The Last Van Gogh (30 page)

It took Paul only a few seconds before he was scurrying down the stairs.

FIFTY-ONE

The Collection

T
HEY
collected over twenty-six paintings and eighteen drawings of Vincent’s that afternoon, returning home after several trips to the inn with their arms loaded with canvases and a portfolio brimming with sketches. Years later, I met Adeline Ravoux in the bakery and she told me how shameless Papa was after the funeral. “He took so many,” she said. “He went into the closet and underneath Vincent’s bed, and ordered Paul to collect all the paintings from the walls. Your father and brother behaved like vultures.”

“I was told Theo offered them,” I said, trying to defend them.

She shook her head. “They didn’t need to take so many.”

Her words were hurtful, but I knew they were true.

I remember how Papa returned home after the burial and although he seemed visibly upset, there was unmistakably a glimmer of triumph in his eyes. He carried those canvases into his office like a pirate unloading his plunder.

T
HE
next few weeks were a blur to me. I could not believe that Vincent was no longer in our village. That I would no longer see him in the fields, that his heavy footsteps would never again barrel up our front stairs.

Over and over again, I replayed our last moments. I fingered my palm and recalled the sensation of his skin against mine. I imagined his face in front of me, the urge I had to melt into his arms, the way he refused to kiss me, knowing all too well that in a few days he would be gone. Had Papa’s herbs clouded his judgment? Had I been cowardly in not warning him that I had suspicion about Papa’s abilities? Should I have told him that Papa had come into his study of herbs late in life and that they had only seemed to worsen his own condition? Or, even more troubling, had our romance pushed him toward self-destruction when he realized he could never have a marriage and home of his own?

I read over and over the text in the book of Japanese prints that Jo gave me and perused Papa’s office for more literature on the East. “Suicide is not frowned upon,” one of the books said. “It is exalted as a means of familial redemption,” another explained.

And I wondered if that was what it all came down to in the end. Vincent feeling he had to satisfy a debt he believed he owed.

I
TOLD
no one, not even Louise-Josephine, about my secret painting. And only on days when I finished my errands early would I sneak to the cave and look upon that clandestine canvas. That treasure of mine, the last thing that came from Vincent’s hand.

T
HE
following year, Théophile and Louise-Josephine were finally married. Papa surprised everyone by finding two witnesses to attend the ceremony. Although neither he, Paul, nor Madame Chevalier was in attendance, Papa asked the son of one of his oldest friends, Louis Cabrol, and another one of his friends from his bohemian days in Paris to attend in order to facilitate the union.

That morning, I woke up early and collected a fistful of wildflowers for her. I snipped off long ladders of lupine, blue and white daisies, bunches of sweet pea, and lavender forget-me-nots. I had purposefully wanted to get her flowers that grew outside our garden, ones that had grown free.

And as I had promised her, I helped Louise-Josephine get dressed on her wedding day. I combed and plaited her long brown hair. I buttoned the back of her dress and tied her sash in a large voluminous bow. We did not speak, but I saw her eyes in the reflection in the glass. It was a look I knew well: half sad, half brimming with excitement. It was bittersweet for her, I knew. She was marrying and she knew in her heart I would most probably never have the opportunity.

“I am so happy for you,” I whispered as I kissed her cheek. They would be off to Paris on the evening train and I wasn’t sure when I would see her next.

“Come live with us,” she said, reaching her hand out to take mine. “Théophile wouldn’t mind.”

“Only if you move to Mauritius,” I said with a small laugh.

“I’m serious,” she said. “You could sneak out tonight. It will be as we always said it would be.”

I shook my head. I could not go. Not because I didn’t want freedom, but because I knew I could never leave Auvers.

I could never leave my painting.

EPILOGUE

I
HAVE
since learned that an improper dosage of foxglove can cause hallucinations. That it can excite one’s spirit, rather than soothe it. I don’t know if Papa contributed to Vincent’s suicide or if Vincent saw the halos of saffron and gold because the absinthe still lingered in his bones.

Over the years, Papa became obsessed with his attachment to Vincent. He began copying the paintings he had in his collection in an attempt to learn from them. He took the same vases that Vincent had used in his still lifes, the same arrangement of flowers, and tried to re-create what Vincent had painted while in his care.

Paul, too, shared this obsession, even after his numerous applications for art school were turned down. Both Papa and he spent countless hours studying Vincent’s canvases, trying to paint identical versions that would deceive the untrained eye. They would sit in the studio upstairs with one of Vincent’s canvases on an easel between them, and scrutinize each brushstroke in an attempt to reproduce an identical version that more often than not came out as amateurish and awkward. A far cry from the masterpieces Vincent had created in Auvers.

I would have gone mad living with them had Louise-Josephine not returned to Auvers. Théophile’s mother had become ill, and he had requested a job in Vosiers so he could be close to oversee her care.

Every Wednesday she’d come to the house with her small daughter, Violette. The girl had her mother’s brown hair and amber skin, the same mischievous light in her eyes. She seemed delighted by our garden, the small animals that we kept near the shed. How it amused me when she jumped off Louise-Josephine’s lap and ran across the lawn, the wind rushing through her hair! For those brief moments, I could close my eyes and envision how Louise-Josephine and I must have looked, as we ran down the road in our youth, giddy with the anticipation of meeting our loves.

Their weekly visits soothed me and I treasured the quiet moments between Louise-Josephine and me. I enjoyed the companionship; I relished the opportunity to have someone for whom I could bake. Especially little Violette, who ate up my cakes and cookies with a relish I had never seen. Papa allowed us privacy and, as her daughter played, we would sit in the garden and it would be as if nothing had really changed between us. She was still as candid as ever. She took a look around the house one afternoon and commented on how strange the house now seemed. Papa and Paul’s obsession had transformed it into a shrine to Vincent after his suicide. Now his presence was even stronger within the damp, plaster walls of our house than when he had been alive.

P
APA
died some twenty years after Vincent, his body withered and his mind half addled from years of the herbs that brought him little solace. Madame Chevalier had passed away five years earlier, and her absence seemed to worsen Papa’s frailty. In his final weeks, I made his favorite foods and mashed them, carefully spooning them into his mouth and wiping the yarn of saliva from his lips.

In an eerie way, the palette that Vincent had used to paint Papa seemed to foreshadow him in his last days. The same puce color underscored his eyes, his mouth was ghostly pale, his skin lined like the bark of an old tree.

Sometimes, when his eyes would be pooled with hallucinations, he would call out for Madame Chevalier. He would take my hand and stroke it between his papery palms and call me his little Chouchette. And although I yearned for him to say my name, or at least tell me that he held me in some affection, the words never came. I allowed myself to be called his little Chouchette, never once correcting him, letting him believe his beloved companion was there beside him. Her name, however, was not the last thing he uttered before he took his final breath. No, that was something that even took Paul by surprise. With a raspy breath and eyes wide open, he lifted his head from the mound of pillows and stretched out his arms. He called out her name, clearly so that there was no mistaking it, the name that it seemed was closest in all our hearts: “Louise-Josephine.”

M
Y
life changed little after Papa’s death. I continued to have a solitary life, where most of my days were filled with morning walks to the village and afternoons spent tending to the flowers in my garden. But when Papa died, Paul became, by default, the master of the house. He took to his role with great zeal. He rummaged through Papa’s closets and began wearing his cherished smocks, his silk foulards, his nautical caps. Two years later he married our distant cousin Emilienne, someone I only remembered meeting a handful of times. She was too old to have children when they wed, and she was neither a great conversationalist nor a beauty. But their union kept the villagers gossiping just a little less about the queer activities of our household.

My brother continued our father’s obsession, dedicating himself to chronicling Vincent’s last seventy days in our Auvers. He sat at his desk, his hair raked between his fingers, and tried to recall every detail of the relationship between Vincent and our father. He cataloged the paintings Vincent did in our home as well as those he remembered seeing stacked in Vincent’s room at the Ravoux Inn. Like Papa, Paul shunned all visitors to our home except for Louise-Josephine and her daughter, the occasional elderly artist friends of Father’s, or the rare scholar who wrote requesting to see one of the paintings in our collection.

A
FEW
years before Papa died, they dug up Vincent’s body to move him to the new cemetery in town. And when they finally unearthed his coffin, the roots of the thuja tree that had shaded his grave for so long had penetrated the wooden boards and entwined themselves with his bones. The grave diggers gossiped that the roots clung to his skeleton like ferocious brown claws. I winced when I heard they needed pruning shears to cut Vincent free.

When Paul first informed me that Papa had planted a tree on Vincent’s grave, he had not mentioned it was a thuja. That tree was a well-known source of thujone, the toxin found in absinthe. And although Papa did not plant a wormwood tree, the tree that absinthe is most often derived from, it was still an ironic choice, particularly as Vincent admitted that he had been addicted to the “green-eyed devil” prior to his stay in Auvers.

Whether it was a hidden message by Papa or a mere coincidence, I will never know. What I am sure of is that even in death the plant’s lengthy dark ropes held Vincent in a tight embrace, their serpentine legs attracted to the absinthe that remained in his bones.

Even when Vincent’s coffin was disinterred and reburied next to his brother Theo’s, Papa still could not let him alone. He took a few seeds from the tree that had threaded through Vincent’s bones and placed them in an envelope that he labeled “Vincent’s Tree.” A few weeks later, he planted those seeds in the front garden and over the years the tree grew strong and high. It stands there to this day, flowering yellow-green blossoms that paper the ground.

I do not like this tree very much. The image of the original roots choking Vincent’s skeleton is hard to shake from my mind. To me it’s another example of something taken from Vincent. How, even in death, so many people wanted to claim him as their own. Even I, with my thoughts of our stolen moments in the cave, hoard my memories of him. Fingerprints of genius touched my skin, eyes that were aflame and full of vision chose me as a final muse. Of this I am greedy and refuse to share.

P
ERHAPS
we all are predisposed to dislike the act of sharing. As Paul’s obsession with Vincent strengthened, he became more intolerant of the fact that Vincent had chosen me to be his final muse.Vincent had painted Papa, me, Adeline Ravoux, and other faces in Auvers, but never Paul. This fact weighed on him like a thicket of scars that blistered more with each passing year.

So tonight when my brother tells me that, of all the Van Gogh paintings we own, he has decided to sell only one—the one of me—I cannot say I’m surprised.

“It’s the least technically interesting,” he tells me over dinner.

His wife, Emilienne, is silent, looking down at the plate of stewed lamb that I prepared for them.

“We need the money and, as the head of this household, I have decided that because that painting is the weakest in the collection, it should be the first one sold.”

I look up from the table, raising my head to stare at him.
It is mine, it is not yours to sell,
I think to myself. I know that Emilienne is trembling in her seat. I feel her eyes traveling over me like two marbles sliding across an abacus.

I do not speak. I just raise my eyebrows and stare at him with icy pupils. He knows the painting he has chosen to sell has hung for over four decades in the same spot in my bedroom. That it is the image I have seen every night before I went to sleep and the first one that I awakened to each morning.

“You’re a sixty-five-year-old woman,” he mutters underneath his breath. “It’s unhealthy to dwell on a forty-five-year-old painting of one’s younger self.”

I can see his body twitching uncomfortably underneath his jacket. His silk scarf billows underneath his chin, the bristles of his goatee snagging the cloth as he lowers his head.

I try to stifle my body from trembling.

“If you must, Paul,…then you must,” I say knowing I will not win this battle with him.

And so after the plates have been cleared from our dinner, he removes the painting from my bedroom wall. Outside, the November wind howls and I am forced to look away so he does not see my tears.

M
Y
garden has been put to rest, the beet fields are soaked in rainwater, and Vincent’s painting of me at my piano is on its way to hang on a strange new wall. But even with my bedroom wall now bare, I still remember how Vincent pressed that first poppy into my hand; how I sat for him; and how he smudged yellow paint across my cheek before our first kiss. And in those lost moments of my memory, I am as Vincent imagined me: white flesh bursting crimson through taffeta, marble skin trembling under the spell of warm fingers.