Leaving Van Gogh

Fourteen





AFTER MY ENCOUNTER WITH THEO, I felt it was urgent to get back to Auvers. I changed as many appointments as possible and found a colleague to substitute for me at my usual clinic. I was able to take a train back late on Thursday evening.

What could Vincent’s state of mind possibly be? As I sat on the train clacking through the dark to my village, I looked out the window into the darkness. My own wan reflection met me: loose skin, long face, eyes pouched by age and sorrow. Vincent discerned that sadness as no one else had done. He recognized me. He would lose a brother in Theo, but that did not mean he would be alone.

We had a sympathetic relationship, I thought. I could be a friend, and more than a friend. The 150 francs a month that Vincent lived on was not so very much. I could not afford it all myself, but I might find others who would help. Rich collectors, perhaps. And maybe Theo had not done everything possible to promote his brother’s work. There might be eager collectors whom Theo simply had not identified.

Vincent could stay in Auvers; he seemed to like it. He could paint at my house. I could find him more models so that he could make portraits—Paul, for instance, and Madame Chevalier. Perhaps I would resume painting myself. We might paint side by side in the country, as Pissarro and Cézanne had done back in the 1870s.

I had sent word to Madame Chevalier that I would return by a late train, and she had left supper for me, roasted chicken and part of an apricot tart, which Marguerite served. Paul joined us, sitting at the table and absently devouring the end of a baguette.

“Paul,” I began, trying to sound casual. “Have you seen Monsieur van Gogh this week? I am beginning to wonder how he is, since he has not visited us.”

“Only from a distance.”

“Yes? And how recently was that?”

“Yesterday,” he said. “Up on the hillside, you know? By the wheat fields, looking down over the river.”

Had Vincent gone back to the place where I had found him the previous weekend? “Yes, I think I know the spot,” I said and put down my fork.

“He was there every day this week,” Paul said, looking at me attentively.

“Every day?” I repeated, alarmed.

“Yes. I just happened to see him. Marguerite, is there any more of that tart?” He ate like three men in those days.

His sister rose silently and went into the kitchen, returning with a wedge of the tart on a plate that she set in front of him. I watched her, wondering what went on in her head. Was she still infatuated with Vincent? Did she spend her time in her room looking at his portrait of her?

“And Marguerite,” I said, “how are your roses blooming? Did yesterday’s heat fade them?”

“It was not very hot here,” she replied, slipping into her chair. Then she looked up. She was blushing now. “I saw Monsieur van Gogh, Papa. I thought you would want to know.”

“You saw him?” Paul asked, turning to her quickly. “You didn’t tell me.”

“He asked for Papa, not for you,” she answered in an elder-sister tone.

“He asked for me?” I interrupted, wanting to cut off any squabbling between them. “What day was this?”

“It was yesterday. Madame Chevalier had gone to the market in Pontoise, so I answered the bell. Monsieur van Gogh was there. He asked for you. I said you were in Paris. And I told him that we could send you a message if he wanted it. He seemed somewhat … distracted,” she finished.

“Distracted!” scoffed Paul. “What does that mean?”

“You know how Monsieur van Gogh always seems to look at things very carefully? And thoughtfully? He pays attention,” Marguerite explained, appealing to me. “He hardly knew who he was talking to. I don’t mean that he should know me especially,” she added, in some confusion. “But he seemed … He seemed agitated. And his eyes did not settle on anything. They shifted around.” She demonstrated, her eyes slewing right and left. It was disturbing to see my mild-mannered and sheltered daughter so accurately mimicking a behavior I had seen all too often in the mentally unsound. My concern for Vincent increased.

“And when you said I was in Paris …,” I prompted her.

“He said he didn’t want to bother you,” she told me. “I tried to convince him that you would be glad to hear from him, but he …” She frowned, remembering. “He didn’t seem to be listening anymore. He didn’t say good-bye, he just walked away.”

For Marguerite, this was a remarkable observation. Until Vincent’s advent, she had hardly seemed to notice anyone outside the family. Thus her grasp of Vincent’s mental state was uncanny. Moreover, she painted a wrenching picture. I hated to think that Vincent had come to me and that I had not been there to hold out a hand. I finished dinner quickly and, though it was late, left to go back to Ravoux’s. I could not rest without seeing Vincent.

So it was that half an hour later I was rapping on the door of his bedroom. The tiny hall was dark as pitch beyond the glow of my lantern, and I could see only a thin streak of light beneath the crooked door. “Vincent, it’s Dr. Gachet. May I come in?”

A moment passed with no reply. Then I heard a chair scrape, and he opened the door. “Yes, Doctor, of course,” he said, standing aside. I had interrupted him in writing a letter—the finished pages lay on the splintery table that also held the basin and pitcher for washing. There was only one chair, which he held out for me. “Would you like to sit down, Doctor? I can sit on the bed. Or we could go down to the shed, if you’d prefer.”

He sat facing me, hands loosely folded. He seemed composed, showing no interest in why I had taken the unusual step of bursting into his bedroom. Perhaps he was merely indifferent. The single candle on the table left most of the room in shadow; I could make out only the outlines of paintings on the walls and the dim, undefined shapes of his clothes hung on nails. Voices from the café floated up to us in a dull but cheerful clamor.

I took the chair and looked at him carefully for signs of disturbance. He appeared very tired. The lines in his face were etched deeply, and hollows shadowed his cheekbones. “Marguerite said that you had called at the house yesterday. I am sorry I was not there.”

He seemed composed. “Yes. Mademoiselle Marguerite was very kind.”

“Was there something you wanted?” I began. It was difficult to know how to say what I had in mind. Strangely, Vincent’s calm made it more awkward. My hopeful scheme for helping him seemed to have nothing to do with this polite, even wary individual. I pulled from my pocket a small brown bottle. “I have been concerned about you since Saturday. You appeared to be in a very unhappy state. This is a cordial I brew from valerian,” I told him. “It is mild, but it often helps my patients feel more serene. You may swallow a spoonful in water as needed.” I put it on his table.

“Well, Doctor,” he said with a fleeting smile. “You’ve been able to bottle serenity? That is no small achievement. Thank you.”

“No, of course not. It is just an attempt …” My voice tailed off.

“I know, Doctor,” he said. “Perhaps I frightened you that afternoon.”

His suggestion surprised me. It was unusual for Vincent to show any awareness of his effect on other people.

“I frightened myself, if you must know,” he explained. “Doctor, I know why you’ve come. You want to tell me that I will survive this. I’ll drink your valerian, and wake up tomorrow and go back to that hillside and the painting will come. And I’ll keep on painting, and eventually someone, somewhere will buy another picture. People will begin to understand what I am trying to do. They will grow to appreciate it. They will want me to paint them, perhaps.” He looked at me, brows raised, waiting for confirmation.

“Well, of course,” I said. “You have withstood these trials in the past.” My argument sounded paltry to me, but I raised my hand as if to forestall an objection. “I don’t doubt that there are difficulties you have not shared with me. That episode, with my Guillaumin—Perhaps you’ve had other signs that a spell is drawing near?” I met his gaze and saw an unexpected expression of pity in his eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “This is all true. I do desperately fear that another attack is due. I fear that I will do harm. It is a terrible thing not to trust yourself. And surely you can see, Doctor, that if I cannot paint, there is little for me to live for? Should I live for this?” He gestured to the dim garret. “I exist, Doctor, in the margins of other people’s lives. Even Theo and Jo sometimes see me as something to dread. At times the painting can make up for that, but can you conceive of what courage I must expend? I force myself to bear the hours when I cannot be painting. There are consolations, I do not deny it. Your friendship has been one of them. So has the birth of my little nephew. Otherwise, I endure.”

Silence fell between us. A shout from downstairs was followed by a gust of laughter and the clinking of glasses. That was the world Vincent would never belong to.

“So you see that if I cannot paint—” he began.

“That was today, this week,” I broke in. “You cannot know that you will have the same trouble tomorrow.”

“True,” he said, nodding. “Or the next day. Or the next. How many days would you say I should spend sitting in front of a blank canvas? How will I know that I have really finished?”

I could feel myself curling back into the wooden chair, trying to escape his remorseless logic.

“Or should I stop for a while? Do something else? What else would that be? When painting is the only thing I can stand?”

Again, I had no answer, but he did not seem to expect one. We sat silently in the flickering light. Downstairs they were singing a tune that rose to a near roar and dropped off with apparent comic effect to a mock whisper followed by gales of laughter.

“And besides, Theo has syphilis,” Vincent said across the merriment. I didn’t hear him clearly at first. He looked at me sharply. “Did you know?”

“I found out yesterday. I don’t believe he would have told me, but I saw him at the Gare du Nord. He had fallen … He is very ill.”

Vincent moved on the bed, turning to straighten the pillow. “His body is ill, and my mind.”

“Does Jo know?” I managed to ask. It wasn’t the most important question; it was simply the one I was able to utter.

“How can you tell a woman such a thing?” he scoffed. “He believed it was cured. It’s only since they married that he knew it had come back. That is why when the baby was ill he was so worried. He thought little Vincent might have it, too. I believe it happens like that sometimes?” He looked at me, inquiring.

“Sometimes,” I said.

“But you’ve seen the baby. At least he seems all right.”

“Oh, yes,” I said without thinking, “little Vincent Willem is healthy enough.” Then I gathered myself together. The difficulty was that I did not know what to say. My vision on the train, the idea that I should stand in for Theo, suddenly seemed ludicrous. How could I have thought it?

Vincent sat on the narrow bed, elbows on his knees and face in his hands. The noise downstairs seemed to have moved into the street. The room had no windows, but farewells floated in through the skylight. His candle was getting low. I had set my lantern on the floor but lifted it now onto his table, where it suddenly brightened the walls. Vincent looked up, tracking this new light source. He still had a smear of dark paint on his eyebrow from the episode in the wheat field.

“And if Theo dies, then where will I be?” he asked.

“Well,” I began. “I was thinking. It is not such a vast sum, you know, a hundred and fifty francs a month. More than I can afford by myself, but there are others, surely, who believe—”

“If these people exist, they believe in a man who paints,” Vincent cut in, with a mildness that had the effect of a sword. “I have not been able to put the tiniest speck of color onto a canvas for a week.” He spread his hands in a rhetorical gesture. “I can’t do anything besides paint. I cannot support myself, and I cannot even be sure that I will stay sane. I begin to be something of a problem, don’t I? And if I am a problem, even to myself—well.” He shook his head. The little burst of energy that had fueled this speech died away.

The words lingered, though. “If I am a problem, even to myself.” I found myself sitting in a fashion that mirrored Vincent’s, with head bowed and hands slack between my knees. A problem even to myself. Imagine it. You could never escape. The thing that you dreaded, that gave you that leaden feeling, joined to you like a shadow.

We sat slumped for some time, several minutes. I wanted to be able to sit up and reassure Vincent, but I dismissed each source of hope that occurred to me. I suppose, in retrospect, that I could have invented something spurious, perhaps a new cure for hysteria or a medication that would arrest Theo’s symptoms, or a buyer in Paris who had seen his work at Tanguy’s. None of these stratagems occurred to me at the time, and I doubt that they would have convinced Vincent. I am not a good liar.

“Did you know that Theo was ill before he told you?” Vincent asked, his voice breaking our silence.

“I guessed it,” I admitted.

“Will he die soon?”

“I cannot say. It is worrisome that he is so weak. And it seems to be affecting his back. His movements are uneven. But the progress of the disease is mysterious and unpredictable. Periods of poor health are often followed by what looks like recovery. He could survive for years yet.”

“As an invalid?”

“Again, I cannot predict.”

“He could go mad.”

“He could,” I had to agree.

“I wish it could have been I,” Vincent said, musing. “I am half-mad anyway. And no one will miss me when I am gone. The world can much more easily spare me than him.”

“You cannot say that,” I protested, but weakly. There was a horrible pragmatism to his reasoning.

“Doctor, let us leave convention aside. Whose life has more value now? Clearly, that of a man who supports a wife, a baby, an elderly mother, and a ne’er-do-well brother. Not that of a man who is incapable in every way.”

“No,” I said slowly, “I cannot agree. The paintings–”

“But remember, I can no longer paint,” he interrupted.

“That is not certain,” I said sharply. “And think of your friends, think of your mother, think of little Vincent Willem. Who is to say that your life has no value to him?”

“I cannot go on enduring this life for the sake of an infant,” Vincent snapped. “I tell you, from one day to the next I wonder if I will see the sun rise again.” He looked across at me. “I suppose I should not say this to a doctor.”

“You should not say such things to any friend!” I told him. “If you are threatening to do away with yourself—is that it? Good God! Think of the misery you would inflict!” I stood up and took the half step toward him that brought me across the tiny room. “Imagine for a moment your brother beside your coffin! Imagine his despair, his loneliness!”

“Imagine mine,” Vincent countered, looking at the floor. “That’s all.”

I could not answer right away. I backed into the chair.

“One day after the next, Doctor,” he said. “The minutes crawling by. Nothing to look back on but wreckage. Nothing to anticipate but … what?” He shrugged. “If Theo dies, how will I live? I cannot inflict myself on my mother. In fact, I cannot inflict myself on anyone, I know this. At any time I may become violent. Look at what I did to myself. I know Gauguin claims that I threatened him with a knife. It may be true, I cannot say. Should I take this threat that I am and deposit it somewhere among gentle, kindly people who mean no harm?”

Again, I could not answer, but he did not wait for more than a second before standing up. “Enough, Doctor. I apologize for alarming you. I see that I have. These thoughts should never be shared.”

I got to my feet. “No, I cannot agree. What has worried me, Vincent, has been your absence. I would rather see you, distressed as you are, than worry about you being all alone.”

“You see, Doctor, that is where you make a mistake. I feel just as lonely when you are here. I am separated now from mankind. I cannot say just why, but it is so. I know that you came to bring me comfort, but there is no comfort on this earth for me.”

I picked up my lantern, and the upper half of the room grew brighter. On the wall above Vincent’s sagging cot blazed the beautiful canvas of chestnut blossoms he had painted six weeks earlier. I pointed to it. “Surely you were happy when you painted those blossoms?” I asked.

He looked at them and sighed. “If I may say it this way, the flowers were happy. I painted that.”

“And you are so sure that you can no longer find that happiness? And put it on canvas?”

“The thing is, Doctor,” he responded, picking up my bottle of valerian, “I can no longer afford hope. I am simply too weary.” He looked down at the little brown flask. “Thank you for this, I will try it. Quite a change from absinthe.”

It was a dismissal. I turned toward the door. But I had to make one last attempt. “Vincent, will you promise me one thing? Will you come to me if these thoughts get too dreadful?”

He smiled wistfully. “All of your years with the mad have not taught you the important point, have they? Once the thoughts get too dreadful, we are no longer ourselves. I might no longer be Vincent. I will probably become the dreaded madman, and then I cannot find you, though I might wish to.”

I accepted the rebuke. “I see that. But if at any time—I will tell the children, and Madame Chevalier. I can be here from Paris in two hours.”

He did not speak for a few seconds, but the expression of pity had returned to his face. “I cannot make that promise, Dr. Gachet, for I know that you will try to keep me from doing away with myself. But it may be the only hope I have left.” I must have looked uncomprehending, since he went on. “The hope that I can at least limit my suffering. This is my greatest comfort. Good night, Doctor.”

It took all my concentration to get down the narrow stair. In the back hall behind the café, I encountered Ravoux. “Everything all right up there, Doctor?” he asked me.

“Oh, yes, thank you, Ravoux,” I said. “Good night.” I escaped out the back door and began my walk home.

I was dimly aware that it was a magnificent night. The stars frosted the sky, and I had the momentary impulse to go back upstairs, bring Vincent down and point upward. “Look! Look at that! Paint that!” I would say. “Isn’t it beautiful? Only you can create a beauty to match it!” I could imagine the painting so clearly, with a surface of ultramarine and Prussian blue covering the canvas in flowing strokes, and each yellow star surrounded by a halo of white or lemon yellow. The chestnut trees, cluster after cluster of ribbed, almond-shaped leaves, would be viridian, perhaps, with some umber mixed in. The soft, dusty surface of the road …

But he had made himself very clear. No stars, no flowers, no disconsolate elderly doctors would be enough to keep him anchored among us. His pain, he felt, was too great to be borne. And he had given me what amounted to a warning that he might take his own life.

Yet severing oneself from life is not a matter of whim. It often requires an inventiveness and a strength of will that are not available to those in greatest pain. We saw many failed efforts at Bicêtre and at the Salpêtrière: ineptly fashioned nooses, ingestion of the most improbable substances. I remembered that Vincent had already tried to drink lamp oil and had eaten paint. Had those been earnest attempts to die or merely deranged gestures? He seemed earnest now. Was his mind already ranging over his options? There was one he was ignorant of, tucked away in my house, where he refused to come anymore. It chilled me to think that I was in a position to provide the only kind of help Vincent seemed to want now. He had not asked for it. There was no need for him to know that I could supply it. There was no reason for me to think back to the time when I had been asked for such help—and denied it. No reason, though I knew that moment had set the course of my life ever since.

I carried the lantern low at my left side. The circle of light quivered. I held my right hand to my eye to see if it shook, but of course I could not see it in the dark—old, sad doctor that I was. Too fuddled to think clearly. Hands trembling with age, or weakness, or emotion.

I had come to a halt next to a paddock where a farming family kept a pair of plow horses. I heard them rustling in the grass next to me. One nickered, as if to ask who I was. I stepped to the verge and raised the lantern. The long white, whiskered face hovered over the fence, examining me. I held out a hand and felt the beast’s warm, moist breath. Life wasn’t easy for old César, dragging a wooden plow through the heavy, fertile soil of the nearby fields. I brushed his muzzle with the back of my forefinger, then rubbed the broad, hard space between his eyes. He pressed forward and shoved his head against my chest, rubbing it up and down as if I were a convenient scratching post. I was glad enough, at that moment, to be serving some purpose. But then he ambled away and disappeared into the darkness, cropping a few mouthfuls of grass as he went.

I turned back to the road, trying to brush César’s white hairs from my linen coat. When I reached my house, it was as quiet and still as any of the cottages I had passed on the way. I lighted the chamber candle Madame Chevalier had left for me at the bottom of the stairs and climbed up to my bedroom. No light shone from any of the other bedrooms. Although everyone was asleep, I felt the need to be silent. I did not want to be interrupted. I pulled a chair over to the armoire and clambered up onto it, steadying myself against the door. The top shelf held garments I did not use often: a rubberized mackintosh, a coarse muffler knit by Marguerite when she was nine. Behind them lay a flat wooden box that I could just reach with the tips of my fingers. I pulled it forward and carefully dismounted from the chair, holding it beneath my arm.

Twenty years earlier, when I was forty-two, I had served in the National Guard as the Germans swept westward across France toward Paris. We were all issued rifles, each one numbered and registered. I had never thought about weapons before then. I drilled with my rifle, of course, and learned how to load and clean it, but I was a perfectly dreadful shot and grateful never to have to use the gun in battle. I turned it in as required, once the German siege of Paris was lifted. But I still had the revolver.

It was not a government-issued gun. I had come across it on patrol one night, when my unit surprised a small band of looters attempting to break into the cellar of an ironmonger’s shop. My commanding officer said I should keep it. “You may yet need a sidearm,” he told me. So in my military fervor I did keep it, and furthermore took care of it. It lay in the box, as it had for two decades, with a small pouch of cartridges alongside. They clicked together when I brushed against the pouch.

What was I doing, in my bedroom after midnight, mooning over an outdated weapon? I lifted the gun from the box. My fingers curled naturally around the butt—a revolver is one of those objects whose shape tells you how to use it. It was unloaded. I slipped a cartridge from the pouch and broke open the gun, pressing the cartridge into the barrel. I put my palm under the barrel and raised it until I heard the click as it closed. Then I was sitting on my bed with a loaded gun.

I could take it out into the fields and fire it. I could unload it and put it away.

I could wait to hear about Vincent’s suicide attempt. I could wait to know how he did it: poison? A knife? The river?

I could wait to receive the news of an attempt, and rush to find him, wounded, ill, impaired.

I could—someone could—just hand him the gun. As if to say, “Here you are, Monsieur van Gogh, there is no need to prolong your existence, here is an easy way, an efficient way, to ensure that you are a problem no more.”

No, I could not do it. I could not put the means of self-destruction into his hands. I felt all the pity in the world for him. But it seemed that to aid him in this would be to concur in his opinion that his existence was worthless. That, of course, was impossible.

I felt some relief as I pried the cartridge from the barrel of the gun and wrapped everything back up. It was so late and I was so tired that I did not replace the box in its hiding place in the armoire, but rather slid it under my bed. I slept well that night.