Gradually he lost track of the days, of the time he had been in Arles. On some days (though he couldn’t and wouldn’t have said whether the condition of his spirit and soul — how did hospitals put it? — was satisfactory or serious or critical) he went down to breakfast or even had the kitchen make up a box lunch for him to take with him on his ambles through Arles. One afternoon he walked by himself out to the olive orchard that Van Gogh had once painted and had his bread and cheese and bottle of wine and then settled down to sleep under the pale pink blossoms of its slender trees. (Where he dreamed of a wedding couple making a picnic of champagne and éclairs on the limestone coffins alongside the tall trees in Les Alyscamps where Rita had taken the Fellows on his first day in Arles. The groom was the peasant Patience Escalier, and his bride was Berceuse Roulin. They fed and toasted each other while Miller wept for the sweetness and sorrows of life. He wept into their champagne and wept over their éclairs, and when he woke up in the olive orchard he had a salty taste in his mouth, which even the last of his wine would not loosen.) Another time, without in the least knowing where he was headed, he found himself at the Arles-Bouc Canal where he came upon the Dutch-looking drawbridge of Van Gogh’s famous painting, vaguely resembling one of da Vinci’s sketches of a military device, some water catapult, say. Other times, however, he slept in, and couldn’t, at the end of the day, have said whether his spirit and soul were the better or worse for their lack of wear.
What he’d told his doctor (this is how he thought of Félix Rey, though it had been more than a week since he’d seen him) was true. His room at Arles suited him right down to the ground. He did no work on his project and his laptop PC remained unopened even to write the letters he had promised his pals back in Indianapolis. If he’d been able to bring himself to write any letters at all in that room they would have been to Theo, but Miller had no brother, let alone any Theo, and the idea of spilling the beans about himself to anyone else struck him, even after his performance in the music room, as an absurdity, even an act of hubris. (The one time he did turn on the laptop all he did was doodle, making odd designs and even faces out of the period, exclamation point, pound, asterisk, paragraph, section symbol, ampersand, dollar, slash, percentage, left and right bracket, single and double quote, plus, minus, cedilla, diacritical, tilde, hyphen, underscore, and other signs he did not know the name for on his keyboard. Alas, Miller thought as he turned off his PC, I’m no Van Gogh.)
On the whole, however, if only to avoid the Fellows’ questions, he usually chose to be away from Number 2 Lamartine Place more often than he chose to be in it.
So he would find himself — the weather had been amazing — outdoors, sometimes taking a bus to the edge of town and then striking off on his own. Or, if the bus went to some small village nearby, getting off there and then striking off. Once he rode all the way out to Saintes-Maries-de- la-Mer, about twenty-five miles from the city. When he stepped down from the bus and out into the dusty street (more a lane than a street) he had the sense of having been there before. Perhaps he had passed through on the coach during the long ride from Marseilles to Arles his first day in France. This might have been one of those places he’d been momentarily jolted awake and that had left him with his few rough impressions of that journey. But the name of the village was familiar, too. Surely he wouldn’t have retained that as well. While he was looking at the row of peculiar but quite beautiful cottages with their layers of tiered, dyed thatch like actual crops of roofs contoured into the architecture, and their whitewashed sides like thick stucco brushstrokes, it occurred to Miller that he had seen this street before. Not on the bus but in one of Vincent’s paintings. Then a wind blew up, filling his nose with the strong smell of brine. Of course! thought Miller, cuffing his head, suddenly recalling one of those first weeks of the second term of his freshman year in high school. La plume de ma tante! It’s like riding a fucking bicycle! Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer! Nothing was wasted in life. Those vocabulary lists! He knew his French would come in handy one day. “Mer” means sea! Then, facing the wind, tracing the source of that brine, turning this way and that, going up one lane and down another, he came at last to a clearing from which he could see the Mediterranean and where there, on the beach, lined up it seemed to Miller almost exactly as they had been lined up in Van Gogh’s painting of the scene, were four pretty little fishing boats, one red, one green, and two blue, their anchors struck into the sand. Their owners were nowhere about. Indeed, except for one shining white gull, the only other signs of life were four other boats diminished in the distance in the Gulf of Lions.
He was not, Miller understood, a man given to epiphanies. Who, him? With his soured soul and sick spirit? Him, Miller, the man from Indy who — get his dumb aria and parlor-game melodramatics in the damn music room out of your head — had not once during all the times this or that had been “familiar” to him in this queer foreign country, not — count ’em — once ever put down to déjà vu or anything faintly psychological any of his creepy encounters and strange doings. Yet he had his epiphany now. It was this. All his rambles and maunderings of the last few days, all of them, why it was like being on a scavenger hunt! That’s it, that’s right, thought Miller, a scavenger hunt for Van Gogh’s sketches and watercolors and oils, this was what his half-ass project came to, this was what the meaning of his off-again, on-again raids into Arles and its countryside had turned out to be!
He was in Arles at the entrance to the public garden. A man stood with his legs planted so far apart that they might almost have been kicked into position by police. The man was reading a newspaper with the upper half of his body while darkly clothed men and women sat isolated on benches in the attitude of mourners taking time out from their grief along the sidelines of a community nature in the community air. Van Gogh had painted just such a scene. Miller turned away and would not look.
He was approaching at street level the broad, bluish stone steps of the Trinquetaille Bridge, an iron pedestrian bridge across the Rhône. He recognized the bridge as the subject of one of Van Gogh’s paintings. He would not look.
On another occasion he found himself walking south along the Avenue de Montmajour. At almost the last moment he looked up to see that he was about to step under the railroad-bridge underpass a few blocks up from Van Gogh’s room at Arles in the yellow house at Lamartine Place. Van Gogh had done two views — an oil and a sketch— of the underpass. Rather than go past the site, he turned about and went the long way round to his room.
He would not look, he would not look. He would not look at the Provence farmhouse the color of mustard with its haystacks high as a house, or at its low pink stone walls and gateposts. Nor glance at the isolated cypresses rising in the distance behind it like high green flames.
He would not look at the wheat fields set out before him like so many landscapes. He would not look at the sheaves, at the clouds, at the low outbuildings.
He saw a sower, a youth of seventeen or eighteen wearing a hat like a cloth pith helmet, a great bag of seeds attached to him like a paperboy’s sack, and striding forthrightly through the fields like someone on a brisk walk. Crows hovered above the seeds and a little way back of the sower. He wouldn’t look.
There were immense, brilliant sunflowers. He would not look at the sunflowers. He avoided gazing at them as he would have avoided staring into the sun itself.