On the morning of September 16, 1901, when La Croix du Sud dropped anchor just off Atuona, on the island of Hiva Oa, and Paul, from the ship’s bridge, spotted the cluster of people waiting for him at the little port—a gendarme in white uniform, missionaries in long robes and straw hats, a cluster of half-naked native children—he felt great happiness. At last his dream of reaching the Marquesas Islands had come true, and at last the horrible crossing of six days and six nights from Tahiti on that filthy, sweltering little ship was over. In all his time at sea he had scarcely been able to sleep a wink, because he was forever killing ants and cockroaches and driving away the rats that came prowling around his cabin in search of food.
No sooner had he disembarked in the tiny town of Atuona—a settlement of a few thousand people, surrounded by forested hills and two steep mountains crowned with foliage—than he actually met a prince, on the very dock! This was Ky Dong, an Annamite who went by the nom de guerre he had taken when he decided to give up his career in the French colonial administration of his native Vietnam to dedicate himself to political agitation, the anticolonialist struggle, and even terrorism, it seemed. That, at least, was the verdict of the Saigon court, which ruled that he was a subversive and sentenced him to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, in remote Guiana. Before baptizing himself Ky Dong, Prince Nguyen Van Cam had studied literature and science in Saigon and Algeria. From Algeria he returned to Vietnam, where he was forging a splendid bureaucratic career for himself before he abandoned it to fight the French occupation. How had he ended up in Atuona? Thanks to the bête noire of Les Guêpes, ex-governor Gustave Gallet, who met the Annamite in Papeete on a stopover of the ship that was carrying him to serve out his sentence on Devil’s Island. Impressed by Ky Dong’s sophistication, intelligence, and polished manners, the governor saved his life: he made him an officer at Atuona’s medical outpost. That was three years ago. The Annamite had accepted his fate with oriental equanimity. He knew he would never leave here, unless it were to be taken to the hell of Guiana. He had married a Marquesan woman from Hiva Oa, spoke fluent Maori, and was liked by all. Small, discreet, possessed of a rather sinuous natural elegance, he faithfully performed his duties as medical officer and, in this limbo of ignorant folk, did everything he could to preserve his sense of intellectual inquiry and discrimination.
He knew that the new arrival from Papeete was an artist, and he offered to help him settle in and inform him about the place where (“rashly,” he said) Monsieur Gauguin had decided to bury himself. And so he did. His friendship and advice were invaluable to Paul. From the port Ky Dong led him to the hut of Matikana, a Chinese Maori friend of his who rented rooms, at the end of Atuona’s single little dirt road, which was nearly swallowed up by brush. He kept Koké’s chests and bags at his own house until the artist could buy a piece of land and build a place to live. And he introduced him to the people who would henceforth be his friends in Atuona: the American Ben Varney, an ex-whaler who was stranded on Hiva Oa in a fit of drunkenness and now managed the general store, and the Breton Émile Frébault, farmer, businessman, fisherman, and inveterate chess player.
Buying property in this tiny place surrounded by forests was extremely difficult. All the land in the area belonged to the bishopric, and fearsome Bishop Joseph Martin—stubborn, despotic, and locked in a desperate struggle to rescue the native population from the grip of alcohol—would never sell a plot to a foreigner of questionable morals.
Adopting the strategy devised by Ky Dong—whose wide reading, good humor, and grace of spirit made him an excellent companion—Paul attended Mass daily, starting the day after his arrival in Atuona. At church, he could always be spotted in the front row, following the service devotedly, and he frequently confessed and took communion. Some afternoons he went to hear the rosary said, too. His pious, proper behavior in those first days in Atuona convinced Monsignor Joseph Martin that Paul was a respectable person. And the bishop, in a gesture he would bitterly regret, agreed to sell him, for a modest sum, a lovely plot of land on the outskirts of Atuona. At its rear was the Bay of Traitors, a name the Marquesans hated but used nonetheless for the beach and the harbor, and to the front were the two proud peaks of Temetiu and Feani. Along one side ran the Make Make, one of the twenty or so streams into which the island’s waterfalls flowed. From the moment he was faced with the magnificent sight, Paul thought of Vincent. My God, this was it, Koké; this was it. The place the mad Dutchman dreamed of in Arles, the primitive, tropical spot he talked of ceaselessly while you were living together in the fall of 1888, the place where he wanted to establish the Studio of the South, the community of artists where you would be master, and everything would belong to everyone, since money and its corrupting influence would be abolished. In this studio artists would live in brotherhood in a setting of matchless freedom and beauty, devoted to the creation of an immortal art: canvases and sculptures whose vitality would endure for centuries. How you would shout with glee, Vincent, if you could see the light here, even whiter than the light in Provence, and the explosion of bougainvillea, ferns, acacias, coconut palms, climbing vines, and breadfruit trees!
As soon as he had signed the contract of sale with the bishop, and was the owner of the land, Paul gave up going to Mass and to hear the rosary. Struggling with an ever-growing number of ailments—pains in his legs and back, difficulty walking, poor vision that grew worse every day, and palpitations that made it hard for him to breathe—he threw himself body and soul into the building of the Maison du Jouir—House of Pleasure—the name he and the mad Dutchman had given the imaginary Studio of the South of their daydreams fifteen years ago in Arles. Working side by side with him were Ky Dong, Émile Frébault, a white-bearded native called Tioka who from now on would be his neighbor, and even the island’s gendarme, Désiré Charpillet, with whom Koké got along marvelously.
The House of Pleasure was finished in six weeks. It was built of wood, matting, and woven straw, and like his little houses in Mataiea and Punaauia, it had two floors. The bottom floor, two parallel cubes separated by an open space that would be his dining room, housed the kitchen and the sculpture studio. Above, under a conical straw roof, were the painting studio, the small bedroom, and the bathroom. Paul carved a wooden panel for the entrance with the name of the house, and two big vertical panels flanking the sign, with naked women in voluptuous poses, stylized animals and plants, and invocations that caused an uproar at both the large Catholic and smaller Protestant missions of Hiva Oa: Soyez mystérieuses (Be Mysterious, O Women) and Soyez amoureuses et vous serez heureuses (Fall in Love, O Women, and You Will Be Happy). From the moment he learned that Paul had had the audacity to decorate his house with these obscenities, Bishop Joseph Martin became his enemy. And when he learned that, besides a harmonium, guitar, and mandolin, forty-five pornographic photographs depicting outrageous sexual poses were displayed on the walls of Paul’s studio, he denounced the artist in one of his Sunday sermons as a force for evil, someone the Marquesans should avoid.
Paul laughed at the bishop’s rantings, but the Annamite prince warned him that it was dangerous to make an enemy of Monsignor Martin, because he was a man who carried a grudge, and he was powerful and indefatigable. They met every afternoon, at the House of Pleasure, which Koké had stocked well with food and drink bought at the only store in Atuona, owned by Ben Varney. He hired two servants, Kahui, a half-Chinese cook, and a Maori gardener, Matahaba, who was given precise instructions on how to grow sunflowers, as Koké had done himself in Punaauia. In the end, those sunflowers brightened the garden of the House of Pleasure. The memory of the mad Dutchman almost never abandoned you in your first few months in Atuona—why, Koké? You had managed to erase him from your mind for almost fifteen years, and that was probably a good thing, since the thought of Vincent made you uneasy, disturbed you, and might have disrupted your work. But here in the Marquesas, whether because you were painting very little, or because you felt tired and ill, you were no longer able to keep the image of good Vincent, poor Vincent, unbearable Vincent, with his obsequiousness and his fits of madness, from bursting constantly into your consciouness. Nor could you keep from reliving the events, stories, yearnings, and dreams of those eight weeks of difficult cohabitation in Provence fifteen years ago more clearly than you remembered things that had happened just a few days ago, which you often completely forgot. (For example, you made Ben Varney repeat twice in the same week the tale of how, after a spell of hard drinking, he woke up in the Bay of Traitors and discovered that his whaling ship had sailed away and he was stranded without a cent, or even any papers, and without speaking a word of French or Marquesan.)
Now you felt pity for the mad Dutchman, and even remembered him with affection. But in October of 1888, when, after giving in to his pleading and Theo van Gogh’s pressure on you to accept his brother’s invitation, you went to live with him in Arles, you came to hate him. Poor Vincent! He had placed such hopes in your arrival, believing the two of you would be the pioneering members of the artists’ community of his dreams—a true monastery, a miniature Eden—that the failure of his project drove him mad and killed him.
Among the nightmarish trips that Paul had taken in his life, one of the worst was the fifteen-hour journey, with six changes of train, that it took him to get from Pont-Aven in Brittany to Arles in Provence. He was sorry to leave Pont-Aven. Remaining behind were not only several painter friends who considered him their master but also, above all, Émile Bernard and his sister, the gentle Madeleine. Exhausted, he arrived at the station in Arles at five in the morning on October 23, 1888. In order not to wake Vincent so early, he sought refuge in a neighboring café. To his surprise, the owner recognized him as soon as he came in. “Ah, Vincent’s artist friend!” The mad Dutchman had showed him Paul’s self-portrait, in which he appeared as Jean Valjean, the hero of Les Misérables. Helping him to carry his valises and bags, the café’s owner led him to the place Lamartine outside the city’s walls, very near the Cavalry Gate, which was one of the entrances to the old city, not far from the Roman amphitheater and coliseum. On the corner of the place Lamartine closest to the banks of the Rhône was the Yellow House that the mad Dutchman had rented a few months before, in anticipation of Paul’s arrival. He had painted it, furnished it, decorated the rooms, and hung the walls with paintings, working day and night and worrying obsessively over every detail so that Paul would feel at ease in his new home, and in the proper mood to paint.
But you didn’t feel comfortable in the Yellow House, Paul. You didn’t like the riot of blinding, dizzying colors that leaped out at you wherever you turned your gaze, and Vincent’s fawning welcome and flattery discomfited you as he showed you around the house he had arrayed to please you, anxious for your approval. In fact, the house made you feel wary, and somehow oppressed. Vincent was so excessively friendly and agreeable that from the very first day you began to feel that living with such a man would curb your freedom, that you’d have no life of your own, that Vincent would invade your privacy, become a fulsome jailor. The Yellow House could be a prison for a man as free as you.
But now, at a distance, remembered from your House of Pleasure with its majestic views, the mad Dutchman—overexcited, childlike, as solicitous of you as a sick man of the doctor charged with saving his life—seemed to you an essentially good and defenseless person, infinitely generous and free of envy, resentments, and pretentions, devoted body and soul to art, living like a beggar and not caring in the least, hypersensitive, obsessive, inoculated against any sort of happiness. He clung to you like a drowning man to a scrap of wood, believing that you were wise and strong enough to teach him to survive in the wild world. The responsibility he heaped on you, Paul! Vincent, who understood art, colors, and canvases, understood absolutely nothing about life. That was why he was always unhappy, why he went mad, and why he finally shot himself in the stomach at the age of thirty-seven. How unjust it was that those frivolous magpies, those idle Parisians, should blame you now for Vincent’s tragic end! Instead it was you who were nearly driven mad by the Dutchman, and even came close to losing your life in the two months you spent with him in Arles.
There was trouble from the start at the Yellow House. The first problem was disorder, which Paul hated but which was Vincent’s natural element. They agreed on a strict division of labor: Paul would cook, the Dutchman would shop, and both would clean, on alternate days. In reality, Paul did the cleaning, and Vincent the cluttering. Their first argument arose over the basket of spending money. In a test of the collective property system to be instituted in the Studio of the South, the future artists’ colony that they planned to found in some exotic country, they set up a common fund, where they deposited the money sent to them from Paris by Theo van Gogh. A little notebook and a pencil were provided for each to record how much they had taken. In the end, Paul complained: Vincent was taking the lion’s share, especially for what he euphemistically noted as “hygienic activities”: his dalliances with Rachel, a stick-thin young prostitute, at Madame Virginie’s brothel, not far from the Yellow House, on one of the little streets issuing from the place Lamartine.
The bawdy houses of Arles were another source of disagreement. Paul reproached Vincent for making love only with prostitutes; he preferred to seduce women rather than paying for their attentions. And he was having a fairly easy time of it with the women of Arles, who loved his good looks, clever talk, and easy confidence. Vincent assured him that before Paul’s arrival he had visited Madame Virginie’s only a few times a month; now, however, he was going twice a week. This new sexual ardor distressed Vincent; he was convinced that the energy he expended in “fornicating” (which, as an ex-Lutheran preacher, was what he called it) was subtracted from his work as an artist. Paul mocked the puritanical prejudices of the ex-pastor. In his case, nothing made him more eager to take up his brush than having first satisfied his cock.
“No, no,” the mad Dutchman exclaimed in exasperation. “My best work has always been done in periods of total sexual abstinence. My spermatic painting! I did it by spilling all my sexual energy onto the canvas instead of wasting it on women.”
“What foolishness, Vincent. Or perhaps I simply have sexual energy to spare, for my paintings and my women.”
The two of you disagreed more often than you agreed, and yet sometimes—when you heard your friend speak so candidly and hopefully about his longed-for community of artist-monks in retreat from the world, settled in a distant, primitive country with no links to materialist civilization, dedicated body and soul to painting, and engaged in a brotherhood untouched by shadow—you let yourself be swept away by his dream. It was exciting, of course it was! There was something beautiful, noble, selfless, generous, in the Dutchman’s yearning to found that small society of pure-minded artists, creators, dreamers, secular saints, all pledged to art as medieval knights pledged themselves to fight for an ideal or a lady. Perhaps it was not unlike the dreams that spurred on your own grandmother, as, near death, she traveled France trying to recruit disciples for the revolution that would put an end to all society’s ills. Grandmother Flora and the mad Dutchman would have understood each other, Koké.
Paul and Vincent even disagreed about the Studio of the South. One night, at a café on the symmetrical place du Forum, where they often sat and drank an absinthe after dinner, Vincent proposed that they invite the painter Seurat to join the artists’ community.
“That dot-maker who calls himself a creator?” exclaimed Paul. “Never.” He proposed that instead of the pointillist they take Puvis de Chavannes, whom Vincent hated as much as Paul detested Seurat. The argument went on until dawn. You forgot disputes quickly, Paul; not Vincent. For days he would be pale, distraught, turning the matter over in his head. For the mad Dutchman nothing was insignificant or banal; everything touched a central nerve of existence, was linked to larger themes: God, life, death, madness, art.
If the mad Dutchman deserved your gratitude in any way, it was for being the first to whet your appetite for Polynesia, thanks to a little novel that fell into his hands, and which he loved: The Marriage of Loti by an officer of the French merchant marine, Pierre Loti. The book was set in Tahiti, and it described an earthly paradise before the Fall, where nature was bounteous and beautiful, and the natives free, healthy, and without prejudice or guile, abandoning themselves to life and pleasure with naturalness and spontaneity, full of primitive vigor and enthusiasm. Life was full of paradoxes, wasn’t it, Koké? It was Vincent who dreamed of fleeing decadent, money-mad Europe for an exotic world, seeking the elemental, religious force obliterated in the West by civilization. But he never escaped his European jail. It was you, in the end, who reached Tahiti, and now even the Marquesas, trying to make reality of what the Dutchman dreamed.
“I did what you wanted, I made your dream come true, Vincent,” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Here it is, your House of Pleasure, the House of the Orgasm you tormented me with in Arles. It didn’t turn out the way we thought it would. You realize that, don’t you, Vincent?”
There was no one nearby, no one who could answer. Only the cat and dog you had just brought to live with you at your new house in Atuona were there, watching you attentively, as if they understood the meaning of your bellows into nothingness, which were surely frightening the chickens, cats, and little horses that ran wild in the forests of Hiva Oa.
They had spent plenty of time in Arles talking and arguing about religion, too. There was such a difference between a Protestant, puritan upbringing like Vincent’s and the Catholic education you received in the ten years between 1854 and 1864 that you spent in the small seminary of Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, near Orleáns, under the spiritual guidance of Bishop Dupanloup. Which was the better preparation for life, Koké? Vincent’s was more intense, more austere, stricter, colder, more honest, and also more inhuman. Catholicism was more cynical, more accommodating to man’s corrupt nature, richer and more creative from a cultural and artistic point of view, and probably more human, closer to reality, to life as it was truly lived. Did you remember the night it rained and the mistral blew, when the two of you were shut up in the Yellow House and the mad Dutchman began to talk about Christ as an artist? Not once did you interrupt him, Paul. Christ was the greatest of artists, Vincent said. But he scorned marble, clay, and paint, preferring to cast his works in the living flesh of human beings. He didn’t make statues, paintings, or poems. He created immortal beings, forging the tools for men and women to make perfect, exquisite works of art of their lives. He spoke for a long time, taking swallows of absinthe, and sometimes saying things you couldn’t quite make out. But what you heard him declare at dawn, practically roaring, with tears in his eyes, you did understand, and would never forget.
“I want my paintings to be of spiritual comfort to human beings, Paul, the way the word of Christ was a comfort to them. In classical painting, the halo signified the eternal. It’s that halo I’m trying to replace now with the radiation and vibration of color in my paintings.”
After that, Paul, though you could never muster much enthusiasm for the spectacles of blinding light and fireworks that were Vincent’s paintings, you regarded his violent, extravagant colors with more respect than before. The mad Dutchman seemed drawn to martyrdom in a way that sometimes made a shiver run up your spine.
Although he didn’t feel well, his move to Atuona, the construction of the House of Pleasure, and his new friends all cheered Koké. He was happy the first few weeks in his new home, full of plans. Nevertheless, he had gradually if grudgingly come to realize that while the Marquesas might once have been Paradise, they were, like Tahiti, Paradise no longer. Still, the Marquesan women were beautiful, even more beautiful than the women of Tahiti. Or so they seemed to him, though Ky Dong, the gendarme Désiré Charpillet, Émile Frébault, and his neighbor Tioka laughed, telling him that his poor eyesight was fooling him, since many of the lively, friendly Marquesan women who came to the Maison du Jouir to be shown his pornographic photographs—his collection had become famous all over Hiva Oa—and let themselves be photographed and fondled in front of their husbands, weren’t the attractive girls he believed them to be, but ugly old women, some with faces and bodies disfigured by elephantiasis, leprosy, or syphilis, diseases ravaging the native population. Bah, you didn’t care. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve. It was true that your poor eyes could see less and less. But hadn’t you long been saying that the true artist seeks his models in the memory rather than the outside world: in the private, secret sphere of the mind’s eye, which in your case was in better shape than your physical eyes? The time had come to test your theory, Koké.
This had been a cause for bitter argument with Vincent in Arles. The mad Dutchman declared himself a realist painter and said that artists must go out into the open, setting up their easels in the middle of nature and seeking inspiration there. To keep the peace, Paul humored him the first few weeks he was in Arles. Morning and afternoon, the two friends went with their easels, palettes, and paints to Les Alyscamps, Arles’s big Roman and early Christian necropolis, and each did several paintings of the great avenue of tombs and sarcophagi flanked by rustling poplars that led to the little church of Saint-Honorat. But the mistral rains and gusts soon made it impossible to continue working outside, and they had to shut themselves up in the Yellow House, working from memory or the imagination instead of the natural world, as Paul preferred.
What pained you most was having to accept that in the Marquesas, or on this island at least, not a single trace was left of cannibalism. It was a practice you considered not savage and reprehensible, but virile and natural—hearing you, your new friends looked at you in horror—the sign of a vigorous, creative young culture in a state of constant self-renewal, not yet contaminated by conformism and decadence. In Atuona, no one believed there were any Marquesans who still ate human flesh, on this or any other island; in the remote past, maybe, but not anymore. His neighbor Tioka assured him this was true, and it was corroborated by all the natives he questioned, among them a couple from the island of Tahuata, where there were many redheads. Tohotama, wife of Haapuani—he was called the Witch Doctor—was one of them. Her long hair flowed down her back to her waist, and when the sun was bright, it gave off a rosy glow. Tohotama became his favorite model in Atuona. He even preferred her to Vaeoho, a girl of fourteen—the age you liked your lovers, Koké—who became his wife in his third month in Hiva Oa.
Obtaining Vaeoho required an inland excursion to the valley of Hanaupe, the only trip Koké was able to take on Hiva Oa, with his body so battered. He was accompanied by Ky Dong, an expert on island customs, and Tioka, who was perfectly bilingual. Their hazardous six-mile ride on horseback through dense, damp forests—full of wasps and mosquitoes that raised welts all over his skin—nearly destroyed Paul. The girl was the daughter of the local chieftain of a small native village, Hekeani, and the bargaining with him took several hours. In the end, to get the girl, he agreed to pay for a list of gifts that cost him more than two hundred francs at Ben Varney’s store. He didn’t regret it. Vaeoho was beautiful, hardworking, and cheerful, and she agreed to give him lessons in Marquesan, since the Maori that was spoken here was different from Tahitian. Although he sometimes asked her to pose for him, Koké preferred the redheaded Tohotama as a model; her ample breasts, broad hips, and heavy thighs aroused him, which was something that didn’t happen as often as it once had. With Tohotama, it did. When she came to pose, he always found some way to caress her, which she endured unenthusiastically, with an air of boredom. At last, well fortified with absinthe one afternoon, he maneuvered her to the studio bed. As he made love to her, he heard Vaeoho and the witch doctor Haapuani, Tohotama’s husband, laughing and whispering, amused by the spectacle.
The Marquesans were more free and spontaneous than the Tahitians in sexual matters. Married or single, the women mocked the men and brazenly approached them, despite the constant campaigns of the Catholic and Protestant missions to make them obey the norms of Christian decency. The men were still mostly recalcitrant. And some, like Tohotama’s husband, didn’t hesitate to defy the churches by dressing as mahus, men-women, with knots of flowers in their hair, and feminine ornaments on their ankles, wrists, and arms.
Another of Paul’s disappointments in his new land was learning that the art of tattooing, for which the Marquesans were renowned throughout Polynesia, was disappearing. The Catholic and Protestant missionaries were fighting fiercely to bring an end to it, as a manifestation of barbarism. Few natives living in Atuona tattooed themselves any longer, for fear of incurring the wrath of priests and pastors. It was still done in the island’s interior, in tiny villages lost in the depths of those tangled forests, but the calamitous state of your health unfortunately prevented you from going to see for yourself. The frustration, Koké! To know there were tattooists just a few miles away, and to be unable to go and meet them. He couldn’t even visit the ruins of Upeke and its giant tikis, or stone idols, in the valley of Taaoa, because the two times he had tried to climb there on horseback, his fatigue and pain had made him lose consciousness. To be here, so close to the hidden places where the stunning art of the tattoo still survived—the secret codified lore of the Maori people, in which each figure was a palimpsest to be deciphered—and to be unable to reach them because of the unspeakable illness, kept him awake at night in frustration; some nights he even wept.
Sadly, decadence had reached the island, too. Bishop Joseph Martin, convinced that the illnesses and plagues rampant among the natives were caused by alcohol, had prohibited it. Ben Varney’s store sold wine and spirits only to whites. But the cure was worse than the disease. Since they weren’t allowed wine, the Marquesans of Hiva Oa set up clandestine stills to turn oranges and other fruits into liquors that corroded their insides. Indignant, Koké fought the prohibition by filling the House of Pleasure with demijohns of rum, which he gave away to all the native women who came to visit him.
He felt very tired, and for the first time in his life since he had discovered that painting was his calling, when he was still working on the stock exchange in Paris, he had no desire to take up his brushes and sit in front of an easel. It wasn’t only his physical ailments—the burning of the sores on his legs, his failing eyesight, and his palpitations—that kept him idle, sipping from a glass of absinthe and water, in which he dissolved a cube of sugar. It was a sense of futility, too. Why work so hard, pouring all the little energy you had left into canvases that, when they were finished and, after a lengthy voyage, had reached France, would languish in Ambroise Vollard’s storeroom, or Daniel de Monfreid’s attic, waiting for some shopkeeper to spend a few francs on one to adorn his new home?
One day, after a lesson in Marquesan, Vaeoho said something half in French and half in Maori that he didn’t understand. Or did you not want to understand, Koké? He made her repeat it several times until he hadn’t the slightest doubt what it meant. “Every day you’re older. Soon I’ll be a widow.” He went to the mirror and stared at himself until his eyes hurt.
Then he decided to paint his last self-portrait, as a testament to his decline in this forgotten corner of the world, surrounded by Marquesans who, like him, were sinking into ruin, lethargy, degradation, and despair. He set the mirror next to his easel and worked for more than two weeks, trying to transfer to the canvas the picture that his failing eyes glimpsed with difficulty. It seemed to slip away, evaporate: a man defeated but not yet dead, contemplating the inevitably approaching end with serenity and a kind of wisdom pooled in his gaze, which contained, behind a humiliating pair of spectacles, the summary of an intense life of adventures, folly, searches, failures, struggles. A life that was coming to a close at last, Paul. Your hair was short and white, and you were thin, quiet, waiting with tranquil courage for the final onslaught. You weren’t sure, but you sensed that, of the innumerable self-portraits you had done of yourself—as a Breton peasant, a Peruvian Inca on the curve of a pitcher, Jean Valjean, Christ on the Mount of Olives, a bohemian, a romantic—this, your farewell portrait, of the artist at the end of his journey, was the one that captured you best.
Painting the self-portrait reminded you of the portrait of Vincent painting sunflowers you did in the weeks you were confined by the rain and mistral winds to the Yellow House in Arles. The Dutchman had been obsessed with those flowers; he painted them ceaselessly, and often referred to them when he was expounding his theories on painting. They followed the movement of the sun neither by chance nor in blind obedience to physical laws. No, they themselves possessed some of the fire of that heavenly orb, and if one observed them as devotedly and stubbornly as Vincent, one realized that there were halos encircling them. In painting them, while preserving their true nature, he tried to make them torches or candelabras, too. Madness! Upon showing you the Yellow House for the first time, the mad Dutchman proudly pointed out the sunflowers, literally blazing with molten, fiery gold, that he had painted over your bed. You were scarcely able to suppress an expression of distaste. This was why you had painted him surrounded by sunflowers. The portrait was deliberately lacking the vibrant light that Vincent gave his canvases. On the contrary, there was something flat and opaque about it, and in it, the outlines of the flowers as well as the painter were smudged, blurred. Rather than a distinct and coherent human being, Vincent was a shape, a stuffed, rigid mannequin under unbearable strain, at the point of cracking or exploding: a volcano-man. The rigidity of his right arm, especially, which held his brush, revealed the superhuman effort he had to make to keep painting. And all of this was concentrated in his contorted face and dazed expression, which seemed to say, “I’m not painting, I’m immolating myself.” Vincent didn’t like the portrait at all. When you showed it to him, he spent a long time looking at it, turning very pale and biting his lower lip, which was a tic he had at his worst moments. At last he murmured, “Yes, it is I. But mad.”
Weren’t you, though, Vincent? Of course he was. Paul gradually became convinced of it; he noted the abrupt mood changes that afflicted his friend, the swiftness with which Vincent could shift from sickening, overwhelming flattery to aggression and absurd arguments, to scolding him for some trifle. After each altercation he fell into a deathly stupor, an immobility that Paul, alarmed, had to shake him from with cajolery, absinthe, or by dragging him to Madame Virginie’s to go to bed with Rachel.
Then you made your decision: it was time to leave. This experiment in living together would end badly. Tactfully, you tried to prepare him, dropping hints in your conversations after dinner that, for family reasons, you might have to leave Arles before the year you had agreed to spend together was up. It would have been better if you hadn’t, Paul. The Dutchman realized at once that you had already decided to leave, and was plunged into a state of nervous hysteria, of mental collapse. He was like a lover in despair because his beloved is leaving him. With tears in his eyes and his voice breaking, he begged you, implored you, to stay the full year; alternately, he wouldn’t speak to you for days but only stared at you with hatred and resentment, as if you had done him irreparable harm. Sometimes you felt infinite pity for him, seeing him as a helpless being who was unfit to face the world and who clung to you because he sensed you were strong, a fighter. But other times you were outraged: didn’t you have problems enough without being saddled with the mad Dutchman’s?
Things came to a head a few days before Christmas Eve, 1888. Paul awoke suddenly in his room at the Yellow House, with a feeling of dread. In the faint light that came in through the window, he discerned Vincent’s silhouette at the foot of the bed, watching him. He sat up, frightened. “What is it, Vincent?” Without a word, his friend slipped out like a shadow. The next day, he swore he didn’t remember having gone into Paul’s room; he had been sleepwalking, perhaps. Two days later, on the day before Christmas, at the café on the place du Forum, Paul announced that, to his great sorrow, he had to leave. Family business required his presence in Paris. He would leave in a few days, and if everything could be taken care of, he might come back sometime in the future and stay again for a while. Vincent listened silently, nodding exaggeratedly from time to time. They continued to drink, without speaking. Suddenly, the Dutchman picked up his half-empty glass and hurled it at Paul’s face, furiously. Paul managed to duck it. He got up, strode back to the Yellow House, put a few essential things in a bag. As he was leaving, he collided with Vincent, who was just coming in, and he told him he was going to a hotel and would be back the next day to pick up the rest of his things. He spoke without rancor.
“I’m doing it for both of us, Vincent. The next glass you throw might really hit me. And I don’t know whether I’d be able to contain myself, as I did tonight. I might leap on you and wring your neck. That would be no way for our friendship to end.”
Pale as death, his eyes red, Vincent stared at him, saying nothing. For some time now he had been shaving his head like a recruit or a Buddhist monk, and when he was overcome by sadness or rage, as he was now, his cranium seemed to quiver, like his temples and chin.
Paul left, and outside—you remembered it very clearly—the winter cold chilled him to the bone. On his walk through the walled city he heard families singing carols in some of the houses. He was on his way to the Station, a modest hotel whose owner he knew. As he was crossing the little place Victor Hugo, he heard footsteps very close behind him. A foreboding made him turn, and there, a few feet away, barefoot and with a razor in his hand, was Vincent, glaring at him with terrible eyes.
“What are you doing? What is the meaning of this?” Paul shouted.
The Dutchman turned and ran. Was it wrong of you not to immediately warn the gendarmes about the state your friend was in? Of course it was. But how the devil were you to imagine that poor Vincent, after his frustrated attempt to stab you, would slice off half his left ear and take the piece of bloody flesh, wrapped in newspaper, to Rachel, Madame Virginie’s skinny little whore? And then, as if that weren’t enough, he had to lie down in his own bed with his head wrapped in towels, which, when you entered the Yellow House the next morning—the place surrounded by policemen and gawkers—you would see drenched in blood, like the sheets, walls, and paintings. It seemed the mad Dutchman had not only cut off his ear in some barbaric ritual but also baptized the whole scene of his mutilation with blood. And those wretches, those fops in Paris, blamed you for Vincent’s tragedy. Because after his terrible act, the Dutchman was scarcely heard from again. First, he was shut up in the Hôtel Dieu of Arles; then, for nearly a year, in a sanatorium at Saint-Rémy, and finally, in the last month of his life, in the little town of Auvers-sur-Oise, where he finally shot himself in the stomach, so clumsily that he lay dying for a whole day, in hideous pain. The Paris idlers who never bought any of Vincent’s paintings while he was alive had declared post mortem that he was a genius. And you, because you failed to save him that Christmas Eve, were his executioner and destroyer. Bastards!
Would they discover that you, too, were a genius after your death, Paul? Would your paintings begin to be sold at the same high prices as the mad Dutchman’s? You suspected not. And besides, you cared less than you once had about being recognized, famous, one of the immortals. It would never happen. Atuona was too far from Paris, where artistic reputations and fashions were decided, for the triflers there to take an interest in what you had done. And what obsessed you now wasn’t painting but the unspeakable illness, which, in the fourth month of your stay in Hiva Oa, attacked again, fiercely.
The sores were eating up his legs, and they soiled his bandages so fast that he finally lost the will to change them. He had to do it himself, because Vaeoho refused, repulsed, threatening to leave him if he made her nurse him. He kept the dirty bandages on for two or three days, until they stank and were covered in flies, which he grew tired of shooing away, too. Dr. Buisson, Hiva Oa’s medical officer, whom he had met in Papeete, gave him morphine injections and laudanum. They eased the pain but kept him in a state of mindless somnambulism, a sharp foretaste of the rapid mental deterioration to come. Would you be like the mad Dutchman in the end, Paul? In June of 1902 the pain in his legs made it almost impossible for him to walk. There was hardly any money left from the sale of his house in Punaauia. He invested his last savings in a little pony cart, in which, every afternoon, dressed in a green shirt, blue pareu, and Parisian cap, and with a new wooden staff carved once again with an erect phallus, he drove past the Protestant mission and Pastor Vernier’s lovely tamarind trees, toward the Bay of Traitors. At that hour it was always crowded with boys and girls swimming in the sea or riding bareback on the little wild horses, which whinnied and leaped defiantly over the waves. Across the bay, the deserted island of Hanakee seemed a sleeping giant, one of the great whales that were once hunted by the North American ships that so terrified the natives. As they told it, the crews of these ships would ply the native women with drink and then kidnap them, taking them away and making them their slaves. It was an incident involving one of the whaling ships that had given the bay its terrible name. Tired of the kidnappings, the natives of Hiva Oa received the ship’s crew with celebration, dances, and feasts of raw fish and wild pig. And in the middle of the feasting, they slit all the sailors’ throats. “Admit that they ate them!” Koké bellowed, beside himself, each time he heard this story. “Bravo! Well done! They did right!” Just before the sun set, Koké would return to the House of Pleasure, taking a detour down Atuona’s only street. He drove along it very slowly, reining the pony in, from the harbor to the boardinghouse of the Chinese Maori Matikana, waving ceremoniously at everyone, although he could no longer really see who most people were.
Upon his arrival, because they had heard talk of him as the editor of Les Guêpes, the island’s Catholics welcomed him as one of their own. But his dissipated way of life, his bouts of drunkenness, his intimacies with the natives, and the shocking tales about everything that went on at the House of Pleasure had made them come to see him as a reprobate. The Protestants, whom he had attacked so viciously in Les Guêpes, observed him from a distance, resentfully. But the abrupt departure of Dr. Buisson, transferred to Papeete in the middle of June, drove him to approach the Protestant pastor, Paul Vernier, whom he had attacked personally in the magazine. Ky Dong and Tioka took him to see Vernier, saying that he was the only person on Atuona who had any knowledge of medicine and could help him. The pastor, a mild-mannered, generous man, welcomed Paul without a hint of reproach for past insults, and did try to help him, giving him painkillers and salves for his legs. They had some effect, because in July of 1902 he was able to take a few small steps on his own feet.
To celebrate his momentary improvement, and because Paul was an artist, the gendarme Désiré Charpillet had the idea of naming him judge of the traditional July 14 contest between the choirs of the island’s two schools, Catholic and Protestant. The rivalry between the missions manifested itself in the most insignificant matters. Trying not to poison the relationship further, Paul made a Solomonic judgment: he declared a tie between the competitors. But the verdict left both churches unsatisfied, and angry at him. He had to retreat to the House of Pleasure in the midst of recriminations and general hostility.
But when the pony cart reached his house, he had a pleasant surprise. There, waiting for him, was his neighbor, Tioka, the white-bearded Maori. With great seriousness, he said that he had known Paul long enough now to consider him a true friend. He had come to propose that they celebrate a friendship ceremony. It was very simple. They would exchange their respective names, without giving up their own. This they did, and from that day on his neighbor was Tioka-Koké, and he was Koké-Tioka. Now you were a full-fledged Marquesan, Paul.