Leaving Van Gogh

Sixteen





ANOTHER DAY PASSED. Nothing happened. I wondered if I had been wrong to rush back to Auvers, yet I could not escape the conviction that my presence there might avert disaster. No news of Vincent reached me at home, so on Saturday, in the heat of midday, I went down to Ravoux’s. I found the proprietor taking delivery of a dozen barrels of wine, but he spared a moment to tell me that Vincent had not departed from his routine. “He leaves in the morning, comes home in the evening for his supper,” Ravoux said. “He’s quiet, but he’s always been quiet.”

“And he went out this morning as usual?”

“As usual, Doctor, with his box and his canvas and his straw hat. More holes than straw, that hat.”

“Thank you, Ravoux. I will just leave a note for him in the shed, if you don’t mind.”

“Be my guest, Doctor. You know your way.”

Despite the commotion just outside in the yard, the shed was silent. I had not been there in daylight since Theo and Jo’s visit, and I was astounded to see the number of paintings that Vincent had finished since then. There was a magnificent sunset and several canvases of ripe wheat beneath dark, damp skies. I was happy to see these—surely they had been painted this week? Yet when I looked at them closely, the paint appeared to be somewhat dry. I reached out to one and touched the bottom corner. I was not wrong. I went from canvas to canvas, peering at their surfaces, touching the edges of the stretchers, sniffing for the odor of fresh linseed oil.

Not one painting had been finished in at least a week. The most recent one, it seemed to me, was a scene of wheat fields. The horizon was high, as if Vincent had placed himself looking uphill. His usual active strokes were quite coarse, the paint almost spooned onto the canvas and arranged in thick ruts. Three crude paths seemed to diverge in front of the viewer, but none appeared to have a destination. Above the fields, the sky shaded from blue to black. The black was the last pigment Vincent had used. It rolled over the sky from the top of the canvas, slashing downward over the blue and closing in on the horizon. Between, there were dozens of black V shapes, as if a flock of huge crows were flying off into the distance. Or perhaps flapping their way toward the viewer? It was dreadfully ominous, and I could not help remembering Vincent’s disturbing behavior with the black paint on the palette. Could this have been the last painting he finished before that episode?

Thinned white paint brushed on over the blue sky made a pair of clouds. One of the largest crows was caught up in the cloud, it seemed. Here the white had been applied after the black. A few inches away, the blue dashes of the sky invaded the golden dashes of the wheat, cutting a gash in the horizon. I could imagine Vincent standing with his palette, thinning the white, stroking it onto the blue sky, blending it into a cloud formation, like rain mixed into the air. It was lively, arresting, agitated. It was also dry on the surface.

I stepped back, freeing myself from the spell of the menacing clouds, and looked around the room. The boards laid across barrels that had served as a table were cluttered with Vincent’s painting apparatus. Was everything dustier than usual? I could not be sure. The brushes were dry. I picked up a rag and touched a blue spot—it was crusted over. I sniffed, and wondered if the shed usually smelled more sharply of paints and oils. I was desperate to find evidence that the painter had recently used any of his materials.

And I found it. One corner of the table was partially hidden by an empty easel. The surface of the table was clear, but darker than the rest of the unfinished boards. When I stepped closer, I could see that it had been painted over with a dark color. That corner of the room was in shadow, and I admit that my eyes, like those of many an older man, were getting weaker. I had to bend down to see that the paint looked like the mixed black and blue of the sky from the wheat fields canvas. I was puzzled for a moment—why would Vincent paint the table? It occurred to me, then, that he had perhaps brought the canvas home from the fields and set it on the easel. He might then have wanted to darken the sky, and used the table as a makeshift palette.

I braced myself on the table and my finger slipped. The paint was wet. I straightened up and looked at the color on my fingertips. It was thickened, no longer slick. A day or two old. Once again I leaned down and peered at the dark patch on the table, which had an irregular, lighter pattern that I could not quite make out. When it came into focus, I saw that it was writing. Vincent had used the blunt end of his brush to inscribe a message in the wet pigments. He had written, “It is finished.”

I felt a jolt as I read it. It was like glimpsing him by the train tracks, but tenfold, a physical blow. “It is finished!” I was as untutored in Scripture as a man could be in Catholic France, yet even I knew the source of those words—they were Jesus’ dying statement on the cross.

I stood there, my paint-marked hand held out from my side, looking at the inscription. When I straightened up, I could barely see it. He had been careful in the writing—the letters were evenly sized, evenly spaced, almost childish in their rounded contours. I looked to my left to see if I could find the brush he had used. It would have told me nothing, but I felt compelled to move. I scrabbled through the brushes lying on the table, but none had a telltale cap of black on the end. My mind was racing, racing, but no thought connected to another. Was he dead? Had he killed himself?

I had to find him. I had to speak to him.

It was another hot day, and I dreaded trudging up the hill once again to find Vincent in the glare of the afternoon sun, but I did not think of delaying. Maybe I could no longer help him as a doctor, but I could still be a friend. Surely a friend could help a man in such distress.

These thoughts hastened my step, and it was not long before I saw his figure perched at the top of the rise in that immense field of wheat. I was reminded of the painting that he had covered with a flock of crows, but in fact, there was nothing ominous in sight that afternoon. The heads of grain were glossy and plump as I pushed through them, and the cicadas’ buzz drowned out the rustling of my passage through the wheat. Vincent must have heard me coming far in advance, but he did not turn around, even when I stood behind him and greeted him.

“Is it wise for you to be out here, Vincent? Perhaps since you could not paint here last week, you should try a different place. Down by the river, for instance,” I suggested, trying to keep my voice light. Though the scene was exactly as it had been a week earlier, Vincent’s own appearance was frightening now that I saw him in daylight. He was slumped on his ancient camp stool, but his easel still lay folded beside him. The canvas that lay on top of it was blank except for a frieze of grubby fingerprints along the edges. The primed surface was dingy all over. It looked as if he had been carrying it around all week.

“I don’t know, Doctor,” Vincent confessed, without changing his position. “I wonder if I have ever been wise.” Then he turned around and looked up at me. Beneath the brim of his tattered hat, he was haggard, unshaved, terribly thin, and his eyes were bloodshot.

I bent down to move the easel out of the way and sat where it had been lying. This was not a graceful process; I was far too old to be lowering myself to the ground without something to lean on. I found I had to grasp Vincent’s knee, and I ended up with the dirty, blank canvas on my lap. “I see it has not been going well,” I said, setting the canvas aside.

“No, Doctor, not well.”

“Yet here you are,” I said.

“Yes.” He paused. “I do not know where else to go.”

“Have you been sleeping well?” I asked, an apparent non sequitur.

He shook his head and looked down at his clasped hands. “That is not really possible.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Vincent replied, sounding surprised. “I lie there. The village is quiet. I cherished that quiet when I first came here. You cannot imagine what a luxury that was to me, after St.-Rémy! All night long there, men cried out or sang or battled their demons or merely snored. In Auvers, peace reigns. Yet I cannot sleep.”

“I can take care of that,” I told him. “I can give you something to bring on sleep. As your doctor I insist on it.”

He did not answer. He merely sighed and lowered his head to his chest. “If I could die by never sleeping again, I would do it. Or, if I could, I would go to sleep forever.” He straightened up and looked at me. “An entire night is endless, Doctor. The hours of that silence I so longed for seem to last forever. There is so much that torments me. What is to become of Jo and the baby? What will happen to my canvases? I do not even worry about myself anymore. The entity of Vincent seems entirely …” He flicked his hand, as if whisking something away. “Impermanent. Fleeting. I cannot imagine my future. And then, worse than the night is the moment when the sky begins to lighten, for then I understand that I must somehow endure another day.”

“Could the day bring nothing worth living for?” I asked, almost whispering.

“What?” he asked, nodding at the blank canvas. “Not that. It will not come back.”

“How can you know?”

“It is not that I know. But I can no longer afford to hope.” He turned all the way around on his stool now, so that he was facing me squarely. I had to look up at his face, haloed by the tattered straw brim. It was an image that will stay with me forever: the staring eyes, the stubbled, sunken cheeks. “There must have come a time in your life, Doctor, when you had to stop hoping.” I instantly thought of Blanche, and the grim voyage home from Pau. “I can see from your face that there was,” Vincent continued. “At a certain moment, you understand that the anticipation that had kept you alive has suddenly become a terrible burden. It must be set down. I have not come to this lightly. I have hoped and hoped for so long now. It has always seemed to me that if I could only paint, my life, all the difficulties, would be redeemed. I painted, and trusted that someday my work would be understood.” He bent down and picked up the canvas and held it out to the side, so that we could both see it and the beautiful landscape beyond. “Painting was my one escape. I have tried not to pity myself, though my life has been hard. If I cannot paint, there must be an end to it. There is no reason for me to draw breath.”

He said all of this so simply, without trying to gain my sympathy. I could not imagine his despair. I knew nothing of his loneliness. But I had given up hope, and I knew what that meant.

“I wish …” My voice trailed off. I could not say just what I wished—only that things were otherwise, for I understood that I was approaching a terrible juncture.

Neither of us finished the sentence. Vincent lay the blank canvas facedown on the golden wheat.

I wished that Vincent could paint, of course. I wished for more glorious pictures of the world I knew, pictures that helped me understand it and that altered the way I saw everything around me. I wished Vincent would paint the wheat fields under the snow—imagine how lovely they would be! The golden stubble and low gray sky and the patches of snow that, in Vincent’s eyes, would be not white at all but something else, lavender perhaps, or pink.

I could wish that of the artist. But it was also my friend who sat before me, the very image of desolation. If he had painted a self-portrait at that moment, it would have been so full of agony that you could do no more than glance at it. To look longer would have been harrowing.

My mind was boiling. I felt as if the very earth were heaving. I stood up, once again using Vincent’s wiry body as a prop. I felt compelled to act or at least to move while my thoughts ran wild. I did not want to be entertaining the idea that overwhelmed me. Somehow a massive reversal had occurred. I had come churning up to the hilltop to prevent Vincent from taking his life, but now, it seemed, I felt he should be free to do so.

I had entertained such dark thoughts before. There were times, after Blanche died, when nonexistence beckoned me. In those days I understood the melancholiacs I had known at the asylum, drifting barely sentient hour by hour. Eternal rest—for that is what the church promises—takes on a powerful allure. Is death like laudanum? A comfortable, muffled darkness? There have been times when I longed for that. A dose of morphine would so easily have freed me. I could go from pain to no pain, and I found myself deeply tempted.

Yet I had children. It was that simple. I was required to live for my children, and I have not regretted it. Life has brought me many pleasures, many riches. But is there an absolute moral value to living, as opposed to dying? To this day, as my own death naturally approaches, I do not know.

I walked a few steps away from Vincent, then walked back to stand before him. No words came. I strode farther away, some distance down the hill, but my eyes did not even see the green and gold landscape unfurling before me. I clambered back up the hill. No rational thought drove me, and I could formulate no speech. I paused before Vincent, who was still crouched on his stool in his pose of dejection. I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it. I reached out and gripped his shoulder. He did not look up from the ground, but his hand came to cover mine for a moment. Then I walked away. My feet took me down the hill through the wheat field, away from him.

I paced around the countryside of Auvers that afternoon, as Vincent probably had done in his quest for motifs to paint. Sometimes I came across scenes that could have been cut from one of his canvases and nailed to the horizon. How could Vincent contemplate leaving a world that cried out for him to paint it? I was only vaguely aware of the continuing heat and of the sun gliding lower, the shadows thickening.

I did not think of Vincent constantly. My mind wandered, alighting on the strangest things. I wondered whether I would ever receive the Legion of Honor, for example. I thought again about somehow finding a husband for Marguerite. I remembered that the mint was threatening to overwhelm the other herbs in the garden, and needed to be thinned. Every now and then my mind would tiptoe up to the subject of Vincent and dart away. I thought a great deal about Blanche.

I distinctly remembered a moment, several days before she died, when her breathing grew slow and her pulse very weak. She was next to death at that point. Yet something in her body, or perhaps in her spirit—I will never know which—gathered strength. I was crestfallen when I realized that she had rallied. I caught myself wishing she had died. Surely it is a tiny step from there to easing a departure?

Yet these thoughts repulsed me. There was a barrier that I could not cross. I could not have given Blanche a heroic dose of morphine. Fragile as the thread of life was in her, I could not have cut it. Nor, I realized, could I actively promote Vincent’s death.

There it was, Vincent’s death. The end of Vincent van Gogh. I kept the thought in my mind for an instant. No more heated discussions about artists. No more wondering what he might say next. No more alarm mixed with admiration. No frustration, wonder, respect. Vincent believed in the power of art, his art, to console people for the sorrows inherent in life. Making his beautiful paintings comforted him, and they comforted me. If Vincent killed himself, there would be no more of them.

When. When Vincent killed himself. I vowed to myself, for that moment at least, to try to face the facts as Vincent did. The man had just bid me farewell.

I was tired, so I turned toward home from the top of the plateau, where I had been wandering. Vincent was not asking for my help. Vincent was not asking for anything from me. He was simply explaining. Perhaps he was absolving me, too, for it had to be faced: I had not saved him.

I was in the woods at this point, and I had to sit down. There was a fallen tree leaning against a live trunk and I perched against it, bracing myself and trying to catch my breath. I thought of the months he had been in Auvers. I considered the inn, the portraits, the meals, the conversations. They were not insignificant. Vincent had painted many pictures here. He had been pleased with them, and these paintings would not have existed without me. Other paintings probably would have, but not these. I could fairly say that I had done that much at least.

But I had done nothing at all to improve Vincent’s mental health. I thought back to my original meeting with Theo, and how confident I had been that I could help Vincent regain his equanimity. My failure was devastating. I had failed Vincent as I had failed Blanche.

When I got home, Madame Chevalier fussed about my trousers and made me drink some lemonade. There were still hours until dinner, so I went into the garden. Nero lay under a bush with his tongue hanging out, and Pekin the pug panted next to him. At the back of the garden is a kind of cave, an abandoned quarry cut into the steep hill rising behind the house. We used it to store garden tools and the animals’ feed. I went in to find a wire brush and had to step over several cats lounging against the stone walls to absorb their coolness. The big gray one, Louloutte, followed me out of the cave like a puff of smoke.

I settled onto a low chair, and Louloutte sprang into my lap. I held the brush out with my hand, and she rubbed her head against it, again and again, purring. Then she nudged my hand so that I would brush the other side, running the tines against her cheek. Her eyes were closed and her body perfectly relaxed.

Sometimes the only comfort to be had is physical. You cannot look to a cat for sympathy, and very few are affectionate, but Louloutte’s soft weight on my lap, her constant purr, and the rhythmic strokes of the brush provided a simple consolation. Hot as I was, her additional warmth soothed me. At least I was able to make a cat happy.

When she leapt to the ground, I sat with my hands folded over the brush, head tilted back against the chair, and fell asleep. I was wakened moments later by my jaw dropping open, and an insistent nudge on my calf. I looked down and saw Pekin gazing up at me looking heartbroken. He butted my calf again and snorted, then launched himself into my lap to replace the cat.

Pekin was no larger than Louloutte but so muscular that he seemed a bigger burden. He was not content simply to present areas of his body to my brush as Louloutte had—he nudged, he licked, he lifted his chin and howled, his hindquarters wagged his curly tail. His every motion said, “Here I am! Love me!” Even when I finally tipped him onto the ground, he settled next to my ankle, gazing up at me hopefully. Pekin’s life was a continuous festival of confident expectation: food, affection, food, affection, surely they would come his way soon and lavishly.

I dozed again, or perhaps I fell into a trance. I imagined Vincent’s continued existence: more days up on the hillside, with that blank canvas becoming more grimy every day but never receiving a brushstroke of paint. Vincent getting thinner, more tense, more bizarre. Vincent in the grip of a hysterical fit, rolling, thrashing, shouting, alone in the fields or on the village street. How would I feel, how would Theo feel, watching Vincent suffer all of this? Meanwhile, Theo would be suffering trials of his own: pain, paralysis, even madness. Vincent would have to go back to an asylum; there would be no other choice. I remembered my fantasies about supporting Vincent on my own, or with the help of other artists. Nonsense. There was no money. I could not afford to take him to Dr. Charcot for a private consultation. If—or rather, when—Vincent fell into his pattern of attacks, I could not responsibly prevent his being sent away.

I dwelt for a moment on the idea of Vincent in an asylum, of visiting him, with Theo dead and Johanna back in Holland. Vincent without family in France, in despair. He would have to be watched, perhaps restrained. I pictured Vincent in a straitjacket, shuffling along a dingy stone corridor. His hands would be trapped, his arms crossed over his belly. His eyes alone would be free. That might go on for years. I had seen it often enough at Bicêtre and at the Salpêtrière: Fewer than a third of the patients ever left. Most of them simply stayed, passing the rest of their lives in what was effectively a prison. This stopped me for a moment. Would it not be kinder simply to allow every madman to kill himself? Should they not all be spared that life of imprisonment? But I knew I could not make my considerations more general. I could not think about every case, only about Vincent.

So, then, what if he died? No, I must not mitigate the situation. What if Vincent killed himself? We would all grieve, that was certain. We would regret—oh, how we would regret—the loss of his genius.

But would I feel relief for him? Would I be a little bit happy that his misery had ended?

That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted him to get better. I wanted him to pick up that shabby canvas, brush new primer over it, and cover it with paint. I did not want him starving himself to death, believing he was saving the world with his hunger. I did not want him raging around an asylum in the grip of hallucinations. I did not want him throwing himself in front of a train or jumping from a high bridge, and maiming himself yet falling short of death. I knew these decisions were not mine to make. Yet with increasing insistence I thought of the gun in my house.

I tried to brush the animals’ fur off my jacket and trousers before I went into the house. Madame Chevalier and Marguerite both cried out when I walked through the kitchen, and Marguerite firmly turned me around and pushed me back outdoors. “Wait here, Papa,” she told me and went back for a damp cloth. “How can you even touch those creatures in this heat?” she asked, sponging off the gray and white hairs.

“You know how insistent Pekin can be,” I explained.

“You must take these things off,” she continued, shaking her head. “You can’t come to the table like this. Go up and change, and bring these down. I’ll brush them properly after dinner.” I nodded and escaped to my bedroom.

Before I changed my clothes, I had to see the gun. I reached under my bed, but my fingers did not meet the box. I lay on my side and peered into the darkness. It was a sleigh bed, closed at head and foot, pushed up against the wall. I had long found that this dark, protected space attracted all kinds of small objects, ranging from marbles to watches to cravats. I did not remember exactly where I had left the gun—toward the head? Toward the foot? I crept along the floor on my belly, groping for a hard corner with my outstretched hand. I swept from foot to head and back again. The box was not there.

I slithered a few inches closer to see if my eyes could penetrate the gloom. A shaft of evening sun raking in from the western window hit the foot of the bed, and a thin line of light glowed beneath the mattress, making the rest of the low space darker. Nevertheless, I could see nothing there at all, not even a film of dust.

I sat back onto my heels, then stood up. Downstairs, Marguerite was placing dinner plates on the table. I moved the chair over to the armoire and climbed up on it, reaching out to feel the top shelf. Just as the dinner bell rang, my fingers brushed a familiar shape. Somehow, the gun had been moved from beneath my bed to its accustomed hiding place.

I changed my clothes quickly and arrived at the dinner table at the same time as Paul. He asked whether I had seen Vincent, and I found myself absolutely unable to discuss my friend. I boldly pretended that I had not. I am normally a wretched liar, but on this occasion I believe I was convincing. Paul spent the rest of the meal speculating on the likelihood of catching an enormous perch that he had spotted by a weir upstream. My mind, of course, was elsewhere.

Who had moved the box? Did they know it contained a gun? Did it still contain the gun? I hadn’t opened it—perhaps the weapon was missing! Why had it been moved? Would anyone attach any significance to it? What significance could it have?

It would have none, unless it was used.

Naturally as soon as we had finished the meal I made an excuse to return to my room. I climbed once again onto the chair and pulled the box down from the top shelf of the armoire. The gun was inside. So were the cartridges. I pushed the box under the bed again and went back downstairs for coffee.

Later that night, I loaded the little revolver. I slipped it into the pocket of the blue linen coat I had been wearing when Vincent painted me. I left the house quietly, walked to Ravoux’s, and tiptoed into the shed. I put the gun on the table, over the spot where Vincent had scratched his cry of despair.