Upon returning to the inn after her useless trip to Gabriel Gabety’s country house, Flora had a pleasant surprise. One of the maids, a timid adolescent, came knocking at the door of her room. She had a franc in her hand, and she stammered, “Would this be enough to buy your book, miss?” She had been told about The Workers’ Union, and she wanted to read it, because she knew how to read, and she liked to do it in her free time.
Flora embraced her, signed a copy for her, and refused to take her money.
4
MYSTERIOUS WATERS
MATAIEA, FEBRUARY 1893
In the eleven months it took him to make good his decision to return to France, from the tamara’a at which he ended up wallowing with Tutsitil’s wife, Maoriana, until—thanks to the efforts of Monfreid and Schuffenecker in Paris—the French government agreed to repatriate him and he was able to set sail in the Duchaffault on June 4, 1893, Koké completed many paintings and made countless sketches and sculptures, though never with the certainty of having produced a masterpiece, as he had had when he painted Manao tupapau. The failure of the painting of the Suhases’ dead child (Jénot eventually managed to reconcile Koké with the couple) discouraged him from trying to make a living painting portraits of the colonists of Tahiti, among whom, according to his few European friends, he was regarded as a socially unacceptable eccentric.
He hadn’t said a word to Teha’amana about his attempts to be repatriated out of fear that if she knew he was soon going to abandon her, his vahine would leave him first. He had grown very fond of her. With Teha’amana he could talk about anything, because although she knew nothing about many matters of importance to him, like beauty, art, or ancient civilizations, she had a nimble mind and made up for her cultural lapses with her intelligence. She was always surprising him with some idea or joke. Did she love you, Koké? You could never be sure. When you wanted her, she was always willing; she was an enthusiastic lover, and as skilled as the most experienced courtesan. But sometimes she would disappear from Mataiea without the slightest explanation, returning two or three days later. When you insisted on knowing where she had been, she would lose her temper and simply repeat, “I was gone, I was gone, I told you.” She had never shown any signs of jealousy. Koké remembered that on the night of the tamara’a, as he and Maoriana lay on the ground, he saw Teha’amana’s face in the glow of the fire, as if in a dream, her big jet-black eyes gazing mockingly at him. Was her complete indifference to what her mate was doing the natural form of love in the Maori tradition, a sign of her freedom? Doubtless it was, but when he questioned his Mataiea neighbors about it, they refused to answer, giggling evasively. Nor did Teha’amana ever display the slightest hostility toward the women from the village or the nearby countryside whom Koké invited to pose for him, and sometimes she helped him convince them to pose naked, which they were generally reluctant to do.
How would your vahine have reacted to the story of Jotefa, Koké? You would never know, because you never dared tell it to her. Why not? Did the prejudices of moral, civilized Europe still flicker in you? Or was it simply because you were more in love with Teha’amana than you would admit, and you were afraid that if she found out what had occurred on that excursion she would be angry and leave you? Well, Koké! Weren’t you planning to leave her yourself, without any scruples at all, as soon as you were granted your repatriation as a penniless artist? Yes, true. But until then, you wanted to keep living with your beautiful vahine—up to the very last day.
When hardships later beset him, he would remember life in those months as pleasant and, above all, productive. It would have been more so, of course, without the endless money worries. The infrequent remittances from Monfreid or good old Schuff were never enough to cover his expenses, and he was always in debt to Aoni, Mataiea’s Chinese storekeeper.
He would rise early, with the light, take a dip in the nearby river, and after a frugal breakfast—the inevitable cup of tea and a slice of mango or pineapple—set to work with unfailing enthusiasm. The intense light, the bright and contrasting colors, the rising heat and noises—animal, vegetable, human, and the eternal murmur of the sea—were all pleasing to him. The day he met Jotefa, he was carving instead of painting. Small and based on quick sketches, the carvings were an attempt to capture in a few strokes the firm faces of the Tahitians of the region, with their flat noses, wide mouths, thick lips, and stocky bodies. There were also idols of his own invention, since to his disappointment no traces were left on the island of statues or totems of the ancient Maori gods.
The young man who cut trees around Koké’s hut was less timid or more curious than Koké’s Mataiea neighbors, who rarely took it upon themselves to visit if Koké didn’t seek them out. He wasn’t from nearby, but from a small village in the island’s interior. Ax on his shoulder, face and body drenched in sweat by his efforts, one morning he came up to the cane awning under which Paul was polishing the torso of a girl and, with a childish curiosity in his gaze, crouched down to look at it. His presence disturbed you, and you were about to ask him to leave, but something stopped you. Perhaps his beauty, Paul? Yes, that too. And something else, something that you vaguely intuited, as, pausing briefly from time to time, you observed him out of the corner of your eye. He was a male, close to that hazy boundary at which Tahitians became taata vahine, or androgynes, hermaphrodites, that third, in-between sex, which the Maori, unlike prejudiced Europeans, still accepted among themselves with the naturalness of the great pagan civilizations, behind the backs of the missionaries and ministers. Many times Paul had tried to discuss them with Teha’-amana, but the existence of mahus seemed so obvious and natural to the girl that he wasn’t able to get more than a few banalities or a shrug of the shoulders from her. Of course there were men-women—so?
The boy’s muscles swelled beneath his dusky copper skin when he chopped down a tree or carried it over his shoulder to the path where the buyer’s cart would come to take it away to Papeete or some other town. But when he crouched next to Koké to watch him sculpt—his smooth-cheeked face lengthening and his deep, dark eyes with their long eyelashes opening wide as if seeking, deeper and beyond what he was seeing, a secret reason for the task at which Paul labored—his posture, his expression, the pout that parted his lips and showed the whiteness of his teeth were softened and feminized. His name was Jotefa. He spoke enough French to keep up a conversation. When Paul took a break, they talked. The boy, with a small, tight cloth around his waist that barely covered his buttocks and sex, besieged Paul with questions about the little wooden statues of native figures and imaginary Tahitian gods and demons. What made you so attracted to Jotefa, Paul? Why did he have that familiar air about him, as if he were someone you remembered from a long time ago?
Jotefa stayed with him after work sometimes, talking, and Teha’-amana would prepare a cup of tea and something to eat for the woodcutter, too. One afternoon, after the boy had left, Koké remembered. He ran to the hut to open the chest where he kept his collection of photographs, color plates, and magazine clippings of classic temples, statues, paintings, and figures that had caught his fancy, a collection to which he returned time and again as others turn to family keepsakes. Rummaging through the jumbled mass, he came upon a photograph. There was the explanation! It was this image that your consciousness, your intuition, had dimly identified with the young woodcutter, your new Mataiea friend.
The photograph was taken by Charles Spitz, photographer for L’Illustration, and Paul had seen it for the first time at the Paris International Exposition of 1889, in the South Seas section that Spitz had helped to organize. The image had so bemused him that he stood looking at it for a long time. He returned to see it the next day, and at last he begged the photographer, whom he had known years ago, to sell him a print. Charles gave it to him as a gift. Its title, “Plant Life in the South Seas,” was misleading. It wasn’t the giant ferns or the ropes of vines and tangled leaves on a mountainside down which cascaded a small waterfall that were most important, bu
t the person with naked torso and legs, in profile, who, clinging to the foliage, bent to drink or perhaps just to contemplate the falling water. A young man? A young woman? The photograph suggested the two possibilities equally strongly, without excluding a third: that the figure was both, alternatively or simultaneously. Some days, Paul was sure that the silhouette was a woman’s; other days, a man’s. The image intrigued him, stirred his imagination, unsettled him. Now he had no doubt: there was a mysterious likeness between the figure in the photograph and Jotefa, the Mataiea woodcutter. Discovering it gave him a surge of pleasure. The spirits of Tahiti were beginning to let you into their secrets, Paul. That same day he showed Charles Spitz’s photograph to Teha’amana.
“Is this a man or a woman?”
The girl studied the print for a while and at last shook her head, undecided. She couldn’t be sure either.
He had long conversations with Jotefa as he carved his idols and the boy watched. He was respectful; if Paul didn’t speak to him, he would sit still and silent, afraid of getting in the way. But when Paul initiated the exchange, there was no stopping him. His curiosity was boundless, childish. He wanted to know more than Paul could tell him about the paintings and sculptures, as well as many things about the sexual habits of Europeans. His queries were of the sort that, if not posed with such transparent innocence, might have seemed vulgar and stupid. Were the cocks of the popa’a the same shape and size as the Tahitians’? Was the sex of European women the same as that of women here? Did they have more or less hair between their legs? He didn’t seem to be firing off these questions in his imperfect French, mixed up with Tahitian words and exclamations and expressive gestures, from an unhealthy curiosity but rather from an eager desire to enrich his knowledge, to learn what it was that united or divided Europeans and Tahitians in matters generally excluded from conversation among Frenchmen. “A true primitive, a real pagan,” Paul said to himself. “Despite having been baptized and defamed with a name that is neither Tahitian nor Christian, he is still untouched.” Sometimes, Teha’amana came to listen, but in front of her Jotefa was inhibited and fell silent.
For regular or large-sized carvings, Koké preferred the wood of breadfruit trees, pandanus palms, palmyra palms, and coconut palms; for small ones, always that of the balsa tree, from which the Tahitians made their canoes. Soft and malleable, almost a clay, with neither knotholes nor grain, balsa wood felt almost like flesh. But it was hard to find it around Mataiea. The woodcutter told him not to worry. Did he want a good supply of that wood? A whole trunk? He knew a little grove of balsa trees. And he gestured toward the steep side of the nearest mountain. He would take Paul there.
They left at dawn, with a bundle of provisions, wearing only loincloths. Paul had become accustomed to walking barefoot, like the natives, something he had also done in the summer in Brittany and, before that, in Martinique. Although he had traveled frequently in the months he had been on the island, he had always taken the coastal roads. This was the first time he had set out through the forest like a Tahitian, burying himself in the dense growth of trees, shrubs, and brush that tangled overhead and blocked out the sun; the paths were invisible to him, though Jotefa could follow them easily. In the glimmering green shade, livened by the song of birds he hadn’t yet heard, breathing in a damp, oleaginous, vegetal scent that penetrated all the pores of his body, Paul had a feeling of intoxication, fullness, exultation, like something produced by a magic potion.
A few feet ahead of him, Jotefa followed the trail without faltering, swinging his arms rhythmically. At each step, the muscles of his shoulders, back, and legs flexed, flashing with sweat. Paul could see him as a warrior, a long-ago hunter, venturing deep into the jungle in search of the enemy whose head he would cut off and carry home over his shoulder, to offer to his merciless god. Koké’s blood boiled; his testicles and phallus throbbed; he was choked with desire. But—Paul! Paul!—it wasn’t exactly the familiar desire, of leaping on that fine body and possessing it, but rather of abandoning himself, of being possessed the way man possesses woman. As if he had guessed Paul’s thoughts, Jotefa turned his head and smiled. Paul blushed violently: had the boy noticed your stiff cock, poking through the folds of your loincloth? He didn’t seem to give it the slightest importance.
“The road ends here,” he said, pointing. “It continues on the other side. We’ll have to get wet, Koké.”
He plunged into the stream, and Paul followed him. The cold water was soothing, freeing him from the unbearable tension. The woodcutter, seeing that Paul was lingering in the river, protected from the current by a big rock, left the bag of provisions and his loincloth on the other side and dove in again, laughing. The water sang, slapping and foaming against his neat body. “It is very cold,” he said, coming so close to Paul that he brushed up against him. The space was green-blue, not a single bird cried, and except for the noise of the current against the rocks, the silence, tranquillity, and freedom were such that Paul believed this must be paradise on earth. His cock was stiff again, and he felt himself swoon from an unfamiliar desire: to abandon himself, to surrender, to be loved and treated roughly like a woman by the woodcutter. Conquering his shame, he allowed himself to back toward Jotefa, and rested his head on the young man’s breast. With a bright little laugh, in which there was no hint of mockery, the boy put his arms around Paul’s shoulders and drew him in, clasping him tight. Paul felt him settle himself, mold himself to his body. Seized by vertigo, he closed his eyes. Against his back he felt the boy’s cock, also hard, rubbing against him, and instead of pushing him away and striking out, as he had so many times on the Luzitano, the Chili, and the Jérôme-Napoléon when his fellow sailors tried to use him like a woman, he let the boy have his way, feeling not disgust but gratitude, and—Paul! Paul!—pleasure. He felt one of Jotefa’s hands groping underwater until it captured his sex. Almost as soon as he felt its touch, he ejaculated, groaning. Jotefa followed suit a moment later, against his back, laughing all the time.
They came out of the stream; with the fabric of the loincloths they rubbed away the water running down their bodies. Then they ate the fruit they had brought. Jotefa made no mention of what had happened, as if it were of no importance, or he had forgotten it already. Remarkable, Paul, wasn’t it? He had done something with you that would provoke anguish and remorse, sentiments of guilt and shame, in Christian Europe. But for the woodcutter, who was free, it was a mere amusement, a diversion. What better proof that European civilization (a misnomer) had destroyed all freedom and happiness, depriving human beings of the pleasures of the flesh? The very next day you would start a painting of the third sex, the sex of Tahitians and pagans, still uncorrupted by emasculated Christian morality. It would be a painting about ambiguity and the mystery of the act that (thanks to this heavenly spot and Jotefa) had made you realize—at the age of forty-four, when you thought you knew yourself and everything about yourself—that in the depths of your heart, obscured by your enormous masculinity, a woman was crouched.
They came to the little balsa grove, cut a long, cylindrical branch from which Paul could carve the Tahitian Eve he was planning, and set off immediately back toward Mataiea, carrying the wood between them. It was nightfall when they reached the village. Teha’amana was already asleep. The next morning, Paul gave Jotefa one of his little idols. The boy tried to refuse it, as if by taking it he would spoil the generous gesture he had made in accompanying his friend to find the wood he needed. Finally, at Paul’s insistence, he accepted it.
“How do you say ‘mysterious waters’ in Tahitian, Jotefa?”
“Pape moe.”
That was what it would be called. He began to paint it the next morning, early, after preparing himself the usual cup of tea. He had Charles Spitz’s photograph at hand, but he barely consulted it, because he knew it by heart, and because a better model for his new painting was the naked back of the woodcutter walking before him in the thick undergrowth, in a magic sphere still intact in his mind’s eye.
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He worked for a week on Pape moe. For much of that time, he was in the rare state of euphoria and unrest that he hadn’t experienced since painting Manao tupapau. Only a select few would realize what the true subject of Pape moe was; he planned never to reveal it, not to Teha’amana, with whom he didn’t usually discuss his paintings, and certainly not in his letters to Monfreid, Schuffenecker, the Viking, or his Paris dealers. They would see, in the middle of a lush grove of flowers, leaves, water, and stones, a being standing in shadow on the rocks and inclining his beautiful body toward the thin stream of a waterfall, to quench his thirst or pay tribute to the invisible god of the place. Very few would guess the enigma, the sexual ambiguity of that little person in whom a different sex was incarnated, an option that morality and religion had fought, persecuted, denied, and exterminated until they believed it had disappeared. They were wrong! Pape moe was the proof. In those “mysterious waters” over which the androgynous subject of the painting bent, you were floating too, Paul. You had just discovered it, after a long process that began with the spell cast over you by Charles Spitz’s photograph at the International Exposition of 1889 and ended at the stream where you felt Jotefa’s cock against your back and agreed to become his taata vahine, in that lonely spot outside of time and history. No one would ever know that Pape moe was a self-portrait too, Koké.