Chapter 22
Claire
I’m face-to-face with the skull of Vincent van Gogh. It’s long and cracked, the bone flaking away in places. Jo cradles it in her hands with a reverence equal to the repulsion roiling through my veins.
“It looks like him,” she says, cocking her head as we both gaze into the empty eye sockets. “You can tell by the shape of the head.”
No one responds. I squint and try to picture the skull covered over in flesh. The few times I saw Vincent in life he had appeared sickly and gaunt, already a corpse. In a way, Jo is correct. It does look like him.
The four of us have been out at the grave site for hours. Jo, Dr. Paul Gachet, and his daughter. Johan has been quite ill as of late and is taking a cure in Switzerland.
We’ve watched the gravediggers attempt to bring up the rotting coffin Vincent was originally buried in.
There are complications that no one could have anticipated when Jo sought to transport Vincent’s remains once the lease on his grave site expired.
She paid handsomely to move him to another part of the cemetery so that he could eventually be in a nicer double plot with Theo.
A cypress tree, much like the ones Vincent was so fond of painting here in Auvers, penetrated the cheap coffin, spreading its roots around Vincent’s torso, twisting through the cavities between the ribs in the exact place where the bullet pierced through his body when he shot himself in the chest. The gravediggers have to disentangle the roots right in front of us, splitting the brittle ribs apart. Each crack echoes through the silence.
The mayor of Auvers has approved the double cemetery plot for both Theo and Vincent here, and Vincent is being transferred into something sturdier, a solid oak coffin that costs the amount of the last painting of his Jo sold.
Theo’s reburial will be more complicated.
His body will need to be moved from Utrecht, but Jo will make sure it is done, no matter how long it takes.
The brothers will be together for all eternity, but for today it is only Vincent she holds in her hands as tears slip over her round cheeks.
Dr. Paul Gachet comforts her, wrapping his long arms around her shivering shoulders, careful not to disrupt her grip on the skull.
Gachet was Vincent’s doctor when he died, and also one of his closest confidants.
It’s hard to tell how Jo truly feels about him.
In the past she’s regaled me with tales of Gachet as a bit of a hanger-on to a gang of brooding male artists like Vincent, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Cézanne.
He apparently welcomed them into his home, supported them financially, and developed a “cure” for what he called their neurasthenia, a sort of creative melancholia.
“The cure seemed to be a lot of coddling and stroking of their egos, from what I’ve gathered from some of Theo’s old letters,” Jo had once told me. “Wouldn’t it be nice if nervous and anxious women were given the same kind of treatment? Men can be so fragile.”
But now she’s leaning on the good doctor for support, and I am happy she has it because this entire scene could not be more morbid.
As Jo clutches the skull, the remaining bones, finally dislodged from the roots of the cypress, are arranged in the shiny new casket, one that won’t be imperiled by an impertinent tree.
I can’t help but think that Vincent himself would have appreciated the scene.
I can imagine how he would have sketched it and later painted it, swirling the various shades of early-morning light above the towering pines and through the twisted roots.
One of his very last paintings was of roots exactly like these.
I stare over the cemetery’s low stone wall at the wheat fields Vincent painted so vibrantly in his final days.
For me they convey an incredible joy and lust for life, but I know he felt differently.
In a letter to Theo during that time he wrote, “I made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness.”
It is beautiful and terrible here. I want to flee, but I will stay as long as Jo needs me.
Our efforts for all these years to keep Vincent alive, to resurrect him over and over again for critics and dealers and gallerists, have been modestly successful.
A request recently came in from Paris for paintings to be shown at the World’s Fair.
Jo has been pestering them with proposals for years.
She has never taken no for an answer, merely an invitation to be more persistent.
Vincent is more alive now in the public imagination than he ever was in life.
I worry Jo will slip the skull into her bag, that we will ferry it back to Amsterdam with us, the way we heard the gothic author Mary Shelley kept her husband’s heart after his untimely death, but eventually Dr. Gachet pulls the skull out of her hands and places it inside the new coffin.
“You have done so much, Jo,” he says. “All of it. You have kept his name and his legacy alive.” He is warm and sincere in his words.
Her face flushes. Jo has never been good at accepting praise.
“You have,” I repeat with confidence.
Her nod is barely noticeable, but I see it.
The doctor invites us to come to his house for lunch after the burial.
Jo is eager to go for many reasons. One of which is to finally get a handle on how many of Vincent’s paintings and sketches the good doctor has in his possession.
Before his death Vincent had been paying him for his medical treatments with his art, and Jo has no idea what Gachet possesses.
We follow him through the small village back to his home once the hole is covered over in dirt.
He chatters all the way, mostly about himself.
It feels almost as though I know him already from Theo’s and Vincent’s letters.
At first Vincent had been skeptical of the doctor as well and he wrote long missives to Theo about him.
“We must not count on Dr. Gachet at all. First of all, he is sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much, so that’s that.
Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don’t they both fall into the ditch? ” he wrote.
But his opinion of Gachet quickly changed. In another letter he wrote: “I have found a true friend in Dr. Gachet, something like another brother, so much do we resemble each other physically and also mentally.”
Gachet’s cluttered house looks exactly as Vincent had described it, “full like an antique dealer’s of things that aren’t always interesting.
” There’s a menagerie of animals—a troupe of black cats, numerous dogs, a pair of peacocks, a tortoise, and a goat named Henriette.
Canvases and drawings cover most available surfaces, some merely leaning against the walls.
They’re interspersed with anatomical and scientific sketches, actual human bones, and electrotherapy devices.
Before we take our meal, he insists on showing us the attic studio where he collects plaster casts of the heads of guillotined criminals in the hopes of using phrenology to understand their depraved impulses.
“It’s quite like the workshop of an alchemist in the Middle Ages, isn’t it?
” Jo snickers to me as we make our way down the narrow stairs.
We settle at the table and Jo fills the doctor in on news and sales.
She recently met with Henk Bremmer in The Hague, who is so influential that he is referred to as the Art Pope.
Jo takes many meetings with him, though I was only present for one.
During it she expounded on her own vision of Vincent, explaining his work as the result of a heroic life of sacrifice and extreme struggle that resulted in a Christlike spirituality in his paintings.
Men like Bremmer, the Art Pope, are always eager to anoint the next Great Man, to elevate a new Messiah, and he ate it up like sugared candy.
They laugh and recall the one time Jo visited here before Vincent’s death with Theo and their son.
“Do you remember how Vincent handed the baby a bird’s nest to play with?” Jo chuckles softly to Gachet. “He nearly swallowed one of the sticks.”
“He loved seeing the child, though,” the doctor says. “He knew his own life would always be solitary. Yet he did once tell me that he believed making a painting was the same as having a child.”
At this Jo can’t help but snort. “Said by a man who knew nothing of childbirth.”
“Fair point. I do have many of Vincent’s works to show you, things he left here.
At one point, when Theo could not send him any money for new canvases, he began painting landscapes on tea towels from the inn.
I have several,” Gachet reveals. “I have to also tell you that I have gotten many requests for Vincent’s paintings from a Mr. Henrik Swanson. ”
“Him again.” Jo rolls her eyes. “I suppose he offered you the lowest possible price for the whole lot of them.”
“Indeed.” Gachet strokes his beard. “I told him they were not for sale.”
“That is the correct answer.”
Jo and Gachet can reminisce and discuss the art business for hours, but I am desperate to make my excuses.
There is a woman I am scheduled to meet in the restaurant in town.
Auvers is not very far from the farm where my daughter was placed so many years ago.
After dozens of letters to the family, the sister of my girl’s mother has finally agreed to meet with me while I am in France, and our appointment is set to take place this evening.