Chapter 6
Claire
A week after we visited Agostina’s café, I arrive at the flat on Cité Pigalle to find Jo more flustered than I have ever seen her.
The floor of the apartment is covered in half-filled crates.
Jo has a wild look in her eyes and I notice, not for the first time, how gaunt and exhausted she has become since we met. She is wasting away.
“Would you come with me if I left here?” she asks me.
“Where would we go?” I laugh, assuming she is joking.
“To Bussum. In Holland. Close to where I was raised, but not so close that I would be tempted to go back into my parents’ house.
I am not yet that desperate. I have a friend there and some connections to men who work with art.
I will have an easier time convincing the Dutch of the value of Vincent’s work.
I am consistently told by the critics here that Vincent’s work is too rough, too wild, unfinished, and unrefined.
I cannot stay here. I have sold everything that is worth anything, but we will soon have no money at all. ”
“Why would you want me to come with you?” I am genuinely surprised.
I understand why I feel my connection to Jo.
I spent so much time with Theo that Jo has always felt very real and very close to me.
I want to fulfill my promise to Theo to ensure that she is safe.
But it is not clear what Jo feels toward me.
Only then do I realize most of the chairs are missing. She is leaving. The plans are already set in motion. There is nowhere to sit except for the floorboards. I lift my heavy skirts and sink down next to the fire to stretch my tired muscles.
Jo joins me on the floor, where I am gazing at a painting of a thatched-roof cottage in the countryside, probably similar to the one my daughter lives in without me.
The lazy strokes make me enjoyably dizzy, like the earth and everything on it is trembling on the canvas and inside my body.
I wonder if Jo has these sorts of reactions to Vincent’s paintings, or whether they are simply something she can sell in order to survive.
Or perhaps Agostina was correct, and she feels a misplaced obligation to two dead men.
“The kind of work that you do is not safe and you cannot keep doing it forever,” Jo proclaims with conviction. A heat rises up the back of my neck and spreads to my cheeks.
How can a woman like her understand the circumstances that found me in the brothel at age twelve?
I have no father, a penniless mother, no education.
Madam had found me begging and ill in the streets and brought me to the house to nurse me back to health.
She fed me and clothed me, gave me a warm place to sleep.
The women there were all kind to me. I’d learn only later that many had given away their own children.
I became the house pet and project. They taught me to read and to write, skills they had learned in order to read poetry and correspond in letters with their customers.
It was a higher-end establishment. Not a haunt of gilded courtesans, but not a low-level brothel either.
Madam never coerced me into doing the work.
It was always my choice, but she did explain to me how hard it would be to make a living otherwise.
And she wasn’t wrong. I had tried my hand at taking in washing and sewing.
I couldn’t teach. I had no proper education.
I couldn’t work in a shop with my rotten teeth.
It may not be noble, but there is nothing shameful about it either, Madam had told me many times. You provide a service like any other.
There are days when it is horrific, when I finish the night in intense pain. But many of the men are respectful and we develop friendships. Theo was one of those.
Jo gives my arm a reassuring squeeze. “Do not think I am judging you. I know how difficult it is to be a young woman in this city. You have done what you needed to do, but I think there is another way. Come with me, work as my housemaid, as a caregiver for Vincent. If I am going to do what needs to be done, I won’t be able to manage on my own. ”
“And what is it that needs to be done?”
“I watched Theo while we were married, accompanied him to all his meetings, visited with both the artists he was looking to acquire paintings from and then also with the dealers. I saw both sides of his business. I must start by convincing the critics that there is something special about Vincent. It will be easier in Holland because he is one of them. And then I can work on the dealers and the galleries. I will go door-to-door if I have to. In his lifetime Theo was unable to make Vincent successful. But he believed he could. He believed in it more than anything. There is a boardinghouse that I can lease in Bussum. We will take in renters to make ends meet.”
She motions wildly around the room.
“In the end Theo was delirious, but when he was well enough he begged me to carry on his work and to preserve his brother’s legacy. I promised my husband I would continue his dream for Vincent’s art to hang in the greatest galleries in the world. It is a promise I must keep.”
What an impossible dream when thus far she hasn’t even been able to convince Agostina to hang more of them on the walls of Café du Tambourin. But her enthusiasm is infectious and there is something tantalizing in her request. I’ve become so tired of my life here.
“Do you think it is possible? To make something of Vincent’s paintings?” Though I am also asking about me. Is it possible for me to have a different kind of existence?
“Theo thought it was so.” Her words burn with a new intensity. “I have been reading his letters trying to figure out how to be in the world without him and they have pushed me to this decision.”
“What letters?” I ask.
“Theo and Vincent wrote one another hundreds of letters over the past twenty years and both brothers saved their copies. I have been reading through some of them. When I do, it feels as though he is here with me. They remind me of what a good man Theo was and how much these paintings meant to him. They remind me that I cannot abandon them, not yet. Not yet.”
A knot twists in my stomach, heavy and unyielding. What else does Theo reveal in those letters to his brother? Letters he never thought his wife would read.
“Please do this with me, Claire,” she pleads.
“If I succeed in this, we can both have a better life. I truly believe that bringing you along with me is what Theo would have desired. I know that my dear husband would want the two of us to help one another. It has to be you.” Do I imagine her gaze hardening?
Does she know more about my past with her husband than I assumed? Oh, Theo, what did you write in your letters about me?