MATAIEA, APRIL 1892
He owed his nickname, Koké, to Teha'amana, who was his first wife on the island, since Titi Little-Tits, the New Zealander–Maori chatterbox he lived with for his first few months in Tahiti—in Papeete, then Paea, and finally Mataiea—wasn't his wife, properly speaking, just a lover. In the beginning, everyone called him Paul.
He had arrived in Papeete at dawn on June 9, 1891, after a journey of two and a half months from Marseille, with stops at Aden and Noumea, where he had to change ships. When he set foot in Tahiti at last, he had just turned forty-three. He had brought all his belongings with him, as if to show that he was finished forever with Europe and Paris: one hundred yards of canvas, paints, oils, and brushes, a hunting horn, two mandolins, a guitar, several Breton pipes, an old pistol, and a bundle of old clothes. He was a man who seemed strong—but your health was already secretly undermined, Paul—with prominent, darting blue eyes, a straight-lipped mouth generally curled in a disdainful sneer, and a broken nose like a hawk's beak. He had a short, curly beard and long brown hair, shading to red, that he cut shortly after coming to this city of barely three thousand souls (five hundred of them popa'a, or Europeans), because Lieutenant Jénot, of the French navy, one of his first friends in Papeete, told him that his long hair and little Buffalo Bill cowboy hat made the Maori think he was a mahu, or a man-woman.
He arrived full of expectation. Breathing the warm air of Papeete, dazzled by the brilliant light shining from the bluest of blue skies, and feeling all around him the presence of nature in the explosion of fruit trees that sprang up everywhere and filled the dusty little streets of the city with smells—orange, lemon, apple, coconut, mango, exuberant guava, nutritious breadfruit—he was seized by a desire to work that he hadn't felt in a long time. But he couldn't start immediately, because he had gotten off on the wrong foot in the land of his dreams. A few days after his arrival, the capital of French Polynesia buried the last Maori king, Pomare V, in an impressive ceremony that Paul observed with pencil in hand, filling a notebook with sketches and drawings. A few days later, he thought he was about to die too. At the beginning of August 1891, just as he was beginning to adapt to the heat and the penetrating fragrances of Papeete, he suffered a violent hemorrhage and a racing of the heart that made his chest rise and fall like a bellows and left him gasping for breath. The helpful Jénot took him to the Vaiami Hospital, named for the river flowing by on its way to the sea, a vast complex of buildings with coquettish wooden railings and windows screened against insects, its gardens riotous with mango trees, breadfruit trees, and royal palms with lofty topknots where songbirds clustered. The doctors prescribed a digitalis-based medicine for his weak heart, mustard plasters to treat the sores on his legs, and the application of cupping glasses to his chest. And they confirmed that this attack was yet another manifestation of the unspeakable illness with which he had been diagnosed months before in Paris. The Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny who ran the Vaiami Hospital scolded him, half in jest and half seriously, for swearing like a sailor ("That's what I was for many years, Sister"), for smoking his pipe ceaselessly despite his ill health, and for demanding with brusque gestures that his cups of coffee be dosed with splashes of brandy.
As soon as he left the hospital—the doctors wanted him to stay, but he refused, since the twelve francs a day that they charged wreaked havoc on his budget—he moved to one of the cheapest boardinghouses he could find in Papeete, in the Chinese quarter behind the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, an ugly stone building erected just a few feet from the sea. He could see the cathedral's reddish-shingled wooden steeple from the boardinghouse. Concentrated in the neighborhood, in wooden shacks ornamented with red lanterns and inscriptions in Mandarin, were many of the three hundred Chinese who had come to Tahiti as agricultural laborers but, because of the poor harvests and the ruin of some of the colonial estates, had migrated to Papeete, where they devoted themselves to running small businesses. Mayor Fran?ois Cardella had authorized the opening of opium dens in the neighborhood; only the Chinese were allowed to visit, but shortly after moving in, Paul managed to sneak into one and smoke a pipe. The experience didn't seduce him; the pleasure of narcotics was too passive for him, possessed as he was by the demon of action.
He was able to live cheaply in the Chinatown boardinghouse, but the cramped quarters and pestilence—there were pigpens in the area, and the slaughterhouse, where all kinds of animals were killed, was nearby—diminished his desire to paint and forced him out onto the street. He would go and sit at one of the little portside bars and spend hours playing dominoes over a sugary absinthe. Lieutenant Jénot—slender, elegant, gracious, very well bred—let him know that living among the Chinese in Papeete would ruin his reputation among the colonists, which Paul was happy to hear. What better way of becoming the savage he had long dreamed of being than to be shunned by the popa'a of Tahiti?
He didn't meet Titi Little-Tits in any of Papeete's seven little port bars, where sailors passing through went to get drunk and look for women, but rather in the big Market Square, an open space around a railed-off square fountain from which issued a languid trickle of water. Bordered by the rue Bonard and the rue des Beaux Arts, and adjacent to the gardens of City Hall, Market Square was the central place for selling food, household goods, and cheap wares from dawn until midafternoon; at night, however, it became the Meat Market, as it was called by the Europeans of Papeete, whose terrifying visions of the place were associated with licentiousness and sex. Swarming with roving vendors of oranges, watermelon, coconuts, pineapples, chestnuts, syrupy sweets, flowers, and trinkets, it was the site of festivities and dances that ended in orgies in the pale glow of oil lamps, drumbeats echoing in the dark. It wasn't just the natives who took part; there were also some Europeans of dubious reputation: soldiers, sailors, traveling merchants, vagabonds, nervous adolescents. The freedom with which love was bargained for and practiced there, in scenes of true collective abandon, thrilled Paul. When it became known that the Parisian painter who lived among the Chinese in Papeete was also an assiduous visitor to the Meat Market, his reputation touched bottom among the families of colonial society. Never again was he invited to the Military Club, where he had been taken by Jénot shortly after he arrived, or to any ceremony presided over by Mayor Cardella or Governor Lacascade, who had received him cordially upon his arrival.
Titi Little-Tits was at the Meat Market that night, offering her services. She was a woman of mixed New Zealander and Maori blood, friendly and talkative, who must have been beautiful in a youth spent early in rough living. Paul agreed with her on a modest fee, and brought her back to his boardinghouse. But the night they spent together was so pleasant that Titi Little-Tits refused to take his money. Enamored of Paul, she moved in with him. Although she looked older than she was, she was a tireless lover and in those first months she helped him stave off his loneliness and adjust to his new life in Tahiti.
Soon after they began living together, she agreed to accompany him to the interior of the island, far from Papeete. Paul explained that he had come to Polynesia to live the life of the natives, not a European life, and that to do so it was necessary for him to leave the Westernized capital. They lived for a few weeks in Paea, where Paul never felt quite comfortable, and then in Mataiea, some sixty-five miles from Papeete. There, he rented a hut on the bay, from which he could bathe in the sea. Across the bay was a small island, and behind the hut rose a steep wall of sharp mountain peaks, dense with vegetation. As soon as they were established in Mataiea, he began to paint, with true creative fury. And in the hours spent smoking his pipe and sketching, or standing in front of his easel, he lost interest in Titi Little-Tits, whose incessant talk distracted him. After painting he would strum his guitar or sing popular tunes, accompanying himself on his mandolin, so that he wouldn't have to talk to her. When will she leave? he wondered, curiously observing Titi Little-Tits's evident boredom. It wasn't long before she did. When he had finished some thirty paintings and had been in Tahiti for exactly eight months, he woke up one morning and discovered a farewell note. It was a model of concision: "Goodbye and no hard feelings, dear Paul."
He didn't mourn her much; really, once he was painting seriously, she had become more of a nuisance than good company. She plagued him with her chatter; if she hadn't left, he would probably have had to throw her out. At last he could concentrate and work in peace. After illnesses, difficulties, and missteps, he began to feel that his coming to the South Seas in search of the primitive world hadn't been in vain. Not in vain at all, Paul. Since burying yourself in Mataiea, you had produced thirty paintings, and although none might be masterpieces, your painting was freer, bolder because of the wild world around you. But were you happy? No, you weren't.
A few weeks after the departure of Titi Little-Tits, he began to crave a woman. His Mataiea neighbors, almost all Maori, with whom he was friendly and whom he sometimes invited to his hut to drink rum, advised him to search for a companion in the villages on the east coast, where there were many girls eager to be married. In the end, it was easier than he had supposed. He went on a horseback expedition that he dubbed "in search of the Sabine," and in the tiny settlement of Faaone, at a shop by the side of the road where he stopped for a drink, the woman serving him asked what he was looking for there.
"A girl who'd like to live with me," he joked.
The woman, broad in the hips but still pretty, studied him for a moment before speaking again, scrutinizing him as if she were trying to read his soul.
"Maybe my daughter would suit you," she proposed at last, very serious. "Do you want to see her?"
Taken aback, Paul agreed. Moments later, the woman returned with Teha'amana. She said that the girl was only thirteen, despite her developed body, with its firm breasts and thighs, and fleshy lips that parted over a set of bright white teeth. Paul moved closer to her, somewhat flustered. Would she like to be his wife? The girl nodded, laughing.
"You aren't afraid of me, even though you don't know me?"
Teha'amana shook her head.
"Have you ever been sick?"
"No."
"Do you know how to cook?"
Half an hour later, he set out home for Mataiea, followed on foot by his brand-new acquisition, a local beauty who spoke charming French and was carrying all her belongings on her shoulder. He offered to sit her on the horse's rump, but the girl refused, as if he had proposed some sacrilege. From that day on, she called him Koké. The name spread rapidly, and soon all the residents of Mataiea—and later all Tahitians and even many Europeans—would call him that.
Many times he would recall those first months of conjugal life with Teha'amana in the hut in Mataiea in the middle of 1892 as the best he had known in Tahiti, and maybe the world. His little wife was an endless source of pleasure. Willingly, without reservations, she gave herself to him when he asked, and loved him freely, with gratifying delight. She was a hard worker, too—so different from Titi Little-Tits!—and she washed clothes, cleaned the hut, and cooked with as much enthusiasm as she made love. When she swam in the sea or the lagoon, her inky skin was dappled with reflections that moved him. On her left foot she had seven toes instead of five; two were fleshy growths that embarrassed the girl. But they amused Koké, and he liked to stroke them.
Only when he asked her to pose did they quarrel. It bored Teha'-amana to stay still in a single position for a long time, and sometimes she would simply walk away with a scowl of annoyance. If it hadn't been for his chronic problems with money, which never arrived in time and slipped through his fingers when it did arrive—the remittances sent by his friend Daniel de Monfreid from the sale of paintings in Europe—Koké would have said that in those months happiness was at last catching up with him. But when would you paint your masterpiece, Koké?
Later, with his habit of turning minor incidents into myths, he would tell himself that the tupapaus destroyed the sense he had in the early days with Teha'amana of nearly being able to touch Eden. But it was to those demons of the Maori pantheon that you owed your first Tahitian masterpiece, too: you couldn't complain, Koké. He had been on the island for almost a year, and still he knew nothing about the evil spirits that rise from corpses to poison the lives of the living. He learned of them from a book he was loaned by Auguste Goupil, the richest colonist on the island, and this—what a coincidence—at almost the same time that he had proof of their existence.
He had gone to Papeete, as he often did, to see if there was any money from Paris. These were journeys that he tried to avoid, because a round trip on the public coach cost nine francs, and there was the bone-jarring torment on the wretched road, too, especially if it was muddy. He had left at dawn in order to return by afternoon, but a downpour had washed out the road and the coach let him off in Mataiea after midnight. The hut was dark. That was odd. Teha'amana never slept without leaving a small lamp burning. His heart skipped a beat: might she have left him? Here, women changed husbands as easily as they changed clothes. In that respect at least, the efforts of missionaries and ministers to get the Maori to adopt the strict Christian model of the family were quite futile. In domestic matters the natives had not entirely lost the spirit of their ancestors. One day, a husband or wife would simply decide to move out, and no one would be surprised. Families were made and unmade with an ease unthinkable in Europe. If she had gone, you would miss her very much. Yes, Teha'-amana you would miss.
He entered the hut and, crossing the threshold, felt in his pockets for a box of matches. He lit one, and in the small bluish-yellow flame that flared between his fingers, he saw a sight he would never forget, and would try to rescue over the next days and weeks, painting in the feverish, trancelike state in which he had always done his best work. As time passed, the sight would persist in his memory as one of those privileged, visionary moments of his life in Tahiti, when he seemed to touch and live, though only for a few instants, what he had come in search of in the South Seas, the thing he would never find in Europe, where it had been extinguished by civilization. On the mattress on the ground, naked, facedown, with her round buttocks lifted and her back slightly arched, half turned toward him, Teha'amana stared at him with an expression of infinite horror, her eyes, mouth, and nose frozen in a mask of animal terror. He was frightened himself, and his palms grew wet, his heart beating wildly. He had to drop the match, which was burning the tips of his fingers. When he lit another, the girl was in the same position, with the same expression on her face, petrified with fear.
"It's me, it's me—Koké," he said soothingly, going to her. "Don't be afraid, Teha'amana."
She broke into tears, sobbing hysterically, and in her incoherent murmuring he caught several times the word tupapau, tupapau. It was the first time he had heard it, though he had read it before. As he held Teha'amana on his knees, cradled against his chest while she recovered, he was immediately reminded of the book he had borrowed from Goupil, Travels to the Islands of the Pacific Ocean, written in 1837 by a French consul to the islands, Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout, in which there appeared the strange word that Teha'amana was now repeating in a choked voice, scolding him for leaving her there with no oil in the lamp, knowing how afraid she was of the dark, because it was in the dark that the tupapaus came out. That was it, Koké: when you entered the dark room and lit the match, Teha'amana mistook you for a ghost.
So those spirits of the dead did exist, evil creatures with hooked claws and fangs, things that lived in holes, caves, hidden places in the brush, and hollow trunks, and came out at night to frighten the living and torment them. Moerenhout's book was meticulous in its descriptions of the disappeared gods and demons that existed before the Europeans came and eradicated the Maori beliefs and customs. And perhaps they even made an appearance in that novel by Loti, the novel Vincent liked so much and which first put the idea of Tahiti in your head. Not all was lost, after all. Something of that lovely past still beat beneath the Christian trappings the missionaries and pastors had forced on the islanders. It was never discussed, and every time Koké tried to get something out of the natives about their old beliefs, about the days when they were free as only savages can be free, they looked at him blankly and laughed—what was he talking about?—as if what their ancestors used to do and love and fear had disappeared from their lives. It wasn't true; at least one myth was still alive, proved by the fretting of the girl you held in your arms: tupapau, tupapau.
He felt his cock stiffen. He was trembling with excitement. Noticing, the girl stretched out on the mattress with that cadenced, slightly feline slowness of the native women that so seduced and intrigued him, waiting for him to undress. He lay down beside her, his body on fire, but instead of climbing on top of her, he made her turn over and lie facedown in the position in which he had surprised her. He was still seeing the indelible spectacle of those buttocks tightened and raised by fear. It was a struggle to penetrate her—she purred, protested, shrank, and finally screamed—and as soon as he felt his cock inside her, squeezed and painful, he ejaculated with a howl. For an instant, while sodomizing Teha'amana, he felt like a savage.
The next morning he began to work at first light. The day was dry and there were sparse clouds in the sky; soon a riot of colors would erupt around him. He went for a brief plunge under the waterfall, naked, remembering that shortly after he had arrived, an unpleasant gendarme called Claverie had seen him splashing in the river with no clothes on and fined him for "offending public morality." Your first encounter with a reality that contradicted your dreams, Koké. He went back to the hut and made a cup of tea, tripping over himself. He was seething with impatience. When Teha'amana woke up half an hour later, he was so absorbed in his sketches and notes, preparing for his painting, that he didn't even hear her say good morning.
For a week he was shut away, working constantly. He only left his studio at midday to eat some fruit in the shade of the leafy mango tree that grew beside the hut, or to open a can of food, and he persisted until the light faded. The second day, he called Teha'amana, undressed her, and made her lie on the mattress in the position in which he had discovered her when she mistook him for a tupapau. He realized immediately that it was absurd. The girl could never reproduce what he wanted to capture in the painting: that religious terror from the remotest past that made her see the demon, that fear so powerful it materialized a tupapau. Now she was laughing, or fighting to hold back laughter, trying to make herself look frightened again as he begged her to do. Her body lacked the right tension, too, the arch of the spine that had lifted her buttocks in the most arousing way Koké had ever seen. It was stupid to ask her to pose. The raw material was in his memory, the image he saw every time he closed his eyes, and the desire that drove him those days while he was painting and reworking Manao tupapau to possess his vahine every night, and sometimes during the day, too, in the studio. Painting her he felt, as he had only a few times before, how right he had been in Brittany at the Pension Gloanec when he assured the young men who listened ardently to him and called themselves his disciples, "To truly paint we must shake off our civilized selves and call forth the savage inside."
Yes, this was truly the painting of a savage. He regarded it with satisfaction when it seemed to him that it was finished. In him, as in the savage mind, the everyday and the fantastic were united in a single reality, somber, forbidding, infused with religiosity and desire, life and death. The lower half of the painting was objective, realist; the upper half subjective and unreal but no less authentic. The naked girl would be obscene without the fear in her eyes and the incipient downturn of her mouth. But fear didn't diminish her beauty. It augmented it, tightening her buttocks in such an insinuating way, making them an altar of human flesh on which to celebrate a barbaric ceremony, in homage to a cruel and pagan god. And in the upper part of the canvas was the ghost, which was really more yours than Tahitian, Koké. It bore no resemblance to those demons with claws and dragon teeth that Moerenhout described. It was an old woman in a hooded cloak, like the crones of Brittany forever fixed in your memory, timeless women who, when you lived in Pont-Aven or Le Pouldu, you would meet on the streets of Finistère. They seemed half dead already, ghosts in life. If a statistical analysis were deemed necessary, the items belonging to the objective world were these: the mattress, jet-black like the girl's hair; the yellow flowers; the greenish sheets of pounded bark; the pale green cushion; and the pink cushion, whose tint seemed to have been transferred to the girl's upper lip. This order of reality was counterbalanced by the painting's upper half: there the floating flowers were sparks, gleams, featherlight phosphorescent meteors aloft in a bluish mauve sky in which the colored brushstrokes suggested a cascade of pointed leaves.
The ghost, in profile and very quiet, leaned against a cylindrical post, a totem of delicately colored abstract forms, reddish and glassy blue in tone. This upper half was a mutable, shifting, elusive substance, seeming as if it might evaporate at any minute. From up close, the ghost had a straight nose, swollen lips, and the large fixed eye of a parrot. You had managed to give the whole a flawless harmony, Koké. Funereal music emanated from it, and light shone from the greenish-yellow of the sheet and the orange-tinted yellow of the flowers.
"What should I call it?" he asked Teha'amana, after considering many names and rejecting them all.
The girl thought, her expression serious. Then she nodded, pleased. "Manao tupapau." It was hard for him to tell from Teha'-amana's explanation whether the correct translation was "She is thinking of the spirit of the dead" or "The spirit of the dead is remembering her." He liked that ambiguity.
A week after he had finished his masterpiece he was still giving it the final touches, and he spent whole hours standing in front of the canvas, contemplating it. You had succeeded, hadn't you, Koké? The painting didn't look like the work of a civilized man, a Christian, a European. Rather, it seemed that of an ex-European, a formerly civilized man, an ex-Christian who, by force of will, adventure, and suffering, had expelled from himself the frivolous affectations of decadent Paris and returned to his roots, that splendid past in which religion and art and this life and the next were a single reality. In the weeks after finishing Manao tupapau Paul enjoyed a peace of mind he hadn't known for a long time. In the mysterious way they seemed to come and go, the sores that had appeared on his legs shortly after he left Europe a few years ago had disappeared. But as a precaution, he kept applying the mustard plasters and bandaging his shins, as Dr. Fernouil had prescribed in Paris, and as he had been advised by the doctors at the Vaiami Hospital. It had been a while since he'd hemorrhaged from the mouth as he had when he first came to Tahiti. He kept whittling small pieces of wood, inventing Polynesian gods based on the pagan gods in his collection of photographs, and sitting in the shade of the big mango tree, he sketched and started new paintings only to abandon them almost as soon as they were begun. How to paint anything after Manao tupapau? You were right, Koké, when you lectured in Le Pouldu, in Pont-Aven, at the Café Voltaire in Paris, or when you argued with the mad Dutchman in Arles, that painting wasn't a question of craft but of circumstance, not of skill but of fantasy and utter devotion: "Like becoming a Trappist monk, my friends, and living for God alone." The night of Teha'amana's fright, you told yourself, the veil of the everyday was torn and a deeper reality emerged, in which you were able to transport yourself to the dawn of humanity and mingle with ancestors who were taking their first steps in history, in a world that was still magical, where gods and demons walked alongside human beings.
Could the circumstances in which the bounds of time were transgressed, as they were the night of the tupapau, be artificially produced? In an attempt to find out, he planned the tamara'a on which he would spend, in one of those unthinking acts that punctuated his life, a good part of an important remittance (eight hundred francs) sent to him by Daniel de Monfreid, product of the sale of two of his Brittany paintings to a Rotterdam shipowner. As soon as he had the money in hand, he explained his plan to Teha'amana: they would invite many friends, and they would sing, eat, dance, and drink for a whole week.
They paid a visit to the grocer in Mataiea, a Chinese man named Aoni, to pay off the debt they had accumulated. Aoni, a fat Oriental with the drooping eyelids of a turtle, was fanning himself with a piece of card; he gazed in astonishment at the money he no longer expected to be paid. In a show of extravagance, Koké bought an impressive array of canned food, beef, cheeses, sugar, rice, beans, and drink: liters of bordeaux, bottles of absinthe, flasks of beer and rum made in the island's distilleries.
They invited a dozen native couples from around Mataiea, and some friends from Papeete, like Jénot, the Drollets, and the Suhas, functionaries in the colonial administration. The courteous and amiable Jénot arrived, as always, loaded down with foodstuffs and drink that he had bought at cost from the army commissary. The tamara'a—a dish of fish, potatoes, and vegetables wrapped in banana leaves and baked underground with hot stones—was delicious. When they finished eating it, night was falling, and the sun was a ball of fire sinking behind the blazing reefs. Jénot and the two French couples took their leave, since they wanted to return to Papeete that same day. Koké brought out his two guitars and his mandolin and entertained his guests with Breton songs, and others that were popular in Paris. Better to be left with the natives. The presence of Europeans was always an impediment, preventing the Tahitians from giving free rein to their instincts and truly enjoying themselves. He had discovered this in his first days in Tahiti, at the Friday dances in Market Square. The fun really began only when the sailors had to return to their ships and the soldiers to their barracks, and the crowd that was left behind was almost entirely free of popa'a. His Mataiea friends were drunk, men and women alike. They were drinking rum mixed with beer or fruit juice. Some danced and others sang aboriginal songs, in unison and to a steady beat. Koké helped light the bonfire not far from the big mango tree; through its tentacular branches, heavy with greenery, the stars twinkled in an indigo sky. He could understand quite a bit of Tahitian Maori now, but not when it was sung. Very near the fire, dancing with feet planted, hips undulating, and skin incandescent with the reflection of the flames, was Tutsitil, owner of the land where Koké had built his hut, and Tutsitil's wife, Maoriana, still young and slightly plump, her elastic thighs showing through her flowered pareu. She had the typical column-like Tahitian legs, ending in big flat feet that seemed to merge with the earth. Paul desired her. He brought the couple beer mixed with rum and drank and toasted, his arms around them, humming along with the song they were singing. The two islanders were drunk.
"Let's take off our clothes," said Koké. "Are there mosquitoes, do you think?"
He took off the pareu that covered the lower part of his body and stood naked, with his half-erect cock very visible in the watery light of the fire. No one imitated him. They looked at him with indifference or curiosity, but no sense of involvement. What were they afraid of, zombies? No one answered him. They kept dancing, singing, drinking as if he weren't there. He danced beside his neighbors, trying to imitate their movements—that impossible roll of the hips, the rhythmic little leap on both feet with the knees hitting each other—without succeeding, though he was filled with euphoria and optimism. He had wedged himself between Tutsitil and Maoriana, and now he was pressed against the woman. He held her around the waist and pushed her slowly with his body, moving her away from the circle illuminated by the fire. She offered no resistance, and the expression on her face was unchanged. She seemed not to notice Koké's presence, as if she were dancing with the air, or a shadow. Struggling a little, he made her slide to the ground, neither of them uttering a word. Maoriana let him kiss her but she didn't kiss him back; she sang softly to herself through her teeth as he opened her mouth with his. He made love to her with his senses roused by the chanting of the guests who were still on their feet, in a circle around the fire.
When he awoke a day or two later—impossible to be sure exactly—with the sun stabbing at his eyes, he was covered with insect bites, and suspected that he had somehow found his own way to his bed. Teha'amana, half her body uncovered by the sheet, was snoring. His breath was heavy and acrid from the mix of drinks, and he felt generally unwell. "Should I stay or go back to France?" he wondered. He had been in Tahiti for a year and had finished nearly sixty canvases, as well as innumerable sketches and drawings and a dozen wood carvings. And most important of all, a masterpiece, Koké. To return to Paris and exhibit the best of a year's work from Polynesia—wasn't it tempting? The Parisians would be flabbergasted by the explosion of light, of exotic landscapes; by the world of men and women in their natural state, proud of their bodies and their feelings. They would be overwhelmed by the bold shapes and daring color combinations, which made the impressionists' games seem like child's play. Would you do it, Koké?
When Teha'amana got up and went to make a cup of tea, he was lost in a waking dream, his eyes wide open, savoring his triumphs: the glowing reviews in newspapers and magazines; the gallery owners full of glee at seeing collectors fighting over the paintings, offering insane prices that not even Monet, Degas, Cézanne, the mad Dutchman, or Puvis de Chavannes had ever commanded. Paul would graciously enjoy the glory and fortune that France grants the famous, without letting it go to his head. He would refresh the memory of those colleagues who had doubted him: "I told you my method; don't you remember?" And he would help the young with recommendations and advice.
"I'm pregnant," said Teha'amana, when she came back with the steaming cups of tea. "Tutsitil and Maoriana came to ask whether, now that you have money, you'll return what they loaned you."
He paid them and some other neighbors what he owed them, but then he discovered that all he had left from Daniel de Monfreid's remittance was one hundred francs. How long could they eat on that? He was almost out of canvas and stretchers, his heavy paper had been used up, and he had only a few tubes of paint. Should you return to France, Paul? In the state you were in, and with the dismal future that awaited you here, was Tahiti still worthwhile? But if you wanted to return to Europe, it was necessary to act immediately. There wasn't the slightest chance you could pay for your own ticket. The only way out was to get yourself repatriated. You had the right, according to French law. But since it was one thing to say so and another to make it happen, it was urgent that Monfreid and Schuffenecker, in Paris, should start proceedings at the ministry. It would take six or eight months at least for them to act and for the official response to reach you. To work, then, without a moment's delay.
That same day, his body still aching from what he had drunk at the tamara'a, he wrote to his friends urging them to plead his cause at the ministry so that the minister of fine arts (was it still Monsieur Henri Roujon, who had given him letters of introduction when he came to Tahiti?) would agree to repatriate him. He also wrote a long letter to Roujon, justifying his request on grounds of ill health and total insolvency, and finally, a letter to his legitimate wife, Mette, in Copenhagen, telling her that he would see her in a few months because he had decided to return to France to show the results of his work in the South Seas. Without telling Teha'amana his plans, he got dressed and left for Papeete to mail his letters. The post office, on the capital's main street—rue de Rivoli, lined with tall fruit trees and the mansions of Papeete's leading citizens—was about to close. The oldest employee (was his name Foncheval or Fonteval?) told him that his letters would be sent off soon along the route to Australia; the Kerrigan was preparing to set sail. Although that way was longer, it was safer than the San Francisco route, because there weren't as many transfer points at which the mail could be lost.
He went to have a drink at a bar on the port. Barely a year after his arrival, he had decided to return to Paris. He wouldn't change his mind, but he didn't feel at ease with himself. Plainly speaking, it was an escape, forced by defeat. With the mad Dutchman in Arles; in Brittany; in Paris with Bernard, Morice, and good old Schuff—in all his conversations and dreams about the need to seek a still-virgin world that had not yet been captured in European art, a central consideration had also been escape from the cursed daily quest for money, the everyday struggle to survive. The urge to live in nature, off the land, like primitive man—the healthiest of peoples—had inspired his adventures in Panama and Martinique, and later had led him to investigate Madagascar and Tonkin before deciding on Tahiti. But despite your dreams, here you couldn't live "in nature" either, Koké. One couldn't subsist solely on coconuts, mangoes, and plantains, the only things graciously offered on tree branches. Then, too, the red plantains grew only in the mountains, and one had to scale steep slopes to gather them. You'd never learn to farm the land, because those who farmed dedicated the kind of time to their labor that you needed for painting. Which meant that here too, despite the landscape and the natives—a pale reflection of what was once the fertile Maori civilization—money ruled people's lives and deaths, and condemned artists to enslave themselves to Mammon. If you didn't want to die of hunger, you had to buy canned food from the Chinese merchants, and spend, spend a kind of money that you, misunderstood and rejected by the despicable snobs who dominated the art market, didn't have and never would have. But you had survived, Koké; you had painted; you had enriched your palette with the colors of the island; and living by your motto—"the right to dare anything"—you had risked all, like the great creators.
Only at the last minute would you confess to Teha'amana your plans to return to France. That was over, too. You should be grateful to the girl. Her young body, her languid ease, her alertness, had given you pleasure, rejuvenated you, at times made you feel like a true primitive. Her natural liveliness, her diligence, her docility, her companionship, made life bearable for you. But love had to be excluded from your existence; it was an insurmountable obstacle to your mission as an artist, since it made men bourgeois. Now, with that seed of yours inside her, the girl would begin to swell up, would become one of those monstrous lumbering natives toward whom you would feel repulsion instead of affection and desire. Better to terminate the relationship before it ended badly. And the son or daughter you would have? Well, it would be one more bastard in a world of bastards. Rationally, you were sure you were doing the right thing in returning to France. But something inside you didn't believe it, because for the next eight months, until you finally embarked in June 1893 for Noumea on the Duchaffault, the first stage of your return trip to Europe, you felt uneasy, upset, afraid you were making a serious mistake.
He did many things in those eight months, but one of the times he thought he might paint a second Tahitian masterpiece, he was mistaken. He had traveled from Mataiea to Papeete to see if he had received any letters or money, and in the city there was a commotion at the house of his friend Aristide Suhas, whose young son, a year and eight months old, was dying from an intestinal infection. Koké arrived just after the boy expired. Upon seeing the dead child, the sharp little face, the cerulean skin, he felt a tickle of excitement. Without hesitation, and feigning a sorrow he didn't feel, he embraced Aristide and Madame Suhas, and offered to paint a portrait of the dead child and give it to them as a gift. Husband and wife looked at each other with tears in their eyes and agreed: it would be another way of keeping their son by their side.
He made a few sketches immediately, and others during the wake. He then painted the portrait on one of his last canvases, with great caution and attention to detail. He carefully studied the face, which expressed the precise instant of the child's passing, its eyes closed and its hands clasping a rosary. But when he delivered the painting, instead of thanking him for the gift, Madame Suhas was furious. She would never allow the portrait into her house.
"But what's wrong with it?" asked Koké, not entirely displeased by her reaction.
"That isn't my child. That's a little Chinaman, one of those yellow people who're overrunning the island. What have we done to you to make you mock our pain by giving our angel the face of a Chinaman?"
Koké couldn't contain his laughter, and the Suhases threw him out of the house. On his way back to Mataiea, he looked at the portrait with new eyes. Yes, without realizing it you had orientalized him. Then you rebaptized your newest creation with a mythical Maori name: Portrait of Prince Atiti.
Some time later, upon noticing that Teha'amana's belly wasn't growing, although four months had passed since she had announced that she was pregnant, he noted the fact.
"I bled and I lost it," she said, without interrupting her mending. "I forgot to tell you."
