I hold myself still and listen to the music of his work, to the slap and whisper of brush on canvas. I watch the blue smoke curl from his pinched lips. I feel the air around me turning bluer and bluer. “So much blue,” I say.
“Cobalt,” he says.
Ah. Of course, cobalt. All around me is cobalt. I am bathed in cobalt, drenched in cobalt, drowning in cobalt. I feel in cobalt. As the layers of paint accumulate, my understanding deepens along with the color. I understand that all I have ever known is cobalt, except for occasional periods of ultramarine and Prussian blue and indigo and slate blue and bice blue and cerulean and king’s blue and aqua and blue céleste and robin’s-egg and lilac and cyanine and lapis lazuli. What I would not give to live in viridian! To dance in vermilion! To love in Paris yellow and madder lake!
But no. I am but a tiny sun-scorched face peeking out, in vain, from the greedy, gulping maw of cobalt. All the world’s melancholy, bearing down upon me.
It is a wonder my neck does not snap.
6. Strolling with Henriette (June 24, 1890)
After dinner, Dr. Gachet feels a burn in his stomach that several spoonsful of Elixir do not extinguish, so he decides to go for a walk. He heads down the hill into town with his goat, Henriette, who follows attentively at his heels, only occasionally falling behind to nibble at the irises that grow along the road. A small girl rushes out of a house to pet the goat. She feeds Henriette crusts of bread and chunks of cheese, which she offers in a grubby palm, until an anxious mother’s voice calls her back inside.
Dr. Gachet and Henriette leave the road near the auberge and make their way through knee-high grass to the dilapidated barn where the artist has been storing his many new canvases. It is dark and gloomy inside. The walls are naked wood, with bits of straw poking out from between the boards. The goats in their pens call out when they smell Henriette and scrape their horns against the wooden gates. At the very rear of the barn, in a filthy hay-lined sty, are the artist’s works, some on the walls, some jumbled together on the ground. The doctor sits among the canvases and marvels, while Henriette wanders through the barn, sniffing at the other goats.
Two months from now, after the burial, Dr. Gachet will stand in the same spot, choosing which of the paintings to keep for himself, the artist’s brother having offered them in gratitude to those who looked after the artist in his last days. Monsieur Ravoux, the innkeeper, will claim but two — the portrait of his daughter and a rushed study of the Auvers Hôtel de Ville — before he shakes the executors’ hands and leaves. Dr. Gachet, giddy at all the beauty and genius on display, will choose more than a dozen before he hears someone clear his throat and he feels compelled to stop himself because of the absurd and maddening demands of decorum. “Roll them up, Coco,” he will tell his son, in whose dark eyes — heavy-lidded and deep-set like his father’s — roils the same hunger for art.
But tonight, as Henriette sniffs and nibbles, Dr. Gachet just sits and looks at these images: the swaying wheat fields and the vineyards, the trees undulating in the wind, a pair of children with knowing smiles, the thatched huts and yuccas, his own twenty-two-year-old daughter glowing angelically in the garden. He sits and marvels at the greatness before him, sits and allows himself for once not to feel lonely and not to feel the weight of melancholy and not to worry about his fickle beat-dropping heart, sits and allows himself to believe — deeply, for once — that he is helping, helping this artist work and live, helping this world become more beautiful, more bearable.
He sits there until Henriette comes up behind him and licks the back of his neck, telling him it is time to go. He hums to her as they climb the hill to his house, even improvises a sprightly little song:
Henriette, Henriette,
La plus jolie des toutes les bêtes,
Que penses-tu dans la tête,
Henriette, Henriette?
And he does not care if anyone hears, if anyone sees, if anyone knows that he is an old man who sings to goats.
7. Head over basin, with daughter Marguerite (June 28, 1890)
She takes a handful of powdered saffron from the pouch and spreads it through his wet hair, kneading and stroking as the powder becomes a thin, grainy paste. She rubs small circles on his scalp, then grasps pinches of his hair, gently tugging as she works the dye in, root to tip. As careful as she is, orange stains spread over his skin at the forehead and temples and will take weeks to wear off.
An hour later, she rinses him. He regards himself in the mirror. Even wet, his hair is still several shades lighter than the artist’s.
“Again,” he tells her, as orange droplets fall from his face, dotting the towel wrapped around his neck. “More. Redder.”
8. In the garden, at gunpoint (July 17, 1890)
The gun is Dr. Gachet’s own. Last week he gave it to the artist, who said he needed it to scare away crows that were plaguing him as he painted outdoors. Each afternoon since, the pastoral quiet has been disrupted by gunfire as the artist bangs away up in the fields. And just an hour ago, the dairy farmer Jomaron came pounding on the doctor’s front door in a state of vexation. That lunatic is frightening my stock, he complained, and their milk now has the bitter taste of fear. The farmer was unwilling to accept that this was a sacrifice to be made in the name of art; instead he accepted thirty francs in recompense.
And now the black bore of that very gun is inches from Dr. Gachet’s face. The artist holds it with two hands that tremble with rage, the barrel tracing paths across the doctor’s forehead and back, across and back. Dr. Gachet looks the artist squarely in the eye, as if there is no gun between them, and asks why he is so upset.
“The Guillaumin!” the artist says. “What else?”
The canvas in question: a portrait of a bare-breasted woman lying on a bed, which Armand Guillaumin traded for twelve bottles of Elixir to steady his own erratic heart. It is a lovely work — the artist was even moved to tears upon first beholding it — but Gachet has not yet had time to take it into Paris for Père Tanguy’s man to frame it.
“Sacrilege,” the artist spits. “Incredible. Nothing in this world has to tolerate more stupidity than a painting when it is regarded by fools. You are no better than the rest. You know nothing of art.”
“I know the most important thing of art,” Dr. Gachet answers. “And that is work. Stop behaving like an infant. Be a man, be an artist, and get on with your work.” The artist attempts a retort, but Gachet stands, interrupting him. “I have been very busy,” the doctor says, pointing a stern, steady finger into the artist’s chest. “Busy with many things, not least of which is your treatment.”
“You are a fraud,” the artist seethes. “I am insane to think you can help me.”
The doctor still refuses to look at the gun but imagines the artist’s finger softly pressing against the trigger, then lifting, pressing and lifting, pressing and lifting. The only thing between him and death? A few pounds of force and the indecision of a melancholic mind. He holds his ground, holds the artist’s gaze.
A standoff then, for a long, humid stretch of time, until a door slaps open and Marguerite emerges from the house with the doctor’s afternoon tea. Silently she sets the tea tray down on the garden table — the doctor watches the other man’s eyes following her — then goes to the artist and rubs broad reassuring circles on his back. The artist lowers the gun. He tucks it into the pocket of his blue twill jacket. At a glance from her father, Marguerite returns to the house, and the men sit.