His dear friend and neighbour Tioka, with whom he exchanged names – a Marquesa custom signifying brotherhood and reciprocity – died here, and although his house no longer stands, his family house does, identical to the dwellings that wealthy townspeople built in Atuona in those days. It’s on the other side of the stream where Gauguin used to bathe naked, an act which scandalised the neighbouring missionaries and nuns and outraged the local policeman Claverie, who would have put him in prison – this was his dream – if Gauguin had not died beforehand. Gauguin’s house no longer exists – the House of Pleasure has been rebuilt in another place – but the former site has been identified thanks to the well that the painter helped to dig out with his own hands. This was the house that the girls from the nearby Santa Ana College came to in secret when the Cluny nuns were not keeping an eye on them. The college has grown since then, but it still has a very pretty garden full of bougainvilleas, mangoes and coconut palms, and a myriad laughing and talkative young girls who are not put off at all by the presence of an outsider. When I mention Gauguin, the friendly Mother Superior blushes and changes the subject. Those wilful little girls ignored the ban and went to look around the house of this corrupting devil and see the pornographic postcards that were up on his walls: forty-five exactly, showing every imaginable position, which he had bought in Port Said on a stopover on the boat journey that brought Gauguin to Polynesia.
His sexual exploits, which his biographers have fantasised over at length, were a thing of the past when Gauguin arrived in Atuona. His precarious health did not permit too many excesses. It’s true that he bought a girl, his vahiné, Vaeoho, from an indigenous family in the Hekeani Valley. The family asked for a number of goods in exchange for her, that he had to buy on credit from the shopkeeper Ben Varney. Vaeoho gave him a child, whose descendants, spread throughout Hiva Oa, now flee from journalists and critics as if they had the plague (they’re surely right to do so). However, this marriage did not last long because as soon as she knew she was pregnant Vaeoho, who found his legs revolting, left him. Apart from a bit of more or less harmless dabbling with the girls from the mission who visited him, and an adventure with the red-haired Tohotaua, who was a model for his final paintings, it is inconceivable that, given his physical and mental condition when he reached the Marquesas Islands, he could have indulged in the same excessive behaviour as in Tahiti or in France. On Atuona, the only excesses open to this human wreck were in his imagination. And he did not hesitate in using this imagination to develop impossible projects: delirious religious essays arguing a so-called revolutionary interpretation of anti-Catholic Christianity, and political-judicial campaigns to exempt the indigenous people who lived far from Atuona from the obligation of sending their children to the school, to lift the ban on their purchasing alcohol and to exempt them from paying a road-building tax with the impeccable argument that the state had never built on the island of Hiva Oa one single yard of road (a fact that remains true today, one hundred years later). It was these manifestations of rebellion against colonial society that allowed his enemies – the church and the police – to enmesh him in a court case that he lost, a judgement that would have led not just to him losing his house and his few belongings, but also to a term of imprisonment, had his heart not stopped at an opportune moment.
In Tahiti, although there is an official cult to his memory and his work, many Tahitians put in a number of provisos when they talk about him. His behaviour towards native women was, who could deny it, abusive and sometimes brutal, and some people still repeat that as well as being a paedophile – he liked girls, young girls of thirteen or fourteen – he gave syphilis to many of his lovers. And, besides, could one speak of him as a Tahitian painter? I hasten to agree with them: the Tahiti of his paintings is much more a product of his fantasy and his dreams than of the real model. But is that not a point in his favour, the best way to show his credentials as a creator? Here on the Marquesas Islands, by contrast, I have not found in any conversation the slightest reticence among the native inhabitants in expressing their appreciation and admiration for Koke. Quite the reverse. Everyone knows who he was, what he did, where he is buried, and they tell stories that reveal a warm and friendly attitude towards him, a sense of kinship. Perhaps it isn’t Gauguin at all, but rather the way that the Marquesas people have of understanding and dealing with their fellow men and women: by opening their arms and their heart to them. And wasn’t it this, precisely, that Gauguin came looking for here, in the last journey of his incessant life? He spoke of primitive and intense civilisations, as yet uncorrupted by the abuse of reason and ecclesiastical laws, where beauty would not be a monopoly of artists, critics and collectors but rather a natural manifestation of human life, a shared state of mind, a universal religion. But, probably, behind these big words and schematic generalisations, there lay something much more simple and elusive: a society where happiness was possible. A society where one could live in peace and not in a state of permanent nervousness, without having to struggle for food, money and success, where one could concentrate on one’s vocation and not all the everyday worries that get in the way of this vocation. Paradise is not of this world and those who set out to look for it or construct it here are irremediably condemned to failure. But it is likely that out of all the places in the world that he went to look for it, Gauguin had never been so close to reaching that shimmering mirage that he had pursued all his life, as in this place where he arrived already half dead, where, in truth, he had come not to live but to die. It is enough to feel the gentle warmth that bathes Hiva Oa, and to look out on its mountain slopes or its rough seas, and listen to the melody with which the native people sing their words, and see them walk with a dance in their steps, unhurriedly and with supernatural grace, to feel that, despite everything, Koke, the wretched dreamer, was not completely on the wrong track when he came here in pursuit of his unrealisable dream.
Atuona, January 2001
The Men-Women of the Pacific
When Gauguin arrived in Tahiti for the first time, in June 1891, he had his hair down to his shoulders, wore a cockade with red fur, and his clothes were flamboyant and provocative. He had dressed like this ever since he had given up his career on the Stock Exchange in Paris. The indigenous people of Papeete were surprised at his appearance and believed he was a mahu, a rare species among the Europeans in Polynesia. The colonists explained to the painter that, in the Maori tongue, the mahu was a man-woman, a type that had existed from time immemorial in the cultures of the Pacific, but which had been demonised and banned by common consent by both Catholic and Protestant missionaries, engaged in a fierce battle to indoctrinate the native peoples, during the intense period of colonisation in the mid-nineteenth century.
However, it proved well-nigh impossible to root out the mahu from indigenous society. Concealed in urban settlements, the mahu survived in the villages and even in the cities, and re-emerged when official hostility and persecution abated. Proof of this fact can be found in Gauguin’s paintings in the nine years that he spent in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, which are full of human beings of uncertain gender who share equally masculine and feminine attributes with a naturalness and openness that is similar to the way in which his characters display their nakedness, merge with the natural order or indulge in leisure.
In his book of fantasised memoirs, Noa Noa, Gauguin relates a quasi-homosexual experience that he said inspired his painting Pape Moe (Mysterious Waters), in which an androgynous young person is bending over to drink from a forest waterfall. In fact, Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings would be very different and would seem much more arbitrary, without the strong presence of the mahu in the indigenous community that he was so close to. They are the raw material, the secret root, of his women with their solid thighs and broad shoulders, who stand firmly on the ground, and of his effeminate young men, in languid poses who seem to exhibit themselves as they stretch out to pick fruit from the trees, and who adorn their long hair with diadems of flowers. I
t is true that he invented these unmistakable characters; but he based them on a human reality about which, curiously for a man so loquacious on other topics, he always maintained a stubborn reserve.
It is risky to translate mahu as homosexual because, even in the most permissive societies of our age, homosexuality is still surrounded by prejudice and discrimination. Such prejudices did not exist among the Polynesians before the emissaries of Christian Europe censored a practice that, before their arrival, was recognised and universally respected and accepted as a legitimate variant of human diversity. The extraordinary sexual freedom of the Maoris of the islands has been the subject of countless studies, testimonies and caricatures ever since the first European ships reached these islands of paradisiacal beauty. Only now that Western society has gradually made sufficient advances to allow a similar sexual freedom and tolerance to that enjoyed by Polynesian cultures can we realise how civilised and lucid these small Pacific Maori communities were, at a time when the powerful West was still mired in the savagery of prejudice and intolerance. It was not just a question of sexual freedom; there was also a widespread practice among native communities of adopting orphaned or abandoned children, a custom that is still maintained. (Mr Tetuani of Mataiea, where Gauguin lived for several months, had twenty-five adopted children.)
The mahu might be a practising homosexual or remain chaste, like a girl making a vow of chastity. What defines them is not how or with whom they make love, but that, having been born with the sexual organs of a man, they have opted for femininity, usually from childhood, and that, helped by their family and community, they have become women, in their way of dressing, walking, talking, singing, working and often, but clearly not necessarily, of making love.
One of the reasons why, despite the prohibitions of the Churches, the mahus survived in Maori society during the nineteenth century was that they could count on the hidden complicity of the European colonists. They hired mahus to work as domestic servants – cooks, childminders, launderers, etc. – because for these household tasks the mahus were generally competent and, according to public opinion, ‘irreplaceable’. But in certain dances, songs and public ceremonies the mahus were also indispensable, because some songs, dances and performances are strictly for them, traditional expressions of what we might call that third sex, that are markedly different from male and female expressions.
Is it true that today, unlike what happened in traditional Polynesian society, ninety per cent of mahus are of humble origin, and that there is something like a relationship of cause and effect between the mahu and the poorest and most marginal sectors of indigenous society? (I hasten to add the proviso that ‘poverty’ and ‘marginality’ are concepts that, in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, bear little relationship to the extremes of injustice and inhumanity that these words express, for example, in Latin America). It must be the case, since I was given the information by a sociologist from the University of Papeete, who has studied Maori society for many years. He also told me that whereas in the past it was often the case that if a family had a number of boys, their own parents would decide to educate one of the boys as a girl, today nobody is a mahu through parental imposition, but through their own free choice.
In any event, even though the majority of the mahus are of humble origin, there are a number among the native middle classes of the islands. I have seen them, for example, in university lecture halls, mingling with the other students, as customers or employees in restaurants and cafés, and in the Protestant and Catholic services on Sundays, dressed up in beautiful clothes and headgear, without attracting any impertinent glances apart from mine.
I confess my admiration for the absolute normality with which I have seen the mahus move around, from the streets, hotels and offices of modern Papeete to remote rural areas in Atuona, on the island of Hiva Oa, or on the Marquesas. The cook in the hotel I stayed in on Atuona was a mahu called Teriki who told me that she had realised around eleven or twelve that she wanted to be a woman. Her parents did not place any obstacles in her way; quite the reverse, they helped her from the outset, dressing her as a woman. She assured me that she has never been ill-treated or ridiculed by anyone on Atuona, where she and the other mahus – ten per cent of the male population, she assures me – lead a normal life. It’s true that they had some difficulties at first with the friendly Father Labró of the Catholic mission, but Teriki and other mahus on the island explained their case at length, and from then on ‘the parish priest accepted us’.
However, a curious character that I got to know on Papeete, called Cerdan Claude, assured me that, contrary to appearances and the evidence of my own eyes, the mahus were not widely accepted in Polynesian society. According to him, modernity has also brought machismo and homophobia to Polynesia, above all at night, when it was not unusual to find gangs of thugs bursting into the prostitute district around the port of Papeete looking for mahus to harass and beat up. Cerdan Claude is sixty, and is gaunt and mysterious like a character out of Conrad. He was born in a Foreign Legion camp in Algeria, but he has never been a legionnaire. He has travelled the world, was once a boxer, has spent more than thirty years in Tahiti and now writes novels. His latest is a documentary novel on the world of the rae rae, a word that I thought synonymous with mahu, but he assures me that between the two terms there is a ‘metaphysical distance’. His long explanation of the difference leaves me confused. I finally deduce that while the mahu is the man-woman with traditional roots in Polynesian society, the Tahitian rae rae is its modern, urban expression, having more in common with the snipped and tucked drag queens of the West, with their hormone and silicone injections, than with the delicate cultural, psychological and social re-creation that is the mahu of Maori tradition. The mahu is an integral part of society, while the rae rae lives on its margins. Cerdan Claude seems to know very well the nocturnal world of prostitution inhabited by the rae rae, a world in which he moves freely; he adopts a beneficent, rather paternal attitude towards them. They tell him about their sorrows and desires and he gives them advice on how ‘to deal with the problems of life’: he says it with such conviction that I believe him.
The ‘Piano Bar’ in Papeete, where Cerdan Claude takes me one night, is an enormous, smoky discotheque, where the rae rae and heterosexual couples socialise in perfect harmony. They mingle all the time. It is not easy to detect the borders that separate the sexes – my impression is that very little or nothing separates them – at least to my layman’s eye. Cerdan Claude, by contrast, has a very sharp eye, and knows everyone by name. The rae rae come, one after the other, to greet him and kiss him on the cheek, and he receives them like a kindly grandfather. He introduces me to everyone and encourages them to talk to me about their lives and have their photograph taken by my daughter Morgana, something which they are delighted to do, brimming over with good humour and childish curiosity. Anne, the son of a New Zealand man and a Tahitian woman, is a beautiful, willowy girl who, she says, had difficulties with her parents when, as a boy, she started to dress as a girl. But now she gets on very well with them and they do not object to her sexual orientation. It is difficult to imagine that this smiling young woman was once a man. But she was, and still is, in part, as she tells me with great charm and no hint of vulgarity. She has been under the surgeon’s knife, which retouched her nose and implanted the upright breasts that she displays, but she has still to replace her phallus and testicles with an artificial vagina, because the operation is very expensive. She is saving and she will have it done. She had just spent a couple of years in Paris, where she got some good modelling jobs, but the violence in the city – where, one night, an Arab threatened her with a knife – and the cold made her return to warm and peaceful Polynesia. When she leaves us, the boys at the ‘Piano Bar’ swarm around her like flies, asking her to dance. I heard her utter this patriotic phrase, the most surprising of the night and perhaps of my entire rapid visit to Tahiti: ‘It’s a thousand times better to be a prostitute in Papeete than a model
in Paris.’
Papeete, January 2002
The Painter in the Brothel
Jean-Jacques Lebel, a writer and avant-garde artist who used to organise ‘happenings’ in the sixties, had the very daring idea back then to stage ‘with absolute fidelity’, Desire Caught by the Tail, a delirious theatre piece written by Picasso in 1941 in which, among other crazy things, a female character, La Tarte, urinates on stage for ten consecutive minutes, squatting over the prompter’s booth. (To achieve this effect, Lebel informs us, the liquefying actress had to drinks pints of tea and great infusions of cherries.) He talked to the painter at the beginning of 1966 about the project and Picasso showed him a whole raft of erotic drawings and paintings, from his Barcelona period, that he had never exhibited. From that moment Lebel decided that one day he would organise an exhibition that would show, without any euphemisms or censorship, the power of sex in Picasso’s world. This idea has finally become a reality, almost four decades later, in a vast exhibition of 330 works, many of them never exhibited before, in the Jeu de Paume in Paris, where it will stay until the end of May, before moving on to Montreal and Barcelona.
The first question to ask, after going round this exciting exhibition (never has that adjective been more appropriate), is why it has taken so long to organise. There have been innumerable exhibitions on the work of this artist, whose influence can be found in every branch of modern art, but, until now, nothing specific on the theme of sex which, as this exhibition curated by Lebel and Gérard Régnier so very clearly demonstrates, obsessed the painter in a very productive way. Especially at certain extreme moments in his life – in his youth and old age – he experimented and expressed himself in this area with remarkable confidence and daring, in drawings, sketches, objects, engravings and canvases that, despite their unequal artistic value, reveal his most secret and intimate motivations – his desires and erotic fantasies – and throw a new light on the rest of his work.