Leaving Van Gogh (20 page)

Little seemed to have changed in this part of the great old hospital. The alterations that had brought the surrounding area into the nineteenth century—almost into the twentieth—did not penetrate the walls of the asylum, apparently. I crossed several courtyards, hearing the familiar sounds: the beating of a small drum to help seamstresses keep time in a workroom, the rhythmic scrape of a rake, a high voice wailing. In one courtyard a gardener wheeling a barrow thanked me for stepping off the path. He called me “Doctor.” What else could I be, in that place?

I crossed to the archway between buildings and turned left into the long hallway without thinking. I found the door I knew was there and opened it. Three steps led down into the courtyard, and a stout wardress stood at the bottom. She looked up at me.

“Good morning,” I said. “My name is Dr. Gachet. I was an extern here many years ago and I just met with Dr. Charcot. He suggested I might visit the section of the hospital where I worked. May I stay here for a moment?”

“As you like, Doctor,” she said. “I doubt you’ll see much difference.”

I gazed around. “No,” I agreed. “Nothing has changed.” It was remarkable. The trees were perhaps taller. The gravel must have been renewed at some point. The patients, however, could have come from Gautier’s painting
The Madwomen of the Salpêtrière
. Poor Gautier, now deep in debt—I wished he were with me now. We would have sat on the steps with our drawing pads, and I would have believed I could help these poor creatures. “Do you have any hysterics in this group?” I asked the wardress.

“No, these women are all quiet. The hysterics upset them. One minute your hysteric’s strolling around calmly, next minute she’s upside down and screaming. Having them in with the calm ones just upsets everybody.”

“You’ve worked with them?” I pursued the subject.

“Of course. Some of us like it, adds some interest. I don’t. I feel for these poor things.” She gestured to an obvious melancholiac sitting on a bench in the shade. “Poor Gabrielle, how can you not pity her? Gentle, kind, hates to give trouble. Some of the hysterics put it on for Dr. Charcot, you know. He says they have fits, so they have fits. He says the fits look like this or that, sure enough they do. They like to get off work, go over to the studio and be photographed. Sometimes they perform in his lectures, and I do mean perform!”

This did not surprise me terribly. If the women intuited what Charcot and his students wanted to see in a “hysterical” patient, they would provide that. I had seen a few volumes of the famous
Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière
, published by one of Charcot’s protégés, and some of the patients had appeared very knowing indeed.

“Do they ever get better?” I asked.

The wardress looked carefully at me for the first time. “You should know that if you’re a doctor. Or don’t you treat the mad anymore?”

I looked up at the sky, holding my hat on my head. “Sometimes I wonder if anyone gets better,” I said.

She frowned, and her eyes shifted away. “Well,” she said. “If you say so.” She caught sight of a woman on the ground, scrabbling at the earth with her hands. “Cécile,” she called out, and bustled away. “Cécile, we do not dig!” The woman, spotting her, only began to dig faster, though her busy fingers made no visible hole in the hard ground. It was a futile exercise. She was acting on compulsion, a mysterious command that told her to dig, here, now. Dig. I didn’t think my compulsion to visit the madwomen had been much more productive.

T
welve

I
WAS NOT EAGER
to have a conversation about hysteria with Vincent. It was not that I was afraid. I did not fear that he would turn on me. No, my apprehension was more complex. I was awestruck, you might say, the way a novice monk is cowed by his superior. It was as if Vincent had advanced further than I in some special devotion. He was privy to exalted mysteries in the church of mental illness, and this distinction made him fearsome.

According to Ravoux, Vincent was still leaving the inn before eight and coming home around sunset, exhausted. He was sometimes spotted up on the plateau, either sitting in front of a canvas or making his way to another site, carrying his easel and canvas like an ant with an unwieldy burden. I chose to look for him there. The sun had long since slid from the vertical, but it was still hot. The cicadas, which come late to Auvers, were buzzing in the trees, starting and stopping according to some mysterious signal.

The afternoon was quite still. Sun and shadows lapped over the wheat fields, dark gold and bright. The heads of the wheat are mobile and sensitive, bending in the slightest breeze, but there was none that afternoon. My footsteps crackled as I trudged through one of the fields. No human figure emerged from the sea of grain. Vincent must have gone in a different direction. As I traversed the long field to reach the westbound path, I thought I might as well be in one of his paintings. The golden field with its infinite tones of ocher and yellow was set off by the brilliant blue sky, provided by nature to carry out Vincent’s own theory of complementary colors. Each made the other more intense. I merely crept along the seam between them, feeling very small.

I was hot, so I was very relieved when I saw a tiny figure, no more than a nick on the horizon, and recognized it as Vincent. He was perched at the top of a crest a few hundred meters away, almost swallowed by the wheat. From there he would have a magnificent view of the slope down to the Oise.

He faced away from me, but he must have heard me coming from quite a distance. I found it hard to catch my breath as I toiled up the slope. When I reached him, I could only stand behind him, panting. I looked out at what he had chosen to paint, and it was beautiful. The river, furred with willows, lay in a languorous curve. Vincent would have placed that in the bottom third of the canvas. Then, stretching toward the horizon, he would stack up the fields, those fertile lowland plots, each showing a variant green according to the crop: beans, peas, beetroot. He would use a different pattern of brushwork, too, for each. Some would be dotted, some zigzagged, some painted with a basket-weave or chevron pattern. Then he could use broader, looser strokes for the sky, whose blue softened toward the horizon.

But he had done none of these things. The canvas on his easel was perfectly white. Perhaps he had just arrived. Perhaps there was a canvas next to him, already finished.

I stepped to his side. “It is a magnificent prospect,” I said. “The light at this hour is especially lovely.”

“It is, Doctor,” he said.

I glanced down. I saw no finished canvas. His palette lay on his lap. The colors dotted it in slick cushions: lead white, ultramarine, chrome yellow, three different greens. His right hand clasped three brushes, but they were all clean.

“Did you just get here?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “I have been here all day.”

“But,” I protested, gesturing at the paint. “You just set up your palette.”

He took one of the brushes and flipped it around. With the wooden end he poked the dome of white to show me that a heavy skin had formed. The paint had been drying for hours. “By now these are the wrong colors,” he said. “There is too much blue. They would have been right this morning.” He looked up at me. “Then after a few hours, I would have needed more yellow and ocher. A harder blue, probably cobalt. Then some darker green. Now—” He set the palette on the ground and reached into the box by his side. “Geranium lake, perhaps. The sky will show pink soon.” He tossed a tube onto the ground. “I would need to mix up a purple.” Another tube dropped. “And if I sit here long enough, I will need darker blues, and darker.” He kept reaching into the box, scrabbling for tubes of paint and flinging them ever farther away. “No black, though, Doctor,” he said, in a controlled tone. “I have painted night scenes before. I can do it without black. In fact,” he went on, getting up from his folding stool, “I only have a small tube.”

He crouched in front of the paint box and tipped it upside down. Out fell a small avalanche of crumpled lead shapes. He pawed through them, tossing aside one after another while saying their beautiful names like an incantation: “vermilion, viridian, Prussian blue, malachite green. Ah! Here we are. Black. You see? A small tube.” He held it up to me. “I always have to ask Theo for the largest tubes of yellow.” He unscrewed the top and squeezed a thin rope of darkness onto his palette. The coil grew, invading the blue, then the green. With both hands, he pressed the pigment from the bottom of the tube, carefully urging every last smear of black out of the soft metal casing. Then he hurled the tube far into the wheat, so far that I could barely hear the rustle when it landed.

He knelt on the ground now, with his palette before him. I stood just a foot away, silent, appalled. In another individual—if this had been my son, Paul, for example—I would have thought this behavior nothing more than frustration, a showy explosion of anger. Yet anger was absent in Vincent. His voice was little more than a thread, and he moved in a measured way, as if carrying out a ritual. He looked up at me. He met my gaze for a moment, then shifted his eyes to something behind me and very far away. No number of words could have said more clearly that my presence did not matter. He looked down, and put his right hand squarely onto his palette. He pressed down.

The black oozed up between his fingers. The membrane covering the half-dried pigments gave way so that streaks of white and yellow seeped into the black. He twisted his hand, sliding his splayed fingers through the knots of brighter color. Paint crawled across the tops of his fingers and crept up his wrist. Then he held his palm out to me. “You see, Doctor? This is why you have to be so careful with black, it soon overwhelms everything.”

That black hand held toward me seemed like a threat. What was he going to do? Rub it on his face? On the canvas? Smear it onto his other hand, wipe it onto his clothes, suck the paint from his fingers? He sat before me on the ground, unkempt, sunburned, and streaked with paint like the maddest of madmen. Yet he was perfectly aware, completely controlled.

He lowered his hand into his lap, and his face became, if it was possible, even bleaker. “So,” he said. “That is the end of that.” He turned his palm down and drew it across the ground before him, dragging a shadow over the trampled stems of wheat.

“Doctor,” Vincent said. “There should be a rag in the drawer of the paint box. Perhaps it might be useful.” He was twisting handfuls of wheat stems into a makeshift brush and scraping at the spaces between his fingers. I stepped around him and righted the paint box, opening the drawer and finding a wad of grayish linen, crusted with orange and blue. He took it with his left hand and scrubbed his wrist where the tide of oily colors had left the shadow of a glove. Finished, he let the rag drop to the ground. Then he turned back to the magnificent scene before him, glowing more golden now. I had the sense that the episode, whatever it was, had reached its end. I lifted the blank canvas off the easel and set it down, collapsing the easel to rest beside me. I did not want that white rectangle to reproach my friend for a moment longer. Using the tips of my fingers, I maneuvered the palette out of sight. Then I sat on the stool, shoulder to shoulder with Vincent. All of my hesitation and timidity fell away.

“We have not seen you,” I said. “I was worried.”

“I have not been fit for company.”

“Not as a guest, then,” I said. “But as a patient.”

He brushed away my comment with the paint-stained hand. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

“Have you been distressed?” I asked. “Do you feel there is another attack coming on?” But even as I asked my questions, I knew they were futile.

“Doctor,” Vincent said, scratching his eyebrow, “I know you are a sympathetic man. I know that you would like to be able to make me feel better. I would like that myself.” He turned toward me, with a dark streak now shading one of his eyes. “Do you have a potion? Or is it an electrical treatment? Little waves of current jolting through me”—here he jiggled his body slightly—“to set my brain aright?” He kept his eyes on mine, and this time I felt that he was completely engaged. This was the opportunity, I knew. He had come to a crisis of some kind and was ready to acknowledge his state.

“I saw a doctor in Paris,” I began. “He studies hysteria. It sounds in many ways like what troubles you. The attacks sound very similar, with the voices, visual hallucinations, shouting and thrashing. I witnessed an attack while I was at the hospital visiting him. It was dreadful,” I finished. There was a pause. “I would like to spare you from going through that again.”

“But can you, Doctor?” Vincent asked. “Can this new doctor?”

The question hung there. A troop of cicadas started to thrum in the trees, then stopped. In the silence, I remembered Charcot’s voice saying, “I cannot pretend to you that we have any way to end hysteria.”

“He has found ways …” I found my voice faltering. “Sometimes he is able to reduce the intensity of the attacks, he says. Or the frequency. Or both.” I met Vincent’s gaze.

“I have seen doctors,” he said mildly. “They did not help me.”

“No, but Charcot is an expert. He has seen more cases like yours than anyone in France.”

“And the patient you saw in the hospital, was he getting better?”

I had to admit it. “No.”

“Was Dr. Charcot confident that he could help this man?”

I could not pretend to Vincent that Charcot had been confident. I drew breath to speak. I was going to say, “No, but perhaps he can help you.” I was going to say, “He may be able to find a way. We should at least try this.” I exhaled and shook my head. Charcot himself had warned me how little he could do in cases like Vincent’s. I drew breath again.

“Can you imagine what it is like, Doctor?” Vincent said softly. “If anyone can, it is you. I have felt a kinship between us from the start. You have suffered, I know that. But you suffer other people’s ills as well as your own. That was why I was hopeful when we met. I believe you can guess what it is like. You never know when it’s going to happen. You are going about your business, perhaps in your office seeing a patient. And, suddenly, the world convulses. Your desk, your chair, your curtains writhe in front of you and groan. Or perhaps it is you groaning. Your patient—let us assume she is a lady—draws away as she sees your face. Your face is screwed up, your eyes closed, your teeth like fangs. You are drooling. You drop to the floor because you no longer control your limbs. Your bowels loosen. You flail and shout, knocking over a lamp. Your lady patient has fled the room in terror, and she brings the concierge upstairs. You are still kicking, and the concierge runs away to get help. Her husband drops the coals he is unloading and comes upstairs. He cannot hold you down. There’s shit seeping out of your trousers, the carpet is ruined. You’re sobbing. You’ve broken a chair and torn the feathers from a cushion.” His speech came to a halt.

I could imagine it all. I could imagine it for myself, and for Vincent. For Vincent, this had happened again and again. He had been alone, rolling on the cold stone floor of the asylum at St.-Rémy. He had been held down by warders. He had been tied up in the
gilet de force
.

“And sometimes it goes on, you know. You come to—it’s like waking up, only you’re sick, your head aches, and you’re bruised, of course, from thrashing around. You have a foul taste in your mouth and your arms are crossed in front of you and you can’t get your hands out and that’s when you know. It happened again. And maybe you are awake for an hour or a day, and then it starts again.” Vincent scrambled to his feet, pushing himself clumsily off the ground. He stood for a moment, facing away from the river, back toward the wheat fields I had crossed to find him.

“And then when it’s over, Doctor, you are so weak. You are terrified. Everything,
everything
is filled with menace. Especially your sleep. Oh, the nightmares! Monsters, horrors! I thought sometimes that they might be worse for me because I use my eyes, that because I see so keenly, my visions are more full of terror. But I am not sure of this. Everyone has his own terror.” He took three steps away from me. His voice came a little bit more muffled. “Then it fades. The horrors diminish and it’s easier to sleep. You become stronger. Pleasure comes back. The little pleasures first, the sight of a green shoot or the smell of coffee. It’s like spring, in a way.” The footsteps returned and circled around me. I sat slumped on the painting stool, hands dangling between my knees. I could feel tears drying on my face.