The artist’s eyes are all pupil, and they tremble and jerk. “I must go,” he pants. “So many things call out for my eye, my brush.”
Dr. Gachet shoos him toward the door. “Go. Work is how great men make their marks.”
The door slams, and after Dr. Gachet gets up to close it properly, he returns to his writing table to work on his article — an important piece, to be sure, correcting some of the most alarming provincial misconceptions about public hygiene — but he finds himself unable to concentrate, unable to stop his knees from bouncing or his feet from tapping the floor, unwilling to stop the warmth that rises in him each time he swivels in his chair and looks at the fresh canvas leaning against the wall on top of his tea table. He puts down his pen and takes up a brush.
Within a few hours, he has executed what is, to his eye, a perfect copy. In the lower left corner, he signs his nom d’art, Paul van Rijssel. Then he reconsiders and brushes it out. He experiments with new signatures, rubbing out each one before adding the next, in a new color:
Paul van Rijssel
P. van Rijssel
Dr P. Gachet
P.-F. Gachet
Paul Gachet
Paul-Ferdinand
Paul
Paul van R.
Paul van G.
Dr P. van G.
Dr van G.
Paul-Vincent
Vincent-Paul
When he finally steps away and shakes his head clear, paint stains cover his hands and his clothes, and a smeary blob of Verona green and ocher and burnt sienna has spread, blotting out half of a straw-colored hill. He hurls his brush against the wall, then razors the wet canvas into ribbons.
4. Contemplating the tragus (May 23, 1890)
While the renters are taking dinner in the ground-floor café, Dr. Gachet is behind the auberge with a long, paint-spattered ladder he has found in the grass. He leans the ladder against the building, tests his weight on the bottom rung. A creak, a little give, but sturdy enough. He climbs, catching a splinter in his little finger and suffering a whirl of vertigo when he dares a look down. He wriggles through the attic window, which has been propped open with a stick, and drops himself onto the floor in the room the artist rents for three francs fifty per day. It is a hot, dark, squalid cell. The walls are bare. There is a cot and a chair and a small dressing table and the lingering smell of pipe smoke and armpits and raw plaster.
On the table is a letter to the artist’s brother. At the top of the page, the artist’s handwriting is crisp and well-spaced, but with each sentence it becomes more cramped, anxious. Dr. Gachet leans over the table and reads. This is what a good doctor does, he tells himself. A good doctor must see how the patient is thinking, must gauge the progress of their work together. A drop of sweat falls from his chin onto the paper. He does not wipe it away for fear of smearing the ink. Halfway down the page, he finds the following words:
I think we must not count on Dr. Gachet at all. First of all he is much sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much, so that’s that. Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don’t they both fall into the ditch?
When the artist returns from his meal, Dr. Gachet is sitting on the cot, waiting with the letter in his lap. The artist seems confused by the doctor’s presence. His pipe dips as his lips slacken. The doctor stands, and he takes the artist firmly by his thin wrist. “I have something to show you,” he says, not caring that he hears an angry shake in his voice.
They do not speak as they descend the narrow stairs and exit through the café, where the innkeeper’s wife, collecting plates from tables, looks up peevishly to see what all the stomping is about. Dr. Gachet tows the artist behind him as they walk swiftly up the steep, crooked streets, feels the other man’s pulse quickening beneath his hand. He feels his own pulse thumping in his neck. The artist stumbles on loose stones, no doubt exaggerating his poor sense of balance. The scent of lilac is heavy in the dusky air. They pass the old church and keep walking until they reach the walled cemetery, a stone field of Ici Repose scored by a grid of yellow dusty pathways. The artist seems not to notice that they are surrounded by the dead; he stares off into the whispering wheat fields beyond.
Dr. Gachet removes his blue jacket and drapes it over the stone wall, places his cap upon it, then takes off his shirt and rips it in two. With half the shirt he blindfolds the artist, and while he is tying the knot, he studies the artist’s nubby ear. Lower half of left ear excised, he notes, by means of a diagonal incision, beginning posteriorly toward the top of the ear and cutting anteriorly through the tragus. Hemorrhaging likely was extensive. He runs his thumb over the hardened scar tissue along the line of the cut. The artist tilts his head, leans into the doctor’s hand, as if to say, Carry this, please, carry this.
Dr. Gachet places the other half of the shirt in the artist’s hand. “Put it on me,” he says, and the artist, with his long, bony fingers, blindfolds him. The doctor can smell his own sweat in the fabric as well as traces of dinner on the artist’s hands — rosemary, goat cheese, some kind of berry.
They hold hands and stride through the cemetery, Dr. Gachet leading them toward the open grave in the northeast corner that was dug that morning for old Madame LaChance. They bark their shins on gravestones and trample flowers and kick-scatter tiny rocks on the pathway until at last they step together into nothing.
Inside the grave, they slip off the blindfolds. Warm pain thrums in the doctor’s ankle. Dirt streaks his waxy, sagging belly. The artist sniffs at the sweetly loamy air.
The doctor gestures upward, and together they look up at the rectangle of sky in its frame of brown earth. Night is falling in a mad indigo swirl.
“A beautiful sky,” the artist says.
“So you see,” the doctor says, “it is not the worst thing, to fall in a ditch.”
“We are very much alike, you and I.”
“Stop saying that. I am your doctor.”
A crow alights at the grave’s edge and looks down at them, its head atilt in curiosity.
5. Dr. Gachet, with the heartbroken expression of our time [#1] (early June 1890)
Midafternoon in the garden. On the red garden table: foxglove in a vase and two novels by les frères Goncourt. My pose, he says, is modeled on Delacroix’s painting of the poet Tasso in the asylum at Ferrara, a pose that suggests that all the world’s melancholy is bearing down upon me.
“I enjoy painting portraits,” the artist says. “It consoles me up to a certain point for not being a doctor.” I tell him not to be absurd. He tells me to hold still.