Did you ever love her, Paul? Not when she died, true. But when you were a child, living with your great-great-uncle Pío Tristán in Lima, you loved her very much. One of your clearest childhood memories was how sweet and pretty the young widow looked in the big old house where you lived like royalty, in the central Lima neighborhood of San Marcelo, when she dressed like a Peruvian lady and draped her slender body in a big silver-bordered mantilla, covering her head and half her face with it and leaving only one of her eyes visible. How proud Paul and his little sister, María Fernanda, felt when the vast family clan of Tristáns and Echeniques complimented Aline Gauguin. “So pretty!” “A picture, a vision.”
Where was the portrait you painted of her in 1888, working from memory and the only photograph of her you had kept, buried in your chest of odds and ends? It was never sold, as far as you knew. Did Mette have it in Copenhagen? You should ask her in your next letter. Was it among the canvases in the possession of Daniel de Monfreid or good old Schuff? You’d ask them to send it to you. You remembered it in great detail: a greenish-yellow background, like that of a Russian icon, the color highlighting Aline Gauguin’s long and lovely black hair. It fell to her shoulders in a graceful sweep, and was tied at the neck with a violet ribbon, arranged in the shape of a Japanese flower. Real Andalusian hair, Paul. You worked hard to make the eyes look the way you remembered them: big, black, curious, a little shy, and quite sad. Her very white skin came to life at the cheeks with the blush that rose on them when someone spoke to her, or she entered a room where there were people she didn’t know. Shyness and quiet strength were her prevailing character traits; the capacity for suffering silently and without complaint; the stoicism that so infuriated Grandmother Flora, Madame-la-Colère—your mother had told you so herself. You were absolutely certain that your Portrait of Aline Gauguin revealed all of that and brought to the surface the prolonged tragedy that was your mother’s life. You had to find it and get it back, Paul. It would keep you company here in Punaauia, and you wouldn’t feel so lonely anymore, with the open sores on your legs and the ankle those idiot doctors in Brittany didn’t fix right.
Why did you paint that portrait, in December 1888? Because in the last futile attempt you and Gustave Arosa had made to mend your relationship, you had just learned about that hideous trial. The revelation posthumously reconciled you with your mother; not with your guardian, but with her. But did it really, Paul? No. You were already such a barbarian that even hearing about your mother’s martyrdom when she was a girl—Gustave Arosa let you read all the trial documents because he thought you would feel friendlier toward him if you shared his sorrow—didn’t relieve you of the resentment that had been gnawing at you ever since Aline, after you returned from Lima and had been living for a few years with Uncle Zizi in Orléans, left you as a boarder at Monsignor Dupanloup’s Catholic school and went to Paris. To be Gustave Arosa’s lover and kept woman, of course! You had never forgiven her for it, Koké. Not for leaving you in Orleáns, or for being the lover of that millionaire dilettante art collector. So what kind of savage were you, Paul? A hypocrite with bourgeois prejudices, that’s what you were. “I forgive you now, Mother,” he bellowed. “Forgive me, too, if you can.” He was thoroughly drunk, and his thighs burned as if a small inferno were blazing in each one. He thought of his father, Clovis Gauguin, dying at sea on the voyage to Lima as he was fleeing France for political reasons, and buried at ghostly Port Hunger, near the Straits of Magellan, where no one would ever go to put flowers on his grave. And of Aline Gauguin, arriving in Lima widowed and with two small children, on the brink of despair.
It was then, feeling so forlorn, unable to leave his hut because of the pain in his ankle, that he remembered his mother’s prophecy, made in the will in which she left him her few paintings and books. She wished you success in your career. But she added a sentence that galled you still: “Since Paul has made himself so disliked by all my friends, one day my poor son will be utterly alone.” Your prophecy came true, Mother. Your son was a lone wolf, a lonely dog. She guessed at the savage inside of you before your true nature was revealed, Paul. Yet it wasn’t true that you had been rude to all of Aline Gauguin’s friends, only to Gustave Arosa, your guardian. And you had been rude to him. You could never smile at him or make him believe you loved him, no matter how kind he was to you or how many gifts and how much good advice he gave you, or how he supported you when you gave up the sea to make your way in the world of finance. He got you a job at the firm of Paul Bertin so that you could try your luck on the Paris stock exchange, and he did you many other favors. But he could never be your friend, because if he loved your mother, it was his duty to leave his wife and publicly proclaim his love for Aline Chazal, widow of Gauguin, instead of secretly keeping her as his mistress for the sporadic satisfaction of his desires. Yet a savage shouldn’t be troubled by such foolish matters. What sort of prejudices were these, Paul? Though of course you weren’t a savage then, but simply a bourgeois who made his living on the stock exchange and dreamed of being as rich as Gustave Arosa. His great burst of laughter shook the bed and knocked down the mosquito net, which wrapped itself around him, trapping him like a fish.
When the pains subsided, he made inquiries about his old vahine, Teha’amana. She had married a young man from Mataiea called Ma’ari, and she was still living in the village with her new husband. Although he had few hopes, Paul sent a message with the boy who cleaned Punaauia’s little Protestant church, begging her to come back to him and promising her many presents. To his surprise and satisfaction, in a few days Teha’amana appeared at the door of his hut. She was carrying a small bundle of clothes, as she had been the first time. She greeted him as if they had just seen each other the day before. “Good morning, Koké.”
Though plumper now, she was still a beautiful, graceful girl, with a sculptural body and ripe breasts, buttocks, and belly. Her arrival cheered him so much that he began to feel better. The pain in his ankle disappeared, and he started to paint again. But the reunion with Teha’amana didn’t last long. The girl couldn’t hide her revulsion at his sores, though Paul almost always kept his legs bandaged, after smearing them with a salve of arsenic that soothed the itch. Making love with her now was a pale imitation of the celebrations of the body that he remembered. Teha’amana balked, sought excuses, and when there was no way out of it, Paul saw—divined—how her face screwed up in distaste, and she played along though repugnance prevented her from feeling any pleasure. No matter how he showered her with gifts and swore that his eczema was a passing infection, soon to be cured, the inevitable occurred: one morning Teha’amana picked up her little bundle and left, without saying goodbye. Some time later, Paul learned that she was living again in Mataiea with her husband Ma’ari. What a lucky man, you thought. She was an exceptional young woman and it wouldn’t be easy to replace her, Koké.
It wasn’t. Sometimes mischievous local girls would come to watch him paint or sculpt after their catechism classes at Punaauia’s Protestant and Catholic churches (equidistant from his hut), amused by the half-naked giant surrounded by brushes, paints, canvases, and half-carved pieces of wood. Although he occasionally managed to drag a girl into his bedroom and take his pleasure with her wholly or in part, none of them agreed to be his vahine, as he was always proposing. The coming and going of girls brought him trouble, first with the Catholic priest, Father Damian, and then with the minister, Reverend Riquelme. Both came, separately, to reproach him for his shameless, immoral behavior and his corruption of the native girls. Both threatened him: he might bring the law down upon himself. To both he responded that there was nothing he would like better than to have a permanent companion, because these teasing games were a waste of his time. But he was a man with needs. If he didn’t make love, his inspiration dried up. It was as simple as that, gentlemen.
Then, six months after Teha’amana’s departure, he found another vahine: Pau’ura. She was—naturally—fourteen years old. She lived near the village, and s
he sang in the Catholic choir. Two or three times after the evening practices, she made her way to Koké’s hut. Stifling her giggles, she stared for a long time at the pornographic postcards displayed on a wall of the studio. Paul gave her presents and went to buy her a pareu in Papeete. At last, Pau’ura agreed to be his vahine, and came to live in the hut. She wasn’t as pretty, bright, or passionate as Teha’amana, and she neglected her household duties; instead of cleaning or cooking, she ran off to play with the village girls. But her feminine presence in the hut did him good, especially at night, lessening the anxiety that kept him from sleeping. Hearing Pau’ura’s steady breathing and seeing the shape of her sleeping body in the dark calmed him and gave him back a measure of security.
What was keeping you awake at night? Why were you in this perpetual nervous state? It wasn’t the vanishing of your inheritance from Uncle Zizi and the meager profits of the auction at the Hôtel Drouot. You had grown used to living without money; that never prevented you from sleeping. It wasn’t the unspeakable illness either. Because now the sores had closed again, after tormenting you for so long. The pain in your ankle was bearable for the moment. What was it, then?
Thoughts of his father, the political fugitive whose heart stopped in the middle of the Atlantic as he was fleeing France for Peru; and memories of the Portrait of Aline Gauguin. Where was it? Neither Monfreid nor Schuff had it; they had never even seen it. Mette was hiding it in Copenhagen, then. But he had asked for news of its whereabouts in two letters, and in her one response she hadn’t mentioned the portrait. He asked a third time. When would you receive a reply, Paul? There would be a six-month wait, at least. Hopelessness got the better of him: you would never see it again. Aline Gauguin’s likeness became another irritation, something you couldn’t get out of your head.
It was the memory of the flesh-and-blood Aline Chazal, not just that of her image, that besieged him. Why was it now that you kept remembering over and over again the misfortunes that marked the life of your grandmother’s only surviving child? It would’ve been better if the unfortunate daughter of Flora Tristán had died like her two brothers.
At that last meeting with his guardian, Paul saw how Gustave Arosa’s eyes filled with tears as he described Aline Chazal’s ordeal. That this man knew every detail confirmed Paul’s suspicions about the relationship between his mother and the millionaire. She was so close-mouthed, so jealous of her secrets—to whom if not a lover would she have confided her shameful history? As you learned the macabre details of Aline Gauguin’s life, instead of weeping like your guardian, you were overcome by jealousy and shame. Now, however, on this warm, windless night, the air sweet with the smells of trees and plants, the light of the big yellow moon like the color you used for the background of Aline Gauguin’s portrait, you wanted to cry, too. For yourself, for the unfortunate journalist Clovis Gauguin, but especially for your mother. Hers was a terribly sad childhood, certainly. Born after Grandmother Flora had already fled your grandfather’s house—that heartless monster André Chazal, that revolting hyena, was your grandfather, much as it chilled your blood to admit it—she spent the first years of her life as a fugitive, not knowing what a home or a family was. Under the skirts of fast-moving Grandmother Flora, fleeing the persecution of the abandoned husband, Aline was kept in boardinghouses, small hotels, and seedy inns or, even worse, left with peasant wet nurses. Without father or mother, her childhood must have been dismal. When Grandmother Flora was away for two years in Arequipa, in Lima, crossing the sea, she left Aline with a kindhearted woman from the Angoulême countryside who took pity on her, as Grandmother Flora herself told it in Peregrinations of a Pariah. How you regretted not having that memoir here with you, Paul.
Upon returning to France, Flora rescued Aline, who was able to enjoy her mother’s company for just three years. This period after being taken from Angoulême to Paris, to the little house at number 42, rue du Cherche-Midi, when she was enrolled as a day student at a girls’ school on the nearby rue d’Assas, was the happiest time of Aline’s life. Gustave Arosa said so, and it must have been true, since she had told him so herself: it was the only time she had her mother, a home, a cozy routine approximating normality. Until October 31, 1835, when the nightmare began that would only end three years later, with the pistol shot in the rue du Bac. The day it began, Aline Chazal was on her way home from school, accompanied by a maid. A drunk, carelessly dressed man, his red eyes bulging, stopped her in the middle of the street. In a single motion he shoved the terrified maid aside and pushed Aline into a waiting carriage, shouting, “A girl like you should be with her father, a good man, not with a degenerate like your mother. I tell you, I am your father, André Chazal.” October 31, 1835: the beginning of Aline’s torments.
“What a way to discover the existence of her father,” Gustave Arosa said, with deep sadness. “Your mother was just ten years old, and she had no memory of André Chazal.” It was the first of three kidnappings the girl would suffer, events that had made her the sad, melancholy, wounded being she was ever after, the woman you painted in that missing portrait, Paul. But worse than the kidnapping itself, worse than the cruel, brutal way her father made himself known to Aline, were the motives, the reasons that drove that loathsome creature to abduct her. Greed! Money! The illusion of a ransom to be paid in Peruvian gold! How did the rumor, the myth, that the woman who abandoned him had returned from Peru swimming in the riches of the Tristáns of Arequipa reach that worthless scum, your grandfather André Chazal? He didn’t kidnap Aline out of fatherly love, or the pride of a wronged husband. Rather, he intended to blackmail Grandmother Flora and strip her of the fortune he imagined she had brought back from South America. “There is no limit to the vileness and depravity of some human beings,” lamented Gustave Arosa. And indeed, André Chazal’s behavior resembled that of the worst kinds of animal: crows, vultures, jackals, vipers. The wretch had the law on his side; women who fled their homes were, under the pious moral code of Louis Philippe’s reign, as contemptible as whores, and had fewer legal rights.
Madame-la-Colère handled the situation well, didn’t she, Paul? It was such things that suddenly made you feel visceral sympathy and limitless admiration for the grandmother who died four years before you were born. She must have been crushed, destroyed, by her daughter’s kidnapping. But she didn’t lose her presence of mind. With the help of relatives on her mother’s side of the family, the Laisneys (and especially her uncle, Major Laisney), she arranged a meeting with her husband—because Aline’s kidnapper was still her husband in the eyes of the law. The meeting took place four weeks after the kidnapping, at Major Laisney’s house in Versailles. You could easily imagine the scene, and once you had made a few quick sketches depicting it. The cold conversation, the reproaches, the shouts. And all of a sudden, your magnificent grandmother hurling a flowerpot—a basin, a chair?—at André Chazal’s head and, in the confusion, taking Aline by the hand and running away with her down the empty, flooded streets of Versailles. A providential rainstorm aided her escape. Your grandmother was an incredible woman, Koké!
After that amazing rescue, the story grew tangled, opaque, and looped back on itself in Paul’s memory, like a bad dream. Denounced and persecuted, Grandmother Flora went from police station to police station, from prosecutor to prosecutor, from courtroom to courtroom. Since scandal makes lawyers famous, Jules Favre, an ambitious, detestable young attorney who would later go into politics, assumed André Chazal’s defense in the name of order, the Christian family, and morality, and set himself to ruining the reputation of the escaped housewife, unworthy mother, unfaithful wife. And the girl? Where was your mother while all of this was happening? She had been sent by the court to a chilly boarding school, where Chazal and Grandmother Flora could visit her separately, just once a month.
On July 28, 1836, Aline was kidnapped for the second time. Her father took her by force from the boarding school run by Mademoiselle Durocher at number 5, rue d’Assas, and secretly shut her up in
a disreputable boardinghouse on the rue du Paradis-Poissonnière. “Can you imagine the girl’s state of mind after such upheavals, Paul?” whimpered Gustave Arosa. After seven weeks, Aline escaped from her confinement, climbing out a window, and managed to make her way to Grandmother Flora, who was now living on the rue du Bac. For a few months, she was able to be at home with her mother.
But Chazal, with the help of the devious Jules Favre, got the law and the police to hunt down the girl and return her to his custody. On November 20, 1836, Aline was kidnapped for the third time, this time by a police commissioner at her front door, and turned over to her father. At the same time, the King’s Counsel informed Grandmother Flora that any attempt to snatch Aline from her father would mean prison for her.
Now came the foulest and ugliest part of the story. So foul and ugly that on the afternoon that Gustave Arosa, thinking to ingratiate himself with you, showed you the letter that the girl managed to get to Grandmother Flora in April 1837, you had hardly begun to read it when you closed your eyes, sickened by disgust, and returned it to your guardian. That letter played a role in the trial, was printed in the newspapers, became part of the legal record, and fueled gossip in Paris’s salons and watering holes. André Chazal lived in a squalid lair in Montmartre. In her letter, with spelling mistakes in every line, the girl desperately begged her mother to rescue her. At night she felt fear, pain, and panic, because her father—“Monsieur Chazal,” she said—usually drunk, made her lie down naked with him on the only bed in the room, while he, naked too, held her, kissed her, rubbed himself against her, and wanted her to hold him and kiss him as well. So foul, so ugly was this episode that Paul preferred to gloss over it, as well as over the charge his grandmother Flora levied against André Chazal, accusing him of rape and incest. Terrible, enormous accusations, and they sparked the expected scandal, but—thanks to the consummate skill of that other monster, Jules Favre—they landed the incestuous rapist in jail for only a few weeks, since although all signs indicated that he was guilty, the judge decreed that “the material fact of incest” could not be “irrefutably proved.” Furthermore, the verdict condemned the girl to live apart from her mother once again, at a boarding school.