Lust For Life, page 40
“What little you saw of them is right. Wait until you get to know them. Listen, do you know what my private opinion is?”
“No, what? Will you join me in an absinthe?”
“Thanks. In my private opinion, Aries is epileptic. It whips itself up to such an intense pitch of nervous excitement that you are positive it will burst into a violent fit and foam at the mouth.”
“And does it?”
“No. That’s the curious part. This country is forever reaching a climax, and never having one. I’ve been waiting for three months to see a revolution, or a volcano erupt from the Place de la Mairie. A dozen times I thought the inhabitants would all suddenly go mad and cut each other’s throats! But just when they get to a point where an explosion is imminent, the mistral dies down for a couple of days and the sun goes behind the clouds.”
“Well,” laughed Vincent, “if Aries never reached a climax, you can’t very well call it epileptic, now can you?”
“No,” replied the journalist, “but I can call it epileptoidal.”
“What the devil is that?”
“I’m doing an article on the subject for my paper in Paris. It was this German article that gave me the idea.”
He pulled a magazine out of his pocket and shoved it across the table to Vincent.
“These doctors have made a study of the cases of several hundred men who suffered from nervous maladies which looked like epilepsy, but which never resulted in fits. You’ll see by these charts how they have mapped the rising curve of nervousness and excitement; what the doctors call volatile tension. Well, in every last one of these cases the subjects have gone along with increasing fever until they reached the age of thirty-five to thirty-eight. At the average age of thirty-six they burst into a violent epileptic fit. After that it’s a case of a half dozen more spasms and, within a year or two, good-bye.”
“That’s much too young to die,” said Vincent. “A man is only beginning to get command of himself by that time.”
The journalist put the magazine back in his pocket.
“Are you going to stop at this hotel for some time?” he asked. “My article is almost finished; I’ll mail you a copy as soon as it’s published. My point is this: Aries is an epileptoidal city. It’s pulse has been mounting for centuries. It’s approaching its first crisis. It’s bound to happen. And soon. When it does, we’re going to witness a frightful catastrophe. Murder, arson, rape, wholesale destruction! This country can’t go on forever in a whipped, tortured state. Something must and will happen. I’m getting out before the people start foaming at the mouth! I advise you to come along!”
“Thanks,” said Vincent, “I like it here. I think I’ll turn in now. Will I see you in the morning? No? Then good luck to you. And don’t forget to send me a copy of the article.”
2
EVERY MORNING VINCENT arose before dawn, dressed, and tramped several kilometres down the river or into the country to find a spot that stirred him. Every night he returned with a finished canvas, finished because there was nothing more he could do with it. Directly after supper he went to sleep.
He became a blind painting machine, dashing off one sizzling canvas after another without even knowing what he did. The orchards of the country were in bloom. He developed a wild passion to paint them all. He no longer thought about his painting. He just painted. All his eight years of intense labour were at last expressing themselves in a great burst of triumphal energy. Sometimes, when he began working at the first crack of dawn, the canvas would be completed by noon. He would tramp back to town, drink a cup of coffee and trudge out again in another direction with a new canvas.
He did not know whether his painting was good or bad. He did not care. He was drunk with colour.
No one spoke to him. He spoke to no one. What little strength he had left from his painting, he spent in fighting the mistral. Three days out of every week he had to fasten his easel to pegs driven into the ground. The easel waved back and forth in the wind like a sheet on a clothes line. By night he felt as buffeted and bruised as though he had been given a severe beating.
He never wore a hat. The fierce sun was slowly burning the hair off the top of his head. When he lay on his brass bed in the little hotel at night he felt as though his head were encased in a ball of fire. The sun struck him completely blind. He could not tell the green of the fields from the blue of the sky. But when he returned to his hotel he found that the canvas was somehow a glowing, brilliant transcription of nature.
One day he worked in an orchard of lilac ploughland with a red fence and two rose-coloured peach trees against a sky of glorious blue and white.
“It is probably the best landscape I have ever done,” he murmured to himself.
When he reached his hotel he found a letter telling him that Anton Mauve had died in The Hague. Under his peach trees he wrote, “Souvenir de Mauve. Vincent and Theo,” and sent it off immediately to the house on the Uileboomen.
The following morning he found an orchard of plum trees in blossom. While he was at work, a vicious wind sprang up, returning at intervals like waves of the sea. In between, the sun shone, and all the white flowers sparkled on the trees. At the risk every minute of seeing the whole show on the ground, Vincent went on painting. It reminded him of the Scheveningen days when he used to paint in the rain, in sandstorms, and with the storm-spray of the ocean dashing over him and his easel. His canvas had a white effect with a good deal of yellow in it, and blue and lilac. When he finished he saw something in his picture that he had not meant to put there, the mistral.
“People will think I was drunk when I painted this,” he laughed to himself.
A line from Theo’s letter of the day before came back to him. Mijnheer Tersteeg, on a visit to Paris, had stood before a Sisley and murmured to Theo, “I cannot help thinking that the artist who painted this was a bit tipsy.”
“If Tersteeg could see my Arlesian pictures,” thought Vincent, “he would say it was delirium tremens in full career.”
The people of Aries gave Vincent a wide berth. They saw him dashing out of town before sunrise, heavy easel loaded on his back, hatless, his chin stuck forward eagerly, a feverish excitement in his eyes. They saw him return with two fire holes in his face, the top of his head as red as raw meat, a wet canvas under his arm, gesticulating to himself. The town had a name for him. Everyone called him by it.
“Fou-rou!”
“Perhaps I am a red-headed crazy man,” he said to himself, “but what can I do?”
The owner of the hotel swindled Vincent out of every franc he could. Vincent could not get anything to eat, for nearly everyone in Aries ate at home. The restaurants were expensive. Vincent tried them all to find some strong soup, but there was none to be had.
“Is it hard to cook potatoes, Madame?” he asked in one place.
“Impossible, Monsieur.”
“Then have you some rice?”
“That is tomorrow’s dish.”
“What about macaroni?”
“There was no room on the range for macaroni.”
At length he had to give up all serious thoughts of food, and live on whatever came his way. The hot sun built up his vitality, even though his stomach was getting little attention. In place of sane food he put absinthe, tobacco, and Daudet’s tales of Tartarin. His innumerable hours of concentration before the easel rubbed his nerves raw. He needed stimulants. The absinthe made him all the more excited for the following day, an excitement whipped by the mistral and baked into him by the sun.
As the summer advanced, everything became burnt up. He saw about him nothing but old gold, bronze and copper, covered by a greenish azure sky of blanched heat. There was sulphur-yellow on everything the sunlight hit. His canvases were masses of bright burning yellow. He knew that yellow had not been used in European painting since the Renaissance, but that did not deter him. The yellow pigment oozed out of the tubes on to the canvas, and there it stayed. His pictures were sun steeped, sun burnt, tanned with the burning sun and swept with air.
He was convinced that it was no more easy to make a good picture than it was to find a diamond or a pearl. He was dissatisfied with himself and what he was doing, but he had just a glimmer of hope that it was going to be better in the end. Sometimes even that hope seemed a Fata Morgana. Yet the only time he felt alive was when he was slogging at his work. Of personal life, he had none. He was just a mechanism, a blind painting automaton that had food, liquid, and paint poured into it each morning, and by nightfall turned out a finished canvas.
And for what purpose? For sale? Certainly not! He knew that nobody wanted to buy his pictures. Then what was the hurry? Why did he drive and spur himself to paint dozens and dozens of canvases when the space under his miserable brass bed was already piled nearly solid with paintings?
The desire to succeed had left Vincent. He worked because he had to, because it kept him from suffering too much mentally, because it distracted his mind. He could do without a wife, a home, and children; he could do without love and friendship and health; he could do without security, comfort, and food; he could even do without God. But he could not do without something which was greater than himself, which was his life—the power and ability to create.
3
HE TRIED TO hire models, but the people of Aries would not sit for him. They thought they were being done badly. They were afraid their friends would laugh at the portraits. Vincent knew that if he painted prettily like Bouguereau, people would not be ashamed to let themselves be painted. He had to give up the idea of models, and work always on the soil.
As the summer ripened, a glorious strong heat came on and the wind died. The light in which he worked ranged from pale sulphur-yellow to pale golden-yellow. He thought often of Renoir and that pure clear line of his. That was the way everything looked in the clear air of Provence, just as it looked in the Japanese prints.
Early one morning he saw a girl with a coffee-tinted skin, ash-blond hair, grey eyes, and a print bodice of pale rose under which he could see the breasts, shapely, firm and small. She was a woman as simple as the fields, every line of her virgin. Her mother was an amazing figure in dirty yellow and faded blue, thrown up in strong sunlight against a square of brilliant flowers, snow-white and lemon-yellow. They posed for him for several hours in return for a small sum.
When he returned to his hotel that evening. Vincent found himself thinking of the girl with the coffee-tinted skin. Sleep would not come. He knew that there were houses in Aries, but they were mostly five-franc places patronized by the Zouaves, Negroes brought to Aries to be trained for the French army.
It was months since Vincent had spoken to a woman, except to ask for a cup of coffee or a bag of tobacco. He remembered Margot’s loving words, the wandering fingers over his face that she followed with a trail of loving kisses.
He jumped up, hurried across the Place Lamartine and struck into the black maze of stone houses. After a few moments of climbing he heard a great hubbub ahead. He broke into a run and reached the front door of a brothel in the Rue des Ricolettes just as the gendarmes were carting away two Zouaves who had been killed by drunken Italians. The red fezzes of the soldiers were lying in pools of blood on the rough cobblestone street. A squad of gendarmes hustled the Italians to jail, while the infuriated mob stormed after them, shouting,
“Hang them! Hang them!”
Vincent took advantage of the excitement to slip into the Maison de Tolérance, Numero I, in the Rue des Ricolettes. Louis, the proprietor, welcomed him and led him into a little room on the left of the hall, where a few couples sat drinking.
“I have a young girl by the name of Rachel who is very nice,” said Louis. “Would Monsieur care to try her? If you do not like the looks of her, you can choose from all the others.”
“May I see her?”
Vincent sat down at a table and lit his pipe. There was laughter from the outside hall, and a girl danced in. She slid into the chair opposite Vincent and smiled at him.
“I’m Rachel,” she said.
“Why,” exclaimed Vincent, “you’re nothing but a baby!”
“I’m sixteen,” said Rachel proudly.
“How long have you been here?”
“At Louis’s? A year.”
“Let me look at you.”
The yellow gas lamp was at her back; her face had been in the shadows. She put her head against the wall and tilted her chin up towards the light so that Vincent could see her.
He saw a round, plump face, wide, vacant blue eyes, a fleshy chin and neck. Her black hair was coiled on top of her head, giving the face an even more ball-like appearance. She had on only a light printed dress and a pair of sandals. The nipples of her round breasts pointed straight out at him like accusing fingers.
“You’re pretty, Rachel,” he said.
A bright, childlike smile came into her empty eyes. She whirled about and took his hand in hers.
“I’m glad you like me,” she said. “I like the men to like me. That makes it nicer, don’t you think?”
“Yes. Do you like me?”
“I think you’re a funny man, fou-rou.”
“Fou-rou! Then you know me?”
“I’ve seen you in the Place Lamartine. Why are you always rushing places with that big bundle on your back? And why don’t you wear a hat? Doesn’t the sun burn you? Your eyes are all red. Don’t they hurt?”
Vincent laughed at the naïveté of the child.
“You’re very sweet, Rachel. Will you call me by my real name if I tell it to you?”
“What is it?”
“Vincent.”
“No, I like fou-rou better. Do you mind if I call you fou-rou? And can I have something to drink? Old Louis is watching me from the hall.”
She ran her fingers across her throat; Vincent watched them sink into the soft flesh. She smiled with her empty blue eyes, and he saw that she was smiling to be happy, so that he might be happy, too. Her teeth were regular but dark; her large underlip drooped down almost to meet the sharp horizontal crevice just above her thick chin.
“Order a bottle of wine,” said Vincent, “but not an expensive one, for I haven’t much money.”
When the wine came, Rachel said, “Would you like to drink it in my room? It’s more homey there.”
“I would like that very much.”
They walked up a flight of stone steps and entered Rachel’s cell. There was a narrow cot, a bureau, a chair, and several coloured Julien medallions on the white walls. Two torn and battered dolls sat on top of the bureau.
“I brought these from home with me,” she said. “Here, fou-rou, take them. This is Jacques and this is Catherine. I used to play house with them. Oh, fou-rou, don’t you look droll!”
Vincent stood there grinning foolishly with a doll in each arm until Rachel finished laughing. She took Catherine and Jacques from him, tossed them on the bureau, kicked her sandals into a corner and slipped out of her dress.
“Sit down, fou-rou,” she said, “and we’ll play house. You’ll be papa and I’ll be mama. Do you like to play house?”
She was a short, thickset girl with swelling, convex thighs, a deep declivity under the pointed breasts, and a plump, round belly which rolled down into the pelvic triangle.
“Rachel,” said Vincent, “if you are going to call me fou-rou, I have a name for you, too.”
Rachel clapped her hands and flung herself on to his lap.
“Oh, tell me, what is it? I like to be called new names!”
“I’m going to call you Le Pigeon.”
Rachel’s blue eyes went hurt and perplexed.
“Why am I a pigeon, papa?”
Vincent ran his hand lightly over her rotund, cupid’s belly.
“Because you look like a pigeon, with your gentle eyes and fat little tummy.”
“Is it nice to be a pigeon?”
“Oh, yes. Pigeons are very pretty and lovable . . . and so are you.”
Rachel leaned over, kissed him on the ear, sprang up from the cot and brought two water tumblers for their wine.
“What funny little ears you have, fou-rou,” she said, between sips of the red wine. She drank it as a baby drinks, with her nose in the glass.
“Do you like them?” asked Vincent.
“Yes. They’re so soft and round, just like a puppy’s.”
“Then you can have them.”
Rachel laughed loudly. She raised her glass to her lips. The joke struck her as funny again and she giggled. A trickle of red wine spilled down her left breast, wound its way over the pigeon belly and disappeared in the black triangle.
“You’re nice, fou-rou,” she said. “Everyone speaks as though you were crazy. But you’re not, are you?”
Vincent grimaced.
“Only a little,” he said.
“And will you be my sweetheart?” Rachel demanded. “I haven’t had one for over a month. Will you come to see me every night?”
“I’m afraid I can’t come every night, Pigeon.”
Rachel pouted. “Why not?”
“Well, among other things, I haven’t the money.”
Rachel tweaked his right ear, playfully.
“If you haven’t five francs. fou-rou, will you cut off your ear and give it to me? I’d like to have it. I’d put it on my bureau and play with it every night.”
“Will you let me redeem it if I get the five francs later?”
“Oh, fou-rou, you’re so funny and nice. I wish more of the men who came here were like you.”
“Don’t you enjoy it here?”
“Oh, yes, I have a very nice time, and I like it all . . . except the Zouaves, that is.”
Rachel put down her wine glass and threw her arms prettily about Vincent’s neck. He felt her soft paunch against his waistcoat, and the points of her bud-like breasts burning into him. She buried her mouth on his. He found himself kissing the soft, velvety inner lining of her lower lip.
“You will come back to see me again, fou-rou? You won’t forget me and go to see some other girl?”
