Leaving Van Gogh (25 page)

And suddenly, I did. Blanche’s mother had wanted help dying.

“And did you?” I blurted out, without thinking. Instantly I would have done anything to take the words back. I did not want to know. I did not want to hear, or see—but she nodded again, fierce and proud, a woman I did not know.

A woman who had hastened her mother’s death.

No. A woman who had killed her mother.

I have never been good at hiding my feelings, and that night the moonlight must have revealed my shock, for Blanche took both of my hands in her own and explained like a parent reassuring a child, but with long pauses. “She had only a day or so to live. Perhaps hours. Every breath was a torture. I took from her hours of terrible pain. That was all.”

I did not answer. I was horrified.

“You do the same each time you give me laudanum,” she went on. “You take away the pain.”

“But life itself! To dare!”

This time she shrugged, again a tiny gesture. “What is it then? Life? When it is only agony, why not take it? Is that not the kinder thing?”

“But it’s not for us, there’s always hope,” I babbled. There was no hope in Blanche’s case, we both knew. I turned back to her.

She was looking at me with such pity. For a moment it was as if I were the patient waiting for good news, and she the doctor with the death sentence. “There is no hope,” she whispered. “There is a little bit of time, and a great deal of pain. That is what the rest of my life consists of.” There was no bitterness as she said it, or any effort to convince me, no urging or wheedling. Simply a statement.

“But it is not for us to decide,” I said, aware that I was repeating myself. I thought about the assertion again. Did I believe what I was saying? I stood up and stepped to the window. Trees whipped past, quickly enough to make me dizzy. Their tops were silvered, their bodies black. The moon was so bright that the stars all around it were eclipsed. It was a small, cold sun.

“You don’t believe in God,” came the whisper behind me.

“No,” I answered, without turning around. “I don’t.”

“So you would not be sinning.”

“No,” I had to agree.

“Then?”

“I swore an oath when I became a doctor. We vow to protect life,” I said. I had no idea what I meant.

“When did you ever care for an oath?”

I turned and went back to the bed. “Perhaps this is the only one. Perhaps that is why I feel I must uphold it.” I knelt, my arms on the bed and my head cradled on them. I could feel her fingers in my hair, delicate as moths.

She was waiting, but I could not answer. I could not agree to what she wanted, but I could not explain why. All I knew was that when I began to imagine doing what she asked, I felt a wave of revulsion. I could not contemplate it. My mind flinched away.

“All right” came the thread of her voice. “You cannot do it.”

I looked up at her, and I could feel tears falling onto my hands. My children have always teased me about how easily I weep—much too easily for a man—but it was not always so. It started that night, in the train, in the moonlight. Since then the tears have always been close to the surface. Her fingers wandered over my face, trying to smooth out the furrow between my eyebrows, wiping one cheek and then the other.

“I should not have asked,” she said at length. “Sometimes I forget that you are a doctor.”

“If I cannot heal you, what is that worth? What am I then?” Even I could hear the anguish in my question.

“A good man, Paul. A good husband. A good father. Those are the things you are to me. Other things to other people.”

She fell asleep with the suddenness of the invalid, and said nothing else for several hours. When she woke, the moon was setting on the other side of the train and we had moved into a rocky, irregular landscape that seemed hostile to life. She asked for water, and lay back on her pillow after drinking. I watched her after that, as she lay propped up contemplating the window without expression. She seemed peaceful.

We never spoke again about what she had asked of me. She remained, as she had always been, affectionate and sweet-tempered. She never got bitter or angry, as some patients do when they are in pain. There was something maternal about her attitude toward me during those last weeks. It was as though our whispered conversation in the moonlit train had revealed a weakness in me, a childlike flaw for which she must make allowances.

She spent a month in Auvers, watching April paint the countryside endless variations on green, and drinking in the sight of the children playing with the ducklings and chicks in the garden. But by early May, Blanche was ill enough to become frightening to the children, and I wanted her to be closer to Dr. Sémerie, so I moved her to Paris.

In the last days, the illness moved into her pleura, the sacs encasing her lungs. Each breath was a ragged, agonized torture. None of us slept—not the nurse I’d hired, or Dr. Sémerie, who kept watch with us. Certainly Blanche did not sleep. You could see her eyes fall closed and her entire body relax, then the need for oxygen overcame the exhaustion. Willy-nilly the breath would start again, her eyes would open to an expression of hopeless anguish, and the air would rush into what was left of her windpipe, rattling past the clots of bloody sputum, into her wrecked lungs, and then force its way back out. Agony in, agony out. Thousands of times a day.

We gave her laudanum, though it was difficult for her to swallow it. The doses got higher. It did not seem to relieve the pain, it just made dying easier to bear. I worried about the not-too-distant day when the ruin of her throat would make swallowing impossible. How long after that would she survive?

She had been right, on the train. The last two days of her life were merely dreadful pain. There was nothing else. Nothing for any of us, sitting in chairs beside the bed, holding her clawlike hands, brushing her now-brittle hair off her skull of a face. She didn’t speak. She could not have spoken, there was nothing left of her voice box. I don’t know if she was conscious. I hope she was not. I have hoped that for nearly thirty years.

I did not help her on her way.

S
ixteen

A
NOTHER 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.