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 settle 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?"
"As far as I know, the legal proceedings are stalled." Paul spat toward the nearby palm trees. "Maybe their files were lost or destroyed in the gale. They can't touch me now. Nature, defending art against priests and gendarmes! The cyclone was my salvation, Ben!"
In July of 1884, Mette Gad boarded a ship in the harbor of Rouen and sailed for Denmark with three of the children, leaving Paul in the Norman capital with Clovis and Jean in his care. In Copenhagen, matters improved for the Viking. Her family found her work as a French teacher. And then—dreaming, Koké, always dreaming—you decided to follow her and conquer Denmark for impressionism.
"What is impressionism?" Ben wanted to know.
They were drinking brandy, and the shopkeeper was already tipsy. Paul, however, was perfectly sober, although he had drunk more than his friend. From the hill of the Catholic mission behind them, the wind carried the sound of the choir at the school of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny. They always practiced at this hour, singing hymns that no longer seemed religious, infused as they were with the joy and sensual rhythms of Marquesan life.
"An artistic movement that no one in Paris remembers anymore, I imagine," said Koké, shrugging his shoulders. "And now, Ben, one last toast. If night comes, I won't be able to find my way home with my eyes the way they are now."
Ben Varney helped him down the stairs, across the fenced-in yard, and into his little trap. As soon as the pony felt him climb in, it started off. It knew the way by heart, and trotted along carefully in the dim evening light, avoiding the obstacles in its path. Happily, you didn't have to guide it, Paul; you wouldn't have been able to. In the dusk, your eyes, weakened by the unspeakable illness, couldn't see the dips or bumps in the road. You felt good. Blind and contented, Koké. The air was warm and soothing, and a soft breeze scented with sandalwood blew. That had been a difficult test of your pride, having to live at 29 Frederiksbergalle, Mette's mother's house, supported and snubbed by your mother-in-law and your wife's uncles, aunts, sisters, brothers, and even cousins. None of them could understand, much less accept, that you had given up a bourgeois life and the world of finance to be a bohemian, which in their minds was synonymous with being an artist. They banished you to the attic, where, because of your shabby and eccentric appearance—which you exaggerated to spite your in-laws, of course, by wearing an Indian feather headdress—you had to stay hidden away while Mette taught French to young men and women of the Danish upper class, since there was the risk that the girls would be upset and the boys offended by your unsuitable appearance, and thus abandon their classes. Things didn't improve when, thanks to the sale of a painting from your collection of impressionist works, you, Mette, and the children left your mother-in-law's to live in a little house at 51 Norregada, in a seedy neighborhood of Copenhagen, which gave Mette new cause to rage at you and lament her fate.
This new test you passed, too. Humiliated and lonely in a country whose language you didn't speak, and where you had no friends or purchasers for your paintings, you worked constantly and furiously. You painted skaters in snowy Frederiksberge Park, the trees of East Park, your first self-portrait; you made ceramic pieces, wood carvings, drawings, countless sketches. One of the few Danish artists who was interested in what you were doing, Theodor Philipsen, came to look at your paintings. For an hour, you talked. Suddenly, you heard yourself telling the Dane that for you, feelings were more important than reason. Where did that theory come from? You were inventing it as you went along. Painting should be the expression of the whole human being: his intelligence, his skill as a craftsman, his culture, but also his beliefs, instincts, desires, hatreds. "Like primitive man." Philipsen didn't attach the slightest importance to what you were saying; he was amiable and dull, like all Scandinavians. But you did. You had spoken without thinking; later, upon reflection, you would discover that those words summed up your artistic credo. And still did today, Koké. Because behind your infinite statements and denials, in speech and in writing, on artistic matters over all these years, the fixed nucleus was still the same: Western art had deteriorated because of its alienation from the totality of existence manifested in primitive cultures. In them, art—inseparable from religion—was part of everyday life, like eating, dressing, singing, and making love. You wanted to recapture that tradition in your paintings.
It was dark when he arrived at the House of Pleasure, which, because of the cyclone, was no longer surrounded by forest but by thin ranks of trees and fallen trunks. This was one of Hiva Oa's traits: darkness fell in an instant, like a curtain dropping and hiding the scenery. A pleasant surprise—there were Haapuani and his wife, Tohotama, sitting beside the caricatures of Father Lechery and Teresa, which had survived the hurricane. They had just come from Tahuata, the island of redheaded Maori like Tohotama. To what did he owe this happy visit?
Haapuani hesitated and exchanged a long look with his wife, before responding flatly, "I accept your proposal. Necessity has convinced me, Koké."
Ever since he met him, shortly after arriving in Atuona, Paul had wanted to paint Haapuani. The man's character intrigued him. He had been the native priest of a Maori village on Tahuata, before the arrival of the French missionaries. Now no one knew for sure whether he lived on Hiva Oa or his native island, or traveled back and forth between the two. He would disappear for long periods of time and, upon returning, say nothing about where he had been. The natives of Hiva Oa believed he had ancient knowledge and powers because of his former practices, which, according to Ky Dong, he still continued in secret, away from the scrutiny of Bishop Martin, Pastor Vernier, and the gendarme Claverie. Koké admired him for his daring: sometimes, despite his years (he must have been in his fifties), Haapuani appeared at the House of Pleasure dressed and adorned like a mahu, a man-woman. Although the other Maori took no notice of this, it would have provoked the wrath of the two churches and the civil authority if they found out. Haapuani had no objections to the beautiful, muscular Tohotama posing—she had done so many times—but he would never agree to let Koké paint him. Each time you proposed it, he got angry. The cyclone had made him change his mind, because if it had caused damage on Hiva Oa, it had brought devastation to Tahuata, destroying homes and farms and leaving dozens dead, among them several relatives of the erstwhile witch doctor. Haapuani confessed: he needed money. Judging by his tone and expression, it must have cost him a great effort to take this step.
Would your miserable eyes allow you to paint him?
Without a second thought, Koké accepted, delighted. They immediately made a formal agreement, after which Paul advanced Haapuani some money. He was so excited by the prospect of painting this new work that he spent much of the night awake, tossing and turning in bed as he listened to the wild cats yowl and watched the moon appear and disappear in a cloudy sky. Haapuani knew much more than he was willing to admit. Koké had tested him when he came with Tohotama, as she posed. He would never reveal anything about his past as a Maori priest, and he always denied that cannibalism was still practiced on some of the far-flung islands of the archipelago. But Koké, obsessed, wasn't convinced by these denials. And sometimes he was able to overcome Haapuani's resistance and make him talk about the art of tattooing. Bishop Martin and Pastor Vernier thought they had abolished it, but it was still alive in lost villages and forests all over the Marquesas, preserving—on the brown skin of Maori men and women—the ancient wisdom, faith, and traditions condemned by the missionaries. On his only trip to the interior of Hiva Oa, to the village of Hanaupe, in the valley of Hekeani, to bargain for the purchase of Vaeoho, Koké confirmed it: the villagers displayed their tattoos freely. And through an interpreter he talked with the village tattooist, a smiling old man who showed him how he imprinted those symmetrical, labyrinthine drawings on human skin, with an artist's finesse and assurance. Haapuani, who grew skittish whenever Koké questioned him about his Marquesan beliefs, was sometimes inspired to reveal the meanings of different tattoos to him. One day, drawing on a sheet of paper with the skill of an expert, he even explained the tangle of references contained in certain designs. The ones he sketched were the most ancient, he said: those serving to protect warriors in battle, to impart strength to resist the wiles of evil spirits, and to guarantee purity of spirit.
The witch doctor appeared the next morning at the House of Pleasure, soon after the sun had risen. Koké was waiting for him in his studio. The sky was clear over Atuona, though out to sea, toward the deserted Sheep's Island, a mass of dark clouds and red flashes of lightning heralded a storm. When he made Haapuani stand where the early-morning light would strike him best, Koké's heart sank. The pity of it! You could see little more than a shape, blurred at the edges, and patches of different shades and depths. That was how your eyes saw colors now: as smudges, fogs. Wasn't it pointless to attempt it, Koké?
"No, damn it, no," he muttered, coming up very close to the witch doctor, as if he were about to kiss him or bite him. "Even if I go completely blind or die of rage, I'll paint you, Haapuani."
"It's best to stay calm, Koké," the Maori advised him. "Since you're always so eager to know what the Marquesans think, that is our principal belief: never be angry, except when your enemy is before you."
Tohotama, who was there somewhere—you hadn't heard her arrive—giggled, as if this were all a game. Mette also had that irritating habit of trivializing important matters by making a joke and laughing. Although they never became friends, the Danish painter Philipsen was very good to you. After he visited the house at 51 Norregada to see your paintings, he prevailed on his acquaintances to convince Denmark's Society of the Friends of Art to sponsor an exhibition of your paintings. It opened on May 1, 1884, with a small but distinguished crowd in attendance. Gentlemen and ladies, attentive and polite, seemed to interest themselves in the paintings, and asked you questions about them in courtly French. Still, no one bought anything; no reviews, favorable or hostile, appeared in the Copenhagen press; and five days later the exhibition closed. You would later boast that the authorities, conservative and traditionalist, had ordered it to be shut down, scandalized by your aesthetic daring. But that wasn't the case. In truth, it was because no one went to see it and it was a commercial failure that your only exhibition while you were living in Copenhagen ended so soon.
The worst thing wasn't your frustration; it was how angry Mette's family was at you for the fiasco. So! The outlandish bohemian gives up his position in society and his respectable job as a stockbroker for art—and this is what he paints! Countess Moltke let it be known that if this grotesquely attired, redskin-imitating, effeminate person stayed in Copenhagen, she would stop paying the tuition of the Gauguins' oldest son, Emil, a charitable duty she had assumed six months before. And the Viking, pale and sniveling, dared to tell you that if you didn't leave, the young diplomats to whom she taught French had threatened to find another teacher. And then she and the children would starve. They kicked you out of Copenhagen like a dog, Koké! You had no alternative but to return to Paris, in a third-class train carriage, taking six-year-old Clovis with you, thus relieving Mette of one mouth to feed as she scraped to support the rest of the family. Your parting, at the beginning of June 1885, was a tour de force of hypocrisy. The two of you pretended to be undergoing a temporary separation demanded by the circumstances, telling each other that you would be reunited as soon as matters improved. Yet deep down you knew very well, and perhaps Mette did too, that you would be apart for a long time, perhaps forever. Were you right, Koké? Well, up to a certain point. Although you'd seen each other only once for a few days in the last eighteen years—and then she wouldn't let you touch her—legally, the Viking was still your wife. How many months had it been since Mette wrote you, Koké?
He arrived in Paris without a cent in his pocket and with a child in tow, and went to stay with good old Schuff, in his apartment on the rue Boulard, from whose windows he could see the tombstones of the Montparnasse cemetery. You were thirty-seven years old, Koké. Had you begun to be a real painter? You were still struggling. Since there was no room in the flat to work, you drew and painted in the streets—next to a chestnut tree in the Luxembourg Gardens, on park benches, on the banks of the Seine—in notebooks and on canvases that your friend Schuff gave you. Without letting his wife, Louise, know, Schuff also sometimes slipped a few francs into your pocket so that at midday you could sit for a while on the terrace of a café. Was it in that summer of 1885 that you sometimes couldn't sleep at night, thinking that everything you were doing might be a huge mistake, an act of madness you would come to regret? No, the period of extreme desperation came later. In July, after selling another piece from your collection of impressionist paintings (there were very few left, and they were all in Mette's possession), you left for Dieppe. Spending the summer there was a colony of painters with whom you were acquainted, among them Degas. They gathered in an extraordinarily gaudy, peculiar house, the Chalet du Bas-Fort-Blanc, owned by the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche. You went to visit them, thinking they would receive you with open arms; but you were told they weren't in, and as the butler sent you away, you spotted Degas and Blanche peeping at you through the curtains. After that, both avoided you as if you were an undesirable. You were, Koké. Lonely, you wandered along the harbor and the cliffs with your easel, paints, and paper, painting bathers, sandy beaches, tall reefs. The paintings were bad. You felt like a mangy dog. It was only natural that Degas, Blanche, and the other Dieppe painters should steer clear of you: you were dressed like a tramp because that was what you were now.
The worst was yet to come, Koké. It arrived with the winter, when you returned to Paris, penniless again. Your sister, María Fernanda, turned over Clovis, whom she had grudgingly cared for while you were in Dieppe. The Schuffeneckers could no longer lodge you. You rented a miserable room on the rue Cail, near the Gare de l'Est, unfurnished. In a junk shop, you found a little bed for Clovis. You slept on the floor, shivering under a single blanket. You had only summer clothing, and Mette never sent you the winter things you had left in Copenhagen. Those last months of 1885 and first months of 1886 were bitterly cold, with frequent snowfalls. Clovis caught chicken pox, and you couldn't even buy him medicine; likely he survived only because he had your strong constitution and rebellious spirit, which made you thrive in adversity. You fed him handfuls of rice, and many days you yourself ate little more than scraps. Then—desperation, Koké—you had to stop painting so that you and the boy wouldn't die of hunger. Just when you thought the solution might be to throw yourself from a bridge into the icy waters of the Seine with the child in your arms, you found work: as a bill poster in the stations of Paris. Congratulations, Koké! It was hard outdoor work and left you smeared all over with paste, but after a few weeks you had saved enough to put Clovis into a very modest boarding school in Antony, just outside of Paris.
Was the winter of 1885–86 the worst moment of your life, the point at which you nearly gave up? No. That was now, although you had a roof over your head and—thanks to Daniel de Monfreid and the dealer Ambroise Vollard—a bit of income which, although minimal, was enough so you were able to eat and drink. Nothing, not even that horrible winter eighteen years ago, could compare to the impotence you felt every day, trying, little better than gropingly, to commit to the canvas the colors and shapes suggested to you by Haapuani's presence—his presence, because almost all you could see of him was a faceless silhouette. That didn't matter so much to you. You still had a clear picture in your head of Haapuani's face, attractive despite his years, and you also had an idea what the painting should be. A handsome witch doctor who is also a mahu; a coquettish and distinguished figure with little flowers in his long, silky feminine hair, wrapped in a big red cape flaming at his shoulders, with a leaf in his right hand that stands for his secret knowledge of the world of plants—love philters, healing potions, poisons, magical concoctions—and behind him, as always in your paintings (why, Koké?), two women buried in a leafy glade—real or maybe fantastic, bundled in monkish, medieval hooded robes—watching him, captivated or frightened by his aura of mystery and ambiguity, and his insolent freedom. At the sorcerer's feet would be a dog, of strange bone structure, perhaps hailing from the Maori underworld, and a black rooster. A whitish-blue river and the evening sky would be visible through the trees of the forest in the background. You could see it very well in your mind, but to transfer it to the canvas, you needed to constantly ask the advice of Haapuani himself, or Tohotama, or Tioka, who sometimes came to watch you work, questioning them about the colors, and about the mixes you made essentially by instinct, without being able to check the results. They were more than willing, but they didn't have the words or the understanding to answer properly. It tormented you to think that their inexact information might ruin your work. The painting went extremely slowly. Were you moving forward or backward? There was no way to know. When your helplessness made you groan, or fall to weeping and cursing, Haapuani and Tohotama remained by your side, motionless, respectful, waiting for you to grow calm and take up your brush again.
Then Paul remembered that when he was hanging posters in the railway stations of Paris in that cruel winter eighteen years ago, fate delivered into his hands a little book that he found, forgotten or tossed aside by its owner, on the chair of a café next to the Gare de l'Est, where he went to have an absinthe at the end of the day. Its author was a Turk, the artist, philosopher, and theologian Mani Velibi-Zumbul-Zadi, who united all three disciplines in his essay. Color, according to him, was something deeper and more subjective than could be found in the natural world. It was a manifestation of human sentiments, beliefs, fantasies. All the spirituality of an age, and all its people's angels and demons, were expressed in the values given to different colors, and the way color was used. That was why real artists shouldn't feel themselves bound to literal representation when faced with the natural world: green forest, blue sky, gray sea, white clouds. It was their obligation to use colors in accordance with their innermost compulsions, or simply their private whim: black sun, fiery moon, blue horse, emerald waves, green clouds. Mani Velibi-Zumbul-Zadi also said—how appropriate these teachings were now, Koké—that artists, in order to preserve their authenticity, should give up using models and paint exclusively from memory. If they did, their art would better represent their secret truths. Your eyes had obliged you to do precisely that, Koké. Would The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa be your last painting? The question made you retch with sadness and rage.
"After I finish this portrait I'll never pick up a brush again, Haapuani."
"Do you mean that by letting myself be painted I'm sending you to your grave, Koké?"
"In a sense, yes. You'll send me to my grave, and meanwhile I will immortalize you. You'll have the best of it, Haapuani."
"Can I ask you something, Koké?" Tohotama had been so quiet and still all morning that Paul hadn't noticed she was there. "Why have you put that red cape on my husband's shoulders? Haapuani never dresses like that. And I don't know anyone on Hiva Oa or Tahuata who does."
"Well, that's what I see on your husband's shoulders, Tohotama." Koké's spirits rose upon hearing the girl's deep, rich voice, so in keeping with her sturdy body and red hair, her generous breasts, her broad hips, and her heavy, smooth thighs, all those beautiful things that now he could only remember. "I see all the blood that the Maori have spilled throughout their history. Fighting among themselves, destroying one another for food and land, defending themselves against flesh-and-blood invaders or wraiths from the next world. The whole history of your people is in this red cape, Tohotama."
"I only see a red cape that no person from here has ever worn," she insisted. "And those hooded people? Are they two women, Koké? Or are they men? They can't be Marquesans. I've never seen a woman or man on these islands put something like that on their heads."
He felt the urge to caress her, but he didn't try. You would reach out and touch empty air, because she could easily dodge you. Then you would feel ridiculous. But having desired her even for an instant made you happy, because one of the consequences of the advance of the unspeakable disease was the absence of desire. You weren't dead yet, Koké. A little more patience and resolve and you would finish this cursed painting.
Maybe what Bishop Dupanloup liked to repeat when he extolled the heroes of Christianity in his religion classes at your childhood school in Orléans, the seminary of the Chapelle Saint-Mesmin, was true after all: it was when the sinner had fallen lowest that he was compelled to rise highest, like Robert the Devil, the arch-villain who became a saint. It happened to you after that horrendous winter of 1885–86 in Paris. Just when you felt yourself sinking in the mire, you began to rise little by little toward the surface, toward clean air. The miracle had a name: Pont-Aven. Many painters and amateur artists spoke of Brittany, drawn by the wild beauty of its landscape, its isolation, and its romantic storms. For you, Brittany was attractive for two reasons, one abstract and one practical. In Pont-Aven you would find an archaic culture still thriving, people who instead of renouncing their religion, beliefs, and customs, clung to them with supreme disdain for the efforts of the State and Paris to integrate them into modernity. And then, too, you could live very cheaply there. Although nothing went quite as you expected, your departure for Pont-Aven—thirteen hours by train, on the Quimperlé line—in that sunny July of 1886 was the best decision you had made in your life so far.
It was in Pont-Aven that you truly began to be a painter, even if you had already been forgotten by the snobs and dilettantes of flighty Paris. He remembered well his arrival, aching from his long trip, in the triangular little main square of the picture-postcard town in the middle of a fertile valley flanked by wooded hills and crowned by a forest dedicated to Love, to which the salty afternoon air brought a hint of the sea. On the square were the lodgings for the well-to-do, American and English travelers who came there in search of local color: the Hôtel des Voyageurs and the Lion d'Or. It wasn't these hotels you were looking for, but the modest inn belonging to Madame Gloanec, who, fool or saint, welcomed needy artists and—magnificent woman—permitted those who didn't have the money for their room and board to pay with paintings. The best decision you ever made, Koké! A week after you had moved into the Pension Gloanec, you were dressing like a Breton fisherman—clogs, cap, embroidered vest, blue smock—and you had become the leader of the half dozen young artists who were sheltered there, less because of your painting than because of your forceful manner, your exuberant talk, your outsize faith in yourself, and, doubtless, your age. At last you were out of the abyss, Paul. Now, to paint masterpieces.
Two or three days later, Tohotama interrupted Koké's work again with some exclamations in Marquesan Maori that he didn't understand, except for the word mahu, lost in the flow of sentences. In the world of shadows and contrasts of light and dark that he now inhabited, he realized that Haapuani had left the spot where he was posing and, curious, come to look at the painting and see what was so exciting Tohotama. On the canvas, instead of appearing with a pareu around his waist or naked, the witch doctor, under his red cape, was wearing a dress as tight as a glove on his slender body, a very short garment that left his shapely woman's legs bare. Haapuani stood looking at the canvas for a long time without saying anything. Then, he went back to take up the pose Koké had requested.
"You haven't said anything to me about your portrait," Paul commented, after returning to his painstaking, impossible work. "What do you think of it?"
"You see mahus everywhere," said the witch doctor, evading his question. "Where they exist, and also where they don't exist. You don't see the mahu as something natural, but as a demon. In that way you are like the missionaries, Koké."
Was it true? Well, something odd had happened to you a few months ago, while you were painting The Sister of Charity, a painting for which Tohotama happened to have posed. In the end, you realized that its subject wasn't the nun, but the man-woman standing before her, something you were scarcely conscious of while you were painting it. Why this obsession with mahus?
"Why don't you tell me what you think of your portrait?" Koké persisted.
"The only thing I'm sure of is that the person in the painting isn't me," responded the Maori.
"He's the Haapuani inside of you," Koké replied. "The one who's had to hide in order to keep from being discovered by the priests and gendarmes. Whether or not you believe me, I assure you that the man on the canvas is you. And not just you. It's the true Marquesan, the one who is disappearing, of whom soon no trace will be left. In the future, people will consult my paintings to see what the Maori were like."
Tohotama laughed, a frank, happy, carefree laugh that brightened the morning, and Haapuani laughed too, but grudgingly. That evening, when the couple was gone and Tioka had come over to talk—he stopped by the House of Pleasure a few times a day to see if Koké needed anything—the white-bearded Maori spent a long time looking at the canvas. To see it better, he brought over one of the pitch torches from the door. Paul asked him no questions. After a while, his neighbor, usually sparing of words, gave his opinion.
"In many paintings, you've painted the island women with muscles and men's bodies," he said, intrigued. "But in this one you've done the opposite: you've painted Haapuani like a woman."
If what Tioka was saying was true, The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa looked more or less as you intended it to, although you had painted it almost entirely blind, except in brief intervals when the brightness of the day, your stubborn efforts, or a merciful god had cleared your sight, and for a few minutes you could correct details and brighten or soften the colors. It wasn't just your sight that was failing you. It was your steadiness, too. Sometimes the tremor in your hand was so strong that you had to lie down on the bed for a while, until your body relaxed and the uncontrollable spasms stopped. Only your masterpieces had been painted in states of incandescence like this, Koké. Would The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa be a masterpiece? If you could get a full look at the canvas, even just for a few seconds, you would know. But you would always be left with the doubt, Koké.
At the next session, Tohotama talked to him about the painting. Why were you always so interested in mahus, in men-women, Koké? He gave her a silly explanation—"they're picturesque, striking, exotic, Tohotama"—but the question nagged at him for the rest of the day, and he kept turning it over in his head that night, in bed, after he had eaten a bit of fruit, changed the bandages on his legs, and taken a few drops of laudanum dissolved in water for the pain. Why, Koké? Maybe because in the evasive, semi-invisible, persecuted mahu, detested as a sinful aberration by priests and pastors, there survived the last untamed vestige of those Maori savages who, thanks to Europe, would soon cease to exist. The primitive people of the Marquesas would be swallowed up and digested by Christian and Western culture—the culture you had defended with so much brio and verbiage, so much exaggeration and slander, back in Tahiti, in Les Guêpes and La Sourire, Koké. Swallowed up and digested like the Tahitians before them, and corrected in matters of religion, language, ethics, and, of course, sex. In the very near future, things would be as clear-cut for Marquesans as they were for any bourgeois, churchgoing European. There were two sexes and that was enough—who needed more? Man and woman, male and female, penis and vagina: easy to tell apart, and separated by an unbridgeable gap. Ambiguity in matters of love and desire, as in matters of faith, was a sign of barbarism and vice, as degrading in the eyes of civilization as anthropophagy. The man-woman, the woman-man, were abnormalities to be extirpated the way God razed Sodom and Gomorrah. Poor mahus still left on these islands! The hypocritical colonists and colonial administrators sought them out to hire them as house servants, because they were known to be good at cooking, washing clothes, caring for children, and keeping house. But in order not to fall afoul of the priests and ministers, they forbade them to dress and array themselves like women. When the mahus twined flowers in their hair, wore bracelets on their wrists and bangles on their ankles, and dressed as girls, daring—surely with considerable misgivings and fear of being discovered—to fleetingly display themselves in such attire, they didn't suspect that they were the last gasps of a culture, that primitive man's healthy, spontaneous, uninhibited acceptance of everything inside him—his desires, his fantasies—was soon to be no more. The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa was a tombstone, Koké.
Despite what the blind old Maori woman said when she touched your hooded penis, you were closer to the islanders than to people like Monsignor Martin or the gendarme Jean-Pierre Claverie. Or to those colonists, made callous by ignorance and greed, whom you served as a mercenary in Papeete. You understood savages; you respected them; you envied them. Whereas you despised your supposed compatriots.
At least this much you were sure of, Koké. You didn't paint like a modern, civilized European. No one could be fooled into thinking that. Although you had intuited it in a vague way before, it was in Brittany, first in Pont-Aven and then in Le Pouldu, that you understood it with complete certainty. Art had to break free from its narrow mold, from the tiny horizon to which it had been confined by the artists, critics, academics, and collectors of Paris; it had to open up to the world, mix with other cultures, expose itself to other winds, other landscapes, other values, other races, other beliefs, other ways of living and thinking. Only then would it recover the power that the soft, easy, frivolous, materialistic life of the Parisians had leached from it. You had done it, gone out into the world to seek, to learn, to drink deep of everything that was unknown or rejected in Europe. It had cost you, but you didn't regret it, did you, Koké?
You didn't. You were proud of having made it this far, even in the state you were in. Painting had a price, and you had paid it. When you returned to Paris to face the winter after those summer and autumn months spent in Pont-Aven, you were a different person. You had changed inside and out; you were euphoric, sure of yourself, wild with joy at having at last discovered your path. And avid for mischief and scandal. One of the first things you did in Paris was to attack the beautiful Louise, good old Schuff's wife, with whom you had previously only allowed yourself to flirt. Now, in this new rebellious, bold, iconoclastic, anarchic mood, you seized the opportunity the first time you were alone—good old Schuff was giving his drawing classes at the academy—to launch yourself at Louise. Could it be said that you took advantage of her, Paul? That would be an exaggeration. At most, you seduced and corrupted her. Because Louise resisted only at first, more for appearances' sake than out of conviction. And she never seemed to regret her indiscretion afterward.
"You're a savage, Paul. How dare you lay your hands on me?"
"You said it yourself, my lovely. I'm a savage. I don't follow the same rules as the bourgeoisie. My instincts guide my actions now. And this new philosophy will make me a great artist."
A prophetic declaration of principles, Koké. Did good old Schuff ever find out how you betrayed him? If he did, he must have been able to forgive you. A superior being, that Alsatian. Much better than you, certainly, in terms of civilized morality. Which was doubtless why he always painted so badly.
The next day, after some final retouchings, Koké paid Haapuani the agreed sum. The painting was finished. Or was it? You hoped so. In any case, you no longer had the strength or the will to keep working on it.
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