The Way to Paradise

  What madness was this? Neither Pierre Levergos nor his other friends could understand it. How had Paul come to serve—so stridently, not to say abjectly—the interests of Monsieur Cardella, pharmacist and owner of the sugarcane plantation Atimaono, and the other colonists of the Catholic Party, whose only reason for hating Governer Gallet was that he wanted to restrain their high-handedness and their abuse of power and make them obey the law, instead of behaving like feudal lords? It was absurd and incomprehensible, because for as long as he had lived in Tahiti, Paul had been considered an outcast by the colonists he now served; until just a few months ago, they had scorned him for being a bohemian, for his anarchist views, for being friendly with the natives who appeared in his paintings. How could it be that the Maori, whom you had once praised so highly, lamenting the disappearance of their traditions and ancient beliefs, were now accused in Les Guêpes by their old defender of being thieves, and of a thousand other sins? In each issue, Les Guêpes reproached judges for their tolerant attitude toward natives who stole from the families of colonists, and for turning a blind eye or handing down sentences so light that they were a travesty of justice. Pau’ura received complaints every day from their neighbors in Punaauia. “Is it true that Koké hates us now?” “What have we done to him?” She was at a loss for a response.

  It was money that had brought about this change in him. The Catholic colonists had bought you, Koké. Before, you were always in great difficulties, making those desperate trips to the post office in Papeete to see if your friends in Paris had sent you a remittance, and borrowing money from half the world so that you, Pau’ura, and Émile wouldn’t starve to death. Now, with what you were paid by the Catholic Party to fill the four pages of Les Guêpes with caricatures and invective, you had no material worries. Once again you were able to stock your little house in Punaauia with provisions and liquor and, when your ill health permitted it, to organize those Sunday dinners that ended in orgies and brought a blush even to the cheeks of Pierre Levergos, ex-soldier who thought there was nothing he hadn’t seen. So it was your material needs and the gradual disintegration of your brain from the cursed disease and its cursed remedies that explained your incredible change from one year to the next. Was that it, Koké? Or was this another way of killing yourself, slower but more effective than the previous attempt?

  The meeting on September 23, 1900, was even worse than Pierre Levergos feared it would be. He went knowing that he wouldn’t enjoy himself, but not wanting to disappoint Paul, whom he liked, and perhaps pitied. Pierre, who prided himself on being more French than anyone else (he had proved it by wearing a uniform and bearing arms for France), did not support the war declared by the Corsican Cardella and other wealthy colonists on the Chinese merchants of Tahiti in the name of patriotism and racial purity. What fool would swallow that lie? Pierre Levergos, like everyone in Tahiti-nui, knew that the Chinese were hated because they had upset the monopoly on the import of goods for local consumption. Their stores were cheaper than the shops owned by Cardella and the other colonists. Paul was the only one who seemed wholeheartedly to believe that the Chinese, who had been settled in Tahiti for two generations, constituted a threat to France; that the forces of yellow imperialism wanted to snatch France’s holdings in the Pacific—and that the dream of all yellow men was to rape a white woman!

  It was outrageous ideas like this and worse that Pierre Levergos heard Paul proclaim in the meeting at Papeete’s town hall, which was attended by fifty Catholic colonists. Several of them, though firmly behind François Cardella in his fight against Governor Gallet, showed discomfort at certain passages in Paul’s racist, chauvinistic speech, as when, speaking of the Chinese on the island, he dramatically proclaimed, gesturing emphatically: “The yellow blot on the French flag turns me red with shame.”

  After the members of the audience filed past the stage to congratulate the speaker, Paul and Pierre went to have a drink at one of the little portside bars before returning to Punaauia. Koké was very pale, exhausted. They had to walk slowly, Paul leaning on the staff whose head was no longer an erect phallus but a naked Tahitian woman. He was limping more than usual, and it seemed that any moment he might collapse from fatigue. Once they reached Les Îles, he slumped down at a table on the terrace, shaded by a big umbrella, and ordered absinthe. How he had aged since Pierre Levergos had first met him upon his return from Paris, in September 1895! Only five years had passed, but Paul seemed to have endured ten or more. He was no longer yesterday’s big, strong, handsome figure, but a stooped old man, his hair full of gray. An angry bitterness shone on his face, which was creased with wrinkles and covered with a grizzled beard. Even his nose seemed to have become more broken and twisted, like an old vine. From time to time he grimaced, in pain or exasperation. His hands shook like those of an inveterate drunkard.

  Pierre Levergos was afraid that Paul would ask him what he thought about the speech, but he was lucky, because neither in all the time they spent at the port, nor on the trip back to Punaauia, nor later that night, as they were eating outside at Paul’s hut, watching Pau’ura play with little Émile, did Paul once refer to politics, his obsession of late. Instead, he talked ceaselessly about religion. Incredible, Koké—you would never stop surprising people. Now he was telling the astonished Pierre that upon his death, humanity would remember him as a painter and a religious reformer.

  “That’s what I am,” he declared, confidently. “When the essay I’m about to finish is published, you’ll understand, Pierre. In ‘Modern Thought and Catholicism’ I put Catholics in their place, in the name of true Christianity.”

  Pierre Levergos was blinking rapidly. What the devil? Was this the same Paul who, in Les Guêpes, had called for the removal of all Protestant teachers from the island’s schools, and their replacement by Catholic missionaries? Now he had written an essay tightening the screws on Catholicism. There could be no doubt: he was out of his head and his right hand no longer knew what the left was doing. He continued along on the same theme: sooner or later, humanity would understand that le sauvage péruvien had been a mystical artist, and that the most religious painting of modern times was The Vision After the Sermon, which he had painted back in Pont-Aven, a little town in Breton Finistère, at the end of the summer of 1888. The work revived in modern art a sense of spiritual and religious inquiry that had languished ever since the height of its glory in the Middle Ages.

  After that, Pierre Levergos couldn’t understand a word of Koké’s monologue—Paul had had a lot to drink, and his tongue was somewhat tangled—which was full of the names of people, things, places, and events that meant nothing to him. They must have come from memories that for some reason were stirred up on this quiet, moonless night in Punaauia, pleasantly cool and free of insects.

  “This is 1900, isn’t it?” Paul patted his neighbor on the knee. “I’m talking about the summer of 1888. Just twelve years ago. A grain of sand in the path of Chronos. But yes, it’s as if centuries had passed since then.”

  This was what your body was telling you—the sick, tired, mistreated, and rage-filled body you dragged about with you—now that you were fifty-two. How different it was from the body you had had at forty, when, hale and hearty despite the privations and hardships you suffered for lack of money after you abandoned the world of business for painting, you exuded an invincible optimism about your calling, your talent, the beauty of life, and art as religion, a conviction that swept all obstacles aside. Weren’t you idealizing the past, Paul? That summer of 1888, on your second stay in Pont-Aven, you were hardly in perfect form. Not your body, anyway, though perhaps your spirit was. Your body was still racked by the aftereffects of the fevers and malaria you had caught in Panama, although it had been ten months since you returned to France, in November 1887. The truth was that you painted The Vision After the Sermon while suffering from terrible dysentery, enduring the spasms of pain that were caused by the bile concentrated in your stomach before it came out your anus, escorted by thunde
rous farts that made you the laughingstock of the whole Pension Gloanec. How embarrassed you were to think that the young, beautiful, pure, ethereal Madeleine Bernard might hear those uncontainable strings of farts, legacy of the malarial fevers (perhaps the first symptoms of the unspeakable illness, Paul?) contracted on your ill-fated adventures in Panama and Martinique!

  Now, as your tongue, which had become an unruly little beast, tried to explain all of this to the good Pierre Levergos, who was dozing in his chair, you no longer felt angry at Émile Bernard—although since your split in 1891, he had been proclaiming from streetcorners and rooftops that you grudged him credit for having been the first to develop the concept of synthetism. As if you had any interest in founding schools that it was likely no one remembered anymore. You were more hurt by other things Bernard had said—that handsome, fine-featured, slender boy, twenty years younger than you, and the brother of the beautiful Madeleine. He had appeared one day at the Pension Gloanec at the unspoiled age of eighteen, and said, stammering, “Your friend Schuffenecker sent me from Concarneau to meet you. He says you’re the only person in the world who can help me be a real artist.” Now he claimed that you had plagiarized the ideas and composition of The Vision After the Sermon, and the caps of its ecstatic Breton women, from a painting he had done previously called Breton Women in a Meadow.

  “Nonsense, my dear Pierre,” Paul declared, pounding the table. “The only thing I remember about Breton Women in a Meadow is the title. What could it have been that made my best disciple suddenly envy me and hate me so much?”

  Something very human, Paul: Bernard realized that The Vision After the Sermon was a masterpiece, and the realization was too much for him. In revenge, he began to hate the person he had once so loved and admired. Poor Émile! What must have become of him? Perhaps, upon reflection, his accusations weren’t entirely unfounded. Without Bernard, you might never have painted—in your tiny room at the Pension Gloanec, the inn crammed with painter friends who considered you their mentor: Bernard, Laval, Chamaillard, Meyer de Haan—the work in which you captured a miracle, or possibly simply a vision. A group of pious Breton women, after hearing the Sunday sermon of a tonsured priest (he is tucked into a corner of the painting and has a profile like yours), are absorbed in prayer and caught up in a state of bliss when they see before them—or perhaps imagine—that disturbing episode from Genesis: Jacob wrestling with the angel, the scene restaged in a Breton meadow bisected by an apple tree and colored an impossible shade of vermillion. The true miracle of the painting wasn’t the apparition of biblical characters in real life, Paul, or in the minds of those humble peasants. It was the insolent colors, daringly antinaturalist: the vermillion of the earth, the bottle green of Jacob’s clothing, the ultramarine blue of the angel, the Prussian black of the women’s garments and the pink-, green-and blue-tinted white of the great row of caps and collars interposed between the spectator, the apple tree, and the grappling pair. What was miraculous was the weightlessness reigning at the center of the painting, the space in which the tree, the cow, and the fervent women seemed to levitate under the spell of their faith. The miracle was that you had managed to vanquish prosaic realism by creating a new reality on the canvas, where the objective and the subjective, the real and the supernatural, were mingled, indivisible. Well done, Paul! Your first masterpiece, Koké!

  At the time, you didn’t understand that kind of Catholic faith. You had lost it, if you ever possessed it. You hadn’t gone to Brittany in search of the Catholicism the Bretons had preserved through their stubborn opposition to modernity and their veneration of the past, at a time when they were silently and firmly resisting the Third Republic’s efforts to root out clericalism and institute radical secularism in France. You went, as you explained to good old Schuff, in search of the savagery and primitivism that seemed to you fertile ground for the flourishing of great art. Rural Brittany seduced you from the first as a backward, superstitious place, clinging to its ancestral rites and customs—a land that had happily turned its back on the government’s modernizing efforts and responded to secularization by holding more processions, filling its churches to overflowing, and celebrating sightings of the Virgin everywhere. You loved all of that. To blend into the landscape, you began to wear an embroidered Breton vest and wooden clogs that you carved and decorated yourself. You attended the pardons, ceremonies that were particularly popular in Pont-Aven, at which the faithful, many on their knees, circled the church asking forgiveness for their sins; you visited all the calvaries of the region, beginning with the most revered, in Nizon, and you made a pilgrimage to the small chapel of Tremaló, with its ancient wooden multicolored Christ that would inspire you to paint another religious work: The Yellow Christ.

  Yes, all the elements of the antinaturalist painting you dreamed of attempting were present in Brittany; you had even pontificated to good old Schuff, “When my clogs resound on this granite soil, I hear the dull, matte, powerful tone that I’m after in my paintings.” You couldn’t have done it without Bernard and his sister, Madeleine. Without them, you never would have begun to feel, little by little, not even noticing it at first, that you, too, were being suffused with the faith that came naturally to them, no more and no less than their delicate features, their comely figures, and the grace with which they moved and spoke. The brother and sister lived and breathed religion twenty-four hours a day. Émile had been all over Brittany and Normandy on foot, visiting churches, convents, shrines, monasteries, holy spots, and places of worship in search of traces of the Middle Ages, which he considered the supreme period of human civilization because of its nearness to God and the presence of religion in all its public and private activities. Bernard wasn’t rigidly devout; he was a believer, the kind of person you rarely encountered, and after mocking him for his ardent religious passion, you unconsciously began to let yourself be infected by the intensity with which he lived his Christian faith.

  An unforgettable summer, wasn’t it, Paul? “It was!” he exclaimed, pounding the table again. Pau’ura had gone into the hut with the child in her arms, and by now both would likely be placidly asleep, curled up with the cat. Pierre Levergos dozed, hunched over in his chair, snoring from time to time. The night had been dark when they sat down to eat, but the wind had scattered the clouds, and now a half-moon cast its light all around. As you smoked your pipe, you could see the golden sunflowers ringing the hut. You’d been told that European sunflowers wouldn’t adapt to the tropical humidity of Tahiti. But stubbornly you had asked Daniel de Monfreid for the seeds, and with Pau’ura you had planted them, watered them, and lovingly tended them. And there they were now, alive, standing tall, luminous, exotic. They were less dazzling than the sunflowers of Provence that the mad Dutchman painted with such zeal, but they kept you company and—why was it, Paul?—they gave you a kind of spiritual solace. Pau’ura, on the other hand, laughed at your exotic flowers.

  Extraordinary things had happened to you that summer of 1888, in the small Breton village bathed by the Aven. You came to understand the Catholic faith, you read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, you painted a masterpiece, The Vision After the Sermon, you fell chastely in love with Madeleine Bernard, the Virgin Mary incarnate, and you grew fond of her brother, Émile. It was that summer that the mad Dutchman urged you, in a flood of letters, to come at last and live with him in Arles. And it was that summer, because of Panama—because of some fly in a bottle of milk—that you were constantly shitting and explosively farting.

  Of all those things, which was the most important? Les Misérables, Koké. Charles Laval, Jacob Meyer de Haan, Émile Bernard, Ernest de Chamaillard—all the painters living with you at the inn run by the widow Marie-Jeanne Gloanec had read Victor Hugo’s novel (even Marie-Jeanne had read it), and all had praised it. You resisted immersing yourself in the massive tome that was winning hearts all over France, from doorkeepers to dukes, dressmakers to intellectuals, artists to bankers. But you gave in to Madeleine’s pleading when she confessed to
you that the book had “made her soul quake” and that she had read the whole thing “through a mist of tears.” The adventures of Jean Valjean didn’t make you weep, but they did move you, more than any other book you had read before. So much so that when you exchanged self-portraits with the mad Dutchman, at his request and as a prelude to coming to live with him at Arles, you painted yourself as the novel’s hero, Jean Valjean, the ex-convict who becomes a saint through the infinite mercy of Bishop Monsignor Bienvenu, who wins him over to the side of good the day he hands him the candlesticks that Valjean intended to steal from him. The novel awed you, alarmed you, unsettled you. Did such moral purity, capable of withstanding human filth, and such generosity and selflessness, truly exist in this base world? Gentle Madeleine, on the afternoons when it didn’t rain and it was possible to sit and wait for nightfall on the terrace of the Pension Gloanec, had a name for it: grace. But if it was God’s life-giving power that, through Bishop Bienvenu and later Jean Valjean, made good triumph over evil—evil that, pooled deep in the soul of the implacable Javert, is carried to the bottom of the Seine at the end of the novel—then what was the worth of the human animal?

  In the portrait of yourself as Jean Valjean that you sent the mad Dutchman, you painted the misunderstood artist, doomed to social exile because of the blindness, materialism, and philistinism of his fellow citizens. But it may also have been in that self-portrait that you began to paint something that would only take full shape months later, in The Vision After the Sermon: the passage from the historic to the transcendent, the material to the spiritual, the human to the divine. Did you remember the congratulations and praise of your Pont-Aven friends when the painting was finished? And the words of the lovely Madeleine: “This work of yours will be with me until the end of my days, Monsieur Gauguin”?