When she was twenty-two, Flora committed the boldest act of her life, which would definitively mark out her destiny as a pariah and a rebeclass="underline" she left her home, taking her children with her, which not only brought her into great disrepute because of the prevailing moral sanctions of the time, but was also an illegal act for which she could have been imprisoned if André Chazal had reported her. From this time on, between 1825 and 1830, we enter an unclear period in her life about which we know very little, and the little that we do know comes from her and has probably been doctored to hide the depressing truth. What is clear is that in these years she was living on the run, in hiding, in very difficult circumstances — her mother did not approve of what she was doing and from that time their relationship appears to have ended — living with the constant fear that André Chazal, or the authorities, would catch up with her. Two of her three children would die in the following years; the only survivor was Aline Marie (the future mother of Paul Gauguin), who spent most of her childhood in the country, being looked after by different women while her mother hid and earned a living in whatever way she could. Later she would say that she was employed as a travelling companion (it is very likely that she was a mere servant) for an English family whom she accompanied throughout Europe, making her first trip to England. None of this is certain, and anything could have been possible in these years. What is absolutely certain is that they must have been very hard for Flora and must have shaped her strong character, her limitless courage, her bravery and her conviction that the world was badly made, unjust, brutal and discriminatory, and that the main victims of the prevailing injustice were women.
Flora’s trip to Peru — where she was to live for a year — was, according to her, quite accidental, something out of a romantic novel. At an inn in Paris she had run into Zacharie Chabrié, a ship’s captain who often travelled between France and Peru. In Arequipa he had met the wealthy and powerful Tristán family, whose head was Don Pío Tristán y Mocoso, the younger brother of Don Mariano, Flora’s father. It was Chabrié, she said, who convinced her to write to her uncle. She did so in a heartfelt, imploring letter, referring to the hardship and difficulties that she and her mother had endured since the death of her father, due to her parents’ irregular marriage, and asking for assistance and even for recognition. Months later Don Pío replied with an astute letter in which, alongside the expressions of affection for his recently appeared little niece, and protesting his love for his brother Mariano, he firmly states that he will not legally recognise a woman who, by her own admission, had been born in an illegal union. But he sent her some money of his own and some other money from her grandmother, who was still alive.
After three years of matrimonial disputes with Chazal and repeated attempts to escape, in April 1833 Flora finally embarked, in Bordeaux, on the boat that would take her to Peru. Her captain was none other than Zacharie Chabrié. The six-month crossing, in the company of sixteen men — she was the only woman — had a Homeric element to it. Flora stayed in Arequipa for eight months and in Lima for two months before returning to France in the middle of 1834. This is the transitional moment in her life, which separates the rebellious, confused young woman who fled her husband and dreamed of a stroke of fortune — to be recognised as the daughter of Don Mariano by her Peruvian family and thus suddenly acquire legitimacy and fortune — from the social militant, the writer and the revolutionary who would resolutely direct her life to fighting, with her pen and her words, for social justice, for the emancipation of women.
In Arequipa, her uncle Don Pío dashed her hopes of being recognised as a legitimate daughter and thus claiming her birthright. But this frustration was to some extent alleviated by the good life that she had in the family house, surrounded by servants and slaves, spoiled and flattered by the Tristán tribe, and sought after and courted by Arequipa’s ‘good society’, which was turned upside down by the arrival of this young and beautiful Parisian with her large eyes, her long dark hair and very fair skin. She had hidden from everyone, beginning with Don Pío, that she was married and the mother of three children. There is no doubt that suitors must have swarmed around her like flies. Flora doubtless enjoyed all this comfort and security, this first taste of the good life. But she also observed and noted down, with fascination, the life and customs of this country that was so different to her own, which was just beginning its life as an independent republic, although the institutions, prejudices and conventions of the colonial period remained almost intact. In her memoir, she would paint a splendid portrait of that feudal, violent society, with its tremendous economic contrasts and its great racial, social and religious divisions, its convents and religious practices verging on idolatry, and its political turmoil, where caudillos fought for power in wars which, as she herself witnessed on the plains at Cangallo, were often bloody and grotesque. This book, which the citizens of Arequipa and Lima would burn in their indignation at the cruel way they were depicted, is one of the most fascinating testimonies that exists, amid all the chaos, pomp, colour, violence and frenzy, of life in Latin America after independence.
But it was not just racism, savagery and privilege that predominated in her father’s country. To her great surprise, there were also some rare customs that Flora had never witnessed before in Paris, precisely in an area that was very important to her: the world of women. Society women, for a start, enjoyed considerable freedom: they smoked, bet, rode on horseback when they liked and, in Lima, women with faces half-covered by a veil — the most sensual garb that Flora had ever seen — went out alone to flirt with men, had autonomy and were treated with a considerable lack of prejudice, even from a Parisian standpoint. Even the nuns in the cloistered convents that Flora managed to slip into enjoyed great freedom of behaviour and committed certain excesses that were not at all in keeping with their nun’s vocation or with the image of the humiliated, downtrodden woman, the mere appendage of father, husband or head of family that Flora carried in her head. Of course, Peruvian women were not free in the same way as men, nothing like it. But in some cases they could compete with men, as equals, in their own spheres. In wars, for example, the women known as rabonas accompanied the soldiers, cooked and washed for them and nursed their wounds, fought alongside them and had the responsibility of attacking villages to get food for the troops. Without their knowing it, these women had, in fact, a life of their own, and destroyed the myth of the helpless, weak woman, useless in a man’s domain. The figure that, for Flora, personified this emancipated, active woman, invading the areas traditionally considered to be exclusively male, was Doña Francisca Zubiaga de Gamarra, the wife of Marshal Gamarra, an Independence hero and President of the Republic, whose figure paled alongside the dominant personality of his wife. Doña Pancha, or La Mariscala as the people called her, had taken over running the Prefecture of Cuzco when her husband was out of the country, and she had put down conspiracies through her guile and courage. Dressed as a soldier, and on horseback, she had been involved in all the civil wars, fighting shoulder to shoulder with Gamarra, and had even led the troops that had beaten the Bolivians in the battle of Paria. When Agustín Gamarra was president, the word on the street was that she had been the power behind the throne, taking the main initiatives and causing some wonderful scandals, like whipping, in an official ceremony, a soldier who had boasted of being her lover. The impression that La Mariscala made on Flora, whom she met briefly when she was about to be exiled, was enormous, and there is no doubt that she helped Flora to realise that it was possible for women to rebel against their marginal status, and that she herself should work to change society. These are the decisions that Flora brought back from Peru when she returned to Paris at the beginning of 1835 and threw herself enthusiastically into a new life, very different from her earlier one.