The Last Van Gogh (29 page)

But Vincent eventually did reappear. He didn’t show up at our front doorstep, though. The following evening he climbed up the garden trellis to my window and knocked at the pane.

I was half asleep when I saw him. He had one hand on the ledge, the other finger brought to his lips.

I went over to the window to open it. The cool night air blew ripples in my cotton nightdress.

“Shhhh,” he said. “We have very little time.”

I looked around to make sure no one could hear us. “I’m not sure I should go,” I said. “I will not have a second chance with Papa.”

“You won’t have one with me, either. Are you coming or not?”

I remained silent for a moment, stunned.

The risk of leaving with Vincent was obvious, but his offer was exhilarating. I knew I could not refuse him; his invitation was what I had been wishing for all week.

No longer was I the solitary figure in a field with no one to accept my hand. The warm sensation of Vincent’s fingers slipping into mine, the feeling of his calloused palms pressed against my skin, sent all sense of reason far away. I hoisted my nightdress above my knees and began my descent.

W
E
tiptoed across the wet garden stairs, down to the street, neither of us taking our hand away from the other. I felt almost naked, the breeze lifting up my flimsy gown as we made our way down the street.

I knew where he was going to eventually take me. It was the only place where we could be ensured our privacy. Knowing this I asked no questions. I simply threaded my hand in his and followed. Down the rue Vessenots we traveled, the moon high in the black sky, the white stars dazzling like ice.

We arrived at the church nearly twenty minutes later. “I have yet to be inside,” he whispered as he pushed open the heavy doors. A few candle tapers still burned from the evening mass. The tabernacle had been put away, but the decorative cloth was still draped over the altar.

“Go sit at the organ,” he ordered. “We don’t have much time.”

I ran, though my feet were now filthy and blistered, and sat down.

He pulled four stretchers out from his rucksack and a square of cotton cloth. He stretched the canvas right there before me, tacking each corner with a small hammer and nail.

He painted with the canvas unprimed. He did not speak another word to me, as his eyes darted between his palette and the easel. It did not take longer than forty-five minutes before he announced he was done.

“We must go now!” Again he barked at me, commanding me in a voice I had never heard before.

I had only a few seconds to look at the wet painting. Me in my nightdress. You could see the flesh of my legs through the white paint. The organ pipes in pale ocher, the dark wood of the instrument in purple and red.

I appeared celestial. Like a Madonna in a medieval painting, my head before a saucer of gold. He held the painting so the fresh pigment was turned outward. A few droplets of pigment landed on the cold stone floor, as Vincent motioned for us to leave.

I rushed behind him. Had you blindfolded me, I would have still known how to get where he intended to take me. We left the empty church and started down the main road. For over thirty minutes we walked. Vincent carried the wet canvas on his hip, some thin paint dribbling down the side. Now the organ pipes looked as though they were bleeding. Thin fingers of amber slid along the right edge.

We arrived at the limestone cave behind the Château Léry.

“Follow me,” he instructed. Vincent no longer had a free hand but was busy adjusting his rucksack and the still wet painting of me. I nodded my head and followed him inside.

He put the painting down at the lip of the cave and reached into his smock to retrieve a candle. “Come,” Vincent said as he lit the match.

I wondered if he wanted to make love to me again. The damp, musky smell of the cave brought a flood of memories to me and I closed my eyes for a moment, so overwhelmed was I by the sight of the powdery white walls and the intimacy of the candlelight.

But Vincent walked ahead of me, determined to do something I had not expected.

“It will be safe in here,” he announced. “No matter what happens, it will always be here.”

He propped the canvas up on one of the ledges that lined the walls of the cave.

“Marguerite, it will always be here for you.”

The painting stood there like an altarpiece on a podium of cold, gray stone. My face, my body, illuminated by swirls of gold and amber paint.

“This way, you’ll always remember how I’ve envisioned you.”

I went to kiss him. My hands trembled as I reached out to touch him. My fingers touched the fabric of his shirt, and felt the bony ribs down his center. He pressed against me so that his breath was hot on my neck. I was crying as I lifted my face up to his. I no longer cared what was right and wrong, I wanted to be with him.

“Marguerite,” he whispered. His lips hovered over mine and I could feel my mouth quivering in anticipation.

“Tonight you are Saint Cecilia, so things between us must remain pure.” He took hold of my wrists and turned them so my palms now faced upward. He bent down and pressed several kisses into them before bringing them close against his cheeks. And I wept as I looked up at him. For I knew the painting and the kisses were his way of saying good-bye.

FIFTY

An Approaching Frost

D
AWN
was approaching as Vincent took my hand to lead me out. The pavement now felt like sandpaper. My toes were covered in dry earth; the soles of my feet were now cracked and raw.

With the darkness beginning to soften, I was more certain of my bearings. I told Vincent it would be safer if I returned home alone.

He stood there watching me, a lone figure as the dark sky lifted behind. I remember taking one last look into his eyes. They were staring at me intently, the radiant stars slicing white light against his cheek. Somehow something told me to savor that look of his, store it deep inside. It was as if I could sense the summer ending, a frost lurking behind the shadows and the sun. I knew, when winter arrived, I would need something to keep me aflame.

I
NEED
not tell you what happened several days later. Up in the fields, not far from the cave, Vincent placed his easel by a haystack, went behind the château, and shot himself in the chest.

Monsieur Ravoux alerted Dr. Mazery, the local practitioner, who in turn alerted Papa.

“The bullet passed below the fleshy tissue.” I heard Papa reading the message, which was delivered to him by a local boy.

It was nine o’clock in the evening and Papa was in his robe. Paul and Madame Chevalier were in the parlor and Louise-Josephine and I were upstairs in my room.

“He’s still alive…,” Father reported as he finished reading the note. “He’s at Ravoux’s. He was able to drag himself back to his room.” Papa’s voice was rough with concern. “Paul, go get me my surgical bag, I must go at once.”

I was sick with worry when I overheard the news. Louise-Josephine had to hold me back with both arms, for I was insistent that I had to be at Vincent’s side.

“You cannot go,” she said. “There is nothing you can do now.” She held me tight in her arms. I must have writhed there for nearly a half hour before I finally collapsed onto the floor.

W
HAT
happened next has now become the stuff of history books. Vincent lasted nearly thirty hours in his bed until his brother Theo came to his side.

He lay there as placid as a monk. His white face ashen, his once high cheeks sunken like dried prunes.

“This is as it should be,” he told Theo. The brothers’ hands remained entwined as Vincent slipped into unconsciousness.

That evening, Papa told us Theo had turned to him and asked him to sketch Vincent as he lay on his deathbed. Papa took a pad and a piece of charcoal and drew Vincent with his head propped up on the small white pillow, his eyes closed as if caught in the middle of a dream.

It was an image I could not erase from my mind—Papa sketching Vincent in his final hours. He must have relished the honor, holding that twig of charcoal in his hand and sketching the man he knew had such genius.

“There was something exquisitely poignant,” I heard him tell Paul years later as the two of them copied one of Vincent’s paintings in the garden. “He painted me in a pose of great pensiveness, and later on, I was the last one to sketch him in a moment of rare calm.”

T
HE
night he died, I was sitting in the parlor with Louise-Josephine when Papa and Paul returned home. It was nearly two in the morning, and Madame Chevalier had already retired to her bedroom.

“How is he, Papa?” I asked. My face was streaked with red from crying, and I could not help but think about how the paint had dribbled down the canvas of the last portrait Vincent had painted of me. Even at the time, it had reminded me of tears.

“He’s passed on, Marguerite.” Papa’s voice cracked. “It was a bullet to the chest and there was nothing I could do.”

My voice cracked, too. “How can that be, Papa? You’re his doctor!” I was weeping now. “What good were all your tinctures then if they couldn’t prevent this?” My words flew out angrily in between my sobs.

“They were a few herbs, Marguerite. Not miracles.” He sat down in his chair, exhausted.

“Monsieur Lavert, the town carpenter, has offered to make the coffin,” Father said, his face half covered by his palms. “It is a kind gesture. Vincent painted his two-year-old son only two weeks ago.”

After a few minutes, Father stood up. There were tears in his eyes. “The funeral will be tomorrow afternoon. There was nothing I could do, Marguerite. I am telling you the truth.”

T
HE
funeral invitations were printed that morning in Pontoise and announced the service for 2
P.M.
Because Vincent had committed suicide, the village priest denied the use of the local hearse and forbade the service from taking place in our church. When I heard this news, I thought of the symbolism of Vincent’s painting of the church at midnight and it haunted me like an apparition.

In the end, a hearse was borrowed from the next township but still no church service was provided. As was the custom for women, I remained at home, unable to attend the funeral.

I wore black anyway that afternoon. Louise-Josephine tried to comfort me as I cried for hours in my room.

“You could not have known,” she said over and over again. But I continued to replay our last moments in my mind. She was wrong. In some way, I had known. But I was too cowardly to admit it.

P
APA
dressed in his black suit and matching top hat. Paul looked even more like his identical twin as the two of them set out in the carriage for Vincent’s burial.

“I want to stop and fetch some sunflowers,” I heard Papa say on his way out.

I remember looking out the window as the two of them descended the garden stairs. Behind the neighboring rooftops, I could see the stretch of meadows, the fields of poppies and sweet peas that Vincent had painted over the past two months.

It was a warm, radiant day, the sun the color of crushed marigolds. But now the chestnut blossoms were on the ground and the lime trees provided little shade. I thought about how the earth was so dry from the summer heat. Only a day before, I had been on my knees in my garden, and my hands had felt like parchment when I dusted off the pebbly soil. Now when I closed my eyes, I saw the ground cracking into myriad tiny fissures as the shovels parted the earth for Vincent’s coffin.

A
CCORDING
to Paul, Papa’s gesture of bringing sunflowers inspired everyone else to go out and return with yellow flowers.

“It was his favorite color,” Paul said, and I nodded, knowing full well. “The coffin lay in his room in the inn, his last canvases nailed to the walls. Papa’s sunflowers were placed beside his coffin, and then hours later, bouquets of yellow dahlias, jonquils, and other yellow field flowers were everywhere. Near his coffin, Theo arranged Vincent’s folding stool, his brushes, and easel to rest next to him.”

I was still in a state of shock as Paul described how he, Papa, Theo, and many of Vincent’s friends from Paris walked behind the coffin as it was taken to the new cemetery in Auvers. He said Papa tried to say a few words but was so overcome with grief, he could only utter a single sentence.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Something to the effect that he was a great artist and an honest man. ‘Vincent had only two aims: humanity and art.’ He then planted a tree on the grave.”

“A tree?” I questioned. “What sort of tree?”

Paul shrugged. “Papa told us it was an ornamental one…one that would flower and thrive in the soil…. I thought it a touching gesture. So did Theo. He wept when Papa knelt down and planted the tiny sapling in the fresh mound of soil.”

I held my hand over my mouth, but my sobs escaped me.

My brother continued, “After the funeral, Papa told me that it would be my responsibility to ensure the grave is always properly maintained. He thought it proper that I have the task, as he is getting on in years.”

“Shouldn’t Vincent’s family be responsible for that?” I asked, looking up at him through my tears.

“Of course, but as they are quite a distance away, Father assured Theo that he will hold himself personally responsible for Vincent’s memory here in Auvers. ‘When I go, my son, Paul, will take over,’ he told Theo. ‘Vincent will always have sunflowers on his grave.’”

I took my handkerchief and blotted my eyes.

“Yes, and in appreciation, Theo told me that I could take a few paintings of Vincent’s…after all, there were so many in his room!”

Paul straightened his back and a small smile slid across his face.

“So even though he never painted one of me, I will have several of his paintings. I hope to study his technique and learn from them.” Again, Paul smiled. “There’s a certain satisfaction in that!”

“Is there?” I asked quietly.

But Paul did not hear me. Papa was calling his name.

“We need to collect the canvases now,” I heard Papa holler.