Would the spiritual Madeleine have remembered The Vision After the Sermon as she lay dying of tuberculosis in Cairo, a year after poor Charles Laval? Of course not. She had surely forgotten all about you, the painting, and probably even that summer of 1888 in Pont-Aven. You never thought you would fall in love with anyone again after Mette Gad, Paul. True, by that time you were living apart, she in Copenhagen with your five children, and you in Pont-Aven, and the only thing left of your marriage was a piece of paper and some meager correspondence. But despite that, and despite your suspicion that you and Mette would never live together as a family again, you hadn’t felt emotionally free. Until then, Koké. By 1888 you had come to the conclusion that Western-style love was a hindrance; that love, for artists, should be exclusively physical and sensual, as it was for primitive peoples, that it should not involve the emotions or the soul. Therefore, when you gave in to the temptations of the flesh and made love—with prostitutes, mostly—it felt like a hygienic act, a diversion without consequences. Madeleine Bernard’s arrival at the Pension Gloanec in Pont-Aven that summer twelve years ago reminded you what it was like to be flustered, struck dumb, and thrown into confusion, so smooth and white was the skin of her youthful face, so melting her blue gaze, and so graceful and fragile her little body, which radiated innocence and goodness when she came into the dining room, went out onto the terrace, or walked on the banks of the Aven, lost in thought, watching the fishing boats set sail, as you spied on her, hidden in the trees.
You never spoke a word of love to her, or let fall a single hint. Because she was too young, because you were twice as old as she was? Rather, out of a strange moral self-censorship, the presentiment that by wooing her you would sully her integrity, her spiritual beauty. That was why you concealed your love, playing the role of an older brother who offers advice from a position of experience to the girl taking her first steps in the adult world. Not everyone suppressed the feelings aroused by her milky beauty. Charles Laval, for example. Was he already courting her that cool summer of 1888, reciting love poems to her while you, in your little room, gave shape and color to The Vision After the Sermon? Was theirs a beautiful romance? You hoped so. It was sad that they had died so young, a year apart, and she in exotic Egypt, so far from her native land. As you would die, Paul.
These experiences—Les Misérables, his pure love for Madeleine, the discussions with his painter friends in which the subject of religion frequently cropped up (like Émile Bernard, the Dutchman Jacob Meyer de Haan, a Jew converted to Catholicism, was obsessed with mysticism)—were crucial in preparing you to paint The Vision After the Sermon. When you had finished it, you sat up several nights in a row, writing letters to your friends by the light of the bedroom’s tiny oil lamp. You told them that at last you had achieved the rustic, superstitious simplicity of the common folk, who drew no clear distinction in their daily lives and their ancient beliefs between reality and dreams, truth and fantasy, or sight and vision. Writing to Schuff and the mad Dutchman, you assured them that The Vision After the Sermon dynamited realism, ushering in an era in which art, instead of imitating the natural world, would be abstracted from the immediate experience of life through sleep; thus it would follow the example of the Divine Lord, creating as he had created. This was the obligation of the artist: to create, not imitate. In the future, freed from their bonds, artists could dare anything in their efforts to forge worlds different from the real world.
In whose hands must The Vision After the Sermon have come to rest? At the auction to raise money for your first trip to Tahiti, on Sunday, February 22, 1891, at the Hôtel Drouot, The Vision After the Sermon went for the highest price, nearly nine hundred francs. In what bourgeois Paris dining room must it be languishing now? You had wanted a religious setting for The Vision After the Sermon, and you offered to make a gift of it to the church in Pont-Aven. The priest turned it down, arguing that the colors—where in Brittany was there earth the color of blood?—would disturb the quiet decorum that was necessary in places of worship. And the priest at Nizon rejected it, too, even more angrily, claiming that such a painting would shock and scandalize his parishioners.
How things had changed in the last twelve years, Paul, since you wrote to tell good old Schuff that “with the problems of intercourse and hygiene solved, and now that I am able to focus wholly on my work, my life is settled.” It was never settled, Paul. Nor was it settled now, although your articles, drawings, and caricatures for Les Guêpes had ended the anguish of wondering each day whether you would eat or not. Now, thanks to François Cardella and his Catholic Party cronies, you could eat and drink with a regularity you hadn’t known in all your years in Tahiti. Often, the powerful Cardella invited you to his grand two-story mansion on the rue Bréa, with its carved-railing terraces and its sprawling gardens behind a wooden fence, and to political gatherings at his pharmacy on the rue de Rivoli. Were you happy? No. You were bitter and resentful. Because it had been more than a year since you painted even a simple watercolor or carved a tiny tupapao? Maybe, maybe not. What was the sense in painting anymore once you knew that all your works of lasting value were behind you? Should you take up your brushes to produce a testimony to your demise and ruin? Shit, no.
Better to pour all the creativity and aggression left in you into Les Guêpes, attacking the administrators sent from Paris, the Protestants, and the Chinese, who gave Cardella and his friends so many headaches. Did you ever feel any remorse at having become a mercenary in the service of people who once despised you, and who you yourself considered to be despicable? No. Many years ago you had decided that to be an artist it was necessary to rid yourself of every sort of bourgeois prejudice, and remorse was one of those encumbrances. Does the tiger regret the toothmarks it leaves on the deer it kills to eat? Does the cobra feel scruples when it hypnotizes a little bird and swallows it alive? Not even when you announced with great fanfare the wild claim that the Chinese had brought leprosy to Tahiti—an invention borrowed from Pierre Loti’s Marriage of Loti, the novel that so enthused the mad Dutchman—in one of the first issues of Les Guêpes, in April or May of 1899, did you feel a bit of remorse for spreading slander.
“A good whore does her job well, my dear Pierre,” he raved, too weak to rise from his chair. “I’m a good whore, deny it if you dare.”
A deep snore came in response from Pierre Levergos. Once again, clouds had covered the moon, and the two men were plunged into an intermittent darkness, interrupted by the glow of fireflies.
Grandmother Flora would not have approved of what you were doing, Paul. Certainly not. That meddlesome madwoman would have been on the side of justice, not the side of François Cardella, principal producer of rum in Polynesia. What was justice on this wretched island, which every day looked less like the world of the ancient Maori and more like festering France? Grandmother Flora would have tried to find out, poking her nose into the mess of disputes, intrigue, and sordid interests disguised as altruism and then delivering a stern verdict. That was why you died when you were only forty-one, Grandmother! He, on the other hand, who didn’t give a damn about justice, had, at fifty-three, lived twelve years longer than Grandmother Flora. But you wouldn’t last much longer, Paul. In fact, with regard to what really mattered—beauty and art—your life story was already at an end.
When he was awakened at dawn on the following day by a downpour that soaked him to the skin, he remained sitting in his chair, exposed to the elements, with a terribly stiff neck. Pierre Levergos had left at some point during the night. He let the rain fall on him until he was entirely awake, and then he dragged himself into the hut, where he lay down in bed and slept. Pau’ura and the child had gone out.
Since he had given up painting, he no longer got up early as he used to. He tossed in bed until late in the morning, and then went to take the public coach to Papeete, where he stayed until dark, preparing the next issue of Les Guêpes. The magazine was monthly and only four pages long, but since everything in it was his—articles,
caricatures, drawings, festive verses, gibes and gossip, funny stories—each issue required plenty of work. Then, too, he carried the materials to the printer, corrected the colors, proofs, and printing, and made sure that the magazine reached its subscribers and public places. He enjoyed all of this, and he tackled his work with enthusiasm. But he was bored by the constant meetings with François Cardella and Cardella’s Catholic Party friends, who financed the magazine and paid him. They were always annoying him with bits of advice that were really orders in disguise. And they weren’t afraid to reproach him, whether for going too far in his criticisms of Governor Gallet or for not being virulent enough. Sometimes he listened to them resignedly, his mind on other things. Other times he lost patience, interrupting with comments of his own, and on two occasions he offered his resignation. They didn’t accept it. Who could those scum find to replace him, when they were barely able to scrawl a letter?
And so his life would have gone on indefinitely, if his physical ills, which had eased for some time, hadn’t struck again at the beginning of 1901, with more fury than ever. One evening in January of the first year of the new century, at François Cardella’s house on the rue Bréa, when his host offered him a cup of coffee with a splash of brandy, Paul’s heart went mad. It beat fast, furiously, and his chest rose and fell like a bellows. He could scarcely breathe. All week he suffered from shortness of breath and choking attacks; finally, a vomit of blood drove him to the Vaiami Hospital.
“Well, Dr. Lagrange, does this mean I have heart problems now, too?” he joked to the physician examining him.
Dr. Lagrange shook his head. It wasn’t a new illness, my friend. It was the same one as always, continuing its inexorable march. Now, just as it had done to his skin, blood, and mind, it began to ravage his heart. Between January and March of 1901, he had to check into the hospital three times, each time for several days, and finally for two weeks. They treated him well at the Vaiami, because most of the doctors, beginning with Dr. Lagrange, who was now the head of the hospital, supported Cardella in his campaign against the authorities sent from France. They even found him a drawing board so he could prepare issues of Les Guêpes from his bed.
But these obligatory stays in the hospital had an unexpected effect. He thought a great deal, and after a long period of sleeplessness, he suddenly came to the following conclusion: he was tired of what he was doing, and the people he was doing it for. He didn’t want to die working for fools. It was sad to have come to such a pass, you, who had traveled to Tahiti fleeing money and—as you dreamed with the mad Dutchman in Arles, when you were still on good terms—yearning to build a little Eden devoted to freedom, beauty, creation, and pleasure, without European civilization’s dependence on money. The House of Pleasure, Vincent called it! How strange and capricious fate was, Koké.
Had you forgotten, Paul? It all began a year and a half ago, after your frustrated suicide attempt, while you were painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, the last of your masterpieces. Things began to disappear from the hut—did they disappear, or were you imagining that they had?—and in your head you became certain that the thieves were the natives of Punaauia. Pau’ura told you that you were wrong, that you were dreaming. But the wheels of delusion were already turning and could not be stopped. You insisted that the court in Papeete prosecute the thieves, and since the judges reasonably refused to call a trial on the basis of such flimsy accusations, you wrote harsh public letters, full of fire and vitriol, accusing the colonial administration of colluding with the natives against the French. Thus was born Le Sourire: Journal méchant, whose venom amused the colonists. Delighted, they bought it, and sent you notes of congratulations. Then Cardella himself came to visit, and offered you the moon and the stars if you would take charge of Les Guêpes. Everything proceeded so smoothly, almost before you realized what was happening. For eighteen months, you had eaten and drunk, and caused a small earthquake on the island with your diatribes—and you had become distracted, forgetting in the confusion that you were a painter. Were you content with your fate? No. Would you continue working for Cardella? Certainly not.
What would you do, then? Leave this cursed island of Tahiti as soon as possible, since it was already ruined by Europe, which had destroyed everything that once made it a savage place, with room to breathe. Where would you take your tired bones and your ailing body, Paul? To the Marquesas, of course. The Maori people there were still free and untamed, and had preserved intact their culture, customs, and art of tattooing, as well as their sacred cannibalism, which they practiced deep in the forest, far from Western eyes. It would be a reawakening, Koké. In your new surroundings, fresh and unspoiled, the unspeakable illness would halt its progress. It was even possible that you would take up your brush again, Paul.
Once he had made the decision, everything began to fall into place. He had just been released from the Vaiami Hospital when, like a bombshell, the news came that Paris had removed Governor Gustave Gallet from his post. The colonists you worked for were so happy that it wasn’t hard for you to convince them that after this triumph it no longer made sense to keep publishing the paper. They let you go with a nice bonus.
A few days later, when he was in one of those feverish states that always preceded his major life changes, and was investigating ships between Tahiti and the Marquesas, Pierre Levergos came to tell him that Axel Nordman, a Swedish gentleman recently settled in Tahiti, wanted to buy Paul’s hut in Punaauia. He had seen it while passing by and had taken a liking to it. Paul closed the deal in forty-eight hours; after paying for his ticket and the shipping of his few possessions, he even had enough money over to give a little to Pau’ura and Émile. The girl categorically refused to come with him to the Marquesas. How could she live there, so far from her family? It was a very distant and dangerous place. Koké might die at any moment, and then what would she and the boy do? She preferred to return home to her family.
You didn’t care much. Truthfully, Pau’ura and Émile would have been in the way as you embarked on your new existence. It irritated you, however, that Pierre Levergos refused to accompany you. You had offered to take him as your cook and share everything you had with him. Your neighbor was unyielding: he wouldn’t leave here for all the gold in the world. Never would he be so mad as to follow you in your misguided decision. Then Paul called him bourgeois, cowardly, mediocre, and disloyal.
Pierre Levergos sat pensive for a while, without responding to these insults, chewing a blade of grass in a mouth from which half the teeth were missing. He and Paul were sitting outside, in the shade of the big mango tree. At last, calmly, without raising his voice, and enunciating each word clearly, Pierre spoke.
“Everywhere you go, you’ve been saying to people that you’re leaving for the Marquesas because you’ll be able to find cheaper models there, and virgin land, and a culture that isn’t spoiled yet. I think you’re lying to them. And you’re lying to yourself, too, Paul. You’re leaving Tahiti because of the rash on your legs. Here, no woman wants to sleep with you anymore because the smell is so bad. That’s why Pau’ura doesn’t want to go with you. You think that in the Marquesas, because they’re poorer there, you’ll be able to buy girls with a fistful of sweets. It’s just another dream of yours that will turn into a nightmare, neighbor, mark my words.”
No one came to see him off at the port in Papeete on September 10, 1901, when he boarded La Croix du Sud for Hiva Oa. With him he brought his harmonium, his collection of pornographic postcards, his chest of keepsakes, his self-portrait as Christ on the Mount of Olives, and a small painting of Brittany in the snow. Despite the new owner’s insistence that he take everything away from the house in Punaauia, he left some rolled-up paintings there, and a dozen wooden carvings of his invented tupapaos. As he would learn a few months later in a letter from Axel Nordman, the hut’s new owner threw all these trifles into the sea because they frightened his little son.
15
THE BATTLE OF CANGALLO
NÎMES, AUGUST 1844
In the stifling little room at the Hôtel du Gard in Nîmes, with its smell of mustiness and cat urine, Flora spent the worst six days and nights of her tour. Almost every night, from the fifth to the twelfth of August 1844, she had a horrific nightmare. From their pulpits, the city’s priests rallied the fanatical masses packing the churches, sending them out into the streets of Nîmes in search of her, to kill her. Trembling, she hid in doorways, vestibules, dark corners; from her precarious refuge she could hear and see the throngs unleashed in pursuit of the godless revolutionary, to avenge Christ their King. When they found her and fell upon her with their faces distorted by hatred, she awoke, drenched in sweat and paralyzed with fear, smelling of incense.
From the first day, everything went badly in Nîmes. The Hôtel du Gard was dirty and unfriendly, and the food was dreadful. (You, Florita, who had never given much thought to food, now found yourself dreaming of a good homemade meal of thick soup, fresh eggs, and newly churned butter.) Her stomach troubles, diarrhea, and the pains in her uterus, along with the unbearable heat, made each day an ordeal, aggravated by the feeling that her sufferings would be in vain, since in this gigantic priest’s-hole she wouldn’t find a single intelligent worker to serve as a cornerstone for the Workers’ Union.