After the letter from the little Ravoux, for ten years or more, he didn’t hear any news of van Gogh. He wasn’t expecting any. But in their kitchen — from which Armand had fled for the Colonies in the white tie and yellow vest we’ll imagine him wearing no matter what his age; the kitchen that Camille deserted as well, the child made from unsound dust that nonetheless a sea-freight shipping company, the Messageries maritimes, had taken under its wing and paid meagrely each month, so that he’d work in a dismal bonded warehouse in Toulon or Cassis with others as unsound as he; the same kitchen where the tense young man had always appeared for Roulin alone, behatted after Fouquier, or, on more carefree days, with a sky blue cap; the kitchen where Marcelle was still within earshot and in their arms, weaker than when she was two months old and braced against the future, already wasting away, silently; in their kitchen, therefore, perhaps hung with cheap Veronese wallpaper with fat dahlias, a celestial pasture, the muzhik and his baba spoke of Vincent from time to time. Newspapers reported, for example, the opening of the Salon, and they thought about how proud he would have been to be there, the poor guy: to go, he would have to have rented a stovepipe hat and a swallow-tailed coat, and they laughed imagining him in that get-up, boarding the train for Paris; or perhaps Augustine, while cleaning, found a letter, either from Monsieur Gogh or Monsieur Paul, from before he’d lost his marbles or afterward — she and Roulin didn’t agree. They argued about it a little. Mother Roulin felt sorry for him, slowly nodding her head with conviction, and Roulin, who was only listening out of one ear, envisioned all that effort spent for nothing in the fields of Aries, thrown to the wind, as violent and inconsequential as the passing of cowboys on horseback, in the shadows of the oak trees, at noon. They asked themselves what had become of the paintings, paintings that weren’t very pretty, but had cost so much suffering; at least at their house such pain had been in some way rewarded; at least one of these paintings had been unrolled and mounted in a handsome golden frame with large moldings that they themselves had chosen; one out of all of those things thrown furiously to the wind had been hung, and few of the world’s eyes had seen it there, as one sees the great work of the great painters at the Salon, and it was in their home, in their kitchen, between the chromo portrait of Blanqui and the talking bird’s cage, a blackbird or a myna, which could perhaps pronounce the names Anacharsis Cloots and Vincent van Gogh. Tolerant and unconvinced, moved, they turned their eyes to this painting I’ll return to, and they looked at it for a moment. It was already the dinner hour, they were eating, and more often than not it would be the two Vincentian oblations, the yellow potato and black coffee, Vincentian from Vincent’s first period that Roulin didn’t know; but of the third oblation — what Vincent called la blanche, which we also call the green, diabolical and solar, chrome yellow number three — only Joseph partook before eating.
Sure, Roulin was still drinking; but it didn’t help the way it used to. It no longer produced this desirous, violent body that the mad excesses of youth incite, this pure glory made flesh; Augustine is as old as the hills, and even the oyster girls — their sidelong glances, their white arms — if by chance or blindness they mistake you for a sultan, you would lay your hands on them in vain: nevertheless, you look at them with the same eyes you had in Lambesc, and their bodies are the same, heavy, prodigious. It seems that all the friends you drink with have changed, they’ve become inattentive, tactless; they no longer deign to see that beneath the postal cap something of a prince is singing and making intelligent remarks; moreover, maybe the prince speaks less willingly; there are too many things in the world that the postman hasn’t understood, that he knows he’ll never understand, which, therefore, the prince will no longer discuss. And on every 14th evening of July seemingly begun in good spirits — new uniform all polished, settled between the trumpets and the tricolor, the zouaves and the Algerian infantrymen, the blue sky — these nights of the taking of the Bastille you have nothing at all and end up sitting alone at a table in a bistro near the port with the black sea before you, the friends who left you to your ramblings, the young toughs who look at you and laugh with the oyster girls, the white that runs through your beard and the new uniform that you’ve stained, and when angrily you rise, when you push a chair and it falls, it’s no longer revolt, it’s no longer a down payment on the republic to come, it’s the republic itself falling in this chair that you see through your stupor and something close to tears, final but somehow resembling happiness — the republic is delectably lost, fallen there, into the past; when you come home after midnight, you’re just an old sot; and on an obscure back road where you stop to catch your breath, you see fireworks exploding suddenly up there like Vincent’s dahlias, and you wonder, what hands gather them? What celestial herd grazes them? And then you weaken, like an old woman you say to yourself that Vincent is in the sky You speak to him.
One day, as you might expect, van Gogh came back. It wasn’t from some heart of darkness.
It’s evening. Roulin has a little garden fairly far from his house, off by the wooded outskirts, here filled with tomatoes and over there some agaves, toward Estaque or Cassis; he’s coming back to eat and he takes to the incline of his street, rue Trigance for example, toward la Vieille Charité; his back is to us, tired, something in his hand, peppers or endive; he’s still imposing, but far more crooked than when he was pestering the fanatic with muzhiklike cabrioles on the edge of Arles. A young man who is waiting there, in a wine seller’s or under an awning, watches him approach, and his face lights up as though he knows him. But Roulin has never seen this citizen before. The other moves toward him; he has a mimosa jacket and a little mustache, but it’s not Armand; on his head is the inevitable steep stovepipe; he takes his hat in his hands; with a curious respect, he says a few words to the postman; at that moment, we don’t see the postman’s eyes, but we know that a glimmering flame dances there, because his shoulders straighten unfatigued with an air of exclamation, of gaiety that lifts his arms, opens his hands; he shows him that his house is up the road a piece, but the other already knows; together, they head up the bit of road that remains, the elegant one still with hat in hand, Roulin still wearing his cap; at the door he moves to the side — enter my prince — the young man climbs the stairs, he’s upstairs. They’re in the kitchen.
I want to see and hear their first conversation, in this kitchen visited and touched, for the first time, by eyes other than those of his fellow postal workers, those old nostalgic radicals from the Commune who came there to reminisce, to blaspheme; or even the eyes of Mother Roulin’s neighbors, cheerful kids or old women with whom she’d go to market; but the young man wasn’t looking at their kitchen because the Roulins were well liked, because they were despised, envied, or even because he wanted to chat with them and enjoy their company; his stare was the old, absent, clouded look of the prodigal son returned after ten years, after they had moved, and so he figures that, before, the buffet must have been there, and the chromo too, although he can’t remember it, because now it’s yellowed and dog-eared, but not this brand-new birdcage; and, no, not this bird; and Roulin understands this, barely; but that his kitchen was being scrutinized as something enormous and ancient, seen from its base, Egypt’s pyramids — this Roulin doesn’t understand. It doesn’t matter: because what he does see clearly, what he recognizes with a blinding clarity and an extreme joy, what he hasn’t seen in so long that he thought perhaps he had dreamt it, is the way the young man places himself in front of his portrait — the one that makes him look like Nepomucen in the celestial fields — the one Vincent had given him, and high time he said it, for whatever it’s worth; so the young man stood there, the black hat held firmly in his hands before him, unshakable, his shoulders perfectly upright as if standing at attention before a highly decorated officer whom, of course, one would not be able to see; he remains there, on his feet, as if at the bedside of a dead man, and even so there’s a tension in his lips, around his eyes, that’s both ferocious and deliberate, as if upon this little framed surface there were simultaneously represented twenty kilometers of fields leading to the foothills of the Alps — thus to the end of the Earth — as well as, right within reach, a beautiful woman without shame, calling to him, about to step out from the canvas and be touched from head to toe; and nothing in it tolerant, nothing unconvinced, instead, a nonsensical intolerance and an equivalent certitude, as when remembering Gambetta’s fiery rhetoric, as when you want a woman: that was how Monsieur Paul had looked at the paintings, that was how Monsieur Vincent had looked at Monsieur Paul’s paintings. So this way of seeing still exists. Roulin wants to jump up, to talk a lot, but he doesn’t, he understands that it’s tiresome, and besides, he barely knows this young man. Here’s Mother Roulin, who was out running errands; the elegant fellow seems to recognize her as well, and with good reason; and before he can say three words, leaning gently forward as one does in society, his stovepipe pressed indifferently to him, Roulin announces eagerly, “He’s interested in Monsieur Vincent,” and more excitedly: “He saw our portraits in Paris.”