The Way to Paradise

  Carcassonne was no exception to the rule, of course. In the textile factories, which she was prohibited from entering, the men earned one and a half to two francs a day and the women half as much for the same work. The workday had been lengthened from fourteen to eighteen hours. In the silk factories and wool spinning mills children of seven worked for eight centimes a day, though the law prohibited it. There was fierce hostility to her everywhere. Her tour had become known in the region, and lately her enemies in the cities were sharpening their knives to greet her. Flora discovered that factory managers were circulating flyers in Carcassonne that accused her of being “a bastard, an agitator, and a degenerate who abandoned her husband and children, took lovers, and is now a Saint-Simonian and an Icarian communist.” This last bit made her laugh. How could she be both a Saint-Simonian and an Icarian communist? The two groups detested each other. You had sympathized with Saint-Simon some years ago, it was true, but that was ancient history now. Although you had read Cabet’s Travels in Icaria (and owned a signed copy of the 1840 first edition), which had won him so many followers in France, you had never felt any sympathy for Cabet or his disciples, those traitors to society who called themselves “communists.” On the contrary, you had always accused them, in speech and in print, of preparing themselves—under the guidance of their sage, who was an adventurer, Carbonarist, and attorney in Corsica before he became a prophet—to travel to some remote spot (America, the African jungle, China) to found the perfect republic described in Travels in Icaria, free of money, hierarchies, taxes, and rulers. Could there be anything more selfish or cowardly than their escapist fantasy? It was no good fleeing this imperfect world to establish an idyllic retreat for a small group of the chosen, far away, where no one else could come. What was needed was to combat the imperfections of the world as it was, to change and improve it until making it a happy place for all human beings.

  On the third day in Carcassonne, an older man who wouldn’t give his name appeared at the Hôtel Bonnet. He confessed that he was a policeman, assigned by his superiors to follow her. He was amiable and a little shy, his French imperfect. To her surprise, he had read Peregrinations of a Pariah, and declared himself an admirer of hers. He warned her that all the authorities in the region had received instructions to make her life impossible, to set people against her, because they believed her to be an agitator preaching subversion against the monarchy in the working world. But Flora should know she had nothing to fear from him: he would never do anything to harm her. He was so overcome by emotion upon telling her this that Flora planted an impulsive kiss on his forehead. “You don’t know what good it does me to hear you, my friend.”

  The encounter cheered her, at least for a few hours. But reality presented itself again when an influential lawyer abruptly canceled his appointment with her. Maître Trinchant sent a prickly note: “Having learned of your Icarian communist loyalties, I prefer not to see you. Anything we said to each other would fall on deaf ears.”

  “But my job is to make the deaf hear and the blind see,” Madame-la-Colère responded.

  She wasn’t discouraged, but it did her no good to remember her visits to the bawdy houses and finishes of London. Now she couldn’t stop thinking about them. Although she had seen many sad things on her travels in captalism’s underworld, nothing incensed her more than the trade in those unfortunate women. Nor did she forget the visits she made with an Anglican church official to the working-class neighborhoods on the outskirts of London, a succession of tumble-down hovels with treadle spinning machines always humming, crowded with naked children rolling in filth. The same complaints were repeated everywhere, like a refrain: “At thirty-eight, at forty, all of us—men and women—are said to be useless and dismissed by the factories. How are we to eat, m’lady? The food and old clothes that the church gives us aren’t even enough for the children.” In the great gas works on Horseferry Road, Westminster, you almost suffocated trying to see from up close how the workers, wearing only breech-cloths, scraped coke out of ovens that made you think of Vulcan’s forges. After just five minutes, you were drenched in sweat and felt that you would die of the heat. They roasted there for hours, and when they poured water on the clean braziers, they breathed in a thick smoke that must have turned their insides as black as their skin. At the end of this ordeal, they were allowed to lie down in pairs on mattresses for a few hours. The plant manager told you that no one lasted more than seven years on the job before coming down with tuberculosis. This was the price paid for the sidewalks lit by gas lamps on Oxford Street, in the heart of the West End—the most elegant street in the world!

  The three prisons you visited, Newgate, Coldbath Fields, and Penitentiary House, were less inhumane than the workers’ miserable surroundings. It made you shiver to see the instruments of medieval torture greeting inmates in the reception hall at Newgate. But the cells, individual or shared, were clean, and the prisoners—thieves, for the most part—ate better than the workers in the factories. At Newgate, the director let you talk to two murderers, condemned to hang. The first, surly, remained stubbornly mute. But the second, smiling, jovial, and happy to break the rule of silence for a few minutes, seemed incapable of hurting a fly. Yet he had hacked an army officer to pieces. How could he have done such a thing, when he was so obliging and friendly? John Elliotson, a professor of medicine with long sideburns who was a fanatical disciple of Franz Joseph Gall, founder of the science of phrenology, explained it to you: “It is because this young man has two extremely prominent bumps at the base of his skull: the bones of pride and disgrace. Touch them, madame. Here and here. Do you feel them? He was fated to kill.”

  Flora ventured to criticize only two things about the English penal system: the rule of silence, which required that prisoners never open their mouths—a single word spoken aloud merited extremely severe punishment—and the prohibition that forbade them to work. The cultured governor of Coldbath Fields, an old colonial soldier, assured her that silence encouraged closer communion with God, mystical trances, repentence, and self-reform. And regarding work, the subject had been debated in Parliament. It was decided that it would be unfair to ordinary laborers to allow criminals to work, because the competition would be unjust, since criminals could be hired for lower salaries. In England there was no minimum age for being tried, and at all three prisons Flora saw children of eight or nine serving sentences for robbery and other crimes.

  Though it was sad to see such infants behind bars, Flora told herself that perhaps they were better off there; at least they had food to eat and a roof over their heads in their clean cells. In contrast, in the Irish neighborhood of the parish of Saint Gilles, on Bainbridge Street between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, children were literally dying of hunger. They were dressed in rags, and essentially slept out in the open, in flimsy shacks of planks and tin, with no shelter from the rain. Surrounded by puddles of filthy water, putrid waste, mud, flies, and all sorts of vermin—in her boardinghouse on the night after her visit to the neighborhood, Flora discovered that her clothes were full of lice—she had the feeling that she was walking in a nightmare, among skeletons, old men crouched on little piles of straw, and women in tattered clothing. There was garbage everywhere, and rats scurried between people’s feet. Not even those who had work made enough money to provide for their families. They all depended on gifts of food from the churches to feed their children. Compared to the misery and degradation of the Irish, the neighborhood of poor Jews in Petticoat Lane seemed less grim. Although the poverty there was extreme, secondhand clothes dealers carried on a lively business in countless hole-in-the-wall shops and basements, where half-naked Jewish whores were also offered, with much fanfare and in broad daylight. The Field Lane market, where all the handkerchiefs stolen on London streets were sold for a pittance—it was necessary to leave behind wallet, watches, and brooches to venture down that narrow street—seemed more human to her, too. It was even agreeable, with its unabashed clamor and the sound of quain
t disputes between sellers and buyers seeking a bargain.

  At the Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem, known as Bedlam, something happened that made your blood run cold, Florita. Neither your Chartist nor your Owenist friends shared your theory that madness was a social illness resulting from injustice, and a blind, instinctive act of rebellion against established power. And therefore no one accompanied you on your visits to London asylums. Bedlam was old and very clean, with neat, well-tended grounds. As he was showing you the place, the director suddenly remarked that they had a countryman of yours there, a French sailor called Chabrié. Would you like to see him? You stopped breathing for an instant. Was it possible that good Zacharie Chabrié of the Mexicain, upon whom you had played such a cruel trick to be rid of his love, had gone mad and ended up here? You endured a few minutes of infinite anguish until they brought the man. It wasn’t Zacharie, but a handsome youth who thought he was God. He explained it to you cautiously, in calm French: he was the new Messiah, sent to earth “to end servitude, and save women from men and the poor from the rich.”

  “We’re fighting the same fight, my friend,” Flora said, smiling. He winked knowingly in reply.

  That trip to England in 1839 was as instructive as it was exhausting. From it there sprang not only your book, Walks in London—it was published at the beginning of May 1840, and frightened the bourgeois journalists and critics with its radicalism and frankness, though not the public, which bought out two printings in just a few months—but also your idea for the alliance of society’s two greatest victims, women and workers, as well as The Workers’ Union and this very crusade. Five years now, Andalusa, spent in the superhuman struggle to bring your plans to fruition!

  Would you manage it? Yes, if your body didn’t fail you. If God only granted you a few more years, you surely would. But you weren’t certain you’d live long enough. Maybe God didn’t exist, and that was why he couldn’t hear you, or maybe he did exist and was too concerned with higher things to bother himself with the material details that mattered to you, like the pains in your abdomen and your uterus. Each day, each night, you felt weaker. For the first time, you were assailed by a foreboding of defeat.

  At her last meeting in Carcassonne, the lawyer Théophile Marconi—a chevalier to whom Flora had paid little heed—offered of his own accord to organize a Workers’ Union committee for the city. Although doubtful at first, he had finally become convinced that Flora’s strategy was sounder than his friends’ attempts at conspiracy and civil war. Bringing together women and workers to change society struck him as intelligent and feasible. After her meeting with Marconi, a young worker named Lafitte walked her back to her hotel and made her laugh with a plan that, he confessed with a sly face, he had devised to swindle the bourgeois Fourierists. Posing as one of them, he would offer the chevaliers an investment guaranteed to double their capital, a chance to purchase stolen looms at ridiculously low prices. When he had taken their money, he would mock them. “Your greed was your downfall, gentlemen. This money will go to the coffers of the Workers’ Union, for the revolution.” He was joking, but there was a mercurial light in his eye that troubled Flora. What if the revolution became a business opportunity for a few rogues? The engaging Lafitte, upon bidding her farewell, asked permission to kiss her hand. She gave it to him, laughing and calling him “a gentleman in training.”

  On her last night in the walled city, she dreamed of a cast-iron ladle and its eerie clanging. It was a recurring dream, and had come, in a way, to symbolize her trip to England. On many London street corners, ladles were chained to pumps where the poorest of the poor came to slake their thirst. The water those wretches drank was contaminated—before it reached the pumps it had passed through the city sewers. It was the music of poverty, Florita, and it had been ringing in your ears for four years. Sometimes you said to yourself that the clang of those ladles would follow you to the next world.

  20

  THE SORCERER OF HIVA OA

  ATUONA, HIVA OA, MARCH 1903

  What surprises me most about your whole story,” said Ben Varney, looking at Paul as if trying to puzzle him out, “is that your wife put up with your madness.”

  Paul was only half-listening. He was trying to assess the damage done to Atuona by the hurricane. Before, only the little wooden steeple of the Protestant mission was visible from the veranda above Ben Varney’s store where they were chatting. But the devastating winds had blown some trees down and stripped and mutilated many others, so now it was possible to see the church’s whole facade and Pastor Paul Vernier’s immaculate little house, as well as the two lovely tamarind trees that flanked it, hardly touched by the storm. As he surveyed it all from the railing, Paul imagined the path to the beach: it must be completely impassable now, blocked by the mud, stones, branches, leaves, and trunks the hurricane had left in its wake. It would be some time before it was cleared and you were able to resume your evening rides to the Bay of Traitors, Koké. Had the peaceful Marquesans really set a trap for the crew of that whaling ship? Had they really killed them and gobbled them up?

  “That she stayed with you even though your decision to become a painter meant the family’s financial ruin, I mean,” insisted the shopkeeper. Ever since he had heard the story, he had pestered Paul incessantly for more details. “How could she bear to be with you?”

  “She didn’t bear it for long, only a few years,” you resigned yourself to replying. “What choice did she have? The Viking had nowhere to go. As soon as she did have somewhere, she left me. Or rather, she fixed things so that I would leave her.”

  Inside Ben’s store below, they could hear Varney’s wife speaking to some children in Marquesan. In the sky over Hiva Oa the great sunset fireworks display—blues, reds, pinks—was beginning. December’s cyclone had claimed few victims in Atuona, but it had wreaked much havoc: huts knocked down, roofs torn from buildings, trees uprooted, and the settlement’s only street turned into a pitted and oozing mud slick. But like the House of Pleasure, the American’s wooden dwelling had stood firm, sustaining only slight damage, which had already been repaired. Of their friends, the most affected was Tioka, Koké’s neighbor, whose hut was swept away by the swollen Make Make, though his family was unharmed. Now the sturdy, white-bearded old man and his relatives were working hard to build another house on a piece of land that Koké had given them within his own property.

  “I may not know much about art,” the storekeeper admitted. “Well, to tell the truth, I don’t know anything about it. But you have to allow it’s hard for the average intelligence to understand. You’re living a comfortable, prosperous life, and sometime in your thirties you give it all up to become an artist. With a wife and five children! Isn’t that what a person would call crazy?”

  “Do you know something, Ben? If I had stayed at the stock exchange, in the end I would have killed Mette and my children, even if they sent me to the guillotine for it, like the outlaw Prado.”

  Ben Varney laughed. But you weren’t joking, Koké. When you lost your job in August 1883, you had reached the breaking point. Spending a considerable part of the day doing something you hated, since it prevented you from painting—which by then mattered to you more than anything else—had you on the verge of an outburst that might have ended in suicide or crime. You were sure of it. That was why you were so happy when you lost your job, though you knew that starting a new life would require many sacrifices of you, and especially Mette. And so it did. Tests, Koké. The tests of a cruel and faithless little god to determine whether you were meant to be an artist and, even more difficult, whether you deserved to have talent. Twenty years later, although you had passed every one, the merciless divinity kept sending you new trials. Now had come the most fiendish of all: the fading of your eyesight. As a painter, how could you pass the test of semiblindness? Why this persecution?

  A little while after Mette gave birth to their last child, in December 1883—Paul Rollon, who would always be called Pola—the family left Paris to s
ettle in Rouen. You had decided that life would be cheaper there, and that you could make money selling your paintings to the prosperous townspeople, and painting their portraits. The usual pipe dreams, Koké. You sold no canvases, and weren’t commissioned a single portrait. And in the eight months you lived in that tiny flat in the medieval heart of the city, Mette daily cursed her fate, cried, and railed at you for having kept secret your determination to be an artist, which had ruined them all. But these domestic quarrels mattered nothing to you, Koké.

  “I was free and happy, Ben,” Paul laughed. “I painted Norman landscapes, boats, and fishermen in the port. Utter shit, of course. But I was sure that soon I would be a good painter. It was just around the corner. Such enthusiasm coursing through my veins, Ben!”

  “If I were Mette, I would have poisoned you,” said the ex-whaler. “But then, if you had been a good husband you would never have come to the Marquesas. Do you know what? If someone wrote about all of us who’ve been stranded here, it would make a great story. Consider it: Ky Dong and you, or even me.”

  “Your story is the strangest, Ben,” said Paul. “Imagine missing your ship because you were drunk. Is it true? Did it happen that way?”

  The American nodded, screwing up his red, freckled face.

  “The truth is that the other men got me drunk so they could leave me behind,” he said without bitterness, as if he were speaking of someone else. “On the whaler they took me for a difficult kind of bastard, I think. The way people see you here. You and I have something in common, Koké. That must be why I like you so much. By the way, what news of your tangle with the authorities?”