The Way to Paradise

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Suddenly she began to notice a suspiciously greedy glitter in Ismaelillo’s eyes. Sometimes she provoked it, not without malice, carelessly lifting her skirt when they were sitting together so that her slender ankle was revealed, or, seemingly anxious not to miss a syllable of what Ismaelillo was saying, moving so close to him that the young Spaniard must have been able to smell her and feel the brush of her skin. Then he would lose control, turning pale or flushing; his voice would change and he would trip over his words, leaping confusedly from subject to subject. He had taken a liking to her as soon as he saw her, in that old house with its smells of wax and incense. Flora knew it from the first day. He had fallen in love with her, and it must have caused him great anguish. But he never dared say anything that went beyond the most conventional of friendly remarks. Still, his eyes betrayed him, and Flora often surprised in them the eager little light which meant: How I’d like to be free, to be able to tell you what I feel, to take your hand and kiss it, to beg you to let me court you, to love you, to ask you to be my wife and let you teach me to be happy.

  In the year she spent in that house, while her voyage to Peru was being arranged, Flora lived like a princess, though she was bored by the incessant religious obligations. Without her reading—never had she read so much as in those months, in Don Mariano’s big library—and the companionship and devotion of the Holy Eunuch, it would have been much worse. Ismaelillo took long walks with her along the banks of the Garonne, or in the neighboring countryside, where the vineyards spread as far as the eye could see, and entertained her by telling her about Spain, Don Mariano, and the intrigues of the great Bordeaux families, which he knew in great detail. One day, when they were playing cards next to the fire, Flora noticed that he kept nervously slapping at his trousers, as if to shoo away an insect, or as if he were being stung. Surreptitiously, she began to spy on his movements. Yes, there could be no doubt about it: he was pleasuring himself, aroused by Flora’s proximity, and he was doing it right there, shamelessly, almost within sight of Don Mariano, who was reading a parchment-covered book in his rocking chair. To torment him, she suddenly asked him to bring her a glass of water. Ismaelillo turned fiery red and stalled by pretending he hadn’t quite heard her; finally he got up, hunched over and turned sideways, but even so, glancing furtively, Flora could see a bulge in his trousers. That night she heard him sob, kneeling in the chapel. Could he be flogging himself? From that moment on, she felt a mixture of compassion and disgust for the young Spaniard. You pitied him, Florita, but he repulsed you, too. He was a good man and he suffered, surely. But how determined he was to heap more sufferings upon those that life doled out of its own accord. What must have become of him?

  Flora’s most picturesque experience in Saint-Étienne was her visit to the munitions factory adjoining the garrison. She was given permission to visit it thanks to three Fourierists who were friends of the colonel heading the regiment, who designated one of his assistants, a captain with a coquettish little mustache, to escort her. His descriptions of the weapons that were made there bored her so much that she let her mind wander. But at the end of the visit, the civilian director of the factory and several artillery officers offered her refreshments. The conversation was proceeding innocuously when suddenly the captain who had been her escort asked her, after much hemming and hawing, what truth there was in the rumors that Madame Tristán had pacifist leanings. She was going to answer evasively—she was expected at a ribbon makers’ workshop in the neighborhood of Saint-Benoît, and didn’t want to waste time on a pointless discussion—but seeing the surprise, frank reproach, and derision on the faces of the officers around her, she couldn’t help herself.

  “Plenty of truth, Captain! I am a pacifist, of course. Which is why my plan for the Workers’ Union states that in the society of the future weapons will be prohibited and armies abolished.”

  Two hours later, she was still arguing heatedly with her scandalized interlocutors when one of them dared to say, furiously, that it was “unworthy of a Frenchwoman” to have such ideas.

  “My loyalty is to humanity first and France second, gentlemen,” she said, ending the conversation. “Thank you for your company. I must go.”

  She left exhausted by the argument, but amused at having unsettled those pretentious artillerymen with her subversive ideas. How you had changed, Florita, since, lodged in the Girondin mansion of Don Mariano de Goyeneche, you prepared to leave for Peru to escape the persecution of André Chazal. You were rebellious then, true, but confused and ignorant, and not revolutionary at all yet. It never occurred to you that it might be possible to fight in an organized way against a society that permitted female slavery in the guise of marriage. What good your Peruvian adventures would do you! You were truly changed by that year in Arequipa and Lima.

  Don Pío Tristán consented to Flora’s voyage, though unenthusiastically. She was invited by the family to stay in the house where her father was born and spent his childhood and youth. Don Mariano de Goyeneche and Ismaelillo looked into ships sailing for South America in the coming weeks. They found the Carlos Adolfo, the Fletes, and the Mexicain. All three were to leave in February 1833. Don Mariano went personally to inspect them. He eliminated the first two; the Carlos Adolfo was old and full of patches; the Fletes was a good ship, but it traveled halfway down the African coast before turning toward South America. The Mexicain was the best choice. A small ship, it would make a single stop before sailing to Valparaíso through the Straits of Magellan. The crossing would take just over three months.

  Once the ship was chosen and the cabin reserved, all that remained was to await the day of departure. Ever since Flora had come to live in Bordeaux, Don Mariano and Ismaelillo had insisted on making her practice her bad Spanish, of which Flora remembered a few words and sentences spoken by her father when she was a child in the Vaugirard house. They both took their roles as teachers very seriously, and in a few months, Flora could follow their conversation and stumble along in Spanish.

  It wasn’t from Don Mariano’s servants that she learned the insulting nickname that Ismaelillo was called in Bordeaux society, but from the victim himself. It was on one of those long walks they took along the banks of the broad Garonne or in the countryside just outside the city, during which Flora thought she could feel his struggles, the fierce and silent battle he was fighting in his heart to confess—or not confess—the passion he felt for her.

  “You will doubtless have heard what they call me behind my back—the people of Bordeaux, that is.”

  “No, I’ve heard nothing. A nickname, you mean?”

  “A vulgar and profane one,” said the young man, biting his lips. “The Holy Eunuch.”

  “It is vulgar,” Flora exclaimed, confused. “And slightly profane. But stupid, mostly. Why are you telling me this?”

  “I don’t want there to be any secrets between us, Flora.”

  Head bowed, he fell silent for the rest of the walk, as if overcome by fatalism. It was, you believed, the moment at which he came closest to breaking his vows and letting you know that he was human, not divine, and that he dreamed of holding a beautiful and intelligent woman like you in his arms. Better that he hadn’t. Despite the disgusting things you saw him do sometimes, you had come to feel affection for him, mixed with compassion.

  Visiting the Saint-Benoît ribbon makers infuriated and depressed her. These twenty or so mute, illiterate, ignorant workers lacked even the most basic curiosity. It was like talking to trees or stones. It would have been easier to turn the preening officers of the Café de Paris into revolutionaries than these wretches, who were numbed by hunger and exploitation, and had had the last particles of intelligence squeezed out of them by the bourgeoisie. When, while she was taking questions, one of the workers alluded to a rumor that she was getting rich selling copies of The Workers’ Union, she didn’t even have the heart to be angry.

  The day she learned the date that the Mexicain would set sail from Bordeaux to Peru—April 7, 1833, at eight i
n the morning, high tide—she also learned that the captain of the ship she was about to take was Zacharie Chabrié. When she heard Don Mariano de Goyeneche say his name, she felt as if she had been struck by lightning. Zacharie Chabrié! The captain from the Paris boardinghouse who had told her about the Tristán family of Arequipa. He had met Aline, and as soon as he saw Flora appear with Don Mariano and Ismaelillo, he would call her madame and ask about her “lovely daughter.” All your lies would come tumbling down and crush you, Andalusa.

  She spent a sleepless night, her chest tight with dread. But by the next morning, she had come to a decision. On a pretext, she went out, claiming a vow to Saint Clara that she had to fulfill alone, and drove to the port in a hired carriage. It was easy to find the company’s offices. After she had waited for half an hour, Captain Chabrié appeared at the door. She recognized his tall figure, his thinning hair, his gentlemanly and provincial round Breton face, his benevolent eyes. He recognized her instantly.

  “Madame Tristán!” He stooped to kiss her hand. “I asked myself, upon seeing the list of passengers, if it might be you. You’re traveling with me on the Mexicain, aren’t you?”

  “Can we speak in private for a moment?” asked Flora, adopting a dramatic expression. “It is a matter of life or death, Monsieur Chabrié.”

  Taken aback, the captain led her into an office, and gave her what must have been his seat, a broad sofa with a little footstool.

  “I am going to confide in you because I believe you are a gentleman.”

  “I won’t disappoint you, madame. How can I help?”

  Flora vacillated for a few seconds. Chabrié had the look of one of those old-fashioned Breton men who, though they’ve traveled the world, still hold fiercely to their traditional beliefs, morals, and religion.

  “I beg you not to ask me any questions,” she implored, her eyes filling with tears. “I’ll explain everything once we’re at sea. On the day we set sail, when you see me come accompanied, I need you to greet me as if you were meeting me for the first time. Don’t fail me. I beg you by everything you hold dear, Captain. Do you promise me you’ll do it?”

  Zacharie Chabrié nodded, very serious.

  “I need no explanation. I don’t know you, I’ve never seen you. I’ll have the pleasure of meeting you on Tuesday, at eight, the hour of our departure.”

  8

  PORTRAIT OF ALINE GAUGUIN

  PUNAAUIA, MAY 1897

  On July 3, 1895, Paul boarded the Australian in Marseille, exhausted but happy. For weeks he had been living in a state of dread, fearing sudden death. He didn’t want his remains to molder in Europe, but in Polynesia, his adopted land. In that respect at least you shared your grandmother Flora’s internationalist manias, Koké. A person’s birthplace was an accident; his true homeland he chose himself, body and spirit. You had chosen Tahiti, and you would die like a savage, in that beautiful land of savages. The thought took a great weight off his mind. Didn’t you care if you never saw your children again, Paul, or your friends? Monfreid, good old Schuff, the last of the Pont-Aven disciples, the Molards? Bah, you didn’t care a bit.

  At Port Said, the last port of call before the ship crossed the Suez Canal, he went down to wander around the makeshift little market by the ship’s gangplank. Suddenly, amid the tumult of voices and the shouts of Arab, Greek, and Turkish peddlers hawking fabric, trinkets, dates, perfumes, and honeyed sweets, he spotted a Nubian in a red turban who winked at him obscenely, showing him something half hidden in his big hands. It was an astounding collection of erotic photographs, in fine condition, depicting every position and union imaginable, even a woman being sodomized by a hound. He bought all forty-five immediately. They would be a great addition to the chest of prints, objects, and curiosities that he had left in storage in Papeete. Gleefully, he imagined the reaction of the Tahitian girls when he showed them his outrageous new possessions.

  Studying those photographs and concocting fantasies inspired by them was one of his few entertainments during the two endless months it took him to get to Tahiti, with stops in Sydney and Auckland, where he was stranded for three weeks waiting for a ship on its way to the islands. He arrived in Papeete on September 8. The ship entered the lagoon in the great orgy of light at dawn, and he felt indescribable happiness, as if he were coming home and a swarm of relatives and friends were gathered at the dock to greet him. But there was no one waiting, and he had a miserable time finding a wagon big enough to carry all of his bundles, packages, rolls of canvas, and paints to a small boardinghouse he knew on the rue Bonard, in the center of the city.

  Papeete had been transformed in the two years he was gone: now there were electric lights, and the nights no longer had the half-mysterious, half-gloomy air they once did, especially the port and its seven little bars, now ten. The Military Club, frequented by colonists and tradesmen as well as soldiers, boasted a brand-new tennis court behind its fence of stakes. The sport was one that you, Paul, who had had to walk with a cane ever since the beating in Concarneau, would never play.

  The pain in his ankle had lessened on the voyage, but no sooner did he set foot on Tahitian soil than it returned worse than ever, so much so that some days it kept him howling in bed. Tranquilizers had no effect; only alcohol helped, when he drank until his speech slurred and he could barely stand. And laudanum, too, which a Papeete druggist agreed to sell him without a prescription, for an exorbitant gratuity.

  The drowsy stupor into which he was plunged by the opium kept him sprawled in his room, or in the armchair on the terrace of the modest boardinghouse where he continued to stay in Papeete while a hut was built for him in Punaauia, some eight miles from the capital, on a piece of land that he had bought for practically nothing. It was a bamboo hut, with a roof of plaited palm leaves, and later he decorated and furnished it with objects left from his previous stay, the few items he had brought with him from France, and other things he bought in the Papeete marketplace. He divided the single room with a simple curtain, so that one side would be his bedroom and the other his studio. Once he had set up his easel and arranged his canvases and paintings, his spirits rose. To make light, he cut an opening in the roof himself, with difficulty because of the chronic pain in his ankle. Still, for several months he was unable to paint. He carved some wooden panels which he hung on the walls of the hut, and when the pain and itching of his legs allowed it—the unspeakable illness had returned again, like clockwork—he made sculptures, idols that he baptized with the names of ancient Maori gods: Hina, Oviri, the Arioi, Te Fatu, Ta’aora.

  All this time, day and night, whether he was lucid or swimming in the gelatinous sea into which the opium dissolved his brain, he thought of Aline. Not his daughter Aline—the only one of his five children with Mette Gad whom he occasionally remembered—but his mother, Aline Chazal, later Madame Aline Gauguin when his grandmother Flora’s political and intellectual friends, eager upon Flora’s death to assure the future of the orphan girl, married her in 1847 to the republican journalist Clovis Gauguin, his father. A tragic marriage, Koké; yours was a tragic family. This torrent of memories was unleashed the day that Paul began to pin the Port Said photographs up in rows on the walls of his new studio in Punaauia. One of the models, looking straight at the photographer from the arms of another naked girl, had the kind of black hair that the Parisians called andalousienne, and enormous, languid eyes; she reminded him of someone, and without knowing why, he felt uncomfortable. Hours later, he realized. It was your mother, Paul. The features, the hair, the sad eyes made the whore in the photograph look a little like Aline Gauguin. He laughed, then grew distressed. Why were you remembering your mother now? He hadn’t thought of her since 1888, when he painted her portrait. Seven years, and now she was lodged in his consciousness day and night, an obsession. And what was that feeling, the lacerating sadness that dogged you for weeks, even months, at the beginning of your second stay in Tahiti? The strange thing wasn’t that he should think of his mother, dead for so long, but that th
e memory should come accompanied by this sensation of sorrow and despair.

  He learned of the death of his widowed mother in 1867—twenty-eight years ago, Paul!—at anchor in the harbor of an Indian city aboard the merchant ship Chili, on which he was employed as a seaman second class. Aline had died in faraway Paris at forty-one, the same age at which Grandmother Flora had died. You didn’t feel then the terrible grief you felt now. “Well,” you kept repeating, assuming a properly bereaved expression as you received the condolences of the Chili’s officers and sailors, “all of us have to die. Today, my mother; tomorrow, the rest of us.”