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 the 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."
Did you ever love her, Paul? Not when she died, true. But when you were a child, living with your great-great-uncle Pío Tristán in Lima, you loved her very much. One of your clearest childhood memories was how sweet and pretty the young widow looked in the big old house where you lived like royalty, in the central Lima neighborhood of San Marcelo, when she dressed like a Peruvian lady and draped her slender body in a big silver-bordered mantilla, covering her head and half her face with it and leaving only one of her eyes visible. How proud Paul and his little sister, María Fernanda, felt when the vast family clan of Tristáns and Echeniques complimented Aline Gauguin. "So pretty!" "A picture, a vision."
Where was the portrait you painted of her in 1888, working from memory and the only photograph of her you had kept, buried in your chest of odds and ends? It was never sold, as far as you knew. Did Mette have it in Copenhagen? You should ask her in your next letter. Was it among the canvases in the possession of Daniel de Monfreid or good old Schuff? You'd ask them to send it to you. You remembered it in great detail: a greenish-yellow background, like that of a Russian icon, the color highlighting Aline Gauguin's long and lovely black hair. It fell to her shoulders in a graceful sweep, and was tied at the neck with a violet ribbon, arranged in the shape of a Japanese flower. Real Andalusian hair, Paul. You worked hard to make the eyes look the way you remembered them: big, black, curious, a little shy, and quite sad. Her very white skin came to life at the cheeks with the blush that rose on them when someone spoke to her, or she entered a room where there were people she didn't know. Shyness and quiet strength were her prevailing character traits; the capacity for suffering silently and without complaint; the stoicism that so infuriated Grandmother Flora, Madame-la-Colère—your mother had told you so herself. You were absolutely certain that your Portrait of Aline Gauguin revealed all of that and brought to the surface the prolonged tragedy that was your mother's life. You had to find it and get it back, Paul. It would keep you company here in Punaauia, and you wouldn't feel so lonely anymore, with the open sores on your legs and the ankle those idiot doctors in Brittany didn't fix right.
Why did you paint that portrait, in December 1888? Because in the last futile attempt you and Gustave Arosa had made to mend your relationship, you had just learned about that hideous trial. The revelation posthumously reconciled you with your mother; not with your guardian, but with her. But did it really, Paul? No. You were already such a barbarian that even hearing about your mother's martyrdom when she was a girl—Gustave Arosa let you read all the trial documents because he thought you would feel friendlier toward him if you shared his sorrow—didn't relieve you of the resentment that had been gnawing at you ever since Aline, after you returned from Lima and had been living for a few years with Uncle Zizi in Orléans, left you as a boarder at Monsignor Dupanloup's Catholic school and went to Paris. To be Gustave Arosa's lover and kept woman, of course! You had never forgiven her for it, Koké. Not for leaving you in Orleáns, or for being the lover of that millionaire dilettante art collector. So what kind of savage were you, Paul? A hypocrite with bourgeois prejudices, that's what you were. "I forgive you now, Mother," he bellowed. "Forgive me, too, if you can." He was thoroughly drunk, and his thighs burned as if a small inferno were blazing in each one. He thought of his father, Clovis Gauguin, dying at sea on the voyage to Lima as he was fleeing France for political reasons, and buried at ghostly Port Hunger, near the Straits of Magellan, where no one would ever go to put flowers on his grave. And of Aline Gauguin, arriving in Lima widowed and with two small children, on the brink of despair.
It was then, feeling so forlorn, unable to leave his hut because of the pain in his ankle, that he remembered his mother's prophecy, made in the will in which she left him her few paintings and books. She wished you success in your career. But she added a sentence that galled you still: "Since Paul has made himself so disliked by all my friends, one day my poor son will be utterly alone." Your prophecy came true, Mother. Your son was a lone wolf, a lonely dog. She guessed at the savage inside of you before your true nature was revealed, Paul. Yet it wasn't true that you had been rude to all of Aline Gauguin's friends, only to Gustave Arosa, your guardian. And you had been rude to him. You could never smile at him or make him believe you loved him, no matter how kind he was to you or how many gifts and how much good advice he gave you, or how he supported you when you gave up the sea to make your way in the world of finance. He got you a job at the firm of Paul Bertin so that you could try your luck on the Paris stock exchange, and he did you many other favors. But he could never be your friend, because if he loved your mother, it was his duty to leave his wife and publicly proclaim his love for Aline Chazal, widow of Gauguin, instead of secretly keeping her as his mistress for the sporadic satisfaction of his desires. Yet a savage shouldn't be troubled by such foolish matters. What sort of prejudices were these, Paul? Though of course you weren't a savage then, but simply a bourgeois who made his living on the stock exchange and dreamed of being as rich as Gustave Arosa. His great burst of laughter shook the bed and knocked down the mosquito net, which wrapped itself around him, trapping him like a fish.
When the pains subsided, he made inquiries about his old vahine, Teha'amana. She had married a young man from Mataiea called Ma'ari, and she was still living in the village with her new husband. Although he had few hopes, Paul sent a message with the boy who cleaned Punaauia's little Protestant church, begging her to come back to him and promising her many presents. To his surprise and satisfaction, in a few days Teha'amana appeared at the door of his hut. She was carrying a small bundle of clothes, as she had been the first time. She greeted him as if they had just seen each other the day before. "Good morning, Koké."
Though plumper now, she was still a beautiful, graceful girl, with a sculptural body and ripe breasts, buttocks, and belly. Her arrival cheered him so much that he began to feel better. The pain in his ankle disappeared, and he started to paint again. But the reunion with Teha'amana didn't last long. The girl couldn't hide her revulsion at his sores, though Paul almost always kept his legs bandaged, after smearing them with a salve of arsenic that soothed the itch. Making love with her now was a pale imitation of the celebrations of the body that he remembered. Teha'amana balked, sought excuses, and when there was no way out of it, Paul saw—divined—how her face screwed up in distaste, and she played along though repugnance prevented her from feeling any pleasure. No matter how he showered her with gifts and swore that his eczema was a passing infection, soon to be cured, the inevitable occurred: one morning Teha'amana picked up her little bundle and left, without saying goodbye. Some time later, Paul learned that she was living again in Mataiea with her husband Ma'ari. What a lucky man, you thought. She was an exceptional young woman and it wouldn't be easy to replace her, Koké.
It wasn't. Sometimes mischievous local girls would come to watch him paint or sculpt after their catechism classes at Punaauia's Protestant and Catholic churches (equidistant from his hut), amused by the half-naked giant surrounded by brushes, paints, canvases, and half-carved pieces of wood. Although he occasionally managed to drag a girl into his bedroom and take his pleasure with her wholly or in part, none of them agreed to be his vahine, as he was always proposing. The coming and going of girls brought him trouble, first with the Catholic priest, Father Damian, and then with the minister, Reverend Riquelme. Both came, separately, to reproach him for his shameless, immoral behavior and his corruption of the native girls. Both threatened him: he might bring the law down upon himself. To both he responded that there was nothing he would like better than to have a permanent companion, because these teasing games were a waste of his time. But he was a man with needs. If he didn't make love, his inspiration dried up. It was as simple as that, gentlemen.
Then, six months after Teha'amana's departure, he found another vahine: Pau'ura. She was—naturally—fourteen years old. She lived near the village, and she sang in the Catholic choir. Two or three times after the evening practices, she made her way to Koké's hut. Stifling her giggles, she stared for a long time at the pornographic postcards displayed on a wall of the studio. Paul gave her presents and went to buy her a pareu in Papeete. At last, Pau'ura agreed to be his vahine, and came to live in the hut. She wasn't as pretty, bright, or passionate as Teha'amana, and she neglected her household duties; instead of cleaning or cooking, she ran off to play with the village girls. But her feminine presence in the hut did him good, especially at night, lessening the anxiety that kept him from sleeping. Hearing Pau'ura's steady breathing and seeing the shape of her sleeping body in the dark calmed him and gave him back a measure of security.
What was keeping you awake at night? Why were you in this perpetual nervous state? It wasn't the vanishing of your inheritance from Uncle Zizi and the meager profits of the auction at the H?tel Drouot. You had grown used to living without money; that never prevented you from sleeping. It wasn't the unspeakable illness either. Because now the sores had closed again, after tormenting you for so long. The pain in your ankle was bearable for the moment. What was it, then?
Thoughts of his father, the political fugitive whose heart stopped in the middle of the Atlantic as he was fleeing France for Peru; and memories of the Portrait of Aline Gauguin. Where was it? Neither Monfreid nor Schuff had it; they had never even seen it. Mette was hiding it in Copenhagen, then. But he had asked for news of its whereabouts in two letters, and in her one response she hadn't mentioned the portrait. He asked a third time. When would you receive a reply, Paul? There would be a six-month wait, at least. Hopelessness got the better of him: you would never see it again. Aline Gauguin's likeness became another irritation, something you couldn't get out of your head.
It was the memory of the flesh-and-blood Aline Chazal, not just that of her image, that besieged him. Why was it now that you kept remembering over and over again the misfortunes that marked the life of your grandmother's only surviving child? It would've been better if the unfortunate daughter of Flora Tristán had died like her two brothers.
At that last meeting with his guardian, Paul saw how Gustave Arosa's eyes filled with tears as he described Aline Chazal's ordeal. That this man knew every detail confirmed Paul's suspicions about the relationship between his mother and the millionaire. She was so close-mouthed, so jealous of her secrets—to whom if not a lover would she have confided her shameful history? As you learned the macabre details of Aline Gauguin's life, instead of weeping like your guardian, you were overcome by jealousy and shame. Now, however, on this warm, windless night, the air sweet with the smells of trees and plants, the light of the big yellow moon like the color you used for the background of Aline Gauguin's portrait, you wanted to cry, too. For yourself, for the unfortunate journalist Clovis Gauguin, but especially for your mother. Hers was a terribly sad childhood, certainly. Born after Grandmother Flora had already fled your grandfather's house—that heartless monster André Chazal, that revolting hyena, was your grandfather, much as it chilled your blood to admit it—she spent the first years of her life as a fugitive, not knowing what a home or a family was. Under the skirts of fast-moving Grandmother Flora, fleeing the persecution of the abandoned husband, Aline was kept in boardinghouses, small hotels, and seedy inns or, even worse, left with peasant wet nurses. Without father or mother, her childhood must have been dismal. When Grandmother Flora was away for two years in Arequipa, in Lima, crossing the sea, she left Aline with a kindhearted woman from the Angoulême countryside who took pity on her, as Grandmother Flora herself told it in Peregrinations of a Pariah. How you regretted not having that memoir here with you, Paul.
Upon returning to France, Flora rescued Aline, who was able to enjoy her mother's company for just three years. This period after being taken from Angoulême to Paris, to the little house at number 42, rue du Cherche-Midi, when she was enrolled as a day student at a girls' school on the nearby rue d'Assas, was the happiest time of Aline's life. Gustave Arosa said so, and it must have been true, since she had told him so herself: it was the only time she had her mother, a home, a cozy routine approximating normality. Until October 31, 1835, when the nightmare began that would only end three years later, with the pistol shot in the rue du Bac. The day it began, Aline Chazal was on her way home from school, accompanied by a maid. A drunk, carelessly dressed man, his red eyes bulging, stopped her in the middle of the street. In a single motion he shoved the terrified maid aside and pushed Aline into a waiting carriage, shouting, "A girl like you should be with her father, a good man, not with a degenerate like your mother. I tell you, I am your father, André Chazal." October 31, 1835: the beginning of Aline's torments.
"What a way to discover the existence of her father," Gustave Arosa said, with deep sadness. "Your mother was just ten years old, and she had no memory of André Chazal." It was the first of three kidnappings the girl would suffer, events that had made her the sad, melancholy, wounded being she was ever after, the woman you painted in that missing portrait, Paul. But worse than the kidnapping itself, worse than the cruel, brutal way her father made himself known to Aline, were the motives, the reasons that drove that loathsome creature to abduct her. Greed! Money! The illusion of a ransom to be paid in Peruvian gold! How did the rumor, the myth, that the woman who abandoned him had returned from Peru swimming in the riches of the Tristáns of Arequipa reach that worthless scum, your grandfather André Chazal? He didn't kidnap Aline out of fatherly love, or the pride of a wronged husband. Rather, he intended to blackmail Grandmother Flora and strip her of the fortune he imagined she had brought back from South America. "There is no limit to the vileness and depravity of some human beings," lamented Gustave Arosa. And indeed, André Chazal's behavior resembled that of the worst kinds of animal: crows, vultures, jackals, vipers. The wretch had the law on his side; women who fled their homes were, under the pious moral code of Louis Philippe's reign, as contemptible as whores, and had fewer legal rights.
Madame-la-Colère handled the situation well, didn't she, Paul? It was such things that suddenly made you feel visceral sympathy and limitless admiration for the grandmother who died four years before you were born. She must have been crushed, destroyed, by her daughter's kidnapping. But she didn't lose her presence of mind. With the help of relatives on her mother's side of the family, the Laisneys (and especially her uncle, Major Laisney), she arranged a meeting with her husband—because Aline's kidnapper was still her husband in the eyes of the law. The meeting took place four weeks after the kidnapping, at Major Laisney's house in Versailles. You could easily imagine the scene, and once you had made a few quick sketches depicting it. The cold conversation, the reproaches, the shouts. And all of a sudden, your magnificent grandmother hurling a flowerpot—a basin, a chair?—at André Chazal's head and, in the confusion, taking Aline by the hand and running away with her down the empty, flooded streets of Versailles. A providential rainstorm aided her escape. Your grandmother was an incredible woman, Koké!
After that amazing rescue, the story grew tangled, opaque, and looped back on itself in Paul's memory, like a bad dream. Denounced and persecuted, Grandmother Flora went from police station to police station, from prosecutor to prosecutor, from courtroom to courtroom. Since scandal makes lawyers famous, Jules Favre, an ambitious, detestable young attorney who would later go into politics, assumed André Chazal's defense in the name of order, the Christian family, and morality, and set himself to ruining the reputation of the escaped housewife, unworthy mother, unfaithful wife. And the girl? Where was your mother while all of this was happening? She had been sent by the court to a chilly boarding school, where Chazal and Grandmother Flora could visit her separately, just once a month.
On July 28, 1836, Aline was kidnapped for the second time. Her father took her by force from the boarding school run by Mademoiselle Durocher at number 5, rue d'Assas, and secretly shut her up in a disreputable boardinghouse on the rue du Paradis-Poissonnière. "Can you imagine the girl's state of mind after such upheavals, Paul?" whimpered Gustave Arosa. After seven weeks, Aline escaped from her confinement, climbing out a window, and managed to make her way to Grandmother Flora, who was now living on the rue du Bac. For a few months, she was able to be at home with her mother.
But Chazal, with the help of the devious Jules Favre, got the law and the police to hunt down the girl and return her to his custody. On November 20, 1836, Aline was kidnapped for the third time, this time by a police commissioner at her front door, and turned over to her father. At the same time, the King's Counsel informed Grandmother Flora that any attempt to snatch Aline from her father would mean prison for her.
Now came the foulest and ugliest part of the story. So foul and ugly that on the afternoon that Gustave Arosa, thinking to ingratiate himself with you, showed you the letter that the girl managed to get to Grandmother Flora in April 1837, you had hardly begun to read it when you closed your eyes, sickened by disgust, and returned it to your guardian. That letter played a role in the trial, was printed in the newspapers, became part of the legal record, and fueled gossip in Paris's salons and watering holes. André Chazal lived in a squalid lair in Montmartre. In her letter, with spelling mistakes in every line, the girl desperately begged her mother to rescue her. At night she felt fear, pain, and panic, because her father—"Monsieur Chazal," she said—usually drunk, made her lie down naked with him on the only bed in the room, while he, naked too, held her, kissed her, rubbed himself against her, and wanted her to hold him and kiss him as well. So foul, so ugly was this episode that Paul preferred to gloss over it, as well as over the charge his grandmother Flora levied against André Chazal, accusing him of rape and incest. Terrible, enormous accusations, and they sparked the expected scandal, but—thanks to the consummate skill of that other monster, Jules Favre—they landed the incestuous rapist in jail for only a few weeks, since although all signs indicated that he was guilty, the judge decreed that "the material fact of incest" could not be "irrefutably proved." Furthermore, the verdict condemned the girl to live apart from her mother once again, at a boarding school.
Had you put all that drama, with its tincture of Grand Guignol, in your Portrait of Aline Gauguin, Paul? You weren't sure. You wanted the canvas back so that you could find out. Was it a masterpiece? Maybe it was. In it, you remembered your mother's shy gaze burning dark and steady, gleaming blue, piercing the spectator and losing itself at some indeterminate point in space.
"What are you looking at in my painting, Mother?"
"My life, my poor wretched life, my son. And yours, too, Paul. I would have liked your life to be different—not like your grandmother's or mine or that of your poor father, who died at sea and was buried at the ends of the earth, but the life of someone normal, settled, safe; a life without hunger, fear, flight, or violence. It wasn't to be. I bequeathed you my bad luck, Paul. Forgive me, son."
When, some time later, Koké's sobs awakened Pau'ura and she asked him why he was crying, he lied to her.
"My legs are burning again, and the ointment is all used up."
It seemed to you that the moon—radiant Hina, goddess of the Arioi, the ancient Maori—was sad, too, motionless in the sky of Punaauia, shining through the leaves intertwined in the square of the window.
Now there was hardly a cent left of the inheritance from Uncle Zizi, and the money Paul had brought from Paris. Neither Monfreid, nor Schuff, nor Ambroise Vollard, nor the other dealers with whom he had left paintings and sculptures in France showed any signs of life. His most faithful correspondent, as always, was Daniel de Monfreid. But Monfreid couldn't find a buyer for a single canvas or sculpture, not even a miserable sketch. Food grew scarce, and Pau'ura complained. Paul proposed an exchange to the Chinese owner of the only shop in Punaauia: he would give drawings and watercolors in return for food for himself and his vahine until he received money from France. At last, the grocer grudgingly agreed.
A few weeks later, Pau'ura told him that the Chinaman, instead of keeping the drawings, hanging them on the wall, or trying to sell them, was using them to wrap his wares. She showed him what was left of a scene of Punaauia mango trees, stained, wrinkled, and spotted with fish scales. Limping, leaning on the cane that he now needed to move anywhere at all, even inside the hut, Paul went to the shop and berated the owner for his lack of sensitivity. He was so loud that the Chinaman threatened to go to the police. From then on, Paul's hatred of the Punaauia shopkeeper began to extend itself to all the Chinese living in Tahiti.
Ill health and lack of money were not the only things that kept him in a state of frustration, always on the verge of exploding in rage. There was also his obsessive preoccupation with his mother and her portrait, lost without a trace. Where was it? And why was it the disappearance of that particular canvas—you had lost so many, without blinking an eye—that plunged you into depression, filling you with foreboding? Were you going mad, Paul?
For a while he stopped painting, instead just sketching in his notebooks and sculpting small masks. He worked without conviction, distracted by his worries and his physical ills. His left eye became infected and was always weeping. The Papeete druggist gave him some drops for conjunctivitis, but they had no effect at all. When the vision of the infected eye began noticeably to deteriorate, he was frightened: were you going blind? He went to the Vaiami Hospital, and the physician, Dr. Lagrange, made him stay. From the hospital, Paul wrote a letter full of bitterness to the Molards, his old neighbors on the rue Vercingétorix, in which he told them, "Ever since my infancy misfortune has pursued me. Never any luck, never any joy. Everyone always against me, and I exclaim: God Almighty, if You exist, I charge You with injustice and spitefulness."
Dr. Lagrange, who had lived in the French colonies for a long time, never liked him. He was a man in his fifties, too bourgeois and formal—with his little bald spot, rimless spectacles pinching the end of his nose, stiff collar and bow tie despite the heat of Tahiti—to be friendly with a bohemian of outrageous habits who mingled with the natives, and about whom the worst kind of stories circulated around Papeete. But he was a conscientious professional, and he submitted him to a rigorous examination. The diagnosis came as no surprise to Paul. His eye infection was another manifestation of the unspeakable illness, which had moved into a more serious stage, as the rash and suppurating sores on his legs indicated. Would it keep getting worse, then? How much longer, Dr. Lagrange?
"It is an illness of long duration, as you know," said the doctor, evading the question. "You must continue to adhere strictly to the treatment. And be careful with the laudanum; don't exceed the dosage I've prescribed."
The doctor hesitated. He wanted to add something but didn't dare, doubtless fearing your reaction, since in Papeete you had become known for your temper.
"I'm the kind of man who can stand bad news," Paul encouraged him.
"You know, too, that this is a very contagious illness," murmured the doctor, wetting his lips with the tip of his tongue. "Especially if one has sexual intercourse. In that case, the transmission of the malady is inevitable."
Paul almost responded with a crude remark, but he restrained himself in order not to aggravate the problems he already had. After he had been in the hospital for eight days, the administration presented him with a bill for 118 francs, warning him that if he didn't pay at once, his treatment would be suspended. That night he climbed out a window and jumped the hospital gate to reach the street. He returned to Punaauia in the public coach. Pau'ura announced that she was four months pregnant. She also told him that the Chinese grocer, in retaliation for his shouting, had started a rumor in the village that Paul had leprosy. The neighbors, alarmed by the idea of such a horrifying illness, were uniting to petition the authorities to make him leave town, shut him up in a leper colony, or rule that he keep away from the populated places of the island. Father Damian and Reverend Riquelme were backing them up because, although they probably didn't believe the Chinaman's gossip, they were happy to seize the chance to free the village of a lecher and a heathen.
None of this frightened or worried him much. He spent most of the day dozing in the hut, his mind emptied of all memories and longing. Since his only source of provisions had dried up, he and Pau'ura ate mangoes, bananas, coconuts, and breadfruit, which she picked nearby, and the fish that the girls who had befriended him sometimes brought, behind their families' backs.
Around this time, Paul finally began to forget the portrait of his mother. Another obsession replaced Aline Gauguin: his conviction that the Arioi secret society still existed. He had read about it in Moerenhout's book about ancient Maori beliefs, lent to him by the colonist Auguste Goupil. And one day he set out to prove that the natives of Tahiti were keeping the existence of this mythical society hidden, guarding it jealously from foreigners, European or Chinese. Pau'ura told him that he was imagining things; the Maori villagers who still came to visit him assured him that he was mad. Most of them had never even heard of the secret society of the Arioi, gods and lords of the ancient Tahitians. And the few who had heard of it swore that no natives believed in such antiquated notions anymore, that they were beliefs lost in the mists of time. But Paul, stubborn and single-minded, persisted day and night for several months on the subject of the Arioi. And he began to paint canvases and carve idols and wooden statues inspired by the imaginary beings. The Arioi made him want to paint again.
They're lying to me, you thought; they still see me as a European, a popa'a, not the barbarian I have become inside. A few dozen years of French colonization couldn't have wiped out centuries of beliefs, rituals, myths. In order to defend their religious traditions, the Maori must surely have hidden them away in a holy place, out of reach of the Protestant ministers and Catholic priests, enemies of their gods. The secret society of the Arioi, foundation of the most glorious phase of Maori life on all the islands, was still alive. Its members probably met in the depths of the forest to perform the old dances and sing; the permanent expression of their beliefs was in their tattoos. Though prohibited, and not as elaborate and mysterious as those of the Marquesas, tattoos flourished in Tahiti, hidden under pareus. To those who knew how to read them, they revealed the position of the individual in the Arioi hierarchy. When Paul began to claim that sacred prostitution, anthropophagy, and human sacrifices were still practiced in the brooding silence of the forests, the word spread in Punaauia that although it might not be true that the painter had leprosy, he had probably lost his mind. In the end, people laughed at him when he asked them, sometimes imploring, sometimes furious, to reveal the secret of the tattoos and to initiate him into the society of the Arioi: Koké had paid his dues, Koké was a Maori now.
A letter from Mette ended this ominous stage with a final blow. Written two and a half months previously, it was dry and cold: his daughter Aline, just twenty, had died that January of pneumonia, which she had caught after being exposed to the cold as she returned from a dance in Copenhagen.
"Now I know why I've been troubled by the memory of my mother and her portrait ever since I came back from Europe," Paul told Pau'ura, with Mette's letter in his hand. "It was a sign. My daughter was named Aline after my mother. She was delicate, too, a little shy. I hope she didn't suffer as much in her childhood as the other Aline Gauguin."
"I'm hungry," Pau'ura interrupted him, touching her stomach with a comical expression on her face. "No one can live without food, Koké. Haven't you noticed how thin you are? You have to do something so we can eat."
