Van Gogh at the Battle of Arles

(translated from the French by Jean Anderson)

Our rooms—there were five on each side of the corridor, I t hink—had been carved into the thick-walled silence. Mine was like a monk's cell, but filled with light, and through its narrow window I could look out onto a garden in full bloom. The door swung shut behind me; I ran my hand over its white painted surface, very smooth, enjoying the coolness. The bed was high off the floor, the desk was;plain and square like a school desk. I sat down on a pine chair and listened. In the middle of the afternoon the place seemed completely empty. Looking out the window again I saw a corner of the garden that had been laid out to look like one of Van Gogh's paintings. This building in Arles where the Literary Translators’ Centre had been set up was once a hospital, and even though the painter had had his wounded ear cared for somewhere else, the whole complex was named after him. The Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral was another cultural hero ruling over Arles, his portrait on display here and there. And for a few days a third figure would come to haunt our retreat: Samuel Beckett. There was a conference on his work starting at the College, and Beckett translators were pouring in from every corner of the world.

Those of us who'd come here to finish a project in peace found ourselves caught up in the fizzing excitement of the conference and vented our spleen at the disruption. The most outspoken was probably Radomir, a Serb writer and translator well-known for his opposition to Milosevic. He came to France regularly in the belief that he'd be able to forget about the war, only to find himself all revved up in front of the TV, devouring the newspapers, railing against Western propaganda, trying to find his own space. He was what you'd call a good-looking guy, athletically built and sensitive at the same time, and he knew how to make the most of his charm. Everything was a target page 194 for his scathing irony, and the Beckett conference, which he referred to as a gathering of academic blatherers, was no exception.

We enjoyed listening to him, maybe because of the brooding passion that coloured everything he said. On my very first evening here, out on the terrace where we liked to get together because it was unusually warm for late spring, I could feel something radiating from him, something restless, something that was probably burning him up. Sitting in our plastic armchairs, we would eat cherries and drink white wine, watching night fall over the town, always letting the same people carry the conversation. I don't know what it was I heard, I registered a buzzing of words and laughter while the swallows stitched across the infinite sky to the accompaniment of our chatter and my mind dwelled on the mesh of words that would forever hold me. A little while later the Austrian began to tell us the story of what he called his encounter with France. Spearing little cubes of goat cheese with the blade of his pocket knife, he waved them about while he held forth, like a conductor with his baton. Between statements he mouthed the cheese from his knife with a quick movement of his lips. His name was Jürgen and he had a reputation for being greener than the Greens. He was against the European union for ecological reasons, and he'd driven down from the Tyrol, bringing with him in the back of his station wagon the bike he jumped on every morning to ride up one of the nearby hills. This time he was telling us a story from his student days in Nanterre—how some aging priestess of poststructuralism had tried to have her way with him. When he got to the part where the old dame put her hand on his knee (we were in fits of laughter) I turned my head and Luisa caught my eye, a young Italian, inscrutable behind the delicate lenses of her glasses, a woman with such fair skin, especially in the faint evening light, that it was like the inside of some freshly-cut fruit. And I sensed that her hand was about to slide across towards Jürgen's. He probably hadn't the slightest inkling. Does any man who's so articulate need to be able to read a woman's intentions?

Three days later, Jürgen fronted up around noon, still groggy with sleep and vowing he was going to get straight to work on a piece he was having trouble finishing. That was the morning Claes, the tall page 195 skinny Dutchman, with his cup of coffee in one trembling hand and a cigarette in the other, waggled his head in the direction of Jürgen's beautiful bike, propped in the entry. ‘That's the end of the cycling,’ he said in his gravelly voice, ‘now there's Luisa.’ Radomir nodded and added: ‘It's one thing for Jürgen to give up his bike, but the problem is he swapped the book for the cover.’

The ‘cover’ in question was the paper and bindings Luisa worked with in the Document Conservation Centre. For the last three years she'd been repairing books damaged by fires, floods and mildew or spoiled by foxing. Luisa, who must have been about twenty-five or so, worked in Bologna and Turin but came to Arles for three months every year. The Centre where she worked was on the first floor of a huge and lovely old mansion. Her workshop there was a hospital for ailing manuscripts, parchments, printed documents, maps, old drawings and of course for wounded books. A refuge for the casualties of literature.

No sooner had Jürgen fallen for Luisa than he asked her to teach him her craft. He would join her in the evenings after her fellow workers had gone home. Since her relationship with Jürgen had started Luisa didn't get to work before 2 or 3 pm, so she finished late, sometimes around 11 pm. When Jürgen turned up, they opened the windows, put on a cassette of baroque music and set to work. Jürgen would watch Luisa using the scissors and scalpel, cutting the leathers and that calfskin parchment she said you could only get now in a tiny village in northern Italy. He would copy what she was doing, learning from her example. He enjoyed using his hands, this man who worked so hard with his legs. riding his bike, and even harder with his head—he'd studied not just at Nanterre but in Vienna, Bologna and at Trinity College in Dublin as well.

Next came the glue and the brushes, the patches applied like bandages to the bare boards of the books, the developing chemicals applied to the half-invisible writing to reveal its shadowy traces practically inside the paper itself. Luisa worked with quick and careful precision, without speaking. Now and again Jürgen would take her in his arms and they would stand there, nestled against one another, then she would push him away, murmuring, ‘I have to finish this book, just page 196 look at the mess the mildew has made.’ And Jürgen, happy to see all these patients on the operating table, would nevertheless try to get Luisa to say, ‘I bandaged the wounds, God healed them.’ And this is how Jürgen, the first of us to leave his cell, was also the first to think he'd found heaven.

Radomir the Serb looked on their affair in a knowing way. He'd first met Luisa during his stay the previous year, and had a rather special relationship with her. They would often talk together in private and up until the Austrian's arrival they used to eat pistachios and watch the TV news together. Now that she wasn't around any more he couldn't make fun of French news headlines with her, or ridicule the intellectuals who held forth about the Balkans without knowing anything much about them. What's more, Radomir's closest friend Claes had no interest in politics whatsoever, and since a very reserved Croatian woman had just arrived the Serb preferred to keep his comments to himself. He moved on instead to finding more general targets for his irony, picking on the lordly poet Frédéric Mistral. Radomir found a new fault in him every day: this ‘literary upstart’ was for him the exact opposite of the gifted but struggling Van Gogh, and the embodiment of that Western specialty: propaganda. And this led him to the subject of the literatures of small countries. ‘There are plenty of Faulkners in the Balkans,’ he declared one evening. ‘And even better writers. But they'll never be recognised.’

Yonghui, a round-faced Korean woman with a permanently innocent expression, asked him what he was talking about. Maybe she really didn't understand.

‘He's defending Van Gogh against Mistral,’ the Greek woman said, without taking her eyes from the TV screen.

This time I hoped Radomir would explain himself, but the door opened and the Dutchman Claes came in, or rather he sidled slowly in. He was so gangly he just kept on coming through the doorway. And he was crying.

‘Why are you crying?’ Yonghui asked, getting to her feet.

But she was the only one to stand up. As far as the others were concerned, Claes had already drunk too much to be worth the effort.

‘Oh boy, why am I crying?’ Claes mimicked her. ‘Well spotted!’

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And he explained that a woman academic at the Beckett conference had called him a metaphysical tramp.

Radomir smiled into his glass of rosé.

We decided to wind up the evening at the bodega where Jürgen and Luisa were going to join us, and so we set off happily through the streets. No more blue sky, just the scent of honeysuckle and the sound of our own footsteps. Claes complained the bodega was too far away. He stared into every bar we passed as if that was his final destination, claiming he needed to make a phone call or buy cigarettes, but Radomir pulled him back with a firm hand and they came to a standstill only once, in front of the statue of Mistral, where Claes spat at it a few times, only to have the mistral wind blow his pit right back at him.

When all six of us reached the bodega—Luisa and Jürgen had met up with us on the way—the waiters had already started to take in the tables and so we settled ourselves inside the bar. The owner was wearing a beret and a multi-coloured sash, just as he used to when he was a matador; he rushed over to greet Claes, who was well-known and well-linked in most of the bars in town. Then still holding on to Claes's hand, he bowed to Luisa and Yonghui. Actually it would have been hard not to notice how beautiful they were. Straightening up again, he started talking about his prowess as a torero in Nimes and Spain, where he'd worked with the very best. He told us about offering the bull's ears to his lady love in their bedroom after the bullfight, and Yonghui gazed at him with an expression of complete openness which he probably took for admiration. He was getting more and more carried away, his face flushed with excitement, and as he talked about his exploits the spittle flew. ‘Two bottles of white for table three,’ he shouted at length. ‘On the house!’ And he bowed again to Yonghui and Luisa, flourishing one arm as if he were waving a muleta. Then, taking a step back, with no warning and no guitar to accompany him, he burst into song, a tragic tale of love and death.

As he was singing away, I could see his throat bulging with the effort, his veins standing out as if readying themselves for the blow that would burst them and set them free, the estocada, the posthumous vengeance of the bulls he had lived off for so long, now coming back page 198 to get him, swelling up his throat in this braying love song. But it didn't kill him, and what saved him from death was good old married life. His wife, who'd been slaving sway behind the bar for some time, took advantage of his pausing for breath to shout at him to stop playing the fool and come and give her a hand. He obeyed instantly, after one last bow, saluting us with his left arm in a final farewell.

Even the people at the next tables applauded.

In all the racket, I turned to look at Radomir, whose face was flushed in the reflected candlelight—only one eye and his curly blond hair were visible—and asked him why he and Claes had spat at the statue of Mistral. Claes, fine, I could understand that (the drink was always an excuse), but why him? He leaned back, his mouth stretching into a broad grin, and when he leaned forward again he asked, ‘I can tell them, can't I, Luisa?’, nudging her gently with his elbow.

And Luisa, looking embarrassed, answered, ‘Sure, go ahead’, and turned away at once towards Jürgen, already on his feet to go for cigarettes.

Very quietly, making us lean closer to him, Radomir told us that a few months earlier Luisa had found an unpublished letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo. A letter that was going to be published, now that it had been authenticated by a Dutch expert.

‘The letter had been glued inside the cover of a book to strengthen it,’ Luisa explained. ‘That wasn't unusual at the start of the century.’

‘It's astounding!’ Radomir thundered. ‘His paintings were used to plug up holes in chicken coops, his letters went to stick torn books back together.’

‘A universal quick fix?’ asked Yonghui.

‘Like duct tape,’ Jürgen said, offering Luisa one of his Camel Lights.

He must have known about it already because he didn't seem to react at all to what we were saying.

‘I did my Master's on Van Gogh, I'm interested in this,’ grumbled Claes.

‘The important part is what's in the letter: it was never posted. It's about Van Gogh's visit to Mistral in the spring of 1888. What it is,’ he stressed, ‘is proof the two men met. Mistral was already famous, even if he hadn't won the Nobel prize yet. Van Gogh says that Mistral page 199 treated him with contempt, thinly disguised behind a barrage of typically southern effusiveness. And in the letter Van Gogh also repeats Gauguin's statement, that Arles is the dirtiest place in the South of France.’

My jaw dropped.

‘Well, gotta go,’ said Luisa.

‘You can't,’ I insisted, ‘you've got to tell us the whole thing.’

‘Radomir knows more about it than I do,’ she said with a faint smile.

And off they went, she and Jürgen, disappearing down the little street, two tall slender figures, twined around one another like vines.

‘Ain't love wonderful,’ Radomir jeered. ‘But fame and fortune are better.’

Their offhandedness left me stunned. To walk out on us like that after such a revelation! I let go of Yonghui: I'd grabbed her arm without realising. She seemed more amused by our discussion, by the looks on our faces, than by the possible implications of the discovery.

‘Hey, Radomir,’ Claes asked, ‘why'd Van Gogh go to see Mistral? The prince of poets and the pariah, they don't mix.’

‘Maybe they do,’ Radomir answered.

‘And it was after that that Vincent cut off his ear, right?’ stammered Claes. He had tears in his eyes at the thought of it, as he held his glass in mid-air, unable to drink from it or put it down. Through his tears he must have had a pretty distorted view of the world.

Radomir shrugged. He didn't know, and in a way all these details were pointless. At that precise moment I felt a kind of grace floating above us. In this nearly empty bodega with dirty sawdust on the floor and bits of paper blowing along the street, with the half-empty bottles and the fatigue of the evening enveloping everything, even the last notes of some distant music, I had the impression that we hadn't come to Arles by accident, that we had been secretly summoned to the Translation Centre to witness real justice being done, justice that would bridge the centuries, justice that would mean the Van Goghs of this world would never again turn their razors or their guns against themselves but against their oppressors instead. And this letter, the weapon Van Gogh hadn't dared to use, one of us was going to wield it for him.

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We wanted to know. Who did the letter belong to? Was Luisa entitled to publish it in some national paper the way she intended to? Who would get the money?

Bit by bit, at the bodega to begin with, then as we walked along the banks of the Rhone, Radomir answered our questions as best he could, but always with a certain reserve I found extremely irritating.

I pictured Luisa opening an old book that had water damage, a volume of poetry in Provençal (this would be the sweetest way to introduce Van Gogh's opposition to Mistral); she'd noticed the folded over page reinforcing the cover. Lifting back a corner of it, she saw the pencilled signature, Vincent. Maybe she'd thought of Van Gogh at that point. In any case she'd decided to save the document, and tried to detach it gently, by steaming it. When this didn't work because the glue had soaked too deeply into the paper, she had to use the scalpel to free the two pages by cutting the cover away from beneath them. And there, under the transparent yellow layer of glue, was a three-page letter written in pencil, addressed to Theo, signed and dated. And never sent.

Why not? Perhaps because it was destined to reach her, Luisa, over a hundred years later, one September evening when she would be alone in her workshop, so much alone that there'd be no one to call to, ‘Come and look at this!’ and so she'd turn towards the other maimed books, the pages laid out to dry or pinned to the wall, waving in the breeze as if they were trying to respond. Because real post, real letters between people who know how to speak and how to listen, are vague fumblings, full of awkwardness and the vagaries of chance.

Oh, how Luisa's head must have swum with it! And what was she going to do now with this treasure?

‘Tell me, Radomir, how did she manage to keep possession of this letter? I mean…’

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He called out, ‘Vincent’, then a few paces further, ‘poor man’, as if he'd tripped on the first word and caught himself from falling on the second, his stumbling walk matching the rhythm of his words.

Radomir had drifted off onto general topics, describing Arles as the central pivot of the compass, the embryonic heart of European culture, where the confrontation between Mistral and Van Gogh foreshadowed our own. I'm pretty sure he said ‘our own’, in any case he went on about good and evil, about how American soaps, with their simplistic oppositions, had become the template of Western education.

‘Like the opposition between Van Gogh and Mistral,’ I exclaimed. ‘Here we are smack in the middle of a cultural soap opera.’

‘Uh huh,’ he said, sniggering, ‘now you're starting to get it.’

He stopped. I could feel the cold at my back, the wind blowing off the Rhone. I tried to look Radomir in the eye, saw his face like a statue's, glistening and rigid. Yonghui, beside me, was staring at him too.

‘Dont’ get your knickers in a twist,’ he said. ‘You either, Yonghui.’

‘Why not?’

‘There is no letter,’ Radomir said. ‘I made it up.’

A brief pause, then he added, ‘With Luisa's agreement.’

For a moment there was no sound but our breathing.

‘I was talking to Luisa about the injustice of history when the idea came to me,’ he said.

Claes came up to us. He was listening too, but he didn't seem to have caught on yet.

‘Oh come on,’ Radomir told me, ‘don't look at me like that. Can't you feel it now, the injustice of history?’

Oh yes, I could feel it all right! It was pounding in my ears. I put my hands over them. There was a hissing pain drilling into my head, amplifying the noise of the wind and the Rhone. And Radomir, arrogant as a lord in the face of my frowning expression, saying to Claes, ‘It would have been really great if the letter had existed. Don't you think that's weird? Don't you think it's weird that we put so much… passion into justifying our little obsessions? It disgusts me.’ And he spat. But since he spat with the mistral, nothing rebounded back at him.

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I shouted ‘You used Van Gogh, that's despicable!’

He stopped, looking at me sideways. He was much bigger and stronger than me, and not over-impressed by my anger. He was probably even pleased about it.

‘Oh come off it,’ he answered. ‘That's what art is. If you're going to create you have to know how to lie.’

Claes put his head in his hands, groaning: ‘That's crazy, man. Yeah, I thought as much. Something didn't ring true.’

‘You suspected something,’ I exclaimed, totally disgusted.

Yonghui, meanwhile, had withdrawn into a dense and silent hostility.

A little further on, Radomir started to whistle softly between his teeth.

‘You'll be able to write about this,’ he said, turning to me, his teeth gleaming whitely in the moonlight.