Early in the morning; he stepped out of the third-class carriage onto a winding road - leading to the Place Lamartine, a market square bounded on one side by the embankment of the Rhone, and on the other by cafés and inferior hotels. Al is just ahead, stretching away along the foothills as if it were a plasterer's clean clay knife, dozing under the tropical heat of the return.
What kind of place he found to stay, Vincent didn't care. He walked into the first hotel he passed on the square, the ~Station Inn~, and booked a room. The room had a harsh brass bed, a broken kettle in the basin, and an ungainly chair. The owner brought in an unpainted table. There was no place to set up an easel, and it was a good thing Vincent had planned to paint outdoors all day.
He reported his handbag on the bed and turned and ran out to view the city. There were two roads from Place Lamartine to the central part of Arles. The roundabout on the left, which drove vehicles, encircled the edge of the town and slowly wound its way to the top of the hill, passing in front of the Roman commune and the amphitheater. Vincent crossed the narrow maze of cobblestone streets on a shortcut and walked up the long hill to reach the blazing sun-baked Piazza del Municipio road He walked through cold stone courtyards and square courtyards-one that looked as if it had never been touched since ancient Roman times. To escape the sun, the streets were so narrow that Vincent could reach the houses on either side with his fingertips if he stretched out his arms. To escape the biting northwest wind, the streets twisted and turned at the foot of the hill, and there was no straight road ten yards long. The streets were full of garbage, the doorways were full of children who had been left at large, and everything carried the ominous, chased-by-fate look.
Vincent left the town square, crossed a short alley, paced toward the main market road behind the hill, sauntered past the small park, and then, stumbling down the hill, headed for the Colosseum. Like a goat, he hopped up the bleachers one level at a time, all the way to the top. Sitting on a rock, his feet dangling over an indentation made by millions of pairs of feet, he lit his pipe and looked down on the territory he had made his self-appointed lord.
The marketplace, underfoot, cascaded like a kaleidoscopic waterfall down to the Rhone. The roofs formed a criss-crossed patterned painting. The roofs were originally red tiles, but, after being baked constantly by the hot sun, they are now multicolored: from the brightest lemon yellows and elegant shell reds, to blinding pale purples and earthy yellows.
The broad, fast-flowing Rhone makes a sharp turn along the foot of Arles and heads straight down towards the Mediterranean. There were stone embankments on both sides of the river. On the opposite bank, Tranquetaye shimmered like a colored city. Behind Vincent were the mountains, with their peaks thrusting straight into the white light of the net bright. Before him was a panorama: plowed fields, blossoming orchards, the rising hills of Montmajour, fertile valleys ploughed into millions of borders, all gathered in a single point of infinite distance.
It was the colors of the countryside, however, that made him raise his hand to put a pergola over his astonished eyes. The sky was so blue, a blue so harsh, unforgiving, and deep that it was not blue at all anymore, but colorless. The green of the sprawling fields unfolding below him was the true essence of green, green with madness. The scorching lemon yellow of the sun, the blood red of the soil, the snowy whiteness of the lone cloud over Montmartre, the yearly resurgence of rose cover in the orchards . . these colors are astonishing. How could he portray them? Even if he could bring these colors to the palette, how could he convince anyone that it was real? Lemon yellow, blue, green, red, rosy red, nature soars with these five tortured hues.
Vincent walked from the cart path to the Place Lamartine, straining along the Rhone with his easel, paints and canvas.
Everywhere apricot blossoms blossomed. The crystalline glitter of the sun on the river stung his eyes. He had forgotten his hat at the hotel. The sun burned through his red hair, sucking out of him the cold of Paris, the exhaustion, frustration and satiety that city life had filled his soul with.
A kilometer down the river, he saw an azure sky framing a drawbridge, on which a cart was moving slowly. The water was as blue as well water, and the orange banks were dotted with green grass and a group of washerwomen in smocks and colorful hats, doing dirty laundry in the shade of a lone tree.
Vincent set up his easel, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. No one could have captured such color with open eyes, where Seurat's talk of scientific pointillism, Gauguin's primitive decorative rhetoric, Cézanne's revelation of solid surfaces, and Lautrec's lines of color and perverse hate had all deserted him.
Only Vincent remained here.
He returned to the hotel at dinner. He sat at a small table in the bar and bought an absinthe. He was too excited, and the realm of color had filled him up too much to even think about eating. A man sitting at a table next to him, seeing the color splattered all over Vincent's hands, face and clothes, climbed into conversation with him;...
"I'm a journalist from Paris," he said, "and I've been delayed here for three)5 to gather material for a book on the language of Provence."
"I just got here this morning from Paris." Vincent said.
"I can see that. Want to stay long?"
"Yes. Have that intention."
"Well, take my advice and don't tarry here. Al is the craziest, craziest place on Earth."
"What makes you think that?"
"I'm not thinking. I understand. For three months I've been watching these people, and let me tell you, they're all insane. Just look at them, look into their eyes. Can't find a single sane, rational person in this entire neighborhood of Tarascon!"
"What a strange thing to say." Vincent said.
"In less than a week, you'll agree with me. The countryside around Arles is the region of Provence torn and mercilessly whipped by the sun. You have tarried in that sun. Can't you imagine what should be done for these people who are day in and day out under a sun that would blind them? Really, the sun burns their brains out. And the northwest wind. You haven't tasted the northwest wind, have you? Sniff, my dear, just you wait. Two hundred days a year backwards, the northwest wind whips the municipal whips into a frenzy. If you try to walk down the street, the wind blows you against the wall. If you're in a field, the wind turns you over and grinds you into dust. The wind twisted your internal organs and made you feel like you couldn't stand another minute. I've seen that terrible wind tear down windows, uproot trees, knock down fences, and whip people and animals in the fields, and I'm so afraid they're going to fall to pieces. I've only tarried here three months, and I'm already a little mad. To-morrow morning I shall run away!"
"You must be overstating things?" Vincent asked; "Al's people seem quite nice to me, though I've seen very few of them today."
"The ones you see as quite nice are just a few individually. You wait until you get to know them. Listen, you know what my personal opinion is?"
"I don't know, what is it? Please join me in an absinthe kowtow" Thanks a lot. My personal opinion, Al is epileptic to sex. It comes in bursts of hysterical seizures so close together that you think it's bound to have a grand mal seizure, with white foam flying from all corners.
"Has it ever had a seizure?"
"No. That's the marvelous thing. This countryside is always approaching a climax, but never arriving. For three months I have been waiting to see a revolution, or a volcanic eruption in the town square. More than once I had thought that the inhabitants would suddenly all go mad and slit each other's throats! But whenever they have just reached the touch-and-go moment, the northwesterly winds abate for a few days, and the sun hides behind the clouds."
"Well," Vincent laughed, "since Al never reaches the climax, you're not sure that it's epileptic, are you?"
"No," the reporter replied, "but I'm able to call it epileptic vs. sexual."
"And on what basis?"
"I am writing an article on the subject for my newspaper in Paris. It was this German article that inspired me."
He pulled a magazine out of his pocket and pushed it across the table towards Vincent.
"These doctors observed hundreds of psychotic patients with symptoms much like epileptic disease, but never in bouts. From these charts you can see how to graph the upward curve of their neurotic and hyperactive states; what the doctors call erratic nervous tension. Well, the heat of each of these conditions is always rising until the age of thirty-five to thirty-eight years. At the average age of thirty-six, they have a great epileptic fit. After that it is several convulsions, and it takes no more than a year or two. And then it goes again la."
"That's too early to die," Vincent said, "It's when a person is just starting to get established."
The reporter put the magazine back in his pocket.
"Do you plan to stay at this hotel for a while?" He asked, "I'm almost done with my article, I'll send you a copy as soon as it's published. The point of finding it is that Arr is a city of epileptic drops. Its pulse has been quickening for centuries. It's approaching its first crisis. It's bound to happen. And it's not far off. And when it does, we will witness a terrible cataclysm. Murder, arson, rape, mass destruction! This countryside cannot remain in a state of retribution and torture forever. Something is bound to happen. I'm leaving before people start foaming at the mouth! I urge you to follow suit quickly!"
"Thanks," Vincent said, "I like it here. I'd like to go to bed now. Will I see you in the morning? No? Well, good luck then. Don't forget to send me a copy of the masterpiece."
Every morning Vincent rises before dawn, dresses, and walks a few kilometers down the river or through the fields, looking for a place that appeals to him. Every evening he returns home with a finished painting, so-called finished only because he can't paint any more. As soon as he had a good dinner, he went to bed.
He became a blind painting machine, painting one painting after another without knowing what he was doing.
The orchard in the countryside was in full bloom. He painted them all with great enthusiasm. He no longer thought about his paintings. He just kept on painting.
Eight years of hard work finally revealed a triumphant burst of vigor. Sometimes he began painting just as the sky was turning white, and by midday he was finished. He walks slowly back to the municipality, grabs a cup of coffee, takes a fresh canvas, and trudges off in another direction.
He doesn't know if his painting is good or bad. Nor does he care. He revels in the colors.
No one accosted him. He doesn't talk to anyone. He uses what little strength he hasn't exhausted in his painting to fight the northwest wind. Three days a week, he has to tie his easel to a stake driven into the earth. The easel swayed back and forth in the wind like a sheet on a clothesline. At night, he felt as sore as if he had been beaten.
He never wore a hat. The hot sun slowly burned his hair off his head. At night, when he lay on his brass bed in the inn, he felt as if his head had landed in a ball of fire. The sun had made him color-blind. He could not distinguish between the green of the fields and the blue of the sky. But, back at the hotel, he realized that his paintings were at last stark, brilliant facsimiles of nature.
One day he was painting in an orchard of lilacs surrounded by a red hedge and two peach trees with pale red flowers against an azure and white sky.
"This one is probably my best landscape painting." He murmured.
Returning to the hotel, he saw a letter informing him that Anton Mauve had died in The Hague. He wrote under the peach tree, "In memory of Moff, Vincent and Théo," and sent the painting immediately to Moff's house on Jurbumen Street.
The next morning he found an orchard of plum blossoms in full bloom. While he was painting, a vicious wind rose up in the bracket, coming and going like a sea wave. In the intervals between the gusts of wind picking up and going, the sun shone, and the white flowers on the trees shimmered and glowed. Despite the fact that the whole landscape on the ground was changing every minute, Vincent kept on painting. It reminded him of his days in Scheveningen, when he used to paint in the rain, in the sandy wind, with the waves of the sea splashing violently on his body and easel. His pictures had a white effect with a lot of yellow in them, as well as blue and light red. When he was finished, he saw that the painting was having certain things in it that he didn't really want to paint - the northwest wind.
"People are going to think I was drunk when I painted this." He said to himself with a laugh.
He remembered a line from Teo's letter the other day. When Mr. Testigue was visiting Paris, he stood in front of the Sisley painting and cooed to Teo, "I think the artist must have been drunk when he painted this one."
"If Testigue had seen my Alto painting," Vincent thought, "he would have said that it was a great derangement of nerves."
The inhabitants of Al turned away from Vincent. They saw him hurrying out of town before sunrise, heavy easel on his back, bareheaded, his chin jutting vigorously forward, his eyes glowing with feverish exuberance. They saw him come back with two holes of fire in his face, the top of his head red as fresh meat, a damp canvas under his armpits, gesturing to himself. The town had given him a name. Everyone called him by that name.
"The Mad Prodigal!"
"Maybe I'm a crazy redhead," he said to himself, "but what can I do?"
The innkeeper cheated Vincent out of every franc he had. Vincent couldn't get anything to eat, because in Arles, almost everyone ate at home. Restaurants were expensive. Vincent tried all the restaurants to get the soup, but there was nothing.
"Is it hard to boil potatoes, ma'am?" He asked at one place.
"Impossible, sir."
"And does this work have rice?"
"That's for tomorrow."
"What about macaroni?"
"There's no room on the stove for macaroni.' Then he stopped thinking much about food and ate whatever was available. Though his stomach did not get the delicacies, the hot sun enhanced his vigor. He substituted absinthe, tobacco, and the stories of the burden-throwers of the Dudes1 for the tedious food. The countless hours of preoccupation at the easel wore his nerves out. He needed stimulation. Absinthe gave him extra excitement the next day - the excitement of being whipped by the northwesterly wind and the sun baking his body and mind.
With the summer in the English, everything burned. All he could see around him was a shroud of gold, bronze and copper colors under a slightly greenish blue sky bubbling with white heat. Everything the sun hit took on a sulfurous yellow color. His paintings were heaps of glittering, burning yellow. He knew that the color yellow had not been used in European painting since the Renaissance2 era, but that did not stop him. As soon as the yellow color squeezes from the tube onto the canvas, it stays there. His pictures were soaked and burned by the sun, whipped by the burning sun and swept by the air.
He believed that painting a good picture was no easier than searching for a diamond or a pearl. He is not happy with himself or with what he has done, but he has a glimmer of hope: that it will be all right in the end. At times, that hope seemed like a Fata Morgana.
He feels alive only when he is squeezing life into his paintings. As for a personal life, he has none. He was just a machine, a blind painting automaton that poured in food, drink and paint every morning and produced a finished painting at night.
What is the purpose? To sell? Of course not! He knew no one was going to buy his paintings. So why the rush? What was the purpose of the dozens and dozens of paintings he had pushed back himself to paint to the point where he had stuffed himself to overflowing under his poor brass bed?
The thought of success had left Vincent. He painted only because he had to, because it made him mentally less miserable, because it distracted him. He could live without a wife, family and children; he could live without love, friendship and health; he could live without security, comfort and food; he could even live without God. But he cannot be without that which is greater than himself, which is his life - the power and skill of creation.
He tried to hire a model, but the people of Ar refused to pose for him. They thought it was being made a fool of. They were afraid that friends and family would laugh at the likenesses he drew. Vincent realized that if he painted as beautifully as Ichigoro, people would not be ashamed to be painted. He had to give up the idea of modeling and specialize in painting landscapes.
As he entered midsummer, the sea-summer came on and there was not a breath of wind. The light in which he painted faded from the yellow of pale sulfur to a pale golden color. He often thought of Renoir and his washed-out, clear lines. That was how everything looked in the bright air of Provence, just as it did in Japanese prints.
Early one morning he saw a girl, brown-skinned, with light blonde hair and gray eyes, wearing a tight blouse of calico the color of talking roses, in which he could see a pair of breasts, pointed, small, firm. She was a woman as simple as a field, every line virginal. Her mother was dazzling in a dress of tarnished yellow and lost blue, bathed in strong sunlight against a bright, colorful field of snowy white and lemon yellow flowers. They posed for him for a few hours to earn the few dollars they didn't have.
After he returned to the hotel that dusk, he found himself pining for the brown-skinned girl. He couldn't sleep. He knew there were technical colleges in Arles, but they were all five-franc places patronized by Juave soldiers - blacks in the French army who had come to Arles to train.
Vincent hadn't spoken to a woman in months, except to ask them for a cup of coffee or a bag of tobacco. He recalled Margot's words of love, the fingers of the junkies who had caressed his face and the burst of passionate kisses that had followed.
He jumped up and hurried across the Place Lamartine and ran into the black maze of stone houses. After climbing for a while, he heard a noise up ahead. He ran up and reached the front door of the brothel on Rue de Ricollet just in time to see the gendarmes tech away the bodies of two Juave soldiers who had been beaten to death by a couple of drunken Italians. The soldiers' red Turkish hats fell in a pool of blood on the uneven cobblestone street. A squad of gendarmes marched several Italians to prison, the angry crowd roaring in their wake, shouting,
"Hang them! Hang them!"
Vincent took advantage of this chaos and slipped into the brothel at No. 1 Rue de Ricollet. The owner, Louis, welcomed him and guided him into a small room to the left of the lobby, where several pairs of men and women sat drinking.
"I have a lovely little girl named Rachel," Louis said, "Would you like to try her, sir? If you don't like her looks, you can pick another girl from the others.' "May I see her?"
Vincent sat down at a table and lit his pipe. There was a giggle from the hall outside and a girl came in dancing.
She slid into the chair across from Vincent and smiled at him.
"My name is Rachel." She said.
"Noisy," Vincent exclaimed, "You're still a doll.1" "I'm sixteen." Rachael said proudly.
"How long have you been here?"
"Here in Louis? A year."
"Let me see you."
The yellow gaslight was behind her, her face in shadow. She leaned her head back against the wall and lifted her chin toward the light for Vincent to see.
He saw a chubby round face, a pair of big blank blue eyes, a fleshy chin and neck. Her dark hair was coiled on top of her head, making her face more like a ball. She wore only a light-colored calico shirt, stocked with a pair of sandals. The nipples of her rolled country breasts pointed straight at him like accusing fingers.
"You look beautiful, Rachael," he said.
A quick, childlike smile appeared in her vacant eyes. She spun in a circle and caught his hand in both of hers.
"I'm glad you like me." She said. "I like the men who like me too. It's better this way, don't you think?"
"Yes. Do you like me?"
"I thought you were a ridiculous person; the crazy prodigal son."
"The crazy prodigal son! So you recognize me then?"
"I saw you in Lamartine Square. You're always carrying big bundles of stuff and rushing around, what are you doing?
Why don't you wear a hat? Doesn't the sun burn you? Your eyes are all red. It's hurt, isn't it?"
Vincent laughed at the child's naivety.
"You're so sweet, Technicolor. Would you scream if I told you my real name?"
"Call what?"
"Vincent."
"No, I like to be called Mad Prodigal Son. Would you be offended if I called you the Mad Prodigal? Can I have a drink? Old Louis is looking at me from the hall."
Her fingers entertained the throat; Vincent looked at them as they sank into the soft flesh. Her blank blue eyes smiled, and he could see that her smile was a sign of pleasure, and that would make him happy too. Her teeth were neat, but dark; her thick lower lip drooped, almost touching the sharp, parallel gap in that fleshy chin.
"Order a bottle of wine," Vincent said, "but don't order anything expensive, because I don't have much money."
When the wine was brought up, Rachel said, "Would you be happy to drink it in my room? It can be casual there."
"Very well."
They stepped up a flight of stone steps into Rachael's cave. The cave had a small bed, a dresser, a chair, and several colorful circular relief prints of Julian② hanging on the pink walls. Two tattered rag dolls stood on the dresser.
"I brought these two dolls from home," she said." Hey, crazy prodigal, take them. This is Jacques and this is Katelyn.
I used to play with them in little people's homes. Sniff, Crazy Prodigal, look at your silly face!"
Vincent stood, holding a doll in one hand and making off cheekily until Rachael stopped laughing. She took Katelyn and Jacques from him and threw them onto the dresser, kicking her sandals into the corner and casually stripping off her clothes.
"Sit down, Crazy Prodigal," she said, "Let's play little people. You be the daddy and I'll be the mommy. Do you like playing with little people?" She was a short, fat girl with two stubby legs, a steep slope under her pointy tao, and a rolling country belly of flesh rolling downward.
"Rachel," Vincent said, "if you call me crazy prodigal again, I'll give you a name, too."
Rachel clapped her hands together and all at once jumped to sit on his lap.
"Ugh, say, what's the name? I like having a new name!"
"I want to call you Dove."
Rachel's blue eyes took a hurtful, embarrassed wink.
"Why am I a little dove, Daddy?"
Vincent gently stroked the round belly of her love god.
"Because you look like a little dove, with gentle eyes and a chubby little belly."
"Is it good to be a little dove?"
"Chagrin, yes. Doves are very pretty and cute ...... you are too."
Rachel leaned down to kiss his ear, jumped up from the bed, and got two drinking glasses for the wine.
"What a funny little pair of ears you have, crazy prodigal," she said, sipping the red wine. She sipped it like a doll, her nose buried in the glass.
"Do you like it?" Vincent asked.
"Love it. It's soft and round, like puppy ears."
"Then here you go."
Rachel laughed out loud. She raised the cup to her lips. The joke amused her again, and the demented laughter continued. A drop of red wine disappeared on her left breast, and the realm flowed sinuously across the pigeon's belly.
"You're so cute, crazy prodigal," she said. "Everyone says you're as good as crazy. But you're not crazy, are you?"
Vincent frowned;
"Just a little," he said.
"Will you be my lover Yan Rachel asked. "I have not had a lover for over a month. Will you visit me every night?"
"I'm afraid I can't come every night, little dove."
Rachel sucked in her mouth. "Why can't you?"
"Oh, among other reasons, I have no money."
Rachel lyrically twisted his right ear playfully.
"If you didn't have five francs, Mad Prodigal, would you be willing to cut off your ear and give it to me? I'd be glad to have the ear. I'm going to put it on my dresser and play with it every night."