Van Gogh (165 page)

It had traveled an odd path. If Vincent had meant to hit his heart, his aim was inexplicably wide of the mark. The gun had been held too low and pointed downward, hurling the little bullet into a dangerous position, but far from its intended target. It looked like the crazy angle of an accidental shooting, not the studied straightness of a determined suicide. And another oddity: normally, a bullet fired at such close range, if it didn’t hit bone, would have passed through
the soft tissue of the midsection and exited the other side. That it remained in his body indicated not only a small caliber with limited powder, but also that the gun had been fired from farther out—“too far out,” according to the doctor’s report—perhaps farther out than Vincent’s reach.

At some point, Dr. Gachet arrived. He had gone fishing with his son and heard about the shooting from a passerby—an indication of how quickly the news was spreading. As Vincent’s nominal custodian in Auvers, Gachet had much to answer for. He rushed to the Ravoux Inn, no doubt expecting the worst. He found Vincent surprisingly lucid—smoking his pipe—but demanding that someone remove the bullet from his stomach. “Will nobody cut my belly open for me?” one witness recalled him pleading.

Gachet examined the wound himself and consulted apart with Dr. Mazery. Neither dared to attempt surgery. Mazery was a Paris obstetrician on summer holiday; Gachet, an expert on nutrition and neurotics, not gunshot wounds. Moving Vincent to a Paris hospital presented even greater risks. With no symptoms to treat, they applied a dressing and hoped for the best. Undoubtedly over Vincent’s protests, Gachet drafted a letter to Theo saying only that Vincent had “wounded himself.” “I would not presume to tell you what to do,” he wrote cautiously, “but I believe that it is your duty to come, in case of any complications that might occur.”

To avoid the alarm of a telegram, Gachet planned to post the letter. But when he asked Vincent for Theo’s address, Vincent refused to give it. Gachet decided to dispatch the young Dutch painter Hirschig to Paris the next morning to hand-deliver the letter to Theo at his gallery, where Gachet had visited him. After that, both doctors left the little attic room. Vincent smoked his pipe and waited. Every now and then, his body stiffened and his teeth clenched in pain. That night, Anton Hirschig, who occupied the room next to Vincent’s, heard “loud screaming.”

By the next morning, Auvers buzzed with rumors about the extraordinary events of the night before. Someone had seen Vincent, around dusk, enter a walled farmyard just off the main thoroughfare—far from the fields above the town. He appeared to be hiding behind a dunghill, as if for a rendezvous, or perhaps detained by unseen companions. It was here, the rumors said, that the fateful shot had been fired. Vincent could have dragged himself wounded over the level ground between the dunghill and the Ravoux Inn—less than half a mile—a far easier route than the steep, tricky slope of the riverbank. His easel and canvas, and the gun, could have been disposed of.

Revolvers were rare in Auvers, and in the days after the shooting, locals inventoried every one of them. Only one was missing—along with its owner. René Secrétan and his “Puffalo Pill” “peashooter” had left town—spirited away with his brother Gaston after the shooting by their pharmacist father in the middle
of the summer. The brothers eventually returned to Auvers, but the pistol was never seen again. Decades later, René Secrétan came forward to offer an explanation. After more than half a century of silence, he told an interviewer that Vincent had stolen it from him. “We used to leave it around with all our fishing gear,” he said, “and that’s where Vincent found it and took it.”

But the verdict of rumor had long since been rendered. In the 1930s, when the great art historian John Rewald visited Auvers and interviewed the surviving witnesses of that midsummer night in 1890, he heard people say that some “young boys” had shot Vincent accidentally. The boys never came forward, he was told, because they feared being accused of murder; and Vincent chose to protect them as a final act of martyrdom.

THEO ARRIVED BY MIDDAY
on the twenty-eighth, only hours after Hirschig appeared at the gallery. Even after all the thunderbolts of the past, the news from Auvers came as a shock. He had spent the previous week assaying the ground-floor apartment in his building, dreaming about his reunion in August with his wife and child in Holland, and planning, in the meantime, a weekend excursion to Passy—a summer watering spot outside Paris, not unlike Auvers. When he allowed himself to worry, it wasn’t about Vincent, it was about his job. Since his aborted ultimatum, he had heard rumors that two of the firm’s branches in Paris had been marked for closing—one of them, his.

Gachet’s letter interrupted all that. On the train to Auvers, the old dread crashed in on him. Only a week before, he had dismissed such worries in words that must have haunted him as the train left Paris. “As long as he’s not melancholic and heading for another crisis,” he reassured Jo on July 20, “it was all going so well.” Gachet’s letter said that Vincent had “wounded himself.” The last time Theo was summoned by news like that, he had arrived in Arles to find his brother lying mutilated and unmoored in a hospital bed. What new horror awaited him in Auvers? Hirschig may have mentioned the possibility of a suicide attempt—a scandalous charge that Gachet had discreetly omitted from his letter—raising yet another specter to torment the endless hour-long ride.

By the time he arrived at the Ravoux Inn, his face was “distorted by grief,” Adeline Ravoux recalled. He rushed upstairs to Vincent’s room. But instead of the deathbed scene he feared, he found Vincent sitting up in bed, smoking. “I found him better than I had expected,” he wrote Jo later that day, “although he is indeed very ill.” The brothers embraced, according to Adeline (who had followed Theo and her father to the room), and immediately fell into deep conversation in Dutch. The Ravouxs withdrew.

For the rest of the day and into the evening, they talked: Vincent on his low-slung iron bed, Theo in the lone straw chair that he drew up next to it. Alternately
agitated and enervated, taking short breaths and wincing with pain, Vincent thanked his brother for coming and giving them this opportunity to “be together constantly.” He asked about Jo and the baby. How sweet for them, he said, to “have no inkling of all life’s sadness.” If Vincent claimed a suicide attempt—as he had to Ravoux and others—Theo surely raised questions. Why had he given no warning? His most recent letter had been filled with buoyant spirits (“good luck in business … handshakes in thought”) and boisterous sketches of country life—even an order for more paint. Looking around the room Theo could see no signs of preparation for death—no tidying up, no farewell note. Discarded drafts and torn fragments of letters that Vincent clearly never intended to be read lay on his desk.

V
INCENT’S BEDROOM AT THE
R
AVOUX
I
NN
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Illustration credit 43.1
)

During one of their few breaks—perhaps while Vincent tried to sleep or take food, or lapsed into unconsciousness—Theo wrote Jo. He gave no hint of suicide, only surrender. “Poor fellow, he wasn’t granted a lavish share of happiness,” he wrote, “and he no longer harbors any illusions. He was lonely, and sometimes it was more than he could bear.” He reassured Jo, and himself, with memories of Vincent’s previous injuries and recoveries. “It was just as desperate before,” he noted hopefully, “and the physicians were surprised by his strong constitution.” He promised to return to Paris the next day “if he’s better tonight.”

But Vincent’s wound would never heal, and there was only one treatment.
He had lost “faith in life,” Theo concluded. Fate had given him this chance—whether by his own hand or another’s—and he was choosing death.
“I would not expressly seek death,”
Vincent had written in Nuenen,
“but I would not try to evade it if it happened.”

As the sun set and the attic began to cool, both conversation and rest became more elusive. Vincent’s breathing grew shallower and faster. His heart raced. Color and warmth drained from his skin. He had spells in which he seemed almost to be “suffocating,” Theo recalled. By nightfall, the end seemed near. The spells came more often. They talked less.

With each panic of breathing, with each fond remembrance and each flush of tears, the subject of death hovered closer. The brothers had said little about suicide over the years—except to disavow it—but death had obsessed Vincent’s letters from the beginning. The thought of death “warmed me and made my heart glow,” he wrote from England in 1876. He lingered in graveyards and longed to draw corpses. He cherished images of funerals and plagues and portrayals of Death. He saw serenity in the faces of the dead and envied their freedom from “the burden of life, which we have to go on bearing.” “Dying is hard,” he had scolded a mourner at his father’s funeral, “but living is harder still.”

The years of failure, penury, guilt, loneliness, and finally madness had shown him a different face of death. Deprived of the comfort of religion by his father’s death in 1885, he had failed ever since to fill the void it left. He tested everything from Tolstoy’s nihilism to Voltaire’s cosmic laugh, and found them all wanting. In the end, only art consoled. “My aim in life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can,” he wrote; “then, at the end of my life, I hope to pass away, looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, ‘Oh, the pictures I might have made!’ ”

But pictures alone were not enough. “Of the future life of artists through their works I do not think much,” he wrote in Arles. “Yes, artists perpetuate themselves by handing on the torch … But is that all?” He could not live without the possibility of a world beyond—a place where he could finally be free from “the empty stupidity and the pointless torture of life.” To keep alive the promise of a second chance, of starting over—for him, the indispensable consolation of religion—he had spent long hours constructing his own versions of an afterlife: glorious visions of distant orbs and “invisible hemispheres”—of trains to the stars and lifetimes as limitless as planets in the universe. Like his paintings, these elaborate conceits drew on the beauties of nature, the allure of science, the “deeply saddening Bible,” and, especially, the transcendent power of art. “Illusions may fade,” he wrote in Antwerp, “but the sublime remains.”

Of all these consoling visions—some of which no doubt flitted through his thoughts as he felt the end approach—none was more glorious or more hopeful
or more comforting than the one he imagined in Arles, in 1888, as he waited in the Yellow House for Gauguin’s arrival:

At half past midnight, on July 29, cradled in his brother’s arms and struggling for breath, Vincent uttered his last words to his
waarde
Theo: “I want to die like this.” He lay there for another half hour, one arm cast over the side of the bed with his hand resting on the floor, his mouth agape and panting for air. A little after one in the morning, with his eyes wide open, his fanatic heart stopped.

“He has found the rest he was longing for,” Theo wrote his mother. “Life was such a burden to him.… Oh Mother! he was so my own, own brother.”

LATER THAT MORNING
, Theo buried his grief in a new mission: to give Vincent the dignity in death that he never had in life. Working with grim focus and efficiency, he presented himself at the town hall and completed all the official paperwork. He arranged with a printer to have both death notifications and funeral invitations printed within hours. The invitations had to make the post in time for delivery in Paris that same day or early the next morning, July 30—the day of the funeral. He listed train departure times to ensure the largest possible attendance. The ceremony would begin at the Auvers church “precisely” at 2:30
P.M.
, and would include a “funeral procession, service, and burial.” Meanwhile,
he engaged a carpenter to provide a coffin and an undertaker to stabilize the body in the sweltering summer heat.