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Flora in Auxerre
April 1844
She opened her eyes at four in the morning and thought, Today you begin to change the world, Florita. Undaunted by the prospect of setting in motion the machinery that in a matter of years would transform
humanity and eliminate injustice, she felt calm, strong enough to face the obstacles ahead of her. It was the same way she had felt on that afternoon in Saint-Germain ten years ago, at her first meeting of Saint-Simonians, when she listened to Prosper Enfantin describe the messianic couple who would save the world and vowed to herself, You'll be that Woman-Messiah. Poor Saint Simonians, with their elaborate hierarchies, their fanatical love of science, their belief that progress could be made simply by putting industrialists in government and running society like a business! You had left them far behind, Andalusa.
Unhurriedly, she got up, washed, and dressed. The night before, after the painter Jules Laure visited to wish her luck on her tour, she had finished packing her bags and, with the help of Marie-Madeleine,
the maid, and the water-seller Nol Taphanel, moved them to the foot of the stairs. She herself had carried the freshly printed copies of
The Workers' Union, stopping every few steps to catch her breath because the sack was so heavy. When the carriage arrived at the house on the rue du Bac to take her to the wharf, Flora had been up for hours.
It was still the dead of night. The gas lamps on the corners had been extinguished, and the coachman, buried in a cloak so that only his eyes were visible, urged the horses on with a whistle of his whip. As
she listened to the tolling of the bells of Saint-Sulpice, the streets, dark and lonely, seemed ghostly to her. But on the banks of the Seine, the wharf swarmed with passengers, sailors, and porters preparing for departure. She heard orders and shouts. When the ship set sail, trailing a foamy wake in the brown waters of the river, the sun was shining in a spring sky and Flora sat drinking hot tea in her cabin. Wasting no time, she noted the date in her diary: April 12, 1844. And at once she began to study her travel companions. You would reach Auxerre by dusk, so you had twelve hours in this floating specimen case to expand your knowledge of rich and poor, Florita.
Few of the travelers were bourgeois. Many were sailors off the boats that carried the agricultural produce of Joigny and Auxerre to Paris, and were now on their way home. They were gathered around their master, a hairy, gruff, redheaded man in his fifties, with whom Flora had a friendly exchange. Sitting on deck surrounded by his men, at nine in the morning the master gave each man as much bread as he could eat, seven or eight radishes, a pinch of salt, two hard-boiled eggs, and, in a tin cup passed from
hand to hand, a swallow of wine. These freight sailors earned a franc and a half for a day of labor; over the long winters, they barely scraped by. Their work in the open air was hard when the weather was rainy. But in the relationship of the men with their master, Flora saw none of the servility of the English sailors, who hardly dared meet the eyes of their superiors. At three in the afternoon, the master served them their last meal of the day: slices of ham, cheese, and bread, which they ate in silence, sitting in a circle.
In the port at Auxerre, it took an infernally long time for the baggage to be unloaded. The locksmith Pierre Moreau had made a reservation for her at an old inn in the center of town, and she arrived there
early in the morning. Day was dawning as she unpacked. She got into bed knowing she wouldn't sleep a wink. But for the first time in a long while, during the few hours that she lay watching the light grow through the cretonne curtains, she didn't daydream about her mission, the suffering of humanity, or the workers she would recruit for the Workers' Union. She thought instead about the house where she was born, in Vaugirard, on the outskirts of Paris, a neighborhood of the bourgeoisie whom she now detested. Were you remembering the house itself -- spacious, comfortable, with its manicured gardens and busy maids -- or the descriptions of it your mother gave when you were no longer rich but poor, the flattering memories in which the unhappy woman took refuge from the leaks, disarray, clutter, and ugliness of those two little rooms on the rue du Fouarre? You and your mother were forced to move there after the authorities seized the Vaugirard house, claiming that your parents' marriage, performed in Bilbao by a
French expatriate priest, wasn't valid, and that Mariano Tristn, Spanish citizen from Peru, belonged to a country with which France was at war.
Most likely, Florita, your memory preserved only what your mother had told you of those early years. You were too little to remember the gardeners, the maids, the furniture upholstered in silk and velvet,
the heavy draperies, the silver, gold, crystal, and painted china that adorned the salon and the dining room. Madame Tristn fled into the splendid past of Vaugirard so as not to see the poverty and misery of the foul-smelling place Maubert, crowded with beggars, vagabonds, and lowlifes, or the rue du Fouarre, full of taverns, where you spent several years of your childhood -- those years you remembered well. Carrying basins of water up and down, carrying sacks of rubbish up and down. Afraid of meeting, on the worn creaky steps of the steep little staircase, that old drunkard with the purple face and swollen nose, Uncle Giuseppe, a man with wandering hands who sullied you with his gaze and sometimes
pinched you. Years of scarcity, fear, hunger, sadness, especially when your mother fell into stunned silence, unable to accept such misfortune after having lived like a queen with her husband -- her legitimate husband before God, no matter what anyone said -- Don Mariano Tristn y Moscoso, a colonel of the Armies of the King of Spain who died prematurely of apoplexy on June 4, 1807, when you were barely four years and two months old.
It was just as unlikely that you would remember your father. The full face, the heavy eyebrows, the curly mustache, the faintly rosy skin, the ringed fingers, the long gray sideburns of Mariano Tristn that came to your memory weren't those of the flesh-and-blood father who carried you in his arms to watch the butterflies flutter among the flowers of the gardens of Vaugirard, and sometimes offered to give you your bottle; the man who spent hours in his study reading chronicles of French travelers in Peru; the Don
Mariano who was visited by the young Sim¢n Bol¡var, future Liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. It was the Mariano Tristn of the portrait your mother kept on her night table in the tiny apartment on the rue du Fouarre; the Don Mariano of the oil paintings hanging in the Tristn family house on Calle Santo Domingo in Arequipa, paintings that you spent hours studying until you were convinced that that handsome, elegant, prosperous-looking gentleman was your father.
The first morning noises began to rise from the streets of Auxerre, and Flora knew sleep had fled for good. Her appointments began at nine. She had arranged several, thanks to Moreau, the locksmith, and
the good Agricol Perdiguier's letters of introduction, addressed to his friends at the workers' mutual aid societies of the region. But you had time. A few moments longer in bed would give you strength to rise to the circumstances, Andalusa.
What if Colonel Mariano Tristn had lived many years more? You'd never have known poverty, Florita. Thanks to a good dowry, you'd be married to a bourgeois, and maybe you'd be living in a beautiful
Vaugirard mansion, surrounded by gardens. You'd have no idea what it was like to go to bed with your insides twisted by hunger; you wouldn't know the meaning of such concepts as discrimination and exploitation. Injustice would be an abstract term. But perhaps your parents would have given you an education -- schooling, teachers, a tutor. Though they might not have: a girl from a good family was
educated only in order to win a husband and learn to be a good mother and housewife. You'd have no knowledge of any of the things necessity had forced you to learn. True, you wouldn't make the spelling mistakes that had embarrassed you all your life, and doubtless you'd have read more books. You would spend the years occupying yourself with your wardrobe, caring for your hands, your eyes, your hair, your figure, living a worldly life of soirees, dances, plays, teas, excursions, flirtations. You'd be a lovely parasite burrowed deep into your good marriage. Never would you seek to discover what the world was like beyond your sheltered existence in the shadow of your father, your mother, your husband,
your children. A machine for giving birth, a contented slave, you'd go to church on Sundays, to confession on the first Friday of every month, and now, at forty-one, you'd be a plump matron with an irresistible passion for chocolate and novenas. You would never have traveled to Peru, or seen England, or discovered pleasure in the arms of Olympia, or written the books that you've written despite your poor spelling. And, of course, you would never have become conscious of the slavery of women, nor would it have occurred to you that in order for women to be liberated it was necessary for them to unite with other exploited peoples and wage a peaceful revolution -- as crucial for the future of humanity as the emergence of Christianity 1,844 years ago. "It was better you died,
mon cher papa," she said, laughing, as she leaped out of bed. She wasn't tired. For twenty-four hours she had felt no pains in her back or womb, nor had she noticed the cold presence in her chest. You were in great spirits. Florita.
Copyright c 2003 Mario Vargas Llosa