Sunflowers (19 page)
Decisions
He is entirely conscious of his condition and talks to me of what he has been through and which he fears may return, with a candor and simplicity which are touching
.
—Reverend Mr. Salles to Theo, 19 April 1889
A
t first Vincent was as eager to leave the Hôtel-Dieu as I was for him to go. He complained about being stuck inside when spring was coming, about having to take medicines and eat hospital food, about being around nuns and sick people all the time. The police had dismissed the charges filed by the petitioners—on whose authority Roulin couldn’t find out—so he was free to leave whenever Dr. Rey deemed him well enough. The doctor reminded him that he shouldn’t rush things, said he needed to stay a while longer.
“I’m not going back to the Place Lamartine,” Vincent told me one day as we sat before the stove. “Soulé’s probably rented the house to someone else anyway—our arrangement only goes to the end of this month. Reverend Salles thinks I could find something near the hospital.” I offered to look at lodgings for him, but he shook his head. “I should look myself, so I can examine the light and space for my studio. Reverend Salles said he’d come with me, I’m guessing so he can help persuade a landlord to rent to the
fou rou
.” He smiled wryly. “It’s already the beginning of April. Surely I can leave here soon.”
But once Dr. Rey gave Vincent permission to go outside and paint, his urgency about leaving seemed to fade. Now I was restless and pestering, asking every visit when he might be released. A fortnight passed, another week beyond that, and he sidestepped my questions—about a new apartment, about moving his things from the yellow house—with the vaguest of answers. “Soon,
ma petite
,” he’d say. “Soon.”
One fine afternoon near the end of April, I came to the hospital to find Vincent painting in the courtyard garden. It was the warmest day so far that spring, and the flowers displayed all their colors, as if competing to see who was prettiest. The tidy flowerbeds surrounding the fishpond blended daisies, roses, all manner of blossoms, while a sweet aroma of herbs and orange trees perfumed the air. “Why don’t you take a rest so we can talk a while?” I said.
Vincent frowned at his canvas, then wiped his brushes clean. “Looks like a shower,” he said as we walked around the flowerbeds. “I need to get back to work in a few minutes.”
I put my hand on his arm. “I have to talk to you first. I’m worried about you. You don’t seem to want to leave here, and I really think—”
“I’m glad you mentioned that. There’s something I need to discuss with you.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Dr. Rey offered me an apartment up the street that his mother rents out. I went to look at it with Reverend Salles.”
“That’s wonderful!” I exclaimed. “Does it have plenty of space for your work?”
“It’s only two rooms, but there’s good light. Madame Rey will give me a reduction on the rent, so it won’t cost much.”
“Oh, dearest, I’m so relieved. I was afraid that you were giving up somehow.” He didn’t answer, and I could tell by his face—“Vincent, what is it?”
“I’m not taking the apartment.”
I stopped walking and stared at him. “Are you going back to the yellow house?”
“Do you think the good people of Place Lamartine would allow that?”
“Then where will you go?” As soon as I asked the question, I thought I knew the answer. He was going to Paris to live with Theo and Johanna. Paris was so far away….
He kicked at a pebble on the path. “I’m entering the asylum at Saint-Rémy.”
The walls were closing in.
Vincent caught me before I crumpled to the ground, and he half-dragged, half-carried me to the low stone wall edging the fishpond. “Lean over, put your head between your knees,” he instructed, then yanked up the back of my blouse and pulled at my corset laces. His fingers were warm through the thin cloth of my chemise. “Damn corset—there. Breathe deeply.”
Slowly the world stopped spinning. “Can you sit up?” he asked after a few minutes. I nodded, and he dipped his hand into the cool water to pat my face. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I thought about asking Reverend Salles or Dr. Rey to do it.”
“Why are they sending you there?” I asked when I felt able to speak.
“No one is sending me. It was my idea,” he said, dipping his hand into the pond again. “It’ll only be for a few months. I talked it over with Dr. Rey, and he agrees this is best. When I looked at the apartment, I realized I am terrified of living alone.”
“You wouldn’t have to be alone,” I said. “I could live with you and help you—”
His jaw locked into the familiar stubborn line. “I won’t force you to be my nursemaid. Rachel, please listen to what I’m saying. I need rest and calm to regain my strength, or one day I won’t be able to work.”
“Couldn’t you stay here? Things are going so well…every day you seem better…”
“I need to leave Arles for a while.” Reverend Salles and Theo had already arranged everything, he said, with Dr. Peyron at Saint-Rémy. Theo would pay for Vincent to have his own room, and Dr. Peyron said he could have a second room for a studio. As he spoke, I kept picturing the high walls, the cold stone walls that I’d seen as a child. He took my hand, his voice filled with sadness. “I am unable to look after myself right now—I’m different from what I used to be. You and I have been deluding ourselves for quite some time. I’m not well.”
I knew he spoke the truth, maybe I’d known it for a long time, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. “Will I be able to visit you?”
He looked down at our intertwined fingers. “Reverend Salles, Dr. Rey, and my brother are the only ones who would be permitted.” The thought of him alone in that place was too much for me, and I fell into tears on his shoulder. “
Ma petite
, please don’t. Three months, that’s all it will be, I promise. Please try to understand.”
It seemed important to him to have my blessing, even though the arrangements had already been made and everything was settled. I took the clean rag he offered me and blew my nose. “I do understand, Vincent. It’ll pass quickly, and it’ll be worth it to have you back strong and well.”
He kissed my forehead. “That’s my girl. We’ll spend some time together before I leave, and while I’m in Saint-Rémy I’ll write you letters and draw you pictures,
d’accord?
”
“Promise? You won’t forget about me?”
Something of the old sparkle leaped into his eyes. “How could I?”
Fifteen miles away, and Saint-Rémy might as well have been on the other side of France. I couldn’t say the word
asylum
; it stuck in my throat. “Do you want to take these books with you to Saint-Rémy?” I’d ask as we packed Vincent’s things, or I’d mention something we’d do “when you get back from Saint-Rémy,” as if he’d been going on a painting expedition or summer holiday.
There was much to arrange that last week, and it helped distract me. Madame Ginoux offered to store Vincent’s furniture and some paintings that weren’t yet dry at the Café de la Gare, but she was charging him for the space, her husband’s doing, I felt certain. Vincent’s other things were divided between cases to send to Theo and a trunk to take to Saint-Rémy. He burned most of his papers. “Are you sure you don’t want to keep those?” I asked as he tossed letters from his family and friends into the fireplace. He shrugged and said, “I never do.”
Packing the paintings was the hardest thing to watch: Vincent carefully untacking each canvas from its stretcher, carefully rolling it up, carefully tying the bundles with twine. It must have broken his heart to see those weeks and months of work come down from the walls, out from their homes in the studio, sent away as the ultimate sign of his departure. Some of the paintings had been damaged while he’d been at the Hôtel-Dieu; the spring had been rainy, and with the house closed by the police, no one had been able to light a fire to dry out the air.
“Look how it’s flaking,” he said mournfully as he stared at a painting he’d done of his bedroom, back in the fall. “Theo will have to get it relined.” He pressed newspaper to the painting’s wounds and packed it with the others. When he brought the sunflowers downstairs and started taking them from their frames, I had to go into the kitchen. That I could not bear.
He’d dreamed so much in the yellow house. So had I.
“Where’s the picture you began of me?” I asked when he finished bundling the paintings. I hadn’t seen it since that day of the petition.
“I reused the canvas.” At the look on my face, he added, “I had to,
chérie
, I was out. I couldn’t have finished as it was, anyway. I’ll start again another time.”
My frown became a smile. “In three months it’ll still be summer, you can paint me outside if you want.” He smiled back and said that sounded like a fine effect.
Finally everything was packed. Monsieur Roulin helped Vincent move things to the café, and the cases for Theo were on their way to Paris via goods train. In the morning, Vincent would be going with Reverend Salles to Saint-Rémy, and we agreed to meet at the house one last time. “You’re wearing my favorite dress,” he said when he opened the door.
Of course it was the sunshiny yellow dress I’d worn his first night at Madame Virginie’s. “I’ll never wear it for anyone but you,” I said and kissed him on each cheek.
He took my hand and led me into the studio. How strange it looked with everything gone and nothing on the walls, only the faintest scent of turpentine remaining. “I have something for you.”
“You don’t need to give me anything…,” I began, but my words faded when he brought me the last painting in the yellow house, still in its frame. One of the garden paintings, showing the place where he’d found me.
He spoke softly, and his voice quivered a little. “The other afternoon, I drew that place in pen and ink—I wanted to draw it one more time—but it came out too melancholy to be right.” A long pause. “Why were you crying that day?”
I looked up from the picture in my hands. “The day we met? You saw me?”
“I was painting behind the beech tree. You were crying so hard, I didn’t want to disturb you. Why were you so sad?”
I sighed, trying to remember my life before he’d entered it. “I felt trapped. Lost, like no one could ever understand. But then I opened my eyes, and there you were.”
“
Mon Dieu
, you were so angry with me,” he said with a chuckle.
I laughed at the memory too. “I got over it. After all, if you hadn’t drawn me, maybe we never would have met.”
His voice grew serious. “You’re not sorry?”
Suppose I had known what was going to happen, how much pain would mix with moments of joy. Suppose I could walk into the painting and relive that afternoon, have the chance to do everything differently. When I walked away from him down the garden path, would I still look back?
“I’m not sorry,” I told him. “Not sorry at all.”
The First Letters
17 May 1889
Mlle. Rachel Courteau
c/o Mme. Virginie Chabaud
Rue du Bout d’Arles, no. 1
Arles-sur-Rhône
Ma chère
Rachel,
I have done right to come here. The change of surroundings does me good, and slowly I am losing my fear of madness. It is a disease like any other, and I continue to believe I can be cured.
Dr. Peyron has not yet given permission for me to leave the walls of the asylum to paint. He says we must wait a few weeks to be certain my constitution can endure it, although I assure him it can. During my trip here, I saw that the country around is very beautiful, and I am eager to paint the olive trees. Until then, I spend many hours working in the hospital garden. But I am nearly out of paints and especially canvas, and have written Theo to ask for more.
Theo wrote to say my pictures arrived safely. He particularly liked the portrait of Roulin and the yellow-on-yellow sunflowers. When I think what else could have been accomplished in my little yellow house…But it is folly perhaps to dwell on such things.
May I ask something of you? I did not bring many books and will soon be depleted of things to read. If you could send something of your choice, I would be most grateful. I have asked Theo to send a Shakespeare so I may keep up my English.
My dear girl, I think of you often and miss you a great deal. You must write me and tell me how you spend your days. I, in return, promise to be more regular in my letters.
With a kiss in thought,
Vincent
19 May 1889
M. Vincent van Gogh
Maison de Santé de Saint-Rémy
de Provence
(Bouches-du-Rhône)
Mon cher
Vincent,
I am relieved you are all right and well settled, and I am so happy you are finding things to paint and draw. I hope the doctor will soon let you leave the walls to work—perhaps Theo can request it? I know the fields and groves around Saint-Rémy very well, and you would find much serenity painting there.
What is there to say of these days without you? Even now I sit under the beech tree in the Place Lamartine garden, wishing you were beside me. I’ve been going on long walks into the countryside: south as far as the Langlois Bridge, west to Trinquetaille on the other side of the river, east following the Roubine du Roi canal and out to La Crau. The wheatfields around Arles are turning from green to gold, and soon it will be harvest time.
Everywhere I go, you are with me. I hear you speaking the names of colors—ultramarine, cobalt blue, malachite green, chrome yellow—and I imagine how you’d paint this or that. I tried sketching a few times, thinking I’d send you a picture or two, but I gave up. You’d laugh too hard at my pathetic scribbles.
I’m glad Theo thought well of the new paintings—wouldn’t it be wonderful if he found a way to exhibit them? I know the thought of the yellow house must sadden you, but what’s happened has happened. Let us think about the future instead.
I enclose a few books that I think you might like, along with a jar of your favorite olives to give you a taste of home. I know it makes you cross for me to say it, but don’t work too hard. You must have a good rest so you can come back to Arles.
I send you all my love, and I embrace you in thought. Write me soon.
Ever yours,
Rachel