“Ah,” the man says, “and so what do you do now?”
Vincent chews, and hands back the rest of the core. He shakes his head and then nods. “That’s the question everyone wants an answer to,” he says.
He can see the man is waiting patiently for more, but he has nothing else to say. He looks out over the field and is quiet. Next to him he can sense the man coming to understand that their conversation is over. Vincent does not look at him because he knows he will see the familiar look of confusion, disappointment, and then resignation, the stages he always to seems make a man’s face pass through.
“Well,” the man says, “I guess we should be moving on, then.” He stands and wipes his hands on the sides of his pants.
They walk on alongside each other for a few miles, nearly silent, the horse clopping, occasional clinking sounds coming from the cart, before the man, who has told Vincent his name is George, turns off onto the road into a farm. He holds his hand out to shake Vincent’s in order to say good-bye. “Wait,” says Vincent. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his sketches. “I’d like to repay you for your kindness.”
“What’s this?” asks George.
“They’re just little sketches that I’ve done along the road.” He riffles through them, unsure of which one to give away. He chooses the sketch of the cow chewing, and looks up at George as he passes it over.
“So this is what you do, then,” says George, grinning at him. He takes the sketch, looks at it, and nods. Vincent can read nothing on his face of what he thinks of the picture.
“Thank you, Vincent,” George says, “I will keep this,” and holds out his hand.
They shake hands and Vincent watches him and his horse amble away, feeling strangely bereft of them, not wanting to continue on alone.
He meditates afterward on his encounter with George. What kind of pride is it that has him put his hand in his pocket and bring out those sketches, when he knows they are not adequate payment for the kindness he receives? A day or so ago he gave a different sketch to a farmer’s wife in exchange for a few slices of bread and a cup of coffee; he remembers her face as she looked at the drawing: unimpressed, confused. James and Bertha, too, accepted the drawing as if it were the work of a child. Still, he hears George’s voice: So this is what you do.
Two months ago, in March, he had made a different trek, walking to Courrières, a town not too far over the French border, to try to see the painter Jules Breton. He thinks of it now, remembering the longing in it, how desperately he felt he might gain something from the encounter with the artist.
In 1875, when Vincent was working with Harry Gladwell at Goupil’s in Paris, he saw Breton at a salon opening with his wife and two daughters. He was a commanding presence, a hulking man with long hair combed back from his forehead and a thick beard of black and white, ragged as a mountain range. That year his painting at the salon was The Feast of Saint John, peasant girls dancing on a summer evening around the St John’s bonfire, in the background the village with its church and the moon above it. From across the room, Vincent stared at Breton, trying to match the man with the work. It was as impossible as looking under a man’s skin while he passed by. He tugged on Harry’s sleeve, pointing out the artist, trying to impart to Harry why he was important, but he could tell that Harry barely cared. Later, back in their room while Harry slept, Vincent wrote in his notebook: Even if we could see inside a man, glimpse his blood and his brain, we would not see what we were looking for. There is a reason why feeling is invisible; it is why art is necessary.
How would Breton paint the miner’s life? A dark palette, with single brushes of light—the glow of a lamp lighting the sweat on a man’s body; the canvas taken up with rock, only a sliver where a man lies. A canvas covered with strokes of black, a single corner of glowing yellow and a man’s face, illuminated in the lamplight but black as the night. For months in the Borinage, Vincent had meditated on what such a painting would look like. He spoke to Alard of it one day in February in the salon, telling him about Breton, “a living being of the artist species,” and describing the difficulty of representing the miners, who worked in the dark.
“How would an artist do it?” he said, his eyes glowing. He had made Alard and himself cups of tea on the coal stove in the front of the room, the cups on loan from the Denis house. Alard sat on the floor with his cup in his hands, Smoke, the cat, purring on his lap. “I have thought about it a lot. The experience of being down in the mine is unmatched, and I have never seen an image that comes close to it. Can you imagine? A painting that could capture the way the cage drops, the way you fall through the earth with the speed of a train? I wonder what Breton would do if he were to try it.”
Smoke watched Vincent through a quarter slit of his eye. Vincent told himself to stop, to change the subject, to engage the boy more generously, and yet he could not make his mouth remain closed.
“How do you paint a subject with so little light? How do you represent what is unrepresentable? All that darkness down there, those bodies toiling in the lamplight, it is so beautiful and awful, it deserves to be painted, but I wonder if it is impossible. It would be like—well, can you make a painting of despair? Can you make a painting of grief? Can you make a painting of God?”
Alard put his teacup down and picked up one of the pieces of coal that was in front of him, pulling a piece of paper toward him. “Let’s try it!” he said, and quickly went to work, covering his paper with dark strokes of coal, leaving only one streak white down the middle of the page. When he was done, he held it up to Vincent, who was still pacing. “Here you go!” he said with glee. Vincent took the paper and looked at it, then turned to the boy. “Alard,” he exclaimed, “you’re a genius!” Alard blushed with pride.
A month later, in March, desperate to see and speak with Breton, he trekked to Breton’s house in a too-thin jacket. The first night, he slept in a thin haystack while a steady drip of freezing rain fell on him all night, and then turned back before reaching Breton’s house, with no money and a terrible foolish feeling.
He walks on past the bend in the road where George turned off, and thinks that perhaps it is up to him to make the painting of the miners that he dreamed about. So this is what you do. Could it be? He dreams of how such a tribute might come to be, and what such a thing might look like. He walks with his eyes closed, concentrating, thinking of the descent into the mine, the cage falling fast, Angeline’s elbow a stone in his side; he sees lamplight cast onto wet stone, glints of white on a mottled surface, and a dot of light at the top of the tunnel like a single star on a canvas of black. He sees cells with men working, like the caves of a honeycomb, lit one next to the other in dancing shadows and warm lantern glow; a man’s body, stripped to the waist, lit from the side where a lamp is hanging, body gleaming with sweat and streaked with black, behind him a canary in a cage.
He can see the images in his head—arresting, beautiful, convulsive images of human toil luminous in darkness—but he knows his hands could never execute his vision, and so the idea deflates and crumples. He sees a man’s back, a landscape of burning flesh, skin rippling and blistered, then flakes of skin floating in a pan of water. A man’s eye stares up from a face without skin; the shape of Angeline disintegrates, again and again, into obscurity.
Dear Theo, I cannot do it; I can see it but I cannot make it. Dear Father, you were right: I am good for nothing. He walks on, the baby Vincent next to him, chanting, This is your life, this is your life, this is your life.
1879
December 4, 10:00 a.m.
Petit Wasmes, the Borinage
Dear Theo,
I know it would not make sense to most that a man could give up a warm bed in a house that always smelled like fresh bread to sleep in the dust and cold of a hovel in the depths of a February winter, but this is what I did.
In the hut, I laid a few coal sacks end to end in front of the hearth and filled them with straw. I didn’t have much coal, and I didn’t want to
take any away from the miners and their children, so I lay close to the fire and reached out to stoke it every few hours with a poker that I found when I arrived. I lay listening to the fire crackle and pop, watching the shadows that were cast onto the walls opposite the flame. In them I saw scenes of consolation, a peasant with a scythe, a landscape like Van der Maaten’s Funeral in a Cornfield, which I had sent to Father to hang in his study, black figures making their way into the tall stalks. I thought of Zundert, the family gathered in the back room at Christmas, the candle lights dancing all around the room, Father’s voice reading us stories from the family history. It was better, I thought, to have a space that I could call my own.
I curled up before the small fire, silhouettes of light and darkness moving before me. The spider’s web in the corner grew, silently.
December 5
Dear Theo,
In late February, ten months ago, Father came to the Borinage to visit. Madame Denis sent him a letter, reporting with concern that I had moved from her house to an abandoned mining hut; he came at once. One afternoon I looked up from my bed of straw and there in the doorway stood Pa in his long dark coat. Can you imagine? I thought for a long moment that I must be hallucinating, but then the vision spoke: “Vincent, what is this?”
I sat up, blinking into the light. “Father?”
“Of course. Did you think I would not come when I heard about this decision of yours?” He came into the hut and stood near my pallet, looking around. “And do you think this is a home fit for a man of God?”
Getting to my feet, I felt my cheeks flushing with shame, though as I stood next to Father, I was not sure why. Father looked me over in the dim light, leaned his head close, and sniffed at me. “When was the last time you washed, boy?” he asked, his face twisted in disgust.
I kept my eyes on the ground. Do you remember how he always made us show him our hands before supper? That was how I felt, like I was waiting for him to pronounce them clean enough for me to eat. I ignored this last comment and said quietly instead, “If this is a home fit for miners, why not for a man of God? Are they not the people of God?”
Father looked at me sternly. “There is not even any place clean enough to sit,” he said.
We went for a walk in the snow to see the coal brought up from a mine called the Three Mounds. While we walked, Father spoke. “We have spoken of this before, Vincent,” he said. “Degrading yourself is not the way to reach God. Surely it is not the way to get what you are after in this case, which is a permanent position. How do you expect to serve if you starve yourself, or are too tired to rise to preach?”
I didn’t know how to express myself to him; you know I have never quite been able to. I scrambled to think of ways to explain myself that he might understand. “But Father,” I said, “how can I be a friend to the poor if I do not suffer like them? How can I minister to this flock if I know nothing of what life is like for them?”
“Did you ever consider that your job is other than to be their friend?” Father responded. He reminded me of the days when I used to go with him to visit the Zundert countrymen, how the friendship between them and him was different from one born of collective circumstance. “If God had wanted you to be a miner,” he said, “He would have made you one!”
It was God’s will, said Father, that I be who I was, and that I help the miners in the way that I knew how, and was sent there to do, by teaching them the Word, and by being with them in Christ. That was all God wanted from me. “Each of us has his own trials,” he said. “Each of us has his own sufferings to face. Yours are different from those of these miners, but that does not mean you cannot understand them as men and women who are on this earth the same as you are, and, the same as you, are in need of fellowship, and the path to Heaven.”
I was confused, of course, because this was precisely what I thought I was doing—understanding the miners as best I could. If my way was different from his, did that make me any less capable or pious? But I couldn’t speak with him about this, Theo; we simply didn’t have the same language, and I didn’t want to argue.
He asked me how I was keeping up with the preaching, whether I was holding regular services where the miners would have a chance to learn and pray. I assured him, yes, though I admit to you that I had begun to think of the preaching as less important than the other kinds of fellowship I could offer.
Despite the scolding, I was glad to have Father with me. I pointed out to him the way the blackthorn bushes burned like black flames against the white snow, and how our footprints left white craters that were traced with black, imprints of our humanity on the otherwise pure expanse of nature. When we reached the mine, we stood by the place where the carts were brought up from the earth and went up the ramp to the breaker. I told Father what I knew about how the operation worked. Father was pleased, and remarked at how the carts of coal were signs that there was life underground; he said, “Think of all the activity, all the work that is being done beneath our feet!” He looked at the ground with reverence, as if it were glass and he could see through it. I was happy to see him so moved.
On the way back, I agreed to return to the Denises’, and we gathered my things from the hut and climbed the hill. I washed in the Denis tub and donned my suit, which I hadn’t worn since my first days in the Borinage. When I came into the kitchen wearing it, my face scrubbed clean, Father was sitting at the table in his shirtsleeves, Madame Denis standing nearby, wearing her apron. Both of them looked at me with relief and joy. “There’s my boy,” said Father, and I felt my heart swell with a confusing mixture of pride and rebellious anger. Why should he love me more when I wore a suit?
I took Father to visit the Decrucqs, and on the way there we passed Angeline. She was coming from the slag heap; her face was swept with black and she carried a filthy sack stuffed with coal. I saw her eyes dart over me, taking in my suit and my cleaned-up appearance, and I felt caught, embarrassed, as if I had betrayed her, though of course I had not.
We stopped to say hello next to a house that had been partially consumed by the earth. It had been built over land that had been weakened significantly by the mining underground, and at some point the ground had shifted and the kitchen had been swallowed. This was apparently not too uncommon an occurrence, for when I asked about it, I was met by nonchalance. What did a person expect, if he lived in mining country? The family that lived in the collapsed house lost most of their furniture, but they managed to salvage their stove before it went too deep, with the help of a few of their neighbors and a long length of thick rope.
I introduced Father and Angeline, and they briefly spoke, and I explained to Father that the slag heap was where the villagers gathered their coal. Angeline told Father she worked in the mine but that still she had to climb the heap to gather coal to heat her hut. Father expressed surprise at her mining—I do not know if he thought no women worked in the mine, or if he just didn’t expect those women to look like Angeline. “It is hard,” she said, looking down at her hands clutching the bag. “My family has many mouths to feed.”
“Is there no other way?” Father asked, and I could see his mind trying to come up with one. “There is no other way,” she said stoically. She nodded to us and went on, and I could tell Father was moved, because he said nothing the rest of the way to the Decrucqs’. I wondered at his silence: What was he puzzling over? It seemed possible that Angeline had taught him something in that brief encounter, something that I had been trying to say but could not. Her presence, her circumstance had silenced him. What could he say back to her? Nothing—there was nothing to say. It made me feel vindicated, I admit it, Theo, and I admired Angeline all the more.
In the Decrucq house, they were just sending the boys to bed. Charles was placing the hot bricks in the bedclothes at the foot of the bed before the boys climbed in. This is a frequent technique in the miners’ houses; they heat the bricks in the oven and then wrap them in towels or cotton cloths or even, when there is nothing else, sacking, and t
ransfer them to the beds to keep them warm after they have tamped out the fire. Usually it is just one or two bricks, but in the dead of winter a family uses as many as four to a bed. “When you wake up in the morning,” Decrucq said, tucking in the boys’ thin blanket, “the bricks are often still warm.”
I was happy to see Decrucq and Pa talking, Decrucq telling him all the same stories about his accidents and scars, and Pa leaning back in his chair and nodding, holding his warm cup of coffee, as I had so often seen him do in the cottages of so many other peasants in what seemed such a long-ago and familiar time.
That night I sat up with Pa in the Denis kitchen with its sweet smell, and we spoke of many things. Father said, “That man Decrucq strikes me as a very solid person,” and then he recalled a parishioner of his back in Zundert, a man who looked a lot like Decrucq but with fewer physical scars. Father was leaving in the morning, and I suddenly felt as if I were mourning for him, though he sat right there before me; I had such a melancholy feeling, I thought for sure I was going to weep. I remembered when he came to visit me in Amsterdam at Uncle Jan’s, and after having taken him to the station, after having watched the train until it disappeared and the smoke was no longer visible, I returned home; Father’s chair was still near the table with the books and copybooks we had examined that day, and though I knew that we would see each other again soon, I cried like a child. This is not a side of me that I like to show to Father, or really to anyone, even to you, Theo, but there are times when I cannot hold it back.
There, in the Denis kitchen, across from Father, I had that same feeling. He was saying, “She was a fortunate woman, Mrs. Beelin, with two beautiful children,” speaking of another parishioner, and I was fighting against time. I watched him and slowly I couldn’t hear his words at all, I could only see him, his lips moving and his familiar face expressing his thoughts, and it was as if he were drifting away from me even as he sat there unmoving. I felt time coming at me like an enormous ocean wave. I thought myself too weak to face it. I wanted to grab hold of Pa’s body and cling; I wanted to reach and hang and grip and clamber and hug, for fear of being swept away.
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