Lust for Life

Lying in the darkness of his room he said to himself, “Suppose Theo doesn’t lose his job. Suppose he is still able to send me a hundred and fifty francs a month. What am I going to do with my life? I’ve kept alive these last miserable years because I had to paint, because I had to say the things that were burning inside of me. But there’s nothing burning inside me now. I’m just a shell. Should I go on vegetating like those poor souls at St. Paul, waiting for some accident to wipe me off the earth?”

At other times he worried about Theo, Johanna, and the baby.

“Suppose my strength and spirits return, and I want to paint again. How can I still take money from Theo when he needs it for Jo and, the little one? He ought not spend that money on me. He ought to use it to send his family to the country, where they can grow healthy and strong. He’s borne me on his back for ten long years. Isn’t that enough? Shouldn’t I get out and give little Vincent a chance? I’ve had my say; now the little one ought to have his.”

But at the base of everything lay the overwhelming fear of what epilepsy would eventually do to him. Now he was sane and rational; he could do with his life what he wished. But suppose his next attack should convert him into a raving maniac. Suppose his brain should crack under the strain of the seizure. Suppose he became a hopeless, drivelling idiot. What would poor Theo do then? Lock him in an asylum for the lost ones?

He presented Doctor Gachet with two more of his canvases and wormed the truth out of him.

“No, Vincent,” said the doctor, “you are all through with your attacks. You’ll find yourself in perfect health from now on. But not all epileptics are that fortunate.”

“What eventually happens to them. Doctor?”

“Sometimes, when they have had a number of crises, they go out of their minds completely.”

“And there is no possible recovery for them?”

“No. They’re finished. Oh, they may linger on for some years in an asylum, but they never come back to their right minds.”

“How can they tell, Doctor, whether they will recover from the next attack, or whether it will crack their brains?”

“There is no way of telling, Vincent. But come, why should we discuss such morbid questions? Let’s go up to the workshop and make some etchings.”

Vincent did not leave his room at Ravoux’s for the next four days. Madame Ravoux brought him his supper every evening.

“I’m well now, and sane,” he kept repeating to himself. “I am master of my own destiny. But when the next seizure catches me . . . if it cracks my skull . . . I won’t know enough to kill myself . . . and I’ll be lost. Oh, Theo, Theo, what should I do?”

On the afternoon of the fourth day he went to Gachet’s. The doctor was in the living room. Vincent walked to the cabinet where he had put the unframed Guillaumin nude some time before. He picked up the canvas.

“I told you to have this framed,” he said.

Doctor Gachet looked at him in surprise.

“I know, Vincent. I’ll order a stick frame from the joiner in Auvers next week.”

“It must be framed now! Today! This minute!”

“Why, Vincent, you’re talking nonsense!”

Vincent glared at the doctor for a moment, took a menacing step toward him, then put his hand in his coat pocket. Doctor Gachet thought he saw Vincent grip a revolver and point it at him through the coat.

“Vincent!” he exclaimed.

Vincent trembled. He lowered his eyes, pulled his hand from his pocket, and ran out of the house.

The next day he took his easel and canvas, walked down the long road to the station, climbed the hill past the Catholic church, and sat down in the yellow cornfield, opposite the cemetery.

About noon, when the fiery sun was beating down upon his head, a rush of blackbirds suddenly came out of the sky. They filled the air, darkened the sun, covered Vincent in a thick blanket of night, flew into his hair, his eyes, his nose, his mouth, buried him in a black cloud of tight, airless, flapping wings.

Vincent went on working. He painted the birds above the yellow field of corn. He did not know how long he wielded his brush, but when he saw that he had finished, he wrote Crows Above a Cornfield in one corner, carried his easel and canvas back to Ravoux’s, threw himself across the bed and went to sleep.

The following afternoon he went out again, but left the Place de la Mairie from the other side. He climbed the hill past the chateau. A peasant saw him sitting in a tree.

“It is impossible!” he heard Vincent say. “It is impossible!”

After a time he climbed down from the tree and walked in the ploughed field behind the chateau. This time it was the end. He had known that in Aries, the very first time, but he had been unable to make the clean break.