Leaving Van Gogh

Nineteen





I WOKE AT DAWN. Without rousing Marguerite or Madame Chevalier, I left my house and returned to the inn, where I found Paul sprawled on the floor next to Vincent’s bed. The room smelled worse than it had the night before, so I woke Paul up and had him open the skylight, then sent him home to bed. Soon Ravoux came up the stairs carrying a bowl of coffee for me, which was very kind. Another Dutch painter was staying at the inn, a man called Anton Hirschig. I entrusted him with the letter to Theo, and he left to catch the first train to Paris. He would be at Boussod and Valadon before ten.

Vincent appeared to sleep through this small commotion. When Dr. Mazery came, we changed his dressing. The wound still looked clean—there was no redness and no swelling. The bleeding continued, but at a slower pace. Mazery had brought some old linens, which we packed around Vincent’s side. I felt for the pulse in one of his wrists, and it was both slow and weak. Vincent’s skin tone was pallid, and the contours of his face were sharper than ever. I calculated how long it might be before Theo could reach us; there was still plenty of time.

I spent the morning at Vincent’s side. When he woke and asked for his pipe, I told him that Theo was coming. I fanned Vincent to keep the flies away, and rested in the chair next to his bed, my mind strangely idle. We heard the village wake and the voices muffled downstairs. Several hours passed. We were sitting this way when Theo arrived.

He had begun his day at the gallery, expecting nothing more taxing than the attempt to sell some paintings and the daily effort to control his ailing body. Yet here he was, in his brother’s tiny garret room, dressed in his frock coat and black silk cravat, after several hours of the gravest worry. His eyes were wild, and when he saw Vincent lying with a terrible stillness beneath the pile of covers, he burst into tears. I stood up and led him to the chair. He sank instead to his knees, clasping Vincent’s ivory hand to his cheek. I heard Vincent’s voice very quietly say, “I did it for all of us.” Then he broke into Dutch. As I left the room, I heard the two brothers murmuring to each other in the guttural language of their childhood.

The day went on. I telegraphed my concierge in Paris, canceling all of my appointments for the next few days. I went back to the house to shave properly and inform Madame Chevalier and Marguerite what had happened. Marguerite turned very pale. I assured her that Vincent was not suffering, but she ran upstairs to her room. Madame Chevalier and I exchanged glances, and she promised me that she would take care of the girl. Then I went back to the inn.

Theo appeared to nurse mistaken hope. Around the middle of the afternoon, he came downstairs to find me. I had brought a chair from the café into Vincent’s shed and was dozing among the canvases. I stood up, moving the light chair closer to him. He collapsed into it.

“He seems stronger, Doctor, don’t you think?” he asked. “It can’t have been that grave an injury. His heart was not damaged, I believe?”

“His heart was not damaged,” I answered. “But I have seen no sign that he is stronger. Rather the opposite, Monsieur van Gogh. The wound is still bleeding.”

“But you have not seen him in the last hour,” Theo protested. “You should go up and check on him. Mazery is with him now. He sent me down for something to eat, but of course I cannot eat. I must write a letter to Jo. She is staying with my mother in Holland. This will be a terrible blow for both of them.”

“Then let us go into the café,” I said, holding out a hand to help him get up. I turned him away from the shed, away from the corner of the table where I had laid a sketch pad across the frightening words Vincent had painted there.

“Come and let Ravoux give you some soup,” I suggested. “I will bring you some paper, and you can write your letter to Jo. We will send Paul to mail it when you are finished.”

“All right, Doctor,” he conceded. “But do check on Vincent. You’ll see he is rallying. He is stronger than anyone thinks.”

I did check on Vincent, who seemed even more diminished. His skin was now the color of paper, and his form beneath the quilt seemed even flatter, as if his body were simply vanishing. Theo wrote his note with some difficulty, I noticed. His handwriting was inconsistent, letters variable in size and lines climbing up and downhill. I wrote the Dutch address on the outside at his direction, and we did not mention his lack of motor control. Soup had also been a poor idea: it was dribbled around where he had been sitting. I supposed that the nervous strain of Vincent’s injury must have been taxing his strength.

Vincent smoked another pipe. Ravoux and I managed to get Theo to drink some tea, and later eat a bit of chicken. He seemed to accept, as the day went on, that Vincent was dying—his face grew ever more stoical, and he spoke of his brother’s comfort rather than of his recovery. The temperature in the garret was wretched, but Vincent showed no sign of discomfort. We were all in our shirtsleeves, hair sticking to our faces, but he lay like marble. By evening the wound was still clean and cool. The flow of blood was very slow now, little more than a dark, sticky trickle. His heartbeat was weak, and his breaths were shallow. I turned to Theo as I listened with my stethoscope.

“His heart is very slow, I must tell you,” I said. “I am afraid it will not be much longer.”

Theo looked up at me. He had loosened his cravat, and he must have rubbed against Vincent’s bandage, for there were rusty smears of blood on one of his sleeves. “There was really nothing you could have done, Doctor, was there?”

“Nothing,” I said. “No one could have saved him.” Theo kept his gaze on my face, perhaps waiting for more. But I had nothing left to say.

When I arrived at the inn just after seven the next morning, Vincent was gone. Theo lay next to him in the bed, his arms wrapped around his brother’s body, but he was not asleep. When I stepped into the room, Theo said, “It was a good end. He said, ‘I wish I could die like this,’ and then he breathed his last.”

Grief overwhelmed me in a hot wave. My hands came up to my face, and I found myself crouching next to the bed. Tears poured down my cheeks and my chin, and I watched them spatter the dusty floor. I had known Vincent would die. I had been glad for him. But now that he was gone, I wept.

We knew, all of us who had known Vincent were certain, that we would never have another friend like him. Surely Theo spoke truly when he called his brother “impossible.” I had caught glimpses of his stubbornness and unreason. Yet he was generous and brilliant, and he had the rare quality of knowing exactly what he was meant to do in life. His circumstances had not helped him, but he pressed on, following his calling. Perhaps his sense of conviction drew people to him because we all wished for a share of it. Perhaps that made his death that much more of a blow.

As the day unrolled, we were busy. We had to certify the death at the town hall, to notify friends in Paris. Vincent would be buried the next day in the new cemetery up on the hill. I offered to arrange for the grave and to order the coffin, in part to spare Theo the need to leave the inn. The priest refused to loan the church’s hearse to convey Vincent’s body to his resting place, since his death was a suicide. We were all so stunned with sorrow that we barely perceived the insult. Paul and Hirschig were sent to borrow a hearse from the neighboring village of Méry.

Toward evening the carpenter Levert let us know that the coffin was finished. The heat had abated somewhat, and Theo was lying down in Ravoux’s best room. We did not want to transfer Vincent’s body until Theo was awake, and I would not let him be disturbed. I went upstairs, glad of a respite myself, and sat down next to Vincent’s bed.

The body had been washed, the bloodied bedding taken away. They had dressed Vincent in his best clothes, a white shirt and a pair of brown trousers. Someone, perhaps Madame Ravoux, had washed and starched the shirt to a brilliant white. Vincent’s skin looked waxy next to it. His brow was furrowed, even in death. My hand came up to try to smooth the lines from his face, but I stopped myself.

The skylight was open, and the sounds from downstairs drifted to me as they had on that night when I visited Vincent. Ravoux had insisted that Vincent’s body be placed in the café itself, and Paul had the brilliant notion that we hang Vincent’s canvases around the walls. I heard hammering, and furniture being moved. Horses clopped past, and someone emptied a bucket into the street. Vincent’s room was silent.

I noticed that his table had been tidied, with the papers and pens and bits of charcoal and pencils and notebooks all laid out in rows and stacks. I got up to examine this unfamiliar arrangement, created by hands other than Vincent’s. There were several blank sheets of letter paper next to the candlestick, and without thinking I picked them up. I found a cardboard folder to support the paper and examined the charcoal, choosing the largest piece. Then I sat down again, facing the bed, and began to draw Vincent.

I had considered making a sketch of Blanche on her deathbed. I had done so for my young nephew who died in 1873, and his parents were happy to have a last portrayal of him. Blanche, though, was so ravaged by her last days that it would have broken my heart to look at her with that kind of scrutiny. Maybe a deathbed portrait is just an attempt to delay a farewell, to spend a little bit more time with a loved one. Vincent’s face was so well known to me, yet this was my last chance to fix it in my memory.

Vincent lay on his back, in three-quarters profile to me. I made a bold line for the contour of his forehead, and drew in the two shallow curves of his eyebrows. Another firm line formed his nose, and already I could see his face taking shape. It was so strange, though, to try to depict Vincent without color. He had seen the world in terms of the full spectrum. On the other hand, perhaps charcoal and paper were the right materials for this task. The room was becoming gloomy as the light faded outside. The brilliant canvases had already been taken downstairs. Vincent’s skin was pale as ivory in death—color, for the time being, had vanished.

I used a few thick strokes of the charcoal to indicate the hair at his temple and the top of his head, then made two curved marks for the ear—the damaged ear. It did not look anything like an ear. I quickly made a few horizontal lines to show where the pillow was.

A better artist than I would have been able to convey the lights and shadows on Vincent’s face. I used the side of the charcoal to indicate the hollow of his cheek. I rubbed with my thumb, hoping to turn the marks into what was more obviously a shadow.

Vincent had made this all look easy. When he made the etching of me, I remembered his saying that he had already considered my face as a pattern of lights and darks, so that it would be relatively simple to etch onto the plate. And he had done it so simply, so clearly. Now I looked at his closed eyes, and hesitated. I kept telling myself to see simply dark and light, but it was not that simple.

As my charcoal roved over the page, I felt as though I was touching Vincent’s skin. I drew a series of parallel lines to indicate the furrows in his forehead. There is a popular notion that the dead are at rest, yet Vincent did not look tranquil. I could not help reaching over to smooth away those creases, but they remained.

I sat still for a moment, hoping to regain control of my emotions, then I leaned forward and put the portrait on the bed, beside Vincent’s body. So much for my attempt to dispassionately record the truth. I don’t know how long I sat there weeping, though it could not have been long. The light had not changed when I heard a faltering step outside the door. I straightened and began to hunt in my pockets for a handkerchief. I had to give up and wipe my cheek with my cuff, a gesture that took me back to my childhood. I felt Theo’s hand on my shoulder. I tried to stand up, but he pressed me back into the chair. Instead he sat on the bed by Vincent’s side. He picked up my sketch, and for a moment his eyes filled, too. But he recovered faster than I had from the rush of grief.

“It’s for you,” I said. “There is nothing else I can do.”

He smiled briefly at me, then looked at his brother’s body. Vincent’s hands had been clasped on his chest. Theo lay his left hand on both of them. “We all did what we could, Doctor. I cannot think what else would have helped him. He had an unfinished letter in his pocket—did you know?” I shook my head. “He said …” Theo reached into his trousers pocket and drew out a folded piece of paper. He unfolded it and read, “As for my work, I put my life at stake for it and my reason has almost foundered. Well, that’s that.” He folded the letter and put it back into his pocket. There did not seem to be anything else to say. He leaned forward and put a hand very gently against Vincent’s cheek. Then he stood up. “I have some letters to write. Thank you for making that drawing.”

“Do not overtax yourself,” I said. “Tomorrow will be harrowing.”

He nodded. “I am conserving my strength.” I heard his slow, uneven footsteps go down the stairs.

I picked up the drawing, and the charcoal, which had rolled to the floor. Quickly, before I could think about it, I deepened the down-turning line of Vincent’s lips and drew the fold running from the edge of his nose. I shaded his lower lip and emphasized his chin. And there it was, Vincent’s angular face.

I made a copy of the drawing before giving it to Theo—much as Vincent had copied my portrait for me. We were paired in that way. I have to say that it was not a beautiful image. I have made other pictures—paintings, etchings—that are more pleasant to look at. But this sketch came close to a kind of truth. That was all I was trying for.

We buried Vincent on July 30. His paintings hanging on the walls of Ravoux’s café transformed the room. To stand in its center surrounded by such visions was almost blinding. You could tell by the reactions of the handful of men who came for the funeral. Vincent had always felt alone in the world, yet there was his friend the painter Emile Bernard, there was Lucien Pissarro representing his father, Camille; there was even old Père Tanguy, who had closed his shop to pay tribute to Vincent. One by one they stepped over the threshold from the main street, and then they halted in the doorway, astounded. I saw Tanguy studying all of the paintings as if committing them to memory. Some of the men wept, but often they smiled through their tears, for there was joy on the walls. It is easy to forget, especially for those of us who witnessed his last days, that Vincent found delight in what he saw around him, and he brought it to his paintings.

I tried to say that at his grave. We were a small procession following the hearse, no more than a dozen. In addition to those who had come from Paris, there were men from the neighborhood: Ravoux and his son, Levert the carpenter, others who must have seen Vincent roaming the fields.

I wanted so much to pay tribute to Vincent. I wanted to be sure that everyone there understood how faithful he was to his own mission. There was little talking as we trudged up the hill beside the church. Somehow Theo found the strength to follow the coffin and accept condolences without betraying any more weakness than one would ascribe to a grieving man. It was no cooler, though a dry breeze whisked around us. The cemetery is surrounded by wheat fields—we were in the very center of one of Vincent’s pictures. “How he would have loved to paint this,” Paul murmured as we watched the shifting tones of gold and ocher dancing to the blue horizon.

I told them that. I stood by Vincent’s grave and said, “Those of us who knew Vincent van Gogh will always see the world through his eyes. These fields and these skies are his world, but so are the riverbanks of Paris and the hills of Montmartre and the cypresses of the South.” I could feel my throat tightening. I looked at the knot of dark-clad men, bare heads bowed in the brilliant sun. I looked at the grave, freshly dug. The rich soil was already drying at the edges in the warm air. I looked down at the simple coffin and thought of my friend Vincent, the painter, the patient I had hoped to save. “He was a great artist,” I said, “and he cared deeply about mankind. His art will keep his name alive, I think we all know this.” I took out my handkerchief and mopped my eyes. “There is not a man here who will not remember this day and the genius of Vincent van Gogh,” I managed to choke out. I suppose those were enough words; they were the only ones I could speak. Theo followed me with similar emotion, then the earth was shoveled back onto the coffin. We had all brought with us some of the flowers that decked the bier at Ravoux’s. I had sent Paul out to gather sunflowers that morning: none grow in my gardens, but I knew how much Vincent loved them. Paul had returned with a bouquet that filled his arms. I laid the flowers next to the headstone. I will always see in my mind’s eye those heavy yellow blooms nestled against the gray stone. Vincent would have loved to paint them.