The True Story of Lotus Eater, Painter of the Marquesas.

I met Lotus Eater on a trip to the Marquesas Islands, where I had traveled in the company of some friends. We had been traveling around French Polynesia for some time and Nuku Hiva, the island from the tales of Melville and Stevenson, with their legends about cannibals and their lush vegetation, was our final destination before setting off for home. We had hired a local driver, the owner of the family-run hostel where we were staying, to show us around, taking us on the rough roads of the island to see its valleys and splendid jungles, amongst waterfalls, copra harvesters, wild goats and an endless symphony of greens and blues, virgin plant life and sparse population. One day, we reached a small village on the coast, set in a beautiful bay with coconut trees scattered along the waterfront. We were set to eat at the best restaurant in the area, run by Mama Ivonne: a mandatory stop for every cruise ship that visits the nearby archeological ruins on the way along the coast. Mama Ivonne was also the eternal mayor and heart and soul of everything that went on in town. The restaurant was a lovely vernacular Marquesan building near the sea offering regional cuisine and as much sophistication as can be had in this part of the world, while not erring toward the luxury and feigned picturesqueness of the resorts on other Polynesian islands.

We had a wonderful meal with Jean Claude, our cheerful guide, enjoying some of the local delicacies, but our limited French was sadly lacking in our attempt to discover the recipe of a delicious fish dish. Mama Ivonne came out, with her gray hair and tired smile, to solve our problem and, when she learned that we spoke Spanish, she beckoned to someone named Valentín to come out.

A dark-skinned man arrived, tanner than any Polynesian but with European features, who turned out to be Uruguayan and who kindly answered our question. Thus began a long chat about the customs in the region and the places we should visit, washed down with bottles of Hinano beer, which did not last long enough to get warm, and the pleasant drowsiness of paradise. Jean Claude took leave for a nap. We talked about almost everything, but my friends' curiosity about the past life of Valentín Ossipoff, as our interpreter was called, met with a wall whenever they tried to find out about his past and how he had ended up in that corner of the world. It sparked his curiosity to learn that I was a painter and he confided that he had recently taken up painting, even though this was the first time in his life that he had ever used a brush. An absent-minded German tourist had left a set of oil paints and some panels behind in one of Mama Ivonne's bungalows and he, who sometimes made some money by helping the mayor with odd jobs and housework, had begun mucking around with the paints.

It took me several more beers to convince him to show me his work, although he fiercely resisted, as if that were some intrinsic part of the privacy he was making every effort to preserve. But we had hit it off, and rejection and rigidity do not fit in well in Polynesia, that fertile land for surrender and the wisdom of letting go. We walked along the dirt path next to the coast to a strange raised construction overrun by vegetation. It was unusual, with its incongruous PVC and glass picture windows and a sort of spiral columns adjoining a wooden cabin. A Dutchman had built it, then abandoned it a few years earlier on land belonging to the mayor, who had let Valentín use it for free. The inside was a single open space with a bed to one side, a kitchen and a few utensils, books and belongings. We had seen a similar layout in another family home a few days earlier at a small vanilla plantation or, obvious differences aside, at the reconstruction of Gauguin's studio, which we had visited on the neighboring island of Hiva Oa. 

The inside and outside seemed one and the same, as if the walls were merely a few strokes, like a theater set, that defined a space to live in the midst of the jungle.

Valentín appeared to immediately regret having invited us in, and only a ukulele, on which I could barely strum a couple tunes, managed to bring back the pleasant atmosphere that we had created. The Uruguayan seemed to have a vast and varied universe of knowledge, from The Odyssey to the sex life of strange insects, from the tonal scales of the music of the Pacific to jokes about cannibals, and from spear fishing techniques to the enigmas of the number 432.

When he decided it was time, he went to the back of the room and brought me the pictures he had been painting. There weren't many, but I found them to be excellent, vibrant, naively sophisticated and far from the work of a beginner. The pieces had been repainted over and over, layer upon layer, picture upon picture, because, as he explained to me, they were the only ones he had and he hadn't the least intention of saving any of them. He merely wanted to paint, just because, for no reason, because it made him happy and because sometimes on rainy days he couldn't do what he liked the most: to be, just to be, to exist, in nature, at the beach, in the forests, between land and sea. I tried to convince him to sell me one, but he didn't want to be left without his media. I tried to convince him that he could paint on any board or cloth, but his smile grew impenetrable and one knew there was no budging a stone or a wave.

When it started to grow dark, we bade him goodbye and went to look for Jean Claude to return to the hostel, but our talkative driver was nowhere to be found. We asked in the restaurant, in the little hotel, in the shop and everyone had seen him leave a few hours earlier, but no one knew where to or why.

In bewilderment, we sat down to wait under the dim light of a streetlamp on the promenade, when Valentín appeared. He told us that if we bought some beer, he could invite us to some raw fish with coconut milk, so we grabbed the chance and went back to the painter's house. I had decided to call him that since I had seen his work: a colleague, one of my own, a member of that brotherhood that needs no degrees or studies, just a good eye and intensity, passion and the need to invent things on a square horizon.

So we spent the night there, talking about colors and clouds, and sounds, while my friends dozed under the influence of the Hinano and I worked on a strategy to salvage for the rest of the world these works, which I found increasingly fascinating, now in the light of the candles even more than in the daylight, playful and joyful, free, as if Tarsila do Amaral and 'Le Douanier' Rousseau had taken LSD one crazy morning. 

Only later did we learn from Jean Claude that Valentín, the son of Russian Jews in Montevideo, had studied commerce and traveled as an accountant on a cruise ship that had stopped at Nuku Hiva and that, once, when the crew was allowed ashore, he had decided to stay there to live, without even going back to the ship to pick up his luggage, knowing no one, barely speaking a few words of French, with no money and no plans.

I was lucky because he was running out of paint and it wasn't going to be easy to get more on the Marquesas, so he was already resigning himself to the idea that the next works would be his last. It didn't matter, as he claimed to have reached a point of needing nothing in particular, not even to paint. But there I was, I guess as part of his destiny or by coincidence or whatever, ready to provide him with new canvases, paints and brushes in exchange for his sending me what he finished. A freighter reached that part of the island once a month with products for Mama Ivonne, some machinery for the copra plantations and the like, direct from Papeete, which is, after all, a civilized French colony, so I thought we could come up with a not very complicated exchange.

He was not entirely sure about it - not at all even - but joy and life won over, more like a Yes Minor than a No Major, and in the end he gave in. I would send him new materials and he would send me the works he finished, on one condition: he wanted to know nothing of the fate of the works, whether or not I sold them, exhibited them or burned them. He didn't want anything like a career as a painter, nor did he want anyone to know who had painted them or why. I agreed because it was the only way to save them. But I told him, 'they are going to ask me, it is not so easy to escape from curiosity, especially if they are half as good as I think on this night of Polynesian magic and beer'. 'Make up someone,' I suggested, 'sign however you want, even if it's not your name'. So he took the brush and painted on the back of one of the works, an 'L' and an 'E' intertwined. There's your painter. And that was the instant in which I met Lotus Eater, the artist with no memory and no recollections, no family and no points of reference, the painter of impossible flowers and sun-drenched geometries.

When the sun rose, Jean Claude came to the door of the house with a broad smile and an enormous dish of fruit. The roosters had begun their raucous squawking much earlier and a fine rain was washing the dust from the leaves and trunks.