“Forgive me if I’m a little leery of your wonderful ideas.”
“We’ve all failed as painters. Do you know why?”
“What? I can’t hear a word. Shout it in my ear.”
“DO YOU KNOW WHY WE’VE ALL FAILED AS PAINTERS?”
“No. Why?”
“Because we paint alone!”
“What the devil?”
“Some things we paint well, some things we paint badly. We throw them all together in a single canvas.”
“Brigadier, I’m hanging on your words.”
“Do you remember the Both brothers? Dutch painters. One was good at landscape. The other was good at figures. They painted a picture together. One put in the landscape. The other put in the figures. They were successful.”
“Well, to bring an interminable story to its obscure point?”
“What? I can’t hear you. Come closer.”
“I SAID, GO ON!”
“Paul. That’s what we must do. You and I. Seurat. Cezanne. Lautrec. Rousseau. We must all work together on the same canvas. That would be a true painter’s communism. We would each put in what we did best. Seurat the air. You the landscape. Cezanne the surfaces. Lautrec the figures. I the sun and moon and stars. Together we could be one great artist. What do you say?”
“Turlutut, mon chapeau pointu!”
He burst into raucous, savage laughter. The wind splashed his ridicule into Vincent’s face like the spray of the sea.
“Brigadier,” he cried, when he could catch his breath, “if that’s not the world’s greatest idea, I’ll eat it. Pardon me while I howl.”
He stumbled down the path, holding his stomach, doubled over with delight.
Vincent stood perfectly still.
A rush of blackbirds came out of the sky. Thousands of cawing, beating blackbirds. They swooped down on Vincent, struck him, engulfed him, flew through his hair, into his nose, into his mouth, into his ears, into his eyes, buried him in a thick, black, airless cloud of flapping wings.
Gauguin returned.
“Come on, Vincent, let’s go down to Louis’s. I feel the need of a celebration after that priceless idea of yours.”
Vincent followed him to the Rue des Ricolettes in silence.
Gauguin went upstairs with one of the girls.
Rachel sat on Vincent’s lap in the café room.
“Aren’t you coming up with me, fou-rou!” she asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I haven’t the five francs.”
“Then you will give me your ear instead?”
“Yes.”
After a very few moments, Gauguin returned. The two men walked down the hill to the yellow house. Gauguin bolted his supper. He walked out the front door without speaking. He had almost crossed the Place Lamartine when he heard behind him a well known step; short, quick, irregular.
He whirled about.
Vincent rushed upon him, an open razor in his hand.
Gauguin stood rigid and looked at Vincent.
Vincent stopped just two feet away. He glared at Gauguin in the dark. He lowered his head, turned, ran towards home.
Gauguin went to a hotel. He engaged a room, locked the door and went to bed.
Vincent entered the yellow house. He walked up the red brick stairs to his bedroom. He picked up the mirror in which he had painted his own portrait so many times. He set it on the toilet table against the wall.
He looked at his red-shot eyes in the mirror.
The end had come. His life was over. He read that in his face.
He had better make the clean break.
He lifted the razor. He felt the keen steel against the gooseflesh of his throat.
Voices were whispering strange tales to him.
The Arlesian sun threw a wall of blinding fire between his eyes and the glass.
He slashed off his right ear.
He left only a tiny portion of the lobe.
He dropped the razor. He bound his head in towels. The blood dripped on to the floor.
He picked up his ear from the basin. He washed it. He wrapped it in several pieces of drawing paper. He tied the bundle in newspaper.
He pulled a Basque beret down over the thick bandage. He walked down the stairs to the front door. He crossed the Place Lamartine, climbed the hill, rang the bell of the Maison de Tolerance, Numero I.
A maid answered the door.
“Send Rachel to me.”
Rachel came in a moment.
“Oh, it’s you, fou-rou. What do you want?”
“I have brought you something.”
“For me? A present?”
“Yes.”
“How nice you are, fou-rou.”
“Guard it carefully. It is a souvenir of me.”
“What is it?”
“Open, and you will see.”
Rachel unwrapped the papers. She stared in horror at the ear. She fell in a dead faint on the flagstones.
Vincent turned away. He walked down the hill. He crossed the Place Lamartine. He closed the door of the yellow house behind him and went to bed.
When Gauguin returned at seven-thirty the following morning he found a crowd gathered in front. Roulin was wringing his hands in despair.
“What have you done to your comrade, Monsieur?” asked a man in a melon shaped hat. His tone was abrupt and severe.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, yes . . . you know very well . . . he is dead.”
It took Gauguin a long time to gather his wits together. The stares of the crowd seemed to tear his person to pieces, suffocating him.
“Let us go upstairs, Monsieur,” he said stammeringly. “We can explain ourselves there.”
Wet towels lay on the floor of the two lower rooms. The blood had stained the stairway that led up to Vincent’s bedroom. In the bed lay Vincent, rolled in the sheets, humped up like a guncock. He seemed lifeless. Gently, very gently, Gauguin touched the body. It was warm. For Gauguin, it seemed as if he had suddenly got back all his energy, all his spirit.
“Be kind enough, Monsieur,” he said in a low voice to the police superintendent, “to awaken this man with great care. If he asks for me, tell him I have left for Paris. The sight of me might prove fatal to him.”
The police superintendent sent for a doctor and a cab. They took Vincent to the hospital. Roulin ran alongside of the carriage, panting.
9
DOCTOR FELIX REY, young interne of the hospital of Arles, was a short, thickset man with an octagonal head and a weed of black hair shooting up from the top of the octagon. He treated Vincent’s wound, then put him to bed in a cell-like room from which everything had been removed. He locked the door behind him when he went out.
At sundown, when he was taking his patient’s pulse, Vincent awoke. He stared at the ceiling, then the whitewashed wall, then out of the window at the patch of darkening blue sky. His eyes wandered slowly to Doctor Rey’s face.
“Hello,” he said, softly.
“Hello,” replied Doctor Rey.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital of Arles.”
“Oh.”
A flash of pain went across his face. He lifted his hand to where his right ear had once been. Doctor Rey stopped him.
“You mustn’t touch,” he said.
“. . . Yes . . . I remember . . . now.”
“It’s a nice, clean wound, old fellow. I’ll have you on your feet within a few days.”
“Where is my friend?”
“He has returned to Paris.”
“. . . I see . . . May I have my pipe?”
“Not just yet, old fellow.”
Doctor Rey bathed and bandaged the wound.
“It’s an accident of very little importance,” he said. “After all, a man doesn’t hear with those cabbages he has stuck on the outside of his head. You won’t miss it.”