Van Gogh (38 page)

The “Au Charbonnage” Café
, N
OVEMBER
1878,
PENCIL AND INK ON PAPER, 15½ × 15½ IN
. (
Illustration credit 11.2
)

These were the miners from the Borinage that he had read about in his geography book. They congregated every day in the welcome of this little café,
called Au Charbonnage [to the coal fields]. “The workmen come there to eat their bread and drink their glass of beer during the lunch hour,” he wrote.

He drew the café, lavishing all the facility at his command on this “scratch,” as he called it, barely bigger than a postcard: the shallow, sagging roof; the sad, stained stucco; the little sign over the door (in his own handwriting); the hard cobblestones outside and the soft curtains inside. He added a benevolent crescent moon and shaded the whole image to a twilight gray with a touch so soft that the pencil strokes were barely visible. He left unshaded only the welcoming gaslight from two windows and a transom over the door—the “light from within.” When he was finished, he carefully folded the drawing and put it in a letter to Theo as an announcement: He, too, was headed
au charbonnage
—to the coal fields.

A WEEK LATER
, he was gone. In a weakened condition, in the dead of winter, with no means of support, no plans, and no prospects, he left for the Borinage to pursue the chimera of
it
that he had created. He left so quickly that he may have been gone by the time his father arrived to take him home. “I shall make myself scarce,” Vincent admitted later, was the thought that drove him out of Brussels. If their paths did cross, Dorus no doubt tried to console his wayward son with the same message he had preached to his congregation on the eve of leaving Etten: “I am the sower. Shortsighted people have rejected many fields that through the sower’s hard work produced good fruit. That same sower will not abandon any of his children.”

But Vincent had a different Bible verse on his mind, and only days before leaving Brussels he began writing a sermon on the parable of the “barren fig tree” about a man who waited season after season for his fig tree to bear fruit, until finally, in despair, he cut it down.

Vincent later told Theo that he went to the Borinage to prove “that I did not lack courage.” At the time, he justified it to himself (and, no doubt, to his parents) as yet another proof of his devotion. He promised he would “learn and observe” and come back “having something to say that was really worth hearing”—a “better and riper” man. More than a year earlier, however, in one of his rare flashes of electrifying candor, he had confessed the true reasons for his headlong rush to nowhere:

T
HE TRAIN TOOK VINCENT TO A PLACE NOT SHOWN IN ANY GUIDEBOOK
. To a boy who grew up on the unspoiled heath of Zundert, the surface of the moon could not have appeared stranger. Here and there across a flat horizon rose huge black cones: abrupt, singular, featureless; too stark to be natural, too big to be man-made. On some, grass had begun to grow; others still steamed from inexhaustible inner fires, like great boils on the landscape. “The whole region seems to have been eaten away by an enormous ulcer,” wrote another visitor to the Borinage;

Barely a tree interrupted this desolate vista. Except for a few small gardens, cultivation of any kind had retreated from the black assault of the huge, exhaling slagheaps. Even in summer, one visitor noted, the land was so stripped of greenery that “it stirred one’s heart to see the dusty leaves of a dried-up geranium on a window-ledge.” In the winter, snow turned gray as it fell. When it melted, the gray soil turned black, roads turned into tarlike mud so thick it sucked the shoes off travelers’ feet, and water ran black in the streams. Even on days that should have been clear, gray vapor from the slagheaps and soot from the smokestacks hung in the air, blurring the boundary between ground and sky. Nights descended into a starless, netherworldly darkness. Locals called it
le pays noir
—the black country.

In the featureless brick and stucco towns that punctuated every mile of sunken roads, Vincent met the real Borins: the black people of the black country. “The people are quite black when they come out of the dark mines,” he reported to Theo; “they look exactly like chimney sweeps.” Not just the men, but whole families wore the stain of the mines. Children worked because only their tiny bodies could squeeze through the fissures in the earth where the coal hid; wives, because their families needed the money. After work, the men squatted on the doorsteps of their tumbledown cottages and smoked, while the women—“artificial negresses,” one observer called them—dragged children “with the faces of old people” to fetch water for the daily
dénoircissement
—unblackening.

M
ARCASSE
C
OAL
M
INE
, P
IT
#7 (
Illustration credit 12.1
)

For the men the
dénoircissement
no longer worked. Most bore the permanent marks of scratches and grazes in the mines, the white skin of their arms and chests tattooed “like blue-veined marble.” Indeed, they bore all the scars of their labor: tired, bent-over bodies (life expectancy averaged forty-five years); emaciated, weather-beaten faces; the memory of loved ones lost to the mines; and the knowledge that their children would follow them into the earth because, as Émile Zola wrote, “nobody had yet invented a way of living without food.” Every morning, as husbands, sons, and daughters said good-bye to wives and mothers, they wept, according to another account, “as though they were never going to return.”

In a “vast, dismal human herd” they headed to the mines. In the winter, they set out before the first gray of dawn, by lamplight, toward the ominous beacons of the blue-flamed blast furnaces and the coke ovens’ red glare. In every coal town in the Borinage, the mine overshadowed all else. With its mountain of
slag, its towering chimney and fantastical metal scaffolding, the mine could be seen and smelt for miles around. And heard. The earsplitting sound of its great turning wheel, the panting exhaust of its massive engine, the thundering of its ironworks, and the incessant ringing of bells that marked its every heaving movement spread across the landscape almost as far as its choking cinders. Surrounded by high brick walls indistinguishable from fortifications, and a moat of cinder and stinking gas, the mine swallowed thousands of workers every morning “like some evil beast,” wrote Zola in
Germinal
, his novel set in a French coal mine just across the border, “struggling to digest its meal of human flesh.”

SOMEHOW, VINCENT FOUND
new energy for the new task. Despite the self-inflicted rigors of his life in Brussels, he arrived in the Borinage “well-dressed” and “display[ing] all the characteristics of Dutch cleanliness,” according to the minister who greeted him. To spare the French-speaking Borins the perils of his difficult Dutch name, he presented himself simply as “Monsieur Vincent.”

Armed with his father’s recommendation, passable French, and replenished ardor, he soon found a position in Petit Wasmes, one of a cluster of small towns that cowered together in the shadow of the Marcasse and Frameries mines. There a small congregation had just started its own church and was, by law, entitled to a state-paid preacher. While that position was being finalized, the regional evangelical committee agreed to give Vincent a six-month trial as a “lay preacher and teacher of catechism.” They offered him a small salary and, after a brief stay with a colporteur in nearby Pâturages, installed him with one of their most prosperous members, Jean-Baptiste Denis, a farmer who lived with his five sons in a “rather fine house” in Petit Wasmes.

Vincent immediately started a catechism class for the children of the congregation. He read to them, led them in hymns, and taught them Bible stories using maps of the Holy Land that he drew. In the evenings, he visited members’ houses, where small groups gathered for devotional “classes.” He also visited the sick, “since there are so many of them here,” he told Theo. “I have just visited a little old woman [who] is terribly ill, but full of faith and patience. I read a chapter with her and prayed with them all.” His initial letters home were filled with enthusiastic reports of his new ministry. “It’s the kind of work he likes to do,” Anna wrote, entertaining yet another cautious hope. “He is so content there.” These early reports impressed even his wary father. “He seems to work with success and ambition,” Dorus wrote Theo in January. “We are so glad for him. ”

Because it had only recently split from the church in Wasmes, Vincent’s new congregation had to meet in an old dance hall, the Salon du Bébé. The hall, which seated almost a hundred, had already been adapted for religious use in a region awash in evangelical missions. In his attic room at the Denis house,
Vincent prepared sermons for the workmen and farmers who shuffled into the Bébé every Sunday. He took up again the message of the preacher from Lyon: “We should think of [Christ] as a workman,” he preached, “with lines of sorrow and suffering and fatigue on his face.” Who could better understand the life of a “workman and laborer whose life is hard,” he asked, “than the son of a carpenter … who labored for thirty years in a humble carpenter’s shop to fulfill God’s will”?

For inspiration, Vincent had only to look outside at the dreary procession of miners that passed under his window every morning: men and women dressed in identical “pit rags,” their clogs clattering in the predawn darkness. Or every night, fourteen hours later, when they returned—“just the same as yesterday, and just the same as tomorrow,” according to one account, “as it has been for hundreds of years. Like true slaves.”

It was only a matter of time before Vincent’s fervor drove him to join the gray line filing into the earth.

“It is a gloomy spot,” he wrote about his visit to the Marcasse mine, one of the oldest, grimmest, and most dangerous in the area: “poor miners’ huts, a few dead trees black from smoke, thorn hedges, dunghills, ash dumps, heaps of useless coal.” He made his way to the pit-head through the vast, surreal townscape of the mine complex: the tarpaulin-covered screening shed, the winding house, the drainage pump tower, the coke ovens and blast furnaces. In the distance, slag horses made their slow way up the sides of the black mountain dragging tub after tub of cinder and refuse coal. He probably passed through the locker room, where a huge coal-fired stove gave miners what Zola called “a good skin-full of warmth” before they headed down.

But nothing could have prepared him for the pit-head, a cavernous brick building palled in grimy windows and furious with motion: the shiver of the big copper engine, the churning of its steel arms, the ceaseless throbbing of its exhaust; the thunder of heavy tubs rumbling across the iron floor; the whining of inky cables flying overhead. The cables passed from the engine’s great wheel through greasy pulleys suspended from an iron framework that towered over the pit-head like a skeletal steeple. The screeching of the pulleys announced the arrival and departure of the cages as they appeared from the depths with loads of coal and then dived down again filled with miners—“swallowing men as though the pit were a mouth gulping them down,” wrote Zola.

The cage plunged 635 meters, dropping “like a stone” more than a third of a mile. Miners stood barefoot, lamps in hand, huddled together in empty coal tubs, as the guide beams in the shaft “flew past like a rail under an express train.” The air turned intensely cold and water began to rain down on the cage from the shaft walls: first a trickle, then a deluge. They flew past three abandoned levels: so deep that the miners referred to the world above as “up in Hell”; so deep that
the daylight visible at the top of the shaft dwindled to a spot as small as a star in the sky.