The Gypsy examined the hat, plucked a strand of Vincent’s red hair from the straw, and tucked it away into her skirts. She pulled the hat on right over her scarf and struck a pose, her hunchback suddenly straightening.
“Beautiful, no?” she said.
“Perhaps some flowers in the band,” said Vincent, thinking only of color. “Or a blue ribbon.”
The Gypsy grinned. No, there was a fourth tooth there that he’d missed before.
“Au revoir, Madame.” He picked up his canvas and started up the stairs. “I must paint while I can. It is all I have.”
“I’m not giving your hat back.”
“Go with God, old mother.”
“What happened to your ear, Dutchman, a woman bite it off?”
“Something like that,” said Vincent. He was halfway up the first of three flights of steps.
“An ear won’t be enough for her. Go back to your room and paint a vase of flower
s today.”
“I thought you didn’t tell futures.”
“I didn’t say I don’t see futures,” said the Gypsy. “I just don’t tell them.”
“And what will I get for my hat? Will you tell my future?” Self-Portrait—Vincent van Gogh, 1887
HE SET HIS EASEL AT THE PITCHFORK JUNCTION OF THREE DIRT ROADS. Three wheat fields lay before him and a cornfield behind. He was nearly finished with the painting, the golden wheat under an angry blue-black sky swirling with storm clouds. He loaded his brush with ivory black and painted a murder of crows rising from the center of the picture into an inverted funnel to the right corner of the canvas. For perspective, so the painting wasn’t entirely about color on canvas, although many in Paris were beginning to argue that all painting was just color, nothing more.
He painted a final crow, just four brushstrokes to imply wings, then stepped back. There were crows, of course, just not compositionally convenient ones. The few he could see had landed in the field, sheltering against the storm, like the field workers, who had all gone to shelter since Vincent had started to paint.
“Paint only what you see,” his hero Millet had admonished.
“Imagination is a burden to a painter,” Auguste Renoir had told him. “Painters are craftsmen, not storytellers. Paint what you see.”
Ah, but what they hadn’t said, hadn’t warned him about, was how much you could see.
There was a rustling behind him, and not just the soft applause of the cornstalks in the breeze. Vincent turned to see a twisted little man stepping out of the corn.
The Colorman.
Vincent stopped breathing and shuddered, feeling in every muscle a vibration, his body betraying him, reacting to the sight of the little man as a recovered addict might convulse with cravings upon the first sight of the drug of his downfall.
“You ran from Saint-Rémy,” said the Colorman. His accent was strange, indistinct, the influence of a dozen languages poorly pronounced. He was round-bellied and slope-shouldered, his arms and legs a bit too thin for his torso. With his little cane, he moved along like a damaged spider. His face was wide, flat, and brown; his brow protruded as if to keep the rain out of the black beads of his eyes. His nose was wide, his nostrils flared, reminding Vincent of the Shinto demons in the Japanese prints his brother sold. He wore a bowler hat and a leather vest over a tattered linen shirt and pants.
“I was ill,” said Vincent. “I didn’t run. Dr. Gachet is treating me here.”
“You owe me a picture. You ran and you took my picture.”
“I’ve no need of you. Theo sent me two tubes of lemon yellow just yesterday.”
“The picture, Dutchman, or no more blue for you.”
“I burned it. I burned the picture. I don’t want the blue.”
The wind tumbled Vincent’s painting off the easel. It landed faceup on grass between the ruts in the road. Vincent turned to pick it up and when he turned back, the Colorman was holding a small revolver.
“You didn’t burn it, Dutchman. Now, tell me where the painting is or I’ll shoot you and find it myself.”