The Way to Paradise

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  This serenity was suddenly disturbed (when, Koké? sooner? later?) when you tried to remember if it was in Pont-Aven, Le Pouldu, Arles, Paris, or Martinique where you began ironing your paintings to make them smoother and flatter, and washing them to fade their color and dull their shine. The technique elicited smiles from your friends and disciples (which ones, Paul? Charles Laval? Émile Bernard?) and at last you had to acknowledge that they were right: it didn’t work. The memory of this failure plunged you into a deep depression. Was it morphine that rescued you from that cloud of gloom? Had you managed to pick up the syringe, insert the needle into the little bottle, draw up a few drops of liquid, jab the needle into your leg, arm, stomach, or wherever your hand fell, and inject yourself? You didn’t know. But you had the feeling of having slept for a long time, in a night without sound or stars, in utter peace. Now it seemed to be daytime. You felt rested, calm. “Your faith is invincible, Koké,” he shouted, exultant. But no one must have heard, because your words had no echo. “I am a wolf in the forest, a wolf without a collar,” he shouted. But you didn’t hear your voice this time either, whether because your throat no longer emitted sounds, or because you had been struck deaf.

  Some time later, he became convinced that one of his friends, surely the loyal Tioka Timote, his name-brother, was there sitting beside him. He wanted to tell him many things. He wanted to tell him that, centuries ago, after fleeing Arles and the mad Dutchman, on the very day he returned to Paris, he had gone to see the public execution of the murderer Prado, and that the image of that head, severed by the guillotine in the pale light of dawn, amid the laughter of the crowd, had appeared to him many times in his nightmares. He wanted to tell him that twelve years ago, in June 1891, upon arriving in Tahiti for the first time, he had seen the last of the Maori kings die, King Pomare V, that immense, elephantine monarch whose liver had burst at last, after months and years spent drinking, day and night, a deadly cocktail of his own invention, made of rum, brandy, whisky, and calvados, that would have killed any normal human being in a matter of hours. And that his burial, witnessed and wept over by thousands of Tahitians who had come to Papeete from all over the island and the neighboring islands, had been at once splendid and ridiculous. But he had the impression that the indistinct person he was addressing couldn’t hear him, or couldn’t understand him, because he was leaning very close, almost touching him, as if trying to catch some part of what he was saying or see whether he was still breathing. There was no point in struggling to talk, in wasting so much effort on words, if no one could understand you, Paul. Tioka Timote, who was a Protestant and didn’t drink, would have severely condemned the dissolute habits of King Pomare V. Did he silently condemn yours, too, Koké?

  Later, an infinite time seemed to pass in which he didn’t know who he was, or what place this was. But it tormented him even more to be unable to tell whether it was day or night. Then, with perfect clarity, he heard Tioka’s voice.

  “Koké! Koké! Can you hear me? Are you there? I’m going to get Pastor Vernier, right away.”

  His neighbor, usually impassive, spoke in an unrecognizable voice.

  “I think I fainted, Tioka,” Paul said, and this time his voice issued from his throat, and his neighbor heard him.

  A little while later, he heard Tioka and Vernier bounding up the stairs, and saw them enter the studio, alarm on their faces.

  “How do you feel, Paul?” asked the pastor, sitting beside him and patting him on the shoulder.

  “I think I fainted once or twice,” he said, shifting. He saw his friends nod. Their smiles were forced. They helped him sit up in bed, and made him drink a little water. Was it day or night, friends? Just past noon. But the sun wasn’t shining. Dark clouds covered the sky, and at any moment it would begin to rain. The trees and bushes and flowers of Hiva Oa would give off an intoxicating fragrance, the green of the leaves and branches would be intense and liquid, and the red of the bougainvilleas would flame brightly. You felt enormously relieved that your friends could hear what you were saying, and that you could hear them. After an eternity, you were talking, and conscious once again of the world’s beauty, Koké.

  Pointing, he asked them to bring close the little painting that had accompanied him for so long: the landscape of Brittany covered in snow. He heard them moving about the studio; they were dragging an easel, then making it squeak, doubtless adjusting the screws so that the snowy landscape would face his bed and he could see it. But he couldn’t see it. He could only make out some vague shapes, one of which must have been Brittany as it appeared in the painting, surprised under an onslaught of white flakes. Even though he couldn’t see it, it comforted him to know it was nearby. He shivered, as if it were snowing inside the House of Pleasure.

  “Have you read Salammbô, the novel by Flaubert, Pastor?” he asked.

  Vernier said he had, but added that he didn’t remember it very well. A pagan tale about Carthaginians and barbarian mercenaries, wasn’t it? Koké assured him that it was lovely. Flaubert had described in blazing color the great strength, vigor, and creative force of a barbarian people. And he recited the first sentence, whose musicality he loved. “C’était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d’Hamilcar.” “Exoticism is life, isn’t it, Pastor?”

  “I’m so pleased to see that you’re better, Paul,” he heard Vernier say, tenderly. “I have to give a class at school, to the children. You don’t mind if I leave for just a few hours, do you? I’ll be back this afternoon, in any case.”

  “Go on, Pastor, and don’t worry. I feel fine now.”

  He wanted to make a joke (“By dying I’ll beat Claverie, Pastor, because I won’t pay his fine and he won’t be able to put me in prison”), but he was alone again. A little while later, the wild cats had returned and were prowling the studio. But there were wild roosters there too. Why didn’t the cats eat the roosters? Had they really returned or was it a hallucination, Koké? For some time now the sharp dividing line between life and dreams had vanished. What you were living now was what you had always wanted to paint, Paul.

  In this time outside of time, he kept repeating, like one of the Buddhist chants dear to good old Schuff:

  Fuck you

  Claverie

  I died

  Fuck you

  Yes, fuck Claverie: you wouldn’t pay the fine and you wouldn’t go to jail. You won, Koké. He had the confused impression that one of the lazy servants who almost never appeared at the House of Pleasure anymore—maybe Kahui—had come up to sniff him and touch him. And he heard him exclaim, “The popa’a is dead,” before disappearing. But you must not have been dead yet, because you were still thinking. He was calm, though sorry not to be able to tell whether it was day or night.

  At last, he heard voices outside. “Koké! Koké! Are you all right?” It must be Tioka. He didn’t even try to reply, because he was sure no sound would come from his throat. He heard Tioka climbing the stairs to the studio, and then the sound of his bare feet on the wooden floor. Very close to his face, he saw his neighbor’s face, so grieved and distraught that he felt infinite sorrow for the pain he was causing him. He tried to say, “Don’t be sad, I’m not dead, Tioka.” But of course, not a word came out. He tried to move his head, a hand, a foot, and of course, he couldn’t. In a very hazy way, through half-closed eyes, he saw that his name-brother had begun to hit him on the head, hard, bellowing each time he dealt a blow. “Thank you, my friend.” Was he trying to beat death out of you according to some dark Marquesan rite? “It’s hopeless, Tioka.” You wanted to weep you were so moved, but of course not a single tear fell from your dry eyes. Always in the same dim, slow, shadowy way in which he was still conscious of the world, he saw that Tioka, after hitting him and pulling his hair to bring him back to life, had given up his efforts. Now he began to sing beside the bed, wailing with bitter sweetness and rocking in place on both feet, performing the dance with which the Marquesans bade farewell to their dead. Weren’t you a Protestant, Tiok
a? It pleased you that beneath your neighbor’s apparent evangelism, the religion of his ancestors had always been lurking. Since you could see Tioka mourning you and saying his goodbyes, you couldn’t be dead yet, could you, Koké?

  In the time outside of time in which Paul existed now, Monsignor Joseph Martin and his entourage, two of the members of the Breton order of the Brothers of Ploërmel who ran the boys’ school at the Catholic mission, came into the studio led by Koké’s servant Kahui. He had the sense that the two brothers crossed themselves when they saw him, but that the bishop didn’t. Monsignor Martin bent over him, looking at him for a long time, the sour expression on his face not altered in the slightest by what he saw.

  “What a sty this is,” he heard him say. “And what a stench. He must have been dead for hours. The corpse reeks. He’ll have to be buried as soon as possible, or the putrefaction could breed disease.”

  He wasn’t dead yet. But he could no longer see, whether because someone in the room had lowered his eyelids, or because death had already begun its march, starting at his painter’s eyes. And yet he could hear quite clearly everything that was said around him. He heard Tioka explain to the bishop that the stench wasn’t the smell of death, but came from Koké’s diseased legs, and that he must just have died, because less than two hours ago he had been conversing with Tioka and Pastor Vernier. A short or a long time later, the head of the Protestant mission came into the studio too. You were aware (or was it a final fantasy, Koké?) of the coldness with which the enemies, locked in a permanent fight for the souls of Atuona, greeted each other. And although he could feel nothing, he knew that the pastor was trying to give him artificial respiration. Bishop Martin scolded Vernier sarcastically.

  “What are you doing, man? Can’t you see he’s dead? Do you think you can bring him back to life?”

  “It is my duty to try everything possible to keep him alive,” Vernier replied.

  Almost immediately, the tense, pent-up hostility between the bishop and the pastor erupted into an open war of words. And although you were growing steadily weaker and more distant (your consciousness was beginning to fade, too, Koké), you managed to hear everything they said, even though you were scarcely interested in their argument. And yet it was a fight that in other circumstances you would have enjoyed enormously. Angrily, the bishop ordered the Brothers of Ploërmel to pull down the painter’s filthy, obscene pictures, to be burned. Pastor Vernier said that no matter how offensive they were to decency and morality, the pornographic photographs were part of the estate of the deceased, and the law was the law: no one, not even the religious authorities, could dispose of them before a legal decision had been reached. Unexpectedly, the disagreeable voice of Jean-Pierre Claverie—when had that odious individual entered the House of Pleasure?—spoke up in the pastor’s defense.

  “I’m afraid that’s right, Your Grace. It is my duty to take an inventory of all the possessions of the deceased, including those repulsive things on the wall. I can’t allow you to burn them or take them away. I’m sorry, Your Grace.”

  The bishop said nothing, but the noises you heard must have been the growl and rumble of his insides protesting at this unforeseen obstacle. Almost without pause, a new dispute broke out. When the bishop began to dictate instructions for the burial, Pastor Vernier, usually so retiring and conciliatory, objected with unusual energy to the dead man’s being buried in Hiva Oa’s Catholic cemetery. He said that Paul Gauguin’s ties to the Catholic Church had been cut; that for some time his relationship with it had been nonexistent, even hostile. The bishop, raising his voice to a shout, responded that the deceased, it was true, had been a notorious sinner and a scourge of society, but he was born a Catholic—which meant that he would be buried in consecrated ground, and not in the pagan cemetery, no matter who objected. The shouting match continued until Claverie intervened, saying that as political and civil authority on the island, it was up to him to decide. But he wouldn’t do so immediately. He preferred to wait until tempers had cooled so that he could weigh the pros and cons of the situation in peace. He would make his ruling by the next morning.

  And then you didn’t see or hear or know anything, because you were finally altogether dead, Koké. He didn’t see or know it when Bishop Joseph Martin triumphed in the two battles pitting him against Vernier over the still-warm body of Paul Gauguin, resorting to methods that were not the most appropriate by either the prevailing legal or moral standards. That night, when Koké’s body lay alone in the House of Pleasure—except perhaps for some marauding wild roosters and cats—Bishop Martin had the forty-five pornographic photographs stolen from where they were pinned up in the studio. Perhaps he intended to burn them on an inquisitorial pyre, or perhaps he meant to keep them for himself, to occasionally test his strength of will and power to resist temptation.

  Nor did Paul see or hear or know it when, at dawn on May 9, 1903, before the gendarme could come to a decision about his burial place, Bishop Martin sent four native bearers, under the orders of a little priest from the Catholic mission, to place the body in a coffin of rough planks supplied by the mission itself, and carry it quickly, while the inhabitants of Atuona were just beginning to stir in their huts and rub the sleep from their eyes, to the hill beside the Make Make. They buried it there hastily, in the Catholic cemetery, thus winning the bishop a point—a body or a soul—in his feud with his Protestant adversary. When Pastor Vernier, accompanied by Ky Dong, Ben Varney, and Tioka Timote, appeared at seven in the morning at the House of Pleasure to bury Koké in the lay cemetery, he was confronted with the empty studio and the news that Koké’s remains had already been laid to rest in the place determined by Monsignor Martin.

  Nor did Paul see or hear or know that his only epitaph would be a letter from the bishop of Hiva Oa to his superiors, which, with the passage of the years—Koké now famous, acclaimed, and much studied, his paintings fought over by collectors and museums around the world—would be cited by all of the artist’s biographers as a symbol of the injustice that is sometimes the lot of those who dream of reaching Paradise in this earthly vale of tears: “The only noteworthy event here has been the sudden death of an individual named Paul Gauguin, a reputed artist but an enemy of God and everything that is decent in this world.”

  About the Author

  Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru is 1936. He is the author of some of the last half-century’s most important novels, including The War of the End of the World, The Feast of the Goat, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and Conversation in the Cathedral. In 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  By the Same Author

  The Cubs and Other Stories

  The Time of the Hero

  The Green House

  Captain Pantoja and the Special Service

  Conversation in the Cathedral

  Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

  The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

  The Perpetual Orgy

  Who Killed Palomino Molero?

  The Storyteller

  In Praise of the Stepmother

  A Fish in the Water

  Death in the Andes

  Making Waves

  The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto

  The Feast of the Goat

  Letters to a Young Novelist

  The Language of Passion

  The Way to Paradise

  The Bad Girl

  The Dream of the Celt

  Copyright

  First published Alfaguara, Spain in 2003

  Published in the United States by Knopf

  First published in Great Britain in 2003

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  © Mario Vargas Llosa, 2003

  English translation © Natasha Wimmer, 2003

  The right of Mario Vargas Llosa to be identi
fied as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  The right of Natasha Wimmer to be identified as translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly