “They’re playing Paradise, aren’t they, Sister?” he asked the nun, a small, thin woman half swallowed up in the great folds of her habit.

  “A place you’ll never see,” the nun replied, making a sort of exorcism with her small fist. “Go, stay away from these children, I beg of you.”

  “I used to play the same game when I was small, Sister.”

  Koké spurred on his pony and turned it toward the murmur of the Make Make River, alongside which stood the House of Pleasure. Why did it move you to discover that these Marquesan girls played the game called Paradise, too? Because seeing them, a picture had formed in your memory, clearer than anything your eyes would ever see again in the world, of yourself as a curly-headed boy in short pants and smock, also running back and forth in the center of a circle of cousins and children from the neighborhood of San Marcelo, asking in your Limeñan Spanish, “Is this the way to Paradise?” “No, try the next corner, sir; ask there,” while, behind your back, girls and boys traded places around the circle. The house of the Echeniques and Tristáns, one of the colonial mansions in the center of Lima, was full of Indian, black, and mixed-blood servants and footmen. Locked up in the third courtyard, where your mother had forbidden you and your little sister, María Fernanda, to go, was a lunatic relative whose sudden cries terrified the children of the house. You were frightened, but you were fascinated, too. The game of Paradise! You had yet to find that slippery place, Koké. Did it exist? Was it an illusion, a mirage? As the nun had just predicted, you wouldn’t find it in the next life, either, since it was most likely that there a spot was reserved for you in hell. When, hot and tired from playing Paradise, you and María Fernanda retreated to the drawing room full of oval mirrors, oil paintings, and soft, comfortable rugs, your great-great-uncle Pío Tristán was always sitting beside the enormous latticed window, from which he could look out into the street without being seen, having his inevitable cup of steaming chocolate, in which he sopped the Limeñan cakes called biscotelas. He always offered you one, with a good-natured smile. “Come here, Paul, naughty boy.”

  It wasn’t only the unspeakable illness that began rapidly to worsen at the start of the year 1903. Your clash with the authorities, in the person of the gendarme Jean-Pierre Claverie, also turned bitter, tangling you in a legal snarl. One day, you realized that Ben Varney and Ky Dong hadn’t been exaggerating: at the rate things were going, you would end up in jail, with all your meager belongings confiscated.

  In January 1903, one of the traveling judges sent every so often by the colonial administration to make the rounds of the islands to settle pending legal cases came to Atuona. Maître Horville, a bored magistrate who relied on Claverie’s advice and judgment, concerned himself primarily with the case of twenty-nine natives from a small settlement in the valley of Hanaiapa, on the north coast of the island. Supported by the testimony of a witness, Claverie and Bishop Martin accused them of illegally producing alcohol and getting drunk, in violation of the rule that prohibited the natives from consuming alcoholic beverages. Koké assumed the defense of the accused, and announced that he would represent them before the judge. But he wasn’t able to play his role as their defender. The day of the hearing, he appeared dressed like a Marquesan, barefoot and wearing only a pareu, his chest naked and tattooed. With a defiant air, he sat on the ground among the accused, cross-legged like the natives. After a long silence, Judge Horville, whose eyes were shooting sparks, expelled him from the hall, charging him with disrespect for the court. If he wanted to assume the defense of the accused, he would have to dress like a European. But when Paul returned three-quarters of an hour later, in trousers, shirt, tie, jacket, shoes, and hat, the judge had already presented his verdict, sentencing the twenty-nine Maori to five days in prison and a fine of one hundred francs. Koké was so upset that at the entrance to the building where the trial had been held—the post office—he vomited blood and lost consciousness for several minutes.

  A few days later, his friend Ky Dong came to see him late at night, when all of Atuona was sleeping, with some alarming news. He hadn’t heard it directly, but from their common friend, the merchant Émile Frébault, who in turn was a friend of the gendarme Claverie, with whom he shared a passion for tamara’a, the feasts of food cooked underground with hot stones. The last time they went out fishing together, the gendarme, overjoyed, showed Frébault a communication from the authorities in Tahiti authorizing him to “take steps at once against that man Gauguin, until he is ruined or destroyed, because by attacking obligatory schooling and the payment of taxes, he is undermining the work of the Catholic missions and subverting the natives whom France has promised to protect.” Ky Dong had noted down this sentence, which he read in a calm voice, by the light of an oil lamp. Everything about the Annamite prince was smooth and feline; he made Koké think of cats, panthers, and leopards. Had his good friend really been a terrorist? It was hard to believe that a man of such suave ways and gracious speech would set off bombs.

  “What can they do to me?” he asked at last, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Many things, and all of them serious,” Ky Dong replied slowly, in a voice so low that Paul had to lean forward to hear him. “Claverie hates you with all his heart. He is pleased to have received this order, which he must have requested himself. Frébault thinks so too. Be careful, Koké.”

  How could you be careful, sick, with no influence or resources? In the state of mindless somnambulism into which he was sunk deeper each day by the laudanum and his illness, he waited for the unfolding of events, as if the person against whom such intrigue was about to be unleashed was not him but his double. For some time, he had been feeling gradually more insubstantial, more disembodied and ghostly. Two days later, a summons arrived. Jean-Paul Claverie had brought a suit against him for slandering the authorities—in other words, the gendarme himself—in the letter Paul had written announcing that he wouldn’t pay the highway tax in order to set an example for the natives. With a speed unprecedented in the history of French justice, Judge Horville ordered him to attend a hearing on March 31, again at the post office, where the charge would be presented. Koké dictated a quick letter to Pastor Vernier requesting additional time to prepare his defense. Maître Horville rejected his plea. The hearing on March 31, 1903, took place in private and lasted less than an hour. Paul had to acknowledge the authenticity of the letter, and the harsh terms in which he had referred to the gendarme. His statement—disorganized, confused, and with little legal grounding—ended abruptly when a stomach spasm made him double over and prevented him from speaking. That same afternoon Judge Horville read his sentence: a five-hundred-franc fine and a mandatory three months in prison. When Paul expressed his decision to appeal the verdict, Horville, in a contemptuous and menacing fashion, assured him that he would personally see to it that the court in Papeete resolved the appeal in record time, and increased the fine and prison time.

  “Your days are numbered, filthy swine,” he heard the gendarme Claverie whisper behind him, when, with difficulty and stumbling over the seat, he got into his pony cart to return to the House of Pleasure.

  “The worst of it is that Claverie is right,” he thought. He shivered, imagining what was to come. Since you weren’t in a position to pay the fine, the authorities, which meant the gendarme himself, would take possession of all your belongings. The paintings and sculptures that were still at the House of Pleasure would be seized and auctioned off by the colonial authorities, probably in Papeete, and sold for a pittance to horrible people. With the little energy he had left, Koké determined to save what could still be saved. But he didn’t have the strength to do up the parcels, and he sent Tioka to ask the help of Pastor Vernier. As always, the head of the Protestant mission of Atuona was a model of understanding and friendship.
He brought string, cardboard, and brown paper and helped Paul wrap a batch of fourteen paintings and eleven drawings to be sent to Daniel de Monfreid in Paris on the next boat, which was scheduled to sail from Hiva Oa in just a few weeks, on May 1, 1903. Vernier himself, helped by Tioka and two of Tioka’s nephews, carried the packages to the Protestant mission by night, when no one could see them. The pastor promised Paul that he would take charge of getting them to the port, making the shipping arrangements, and ensuring that they were stowed properly in the ship’s hold. You hadn’t the slightest doubt that the good man would keep his promise.

  Why didn’t you send Daniel de Monfreid all the paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the House of Pleasure, Koké? This was something he asked himself many times in the following days. Perhaps it was so you wouldn’t be more alone than you already were on this final leg of your journey. But it was stupid to think that the pictures piled up in your studio would keep you company, when all that your eyes could distinguish were colors, lines, certain forms, amorphous shapes. It was absurd for a painter to lose his sight, when it was the essential instrument of his vocation and work. What a cruel way of unleashing your anger on a poor dying savage, God, you shit. Had you, Paul, really been so bad in your fifty-five years that you deserved to be punished like this? Well, maybe you had. Mette believed it, and told you so in the last letter she wrote you—a year ago? Two years ago? A bad husband, a bad father, a bad friend. Was it true, Koké? Most of these paintings had been painted months ago, when your eyes, though weakened, weren’t as useless as they were now. They were quite vivid in your memory—their contours, their nuances, their colors. Which was your favorite, Koké? The Sister of Charity, without question. Swathed in wimple, habit, and veil, and symbolizing terror of the body, freedom, nudity, and nature, a nun from the Catholic mission stood in contrast to a half-naked mahu, who, with perfect ease and assurance, faced the world as a free, artificial manwoman, his sex invented, his imagination unfettered. It was a painting that showed the total incompatibility of two cultures, their customs and religions; the aesthetic and moral superiority of the weaker, subjugated people and the decadent, repressive inferiority of the stronger, dominant people. If instead of Vaeoho you had set up house with a mahu, he would probably still be here caring for you, since it was well known that the wives most faithful and loyal to their husbands were mahus. You weren’t a full-fledged savage, Koké. That was what you lacked: pairing up with a mahu. He remembered Jotefa, the Mataiea woodcutter. But you were also fond of your paintings and drawings of the little wild horses that proliferated on the island of Hiva Oa, sometimes suddenly approaching Atuona and crossing the town in a pack, at full gallop, frightened and beautiful, their eyes wide, trampling everything in their path. You especially remembered one particular work, in which you had painted little pink horses, like clouds in the sky, gamboling happily in the Bay of Traitors among naked Marquesans, one of whom, mounted on a horse, was riding bareback along the edge of the sea. What would the fancy folk in Paris say? That it was a demented bit of nonsense to paint a horse pink. They couldn’t know that in the Marquesas, before the sun sank like a ball of fire into the sea, it lent a rosy glow to animate and inanimate beings, turning the whole face of the earth iridescent for a few miraculous minutes.

  After May 1, he was almost unable to get out of bed. He remained in his studio on the upper floor, sunken in a lassitude in which time seemed to stand still, scarcely noticing that the flies weren’t just flocking to the bandages on his legs now; they crawled all over his body and face, and he didn’t even bother to brush them away. Since the burning and the pain in his legs had redoubled, he asked Ben Varney to return his syringe. And he convinced Pastor Vernier to supply him with morphine, reasoning in such a way that Vernier couldn’t argue with him.

  “My good friend, what is the sense of suffering like a dog, like a man flayed alive, if in a matter of days or weeks I’ll be dead?”

  He injected the morphine himself, fumblingly, without bothering to disinfect the needle. The drowsiness relaxed his muscles and muted the pain and the burning, but not his fantasies. On the contrary, it roused his imagination, made it crackle. He relived in images what he had written in his fanciful, highly colored unfinished memoirs, about the ideal life of the artist, the savage in his jungle, surrounded by fierce, amorous beasts, like the regal tiger of the forests of Malaysia and the cobra of India. The artist and his mate, two sensual beasts, too, enveloped in deliciously foul and intoxicating feline scents, would spend their proud, lonely lives making art and seeking pleasure, far from the stupid, cowardly city masses, of no interest to them. It was a pity that the forests of Polynesia had no wild beasts or rattlesnakes; only mosquitoes proliferated here. Sometimes he saw himself in Japan instead of the Marquesas. That was where you should have gone in search of Paradise, Koké, rather than coming to mediocre Polynesia. In the cultured country of the Rising Sun, all families were peasants nine months of the year, and artists for the remaining three. An exceptional people, the Japanese. They hadn’t experienced the tragic separation of artist from everyone else that precipitated the decline of Western art. In Japan, everyone was everything, peasant and artist all at once. Making art didn’t mean imitating Nature, but mastering a technique and creating worlds different from the real world: no one had done that better than the Japanese printmakers.

  “Dear friends: take up a collection, buy me a kimono, and send me to Japan,” he shouted with all his might into the emptiness that surrounded him. “Let my ashes rest among the yellow men. It is my dying wish, gentlemen! Send me to the country where I was always meant to be. My heart is Japanese!”

  You laughed, but you firmly believed everything you said. In one of the few moments in which he emerged from his morphine-induced semiconsciousness, he recognized Pastor Vernier and Tioka, his name-brother, at the foot of the bed. In an imperious voice, he insisted that the head of the Protestant mission accept, as a keepsake, his first edition of L’après-midi d’un faune, which had been a personal gift from the poet Mallarmé. Paul Vernier thanked him for it, but a different matter was troubling him.

  “The wild cats, Koké. They come into your house and eat everything. In the state of inertia you’re left in by the morphine, we’re afraid they might bite you. Tioka has offered to let you stay with him, where he and his family can care for you.”

  He refused. The wild cats of Hiva Oa had long been his good friends, like the wild roosters and wild horses. They didn’t only come looking for food when they were hungry; they also came to keep him company and to take an interest in his health. Anyway, the cats were too intelligent to eat a festering creature whose flesh might poison them. You were pleased when your words made Pastor Vernier and Tioka laugh.

  But, hours or days later—or perhaps sooner?—he saw Ben Varney (when exactly had the shopkeeper arrived at the House of Pleasure?), sitting by the foot of the bed. Varney looked at him with sorrow and compassion, saying to the others gathered there, “He doesn’t recognize me. He’s confusing me with someone else; he called me Mette Gad.”

  “That’s his wife, who lives in some Scandinavian country—Sweden, maybe,” he heard Ky Dong purr.

  Ky Dong was wrong, of course, because Mette Gad—who was, in fact, his wife—wasn’t Swedish but Danish, and if she were still alive, would live not in Stockholm but in Copenhagen, translating and giving French classes. Paul wanted to explain this to the ex-whaler, but his voice must not have been working, or else he spoke so quietly that they couldn’t hear him. They continued talking among themselves about you, as if you were insensible or dead. You were neither, since you could hear and see them—but in a strange fashion, as if a curtain of water separated you from your Atuona friends. Why had you remembered Mette Gad? It had been a long time since you received news of her, and you hadn’t written to her, either. There she was now: her tall silhouette, her masculine profile, her fear and frustration upon discovering that the young man she had married would never be a new Gustave Arosa,
a champion in the wilds of business, an affluent bourgeois, but an artist of uncertain fate who, after reducing her to a working-class existence, sent her off with her children to Copenhagen so her family could support her while he set out to live as a bohemian. Would she still be the same? Or would she have become old, fat, embittered? He wanted to ask his friends if the Mette Gad of today was still anything like the Mette of ten or fifteen years ago. But he discovered that he was alone. Your friends had gone, Koké. Soon you would hear the yowling of the cats and detect the light step of the roosters, their cockadoodledoos ringing in your ears like the whinnies of the little Marquesan horses. They all returned to the House of Pleasure as soon as they realized you had been left alone. You would see the cats’ gray forms stalking around you, see them sniff with their long whiskers at the edges of your bed. But despite what your friend Vernier feared, they wouldn’t leap on you, whether out of indifference or pity, or because they were frightened away by the stench of your legs.

  The image of Mette merged for a few moments with that of Teha’amana, your first Maori wife. Your most persistent memory of her, curiously enough, was not her long blue-black hair, her lovely firm breasts, or her thighs glistening with sweat, but the seven toes on her deformed left foot—five normal and two tiny growths—which you recalled obsessively, and which you had faithfully portrayed in Te nave nave fenua (The Beautiful Earth). In whose hands must that painting be now? It was only a good painting, not a masterpiece. A pity. You were still alive, Koké, much as your friends, when they appeared beside your bed, seemed to doubt it. Your mind was a seething cauldron, a vortex incapable of retaining an idea, image, or memory long enough for you to understand or savor it. Everything that cropped up disappeared in an instant, replaced by a new cascade of faces, thoughts, and figures, which in turn were replaced before your consciousness had had time to identify them. You weren’t hungry or thirsty; you felt no pain in your legs or pounding in your chest. You were overcome by the curious feeling that your body had disappeared, had been eaten away, rotted by the unspeakable illness, like a chunk of wood devoured by the Panamanian termites that could make whole forests disappear. Now you were pure spirit. An immaterial being, Koké. Beyond the reach of suffering and decay, immaculate as an archangel.