Free Leaving Van Gogh by Carol Wallace Page B

but there is a special anguish in being a doctor who cannot cure his wife. Vincent watched me as if waiting for a response. “I lost my wife to illness fifteen years ago,” I confessed. “It is a long time, yet the sadness persists.” I looked around the garden and gestured to the trees and shrubs. “It was at this time of year. Sometimes the way the sunlight falls, or a certain scent on the breeze, brings back a rush of memories.”
    “And you did not marry again,” Vincent observed. He had begun to paint, but I hardly noticed his hand moving swiftly from palette to canvas and back.
    “No, I did not,” I confirmed. “I never met another woman …”
    “Another woman like Madame Gachet?” Vincent prompted.
    “No,” I agreed. I fell silent again. It was the truth. Yet there was a freedom, too, in being unmarried, which brought me occasional solace. Sometimes bachelors like Vincent imagine marriage as a blissful union, but there is a constraint. A married man must live up to his wife. Or perhaps I felt this only because of how Blanche had died. The last days of a consumptive’s life are wretched and painful, yet Blanche showed only courage and kindness as she left us. For me she had forgiveness and more. There is a terrible rebuke in pity from a woman you have failed. I felt that, in contrast to her steadfastness, I had discovered only cowardice in myself. That discovery has haunted me ever since. In any event, I did not expect Vincent to understand.
    Looking at one of his canvases, you can imagine how he moved constantly while he painted. The pigment seems to have been applied with his whole body. As I sat still on that early summer afternoon, he danced around me, stepping back and forth to the canvas, bending his knees, shifting his weight. And talking all the while. I value intensely some of the things he told me that afternoon. He was fascinated by portraits, and loathed photographs; he despised their slavish recording of physical features.
    “I believe that, with color, I can capture a more enduring truth,” he said. “Something more in the nature of a dream, that has a truth of its own that may be different from what we experience every day. For example, I will paint your face in brick red.” (Naturally I found this notion somewhat alarming.) “Next to the blue background, it will appear much paler. Your face will look rosy, healthy—but I will be able to show also how the distress of time has played on your features.” He hoped, he told me, that his portraits might still be valued a hundred years hence, allowing the people of that distant era to better understand the conditions of life as we ended the nineteenth century. He seemed not to think it at all unlikely that people would still know his paintings in 1990. It was a strange kind of confidence for a man whose work had been seen primarily in cafés, a paint shop, and his brother’s apartment, and bought by precisely one collector.
    When he was satisfied with a rough outline of my figure, he allowed me to stand up and move about. “Would you find me that novel, Doctor?” he asked. “Two volumes would be best. I don’t mind what they are, but they must be yellow.”
    I returned to the garden with a pair of volumes that he placed carefully in front of me. “Have you read any of the Goncourts’ novels, Doctor?” he asked.
    “No,” I answered. “I have heard of them, naturally.”
    “I will give these books two of their titles. One of them, Germinie Lacerteux , concerns a remarkable case of mental degeneration. I understand it was the authors’ maid who inspired it. When she became ill and died, they discovered that she had led a secret existence of complete debauchery. She drank and went with men—she had even had a child, I believe. Yet they never guessed it.”
    “What a tale!” I answered. “Of course I have seen women subject to these compulsions, but they normally become apparent. It seems those brothers must not have been