Van Gogh (135 page)

In this simple portrait, Vincent summed up a lifetime of comforting imagery: from the Rembrandt etching of a candlelit cradle that had hung in the Zundert parsonage (and in the Schenkweg studio), to a Carlo Dolci Gethsemane, to his own
Starry Night
—all images that had showed him “a light in the darkness” at times of crisis. He saw in it both Daumier’s simple truth and Corot’s ineffable magic. He claimed it as a vindication for both his long love of “types” and his belief that portraits of everyday people ranked among the most sacred icons of the sublime. He championed it as a promise of artistic procreativity—a Midi fertility goddess that ensured the Yellow House would not be counted among the
“entreprises sans issue.”

The painting also resurrected the dream of The Hague—of magazine illustrations and of lithographic prints—the dream of reaching out directly to the masses, bypassing the hostile world of galleries and dealers, including his brother, to touch the hearts of the common people who hungered for his heartbroken art. Comparing his maternal talisman to “a chromolithograph from a cheap shop,” he imagined it bringing the consoling gospel of color into their colorless lives, just as it had into his.

As always, Vincent bolstered his arguments with images from his reading.
Hadn’t Tolstoy called for a return to a more humble, more human religion—more like the simple faith of “primitive Christians”? And didn’t that simpler faith demand a simpler, earthier art? For sainthood in this new religion, Tolstoy had nominated his nursemaid—“a memorable exemplar of uncomplicated faith and wise naïveté”—the very image of Vincent’s stolid earth mother with her crude form and almanac color. Zola’s mystical
Le rêve
, which Vincent read that fall, echoed the same themes of rustic faith and secular sainthood in a story of medieval craftsmen seeking the sublime through their simple handiwork.

Vincent gave his Byzantine icon the title
La berceuse
, a term that applied to both the maternal figure who rocks the cradle and the lullaby she sings. He claimed that the image had been inspired by the great spinner of simple myths, Pierre Loti. In
Pêcheur d’lslande
(
Icelandic Fisherman
), Loti had described a faïence figurine of the Virgin Mary that accompanied the brave fishermen on their perilous voyages in the cold and violent North Atlantic. Affixed to the wall of the ship’s cabin, this earthenware Mother, “painted in the most naïve style,” heard the seamen’s rough prayers, calmed their lonely distress, protected them through wind and storm, and rocked them to sleep at night in the cradle of their boat. “If one were to put this canvas just as it is in a fishing boat,” Vincent boasted of his new portrait, “even one from Iceland, there would be some among the fishermen who would feel they were there, inside the cradle.”

The “fisherman” Vincent most wanted to comfort with his brightly colored
Berceuse
was his housemate Gauguin, who claimed to have visited Iceland in his merchant marine days and still wore the sailor’s beret described in
Pêcheur
. (Vincent had noted Gauguin’s “affinity” with Loti’s fishermen the moment he arrived.) From its subject matter to its painting style,
La berceuse
pleaded for Gauguin to stay in Arles. Like the Folies ball, the image of the postman’s wife recaptured a moment of solidarity when Vincent and his guest had worked side by side in the front room of the Yellow House with Augustine Roulin as their shared model. Vincent imagined that Gauguin had, in fact, sired his icon of fecundity. “He and I were talking about the fishermen of Iceland and of their mournful isolation, exposed to all dangers, alone on the sad sea,” he reported.

His brush took up the argument using Gauguin’s heavy outlines, flat texture, and careful gradations of color. He borrowed elements from Gauguin’s portrait and grandly seated his Madame Roulin in Gauguin’s thronelike chair. Now working entirely
de tête
, he filled in the ground with Gauguin’s unbroken
vermilion, and, despite the temptation presented by vast stretches of color, reined in his impetuous hand to prevent any hint of impasto from undermining his hope for reconciliation. On the wall behind the figure, that hope burst into great blooms of color as Vincent filled more than half the canvas with flowered wallpaper. Sprays of pink dahlias—the same flower that bedecked the dreamed scene of his mother and sister in the parsonage garden at Etten—burst against a blue-green background—a reverie of the wallpaper in his attic room in Zundert—speckled with orange and ultramarine in an ardent tribute to Cloisonnist ornament.

To enchant his simple figure with Gauguin-like mystery, Vincent planned not to depict the infant Marcelle, but only to
suggest
her presence by showing Augustine holding the rope that she used to rock the cradle. Her grip on the rope—firm yet tender—would capture the Symbolist essence of the magical mother-child bond. It would be, in short, a triumph of Gauguin’s elliptical imagery. But once again Vincent’s draftsmanship failed him. As he worked and reworked every other part of the big canvas in the week before Christmas, the icon’s hands remained unfinished.

Vincent must have blamed the roadblock on his lack of models. The loving grip and tension on the rope presented a special challenge for an artist who always had trouble with hands. And he could hardly model the pose himself. But as the Yellow House spun deeper and deeper into delirium, and his own grip on reality grew more and more uncertain, the unfinished hands on his easel no doubt assumed in Vincent’s fevered imagination a larger and darker significance. Surrounded by celebrations of family and images of belonging, he was losing the battle for connection—both in the world and within himself. Without a rope holding him fast, he would suffer the same fate as the poor seamen who trusted Loti’s faïence Virgin: their boat capsized in a storm and all aboard perished.

VINCENT’S EFFORTS, TOO
, came to grief.

On December 23, the last Sunday before Christmas, the moment he had long feared finally arrived. Whether Gauguin intended to leave Arles when he walked out of the Yellow House that evening isn’t clear. But Vincent thought he did. In the previous few days, their life together had become unbearable. Bad weather had trapped them both inside: Vincent obsessing over his strange portrait of Madame Roulin; Gauguin idle and restless. When not working, Vincent spent his days in rambling arguments punctuated by outbursts of temper and voids of brooding silence. Gauguin, finally convinced of his host’s true “madness,” worried that at any moment “a fatal and tragic attack” might imperil his own safety—especially at night, when Vincent roamed the house menacingly. “I have been living with my nerves on edge,” he reported to Bernard.

Gauguin may have left that evening just to get some air between downpours, or to dull his misery at the nearby Café de la Gare, or to visit a favorite prostitute in the brothel district across the place Lamartine—all escapes he had sought more often as the pressures built up in the Yellow House. He and Vincent had been arguing fiercely over newspaper reports about a famous Jack the Ripper–style killer who, while awaiting execution, was haunted by horla-like nightmares. Whatever Gauguin’s reasons for leaving, Vincent heard the door close and thought it was for the last time.

Gauguin had barely reached the middle of the park before he heard familiar footsteps behind him. “Vincent ran after me,” Gauguin recalled to a friend a few days later, “I turned round, for he had been very strange recently, and I did not trust him.”

“You are going to leave?” Vincent demanded.

“Yes,” Gauguin replied.

He may have meant only to reaffirm his ultimate intention (already well known to Vincent) or, unnerved by the threatening pursuit, he may have felt a sudden, urgent resolve to escape. Either way, Vincent took it as the final verdict he had long expected, and he came armed with a response. Without saying a word, he handed Gauguin a story torn from the day’s newspaper and pointed to the last line:
“Le meurtrier a pris la fuite”
—the murderer has fled.

Gauguin turned and walked on. He heard Vincent running away into the darkness.

No one knows what happened next. Vincent’s previous breakdowns left traces in his letters: trails of thoughts and images that followed his descents and recorded his crashes. In Drenthe, the desolate heath, regret over Sien, dwindling paint supplies, and snatches of disconsolate poetry limned a path toward the disastrous psychotic episode of September 1883. Less than three years later in Antwerp, a diagnosis of syphilis, the indignity of rotting teeth, the deception of his brother, the ridicule of prostitutes and models, and ubiquitous images of death and madness marked his spiral toward the abyss of “absolute breakdown.” In both places, dismal weather, stubborn poverty, and abusive drinking combined to wear down Vincent’s defenses against despair. In this heightened nervous state, even the slightest insult or setback could trigger apocalypse.

Three years later in Arles, it struck again. He said little about the “attack” (his word) this time. He professed to remember nothing about it except
horla
-like “mental fevers” and terrible hallucinations. As before, the stage was set. It had been raining for days in Arles—a cold winter rain. Vincent had been drinking again, too: not just wine and cognac, but the far more potent absinthe. After his confrontation with Gauguin in the square, he may well have fled to a café for a glass or two of the green consolation. And he was broke again. At one point that day, he reached into his pocket and found only a pitiful handful of change—“one
louis and 3 sous”—reminding him not only of his poverty at that moment, but of all the tens of thousands of francs Theo had sent over the years—all now gone.

The images swirling in his head on a Sunday night two days before Christmas included Maupassant’s diabolical
horla
, Dickens’s haunted Redlaw, Loti’s drowned sailors, and especially the ghost of the man who dominated every Sunday and every Christmas of his life—all images of guilt, fear, failure, and death. When he returned to the darkened, empty Yellow House that night, he saw the detritus of his dream everywhere: on the walls, in the accusatory faces of the
bonze
, the Zouave, Patience Escalier, and all the rest of his rejected invitations to the magical South; on his easel, in the unforgiving, unfinishable
Berceuse
, now repudiated by the one man it was meant to please.

In the past, Vincent had always managed to pull himself out of the abyss: in the Borinage, by imagining a new life of artistic brotherhood with Theo; in Drenthe, by inviting Theo to join him on the heath; in Antwerp, by laying plans to join Theo in Paris. By Christmas 1888, however, all these routes of escape had been foreclosed. Two years of living together had almost killed his brother, and the weight of guilt had almost crushed him. Even now, the cautionary example of the Zemganno brothers, who separated in order to survive, still weighed on his conscience. He had left Paris to save Theo; he could not go back. Nor would Theo come to him. Whatever remained of that fantasy had been put to rest by the painful transfer of Theo’s favor from Vincent’s hopeless enterprise in the Midi to the
entresol’s
new star, Gauguin.

By December 23, news had reached Arles that only confirmed the abandonment Vincent already felt: Theo had proposed to Jo Bonger. The two had reunited again in Paris, apparently at Jo’s initiative, and sought their parents’ permission to marry. If the announcement did not wound him, the secrecy of their whirlwind courtship surely did. Vincent had always suspected that, in the end, Gauguin would be drawn away from the Yellow House by his wife and family. Now, for the same reasons, he knew Theo would never come.

Shipwrecked with no hope of rescue, delirious, disoriented, and probably drunk, he stumbled to his bedroom. He went to the corner where the washstand stood. From there he could see into Gauguin’s room, which was still empty. When he turned around, he looked into the mirror that hung over the washstand. Instead of the familiar face he had painted dozens of times, he saw a stranger—an “ill-starred wretch” who had failed his family, killed his father, bled his brother of money and health, destroyed his dream of a studio in the South, and driven away his Bel-Ami. The failure was too overwhelming. The crime was too great. It had to be punished. But how?

Vincent had spent a lifetime inflicting discomfort and pain on the image in the mirror: from refusing food to sleeping on the ground in freezing huts and
beating himself with cudgels. But this crime demanded more. His fevered mind swam with images of punishments exacted for sin, from the sword wounds inflicted by the apostles on Christ’s attackers at Gethsemane to the brutal exorcisms of Zola’s
Le rêve
and mutilations in
La terre
and
Germinal
. The traitorous brother who dragged Zola’s hero from the
Paradou
garden had had his ear chopped off.

Vincent picked up the straight razor that lay on the washstand and opened it. He grabbed the criminal’s ear and pulled at the lobe as hard as he could. He brought his arm across his face and slashed at the offending flesh. The razor missed the upper ear, coming down at about the midpoint and slicing through to the jaw. The skin cut easily, but the rubbery gristle of cartilage demanded either savagery or persistence before the flesh between his fingers came loose. By then, his arm was covered in blood.

Jolted into reality, he tried almost immediately to stanch the fierce, arterial bleeding. The amount of blood must have surprised him, as he scurried to the kitchen in search of more towels, leaving a trail of crimson through the hall and studio. By the time the bleeding slowed, his mind was possessed by a new delusion. He would find Gauguin and show him the awful price that had been paid. Perhaps then he would reconsider. Vincent washed the small fan of flesh and carefully wrapped it, like a cut of meat, in a piece of newspaper. He dressed his wound and covered the bandage with a large beret, then set off into the darkness.