The Season of Migration (15 page)

When it was over, he came back to himself, intact and broken. He felt shame, but he also felt no small measure of joy, and the combination of these was confusing. He lay in Anna's bed, and her leg was draped over his, and the weight of it was so pleasing and he felt such excitement over what they had done that he wanted to do it again, and he was sure that if he touched her in the right way, it would be as simple as that. This was new to him, and he allowed himself for one brief moment to let it make him feel like a man, with a woman at hand who would respond to his touch, who was waiting for him to touch her. He thought perhaps he should love Anna, perhaps he did love Anna, perhaps he was supposed to love Anna all along.

Then she got up to wash, standing at the basin by the bed, and the spell was broken. Anna was not the woman he loved, he did not know her, and yet he could still taste her flesh in his mouth. She was washing the evidence of him from her body. Her face was expressionless as she squeezed the washcloth over her knee; the water ran down in beautiful crystal trails, erasing him. He was a thing that could be washed off with water. An invisible, creeping thing, sinful, unclean; a thing to be scrubbed and sloughed and purged; eliminated; purified; exorcised; punished; sterilized; burned.

*   *   *

The road is quiet once again, the houses spread far from one another, crows alighting in groups from the side of the road. Once again it is nearly dark. He shifts the weight of the knapsack he carries over his shoulder and thinks of Theo in his freshly polished shoes. What is he doing now? Vincent imagines Theo at the Goupil's office in Paris, with a customer, a woman with a bustle and a feather in her hair. He is nodding and smiling at her, that thin, polite smile he gives when he doesn't agree, the same smile he gave to him, Vincent, that day by the Sorcière mine. Or perhaps he is in the back room, his top hat resting next to him on the table as he eats his lunch, hard-boiled eggs and green beans, a perfect cut of turkey breast, and a steaming cup of coffee.

His stomach growls at the thought of food. When was the last time he ate?

Dear Theo, he thinks, I am not the same any longer! Don't you see?

Dear Theo, what is the point of being a man if you must stay the same?

Dear Theo, I do not wish to be a man who stays the same.

In front of him on the road there is a man walking next to a horse drawing a wagon loaded with tools and miscellaneous things. The horse is old and thin and moves at a glacial pace; Vincent is quickly alongside them. He can see the horse's ribs, which protrude left and right from his sides as he slowly clops along.

“Good day,” Vincent says to the man next to the horse as he comes up alongside them.

“Good day,” the man says in response. He is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a coat that looks warmer than Vincent's. He looks twice at Vincent, once fast and then once with a lingering gaze. Vincent is not sure which aspect of him could be so interesting.

The man tells Vincent that he sells the items in his cart to the farmers in the area. “Whatever they might need, I have,” he says with a smile. Vincent notices he is missing two of his teeth. “I like to say I make people happy all day long.” He asks Vincent if he needs anything, or if he has a knife that he needs sharpened, as he does that, too. They are stopped now, and the horse sends a spray of urine into the dirt of the road.

“I have nothing,” Vincent says, “and so I need nothing.” He says it quietly, wishing it to be a statement of fact and not a dismissal. He wants to ask the man if he has any food or water, but he guesses by the horse's ribs that they are both as hard off as he is. To his surprise, then, the man produces two apples from a bag at the front of the cart and offers one to Vincent, giving the other to the horse, who takes it greedily. “You hungry?” he asks Vincent. “I was just about to stop anyway.”

They sit at the side of the road and share the apple, passing it back and forth between them. They hardly speak. Vincent listens to the sound of the horse chewing and of the crunch of the apple as he and the man bite into it.

“So where are you off to, then?” asks the man after a long while.

Vincent swallows, and fights the familiar resistance to answering any questions. “Paris,” he says, “to see my brother.” He passes back the apple.

“Ah,” says the man. “Paris. Too big and busy for me.” He takes another bite.

They chew in silence for a few minutes, and then Vincent finds himself speaking. “I'm coming from the Borinage,” he hears himself say, and is surprised. “In Belgium. I was a lay preacher there for almost a year.”

The man hands the apple back to him; there is only the core left now. Vincent bites off the bottom.

“Ah,” the man says, “and so what do you do now?”

Vincent chews, and hands back the rest of the core. He shakes his head and then nods. “That's the question everyone wants an answer to,” he says.

He can see the man is waiting patiently for more, but he has nothing else to say. He looks out over the field and is quiet. Next to him he can sense the man coming to understand that their conversation is over. Vincent does not look at him because he knows he will see the familiar look of confusion, disappointment, and then resignation, the stages he always to seems make a man's face pass through.

“Well,” the man says, “I guess we should be moving on, then.” He stands and wipes his hands on the sides of his pants.

They walk on alongside each other for a few miles, nearly silent, the horse clopping, occasional clinking sounds coming from the cart, before the man, who has told Vincent his name is George, turns off onto the road into a farm. He holds his hand out to shake Vincent's in order to say good-bye. “Wait,” says Vincent. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his sketches. “I'd like to repay you for your kindness.”

“What's this?” asks George.

“They're just little sketches that I've done along the road.” He riffles through them, unsure of which one to give away. He chooses the sketch of the cow chewing, and looks up at George as he passes it over.

“So this is what you do, then,” says George, grinning at him. He takes the sketch, looks at it, and nods. Vincent can read nothing on his face of what he thinks of the picture.

“Thank you, Vincent,” George says, “I will keep this,” and holds out his hand.

They shake hands and Vincent watches him and his horse amble away, feeling strangely bereft of them, not wanting to continue on alone.

He meditates afterward on his encounter with George. What kind of pride is it that has him put his hand in his pocket and bring out those sketches, when he knows they are not adequate payment for the kindness he receives? A day or so ago he gave a different sketch to a farmer's wife in exchange for a few slices of bread and a cup of coffee; he remembers her face as she looked at the drawing: unimpressed, confused. James and Bertha, too, accepted the drawing as if it were the work of a child. Still, he hears George's voice:
So this is what you do.

Two months ago, in March, he had made a different trek, walking to Courrières, a town not too far over the French border, to try to see the painter Jules Breton. He thinks of it now, remembering the longing in it, how desperately he felt he might gain something from the encounter with the artist.

In 1875, when Vincent was working with Harry Gladwell at Goupil's in Paris, he saw Breton at a salon opening with his wife and two daughters. He was a commanding presence, a hulking man with long hair combed back from his forehead and a thick beard of black and white, ragged as a mountain range. That year his painting at the salon was
The Feast of Saint John
, peasant girls dancing on a summer evening around the St John's bonfire, in the background the village with its church and the moon above it. From across the room, Vincent stared at Breton, trying to match the man with the work. It was as impossible as looking under a man's skin while he passed by. He tugged on Harry's sleeve, pointing out the artist, trying to impart to Harry why he was important, but he could tell that Harry barely cared. Later, back in their room while Harry slept, Vincent wrote in his notebook:
Even if we could see inside a man, glimpse his blood and his brain, we would not see what we were looking for. There is a reason why feeling is invisible; it is why art is necessary.

How would Breton paint the miner's life? A dark palette, with single brushes of light—the glow of a lamp lighting the sweat on a man's body; the canvas taken up with rock, only a sliver where a man lies. A canvas covered with strokes of black, a single corner of glowing yellow and a man's face, illuminated in the lamplight but black as the night. For months in the Borinage, Vincent had meditated on what such a painting would look like. He spoke to Alard of it one day in February in the salon, telling him about Breton, “a living being of the artist species,” and describing the difficulty of representing the miners, who worked in the dark.

“How would an artist do it?” he said, his eyes glowing. He had made Alard and himself cups of tea on the coal stove in the front of the room, the cups on loan from the Denis house. Alard sat on the floor with his cup in his hands, Smoke, the cat, purring on his lap. “I have thought about it a lot. The experience of being down in the mine is unmatched, and I have never seen an image that comes close to it. Can you imagine? A painting that could capture the way the cage drops, the way you fall through the earth with the speed of a train? I wonder what Breton would do if he were to try it.”

Smoke watched Vincent through a quarter slit of his eye. Vincent told himself to stop, to change the subject, to engage the boy more generously, and yet he could not make his mouth remain closed.

“How do you paint a subject with so little light? How do you represent what is unrepresentable? All that darkness down there, those bodies toiling in the lamplight, it is so beautiful and awful, it deserves to be painted, but I wonder if it is impossible. It would be like—well, can you make a painting of despair? Can you make a painting of grief? Can you make a painting of God?”

Alard put his teacup down and picked up one of the pieces of coal that was in front of him, pulling a piece of paper toward him. “Let's try it!” he said, and quickly went to work, covering his paper with dark strokes of coal, leaving only one streak white down the middle of the page. When he was done, he held it up to Vincent, who was still pacing. “Here you go!” he said with glee. Vincent took the paper and looked at it, then turned to the boy. “Alard,” he exclaimed, “you're a genius!” Alard blushed with pride.

A month later, in March, desperate to see and speak with Breton, he trekked to Breton's house in a too-thin jacket. The first night, he slept in a thin haystack while a steady drip of freezing rain fell on him all night, and then turned back before reaching Breton's house, with no money and a terrible foolish feeling.

He walks on past the bend in the road where George turned off, and thinks that perhaps it is up to him to make the painting of the miners that he dreamed about.
So this is what you do.
Could it be? He dreams of how such a tribute might come to be, and what such a thing might look like. He walks with his eyes closed, concentrating, thinking of the descent into the mine, the cage falling fast, Angeline's elbow a stone in his side; he sees lamplight cast onto wet stone, glints of white on a mottled surface, and a dot of light at the top of the tunnel like a single star on a canvas of black. He sees cells with men working, like the caves of a honeycomb, lit one next to the other in dancing shadows and warm lantern glow; a man's body, stripped to the waist, lit from the side where a lamp is hanging, body gleaming with sweat and streaked with black, behind him a canary in a cage.

He can see the images in his head—arresting, beautiful, convulsive images of human toil luminous in darkness—but he knows his hands could never execute his vision, and so the idea deflates and crumples. He sees a man's back, a landscape of burning flesh, skin rippling and blistered, then flakes of skin floating in a pan of water. A man's eye stares up from a face without skin; the shape of Angeline disintegrates, again and again, into obscurity.

Dear Theo, I cannot do it; I can see it but I cannot make it. Dear Father, you were right: I am good for nothing. He walks on, the baby Vincent next to him, chanting,
This is your life, this is your life, this is your life.

 

1879

December 4, 10:00 a.m.

Petit Wasmes, the Borinage

Dear Theo,

I know it would not make sense to most that a man could give up a warm bed in a house that always smelled like fresh bread to sleep in the dust and cold of a hovel in the depths of a February winter, but this is what I did.

In the hut, I laid a few coal sacks end to end in front of the hearth and filled them with straw. I didn't have much coal, and I didn't want to take any away from the miners and their children, so I lay close to the fire and reached out to stoke it every few hours with a poker that I found when I arrived. I lay listening to the fire crackle and pop, watching the shadows that were cast onto the walls opposite the flame. In them I saw scenes of consolation, a peasant with a scythe, a landscape like Van der Maaten's
Funeral in a Cornfield
, which I had sent to Father to hang in his study, black figures making their way into the tall stalks. I thought of Zundert, the family gathered in the back room at Christmas, the candle lights dancing all around the room, Father's voice reading us stories from the family history. It was better, I thought, to have a space that I could call my own.

I curled up before the small fire, silhouettes of light and darkness moving before me. The spider's web in the corner grew, silently.

December 5

Dear Theo,

In late February, ten months ago, Father came to the Borinage to visit. Madame Denis sent him a letter, reporting with concern that I had moved from her house to an abandoned mining hut; he came at once. One afternoon I looked up from my bed of straw and there in the doorway stood Pa in his long dark coat. Can you imagine? I thought for a long moment that I must be hallucinating, but then the vision spoke: “Vincent, what is this?”