Leaving Van Gogh (5 page)

I looked down and found my hands locked together like those of Tanguy in the painting.

“Everyone does that,” Theo said, nodding at my hands. “You don’t even know you’re doing it.” He looked back up at the portrait and shrugged. “So you see, my brother is brilliant. There is no one like him.”

He did not say it with excitement or pride. There was no sense of anticipation, no vision of a future in which Vincent’s paintings would be prized and Vincent himself—Well, what would one hope for Vincent? Even based only on my short acquaintance, I could not imagine a glowing future for him. He was not a man made for success, I thought. He could never tolerate having a busy studio, multiple commissions, an assistant to run errands, and a dealer to broker sales. He was like a monk. He belonged in a different setting, somehow withdrawn from the world.

Tanguy closed the drawer of the massive cash register, and the sole customer edged past us with both of the palettes beneath his arm. “Monsieur van Gogh,” Tanguy greeted Theo. “And I believe it is Dr. Gachet?” We shook hands, and he gestured up at his portrait. “A thing of beauty. Monsieur van Gogh, your brother is a giant. They will see.”

“It is the doctor who would like to see now,” Theo said. “Vincent is staying in Auvers, where the doctor lives.”

“This is the first time I have seen his work,” I added. “The portrait is magnificent. I would be very proud to be painted by him.”

“I am proud,” Tanguy responded. “Monsieur van Gogh feels as no one else does. He puts his heart on the canvas every time he lifts a brush. And if you sit for him, you will find that he puts your heart on the canvas as well.”

A harsh female voice called from the doorway at the back of the shop. “Julien! If you want to eat your supper, you must come now!” He rolled his eyes at us in the age-old gesture of the husband harassed by a shrewish wife, and held back the dark green curtains behind the counter.

“The stairs are there.” He pointed. He lifted two small lanterns from hooks on the wall. “You can light them?” he asked Theo, who nodded. “I’d best join my wife,” he added in a low voice and slipped through the doorway into the room beyond, where the aroma of long-stewed onions vanquished the chemical tang of the shop.

We stood awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs while Theo found a match safe in his pocket. “If you could open the doors,” he murmured to me, once we had light. “Now that I think of it, I should not have brought you here. What can we possibly see in this dim light?”

“Oh, but this is an adventure,” I said, my eagerness apparent in my voice. “We could be characters in a Dumas novel, hunting for hidden treasure.”

Theo smiled gratefully and led the way up the stairs, his lantern swinging gently, making the pool of light before him rock in response. Two flights up, he opened a door into an attic, even more pungent than the shop downstairs. As Theo looked for a place to hang the lantern, I tried to identify the different odors—turpentine was very strong, but so was the unmistakable scent of dead rodent.

“Here,” Theo’s voice said, as he reached a shelf where he deposited his lantern, which provided only a moderate glow. Even doubled by the light from my lantern, the area of visibility was narrow, dim, and wavering.

“This really is like a Dumas novel,” I remarked. “Or Aladdin’s cave. I feel there should be massive jars.”

“We never heard those tales growing up in Holland. Not in a preacher’s house.” Theo was busying himself with a pile of stretched canvases. “I doubt Vincent knows them to this day, though he is very well read. Oh, here we are. Most of these he painted in Paris a few years ago. Some were sent from the South. This, for instance.”

He pulled forward a picture of a coach resting against a brilliant yellow wall. Even in the shadowy room, the canvas crackled with heat. Green and red and black sizzled against each other, respectively the body, trim, and wheels of the carriage. I could almost hear the thrumming cicadas and the crunch of the dusty roadway beneath my feet.

“I begin to see what Tanguy meant about ‘feeling,’ ” I said.

Theo nodded. “This he painted here while he was living with me in Paris. An entirely different mood.”

“Ah, how lovely!” I exclaimed. It was a still life, a copper vase of fritillaries—their bell-shaped, golden blossoms and needles of leaves glimmered on the surface of the canvas. “What a color sense he has. Could the background have been anything besides that blue?”

“In a better light you’ll be able to see all the colors that make up the blue; it’s mixed with lavender, green, pink.… One doesn’t want to say it’s like a Monet—Vincent’s work is not like anyone else’s—but there was a moment when he was fascinated by Impressionist techniques.” As he continued to sort through the disorderly rows of canvases, I saw colors flicker past: ultramarine, scarlet, a surprisingly soft green, and that searing yellow. “Ah. This is what I was looking for.” He held up a horizontal rectangular canvas. At first I could only make out the simplest forms: round tables with crude chairs, clumsy ceiling lamps, a billiards table, awkward, blocky figures. Theo lifted the canvas to take it closer to the lantern on the wall. The colors became more distinct, but I almost wished they had not—the walls of the room were a throbbing red, trimmed with a green so vivid the eye bounced off it. The perspective was distorted so that the floorboards rushed upward while the chairs tilted, ready to eject anyone unfortunate enough to sit on them.

I could not look away from it, but I hated what it made me feel—despair, dislocation, and agitation. Melancholy seemed peaceful compared to this jangling, buzzing, lopsided room peopled with the vacant and desolate. As a window into Vincent’s mental state, it was startling. Could this be the same artist who had painted the fritillaries, or the lovely portrait of Tanguy? “I see,” I told Theo. “This is very disturbing.”

Theo craned around to see the image more clearly. “He calls it
The Night Café
. He intentionally put all those colors together, to make it harsh. I think he said ‘like a devil’s furnace.’ I hate to think that this was what his life was like in Arles, where he painted it. Do you see that figure standing in the center?”

“Yes, the waiter? With his hands hanging down?”

“Yes. He looks so helpless to me. As if he were trapped in this infernal place. Look at how much paint he used for the lamps.” I reached out and touched one of them gently, a small ridged dome on the canvas. I remembered how the skin of Vincent’s hands was seamed with paint. It was as though he sculpted with his pigments.

Theo lowered the painting, as if to set it down at the front of a row of canvases, facing the room. But he changed his mind and slipped it in behind, no doubt to conceal the alarming image. “The worst of his illness dates from Arles,” he said, dusting off his hands. “The doctor in the asylum told us that when he was very ill he did not know who he was. At times he could describe his feelings, but in just a few hours, he would turn morose. He suspected everyone around him of seeking to do him harm.”

“That is very common with melancholiacs,” I said, watching Theo as he idly flipped through more pictures. “They feel they must be perpetually on guard. It is very difficult to win their trust.” He pulled one out and put it at the front of the stack. A golden pottery vase of sunflowers stood against a cream background. Even in the dim light, the blossoms appeared to be so thick they were almost three-dimensional. Aside from the green stems and a narrow blue line dividing the lemon surface on which the vase stood from the pale background, the entire painting was yellow: primrose and mustard and egg yolk, ocher and daffodil and straw. It should never have worked. Yet it was a tour de force. Stepping closer, I could see the signature, “Vincent,” in blue on the side of the vase. He must have been proud of it.

“Vincent painted a series of these sunflowers to decorate his little house in Arles for Gauguin,” Theo said, straightening up. “His expectations were so high that his disappointment must have been dreadfully painful. Do you think he suffers from melancholy? Is that what ails him?” He stood, I couldn’t help noticing, as stiffly as the waiter in
The Night Café
, hands empty at his sides.

“Not at the moment,” I told him. “Patients afflicted by melancholy are always on the verge of fading away. You feel they would like to vanish if they could. But Vincent has such force. You can feel his eyes always moving, seeking motifs and rejecting them. He seems to think of nothing but painting.”

“That is almost true,” Theo agreed and turned to lift his lantern from the shelf. “To the extent that he thinks of anything else, it is almost always related to painting. Even when he reads, he thinks about how the writer’s thoughts could be expressed in color. When he meets someone new, he wonders whether their face would be interesting to paint. He sees the whole world as if there were a palette always in his hand. Shall we go? I must get back to my wife and baby. We called my son Vincent, you know,” he added, looking back from the door. “After my brother, of course, although Vincent thought we should have called the child after our father.”

“Yet he must be pleased,” I said, following Theo’s lantern down the narrow staircase.

“Yes, of course.” Theo’s voice came from below. “In his own way. He painted the most beautiful canvas when he heard that our son had been born. He was in the asylum then. The painting is a branch of blossoming almond against a blue sky, the most limpid, serene blue. A picture of immense tenderness.” By now we were back in Tanguy’s shop. Theo carefully snuffed the lanterns and hung them back on the hook.

“Thank you so much, Monsieur Tanguy,” he called through the door to the back room. “Please do not disturb your dinner. Good evening, Madame Tanguy. I left the lanterns on the stair. We will see ourselves out.”

I was almost startled to find myself on a busy Parisian street on a warm May evening, with light and noise coming from the little square at the end of the block. I turned to Theo and held out my hand. “I am most grateful, Monsieur van Gogh, that you took the time to show me these paintings. Of course I will see more of Monsieur Vincent’s work in Auvers—I believe it is vital for his health that he continue to work—but I am glad you could show me some of his paintings from recent years.” I took a deep breath, trying to control the emotion that I knew was in my voice. “Please believe that I will do everything I can to preserve the welfare of a man with such a gift.”

I knew I might seem overwrought, but I was not embarrassed. Let Theo think what he pleased. If he was taken aback, he had enough command of his features to hide it. “One could ask for no more,” he answered.

F
our

A
FTER THAT EVENING
, the image of
The Night Café
rose before me each time Vincent entered my mind. I wished that I had been able to see the painting of almond branches in bloom that Theo had described. It would have given me something to set against the desolation of the red and green café. But what was more significant, I found that I was now thinking of Vincent van Gogh as an artist rather than as a patient. Before I saw his work, he was for me a troubled man whom I might be able to help as I had helped others. Now I was glad that I had not seen his work before I examined him. As a patient, I had found him intriguing; as an artist, he was formidable.

My mind was full of the beautiful and terrifying paintings stacked up in Tanguy’s attic when Vincent came to visit on the last Sunday in May. I was a little bit startled when Madame Chevalier, with an air of faint reluctance, showed him into the salon. He seemed so small compared to the image of him that his work had built up in my mind. The man who painted those canvases should, I thought, be a titanic physical presence, a man whose courage could be read in his features, not a slight figure in an ill-fitting coat.

We skirmished over coffee and rolls—I was always trying to feed him. But Vincent had come ready to paint, and he would not be distracted. He roamed about the gardens a bit, considering, hesitating, then finally set up his easel before the house, where the terraces step down to the street. I left him, not wanting to hover as he worked. Curiosity, however, drove me to my studio on the third floor several times in the course of that morning. From its window, I could watch his progress. I saw him set a small oblong canvas on the easel and start squeezing colors onto his palette, tossing the mangled tubes back into his box in no order at all. Less than an hour later, the canvas was half-covered. I could not see the details, but Vincent’s brush darted at the painting like a hummingbird.

The time for luncheon approached. I had suggested that Madame Chevalier make a soufflé because of Vincent’s ill-fitting teeth, but that also meant we could not be late to the table, lest the soufflé deflate. While our housekeeper was very fierce in protecting our interests, she had a soft spot for the vulnerable. I was playing on this when I told her about Vincent’s pain while eating and his great need to become stronger; his life in Auvers would be more comfortable if Madame Chevalier was one of his allies. Promptness at meals was essential to winning her over, but I was reluctant to interrupt Vincent. He was painting in a furor, and I feared that, if I disrupted it, the picture could not be finished. I expected him to be possessed, in a way. I could not imagine that the spirit that allowed him to slash paint onto the canvas at such a rate could coexist with the mundanities of a soufflé and the necessity to clean the paint off his hands. He was perfectly affable, however. He finished a twirling orange knot of blossom—I was proud of my dahlias, and delighted to see them painted—and willingly put his brush down.

The painting is before me now, as I write. Vincent gave it to me later that week, when it had dried somewhat. I think he meant the gift as an exchange of sorts, a kind of payment for my care of him, like my paintings from Renoir and Monet. I am still startled by the life and vigor bursting off the canvas. I am lucky enough to own some two dozen of his paintings, many of which are more important than this, which he thought of as merely a “sketch.” But I cannot see this one without being reminded of the first time I watched Vincent van Gogh paint.

I will confess to some initial confusion. I had thought I was abreast of the times, accustomed to the new techniques that involved painting spontaneously to capture fleeting visual conditions. By definition, this goal required swift execution. But Vincent van Gogh did not even appear to think about this composition, let alone plan it. It looked as if he merely tossed paint at the canvas. I could not help contrasting his slapdash approach with my own much more painstaking process: sketching, underpainting, blending pigments. I understood the principle of what he was doing; the eye would do the blending. And of course, as I now knew, he was immoderately gifted. That, no doubt, was why I had to work so much harder for results that pleased me much less.

Vincent became a familiar presence in our house over the next few weeks. On the days when I was in Auvers, he would ring the bell at the gate whenever he passed by. He came to the house one morning and made a beautiful painting of Marguerite watering the roses in the garden. Sometimes he came in just to drink something cool, or to drop off a book he had mentioned to me. We would sit in the shade behind the house and talk about what he had seen or painted that day. He never stayed very long, though; Vincent was industrious, and his next project always called out to him.

Once, I persuaded him to go fishing with me. It was a dull day, one of the few that summer, with low clouds that periodically released showers as if they could no longer be bothered to restrain them. For some reason I don’t remember, Paul was not with us. Perhaps it was so early in June that he was still at the lycée in Paris. Marguerite and Madame Chevalier had embarked on some ambitious and noisy housekeeping task. It was one of those days when I was out of sorts and nothing pleased me, so I barked my displeasure when the women came to the door of the salon with their aprons and feather dusters. Marguerite quailed, as she always did when I raised my voice, but Madame Chevalier, a creature of stronger fiber, thumped down her infernal tools, advanced on me, and suggested forcefully that I remove myself to the riverbank. “If it’s dirt and mess you want, you’ll find it aplenty there. We’ll be finished by sunset, but you’ll have to find yourself a meal elsewhere. I did tell you this, you know.”

I was grateful at that moment that I did not have a wife. There is occasionally something intolerable in women’s obsession with order. I put on my oldest jacket and tore off a good third of a baguette I found in the kitchen, seized my fishing rod, and headed to the river as Madame Chevalier had suggested. It even bothered me that I was obeying her—but fish do come to the surface on damp days like that.

I encountered Vincent near the train station, walking slowly with his shoulders hunched against the rain. He was carrying his painting kit, but a discouraged look on his face suggested that the weather had forced him to change his plans. He had hoped to paint the cottages in the rain, but the humidity interfered with the application of pigment to the canvas. “It so rarely rains in the South,” he told me. “I feel very foolish as well as disappointed.”

I, on the other hand, was delighted to see him. A solitary afternoon beneath the willows would not have been terrible, but Vincent’s company in a rowboat—that would be quite charming.

It was not easy to persuade him to join me. I had to walk back to Ravoux’s with him and beg the loan of a large umbrella so that Vincent could still sketch on the boat in the rain. He refused to have anything to do with a fishing rod. Then at the landing stage, where I rented a boat for a paltry sum—there was certainly no one else out that day—Vincent balked at stepping into the craft. One does not want to laugh in such a situation, for he was masking genuine fear, but his almost childish apprehension was comical. Once we were launched, he seemed consoled by my obvious competence at the oars—at least he could be sure I would not overturn the boat—and before long he was intrigued by the entirely new vantage point provided by the little craft. For my part, I was pleased for once to be the expert, showing him how to sit in the center of the boat, pointing out little landmarks like the river otters’ den. Paul had long since seen everything and sometimes attempted to snub me in similar circumstances, but Vincent was much more receptive. Bit by bit, his apprehension diminished. Then he confessed: “I cannot swim, you know.”

“The river is shallow. And I would have thought you Dutchmen were all at home on the water.”

He laughed. “You know, even fishermen often can’t swim. Imagine what a predicament! Spending your time on the open water, every day, in every weather, always aware that it can kill you.”

“The Oise cannot kill you,” I remember saying, not entirely truthfully. A hip bath can kill you, if you want it to. I shipped the oars and prepared to bait my hook. Vincent watched intently. Then I dropped the hook overboard and let it drift in the current.

“Is that all you do?” he asked.

I was surprised. “Yes.”

“I was expecting nets, I think,” Vincent said. Then he began to laugh. “But that would be ridiculous! I was thinking of ocean fishing, where men go out to sea and put their lives at risk!”

I had to laugh with him. “That being the case, you were very brave to get into this boat with me.”

“That was certainly my opinion!”

This short exchange put us on a new footing. We were companions rather than doctor and patient. Vincent refused to bait the hook, claiming that he could not bear to be cruel to the earthworm, but he took his turn with the rod and reeled in a fairly respectable perch, which he then sketched, lying on the flat seat between us. I wish I knew what had become of that drawing. I suppose those notebooks went back to Holland with Johanna.

“Do you ever paint still lifes?” I asked Vincent, as he admired his catch. I had seen flower paintings at Tanguy’s in Paris, but I wondered about other subjects. “When Cézanne was here, he painted apples over and over again.”

“Because he could find nothing better to paint?” Vincent asked.

“No, we put bouquets together and painted those, and he went out into the village as well. He was experimenting with rendering volume, I believe.”

“That seems to be all he ever does. I understand that this is his primary concern, and I can imagine that he must find it interesting, but the results are quite dull. The colors are always the same, have you noticed?”

“Not always. You’ve seen my flower pieces—he uses clearer tones there.”

“True, but the landscapes are most monotonous. Always the same dreary green.” He pointed at his fish. “Now, you see, if I had my paints, I could make something beautiful with that gleaming skin, something Cézanne would never think of. I would have liked to do that. A kind of silvery olive, shaded with pink. Can I take him with me?”

“Of course,” I said, “but you’d better give him to Ravoux to cook for your dinner. The skin will dull very quickly, and then he will start to smell.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Vincent said with a frown and returned to his sketch. “I painted some sardines once, but even though I work quickly, I could not tolerate their smell for very long. It was a while before I could eat sardines again after that.”

He ended up not painting that fish but eating it, which made me even happier. He came back to the house with me, and Madame Chevalier sautéed his catch and mine with almonds and fresh parsley. I saw him eyeing the skeleton on his plate when he had finished, as if he would have liked to draw it, but he let Madame Chevalier remove the plate without any protest.

If Vincent came to the house on the way to Ravoux’s at the end of the day, he liked to show me what he had painted. Soon we were accustomed to his speed, to the élan with which he covered even large canvases with paint. Once Paul finished his school term, and returned home for the summer, he would often clean up after our new friend; you could always tell where in Auvers Vincent had been working, and often what colors he had used. Paul sometimes came home from his wanderings around the village with one of Vincent’s paint tubes or abandoned brushes, tossed aside when the bristles failed. As I knew, Theo kept him supplied with materials; the shipments from Paris must have been prodigious.

It was the first sign Paul showed of having any artistic inclination, despite my numerous previous attempts to share my interests with him. I told myself that this was because Vincent was a younger man, closer to Paul in age than I was. Certainly Vincent made no attempt to win Paul over, though my son followed him around like a puppy. Paul sometimes tried to strike up a conversation, but Vincent rarely responded beyond mere courtesy. This did not seem to discourage Paul, though. He was always persistent when he wanted something. To this day I wonder what he hoped for from Vincent. Some kind of approval or acknowledgment, I suppose.

The paintings accumulated quickly. I was slightly concerned about Vincent’s almost feverish pace, lest he wear himself out. Yet he seemed to be delighted rather than anxious. This ardor was one of his most compelling traits. Each time I returned from my customary four-day stint in Paris, he was eager to show me what he had done in my absence. It was as if he were discovering the world I lived in with eyes that unveiled a new splendor. It appeared that he could not be deterred by discomfort or fatigue or discouragement. When a painting did not please him, he thought of another way to approach the subject. He was always thinking about the next thing he wanted to paint. His speed reflected a kind of hunger to make the beauty all around him his own. I found this both fascinating and inspiring.