Lust for Life полностью

Rachel leaned over, kissed him on the ear, sprang up from the cot and brought two water tumblers for their wine.

“What funny little ears you have, fou-rou,” she said, between sips of the red wine. She drank it as a baby drinks, with her nose in the glass.

“Do you like them?” asked Vincent.

“Yes. They’re so soft and round, just like a puppy’s.”

“Then you can have them.”

Rachel laughed loudly. She raised her glass to her lips. The joke struck her as funny again and she giggled. A trickle of red wine spilled down her left breast, wound its way over the pigeon belly and disappeared in the black triangle.

“You’re nice, fou-rou,” she said. “Everyone speaks as though you were crazy. But you’re not, are you?”

Vincent grimaced.

“Only a little,” he said.

“And will you be my sweetheart?” Rachel demanded. “I haven’t had one for over a month. Will you come to see me every night?”

“I’m afraid I can’t come every night, Pigeon.”

Rachel pouted. “Why not?”

“Well, among other things, I haven’t the money.”

Rachel tweaked his right ear, playfully.

“If you haven’t five francs. fou-rou, will you cut off your ear and give it to me? I’d like to have it. I’d put it on my bureau and play with it every night.”

“Will you let me redeem it if I get the five francs later?”

“Oh, fou-rou, you’re so funny and nice. I wish more of the men who came here were like you.”

“Don’t you enjoy it here?”

“Oh, yes, I have a very nice time, and I like it all . . . except the Zouaves, that is.”

Rachel put down her wine glass and threw her arms prettily about Vincent’s neck. He felt her soft paunch against his waistcoat, and the points of her bud-like breasts burning into him. She buried her mouth on his. He found himself kissing the soft, velvety inner lining of her lower lip.

“You will come back to see me again, fou-rou? You won’t forget me and go to see some other girl?”

“I’ll come back, Pigeon.”

“And shall we do it now? Shall we play house?”

When he left the place a half hour later, he was consumed by a thirst which could be quenched only by innumerable glasses of clear cold water.

VINCENT CAME TOthe conclusion that the more finely a colour was pounded, the more it became saturated with oil. Oil was only the carrying medium for colour; he did not care much for it, particularly since he did not object to his canvases having a rough look. Instead of buying colour that had been pounded on the stone for God knows how many hours in Paris, he decided to become his own colour man. Theo asked Pére Tanguy to send Vincent the three chromes, the malachite, the vermilion, the orange lead, the cobalt, and the ultramarine. Vincent crushed them in his little hotel room. After that his colours not only cost less, but they were fresher and more lasting.

He next became dissatisfied with the absorbent canvas on which he painted. The thin coat of plaster with which they were covered did not suck up his rich colours. Theo sent him rolls of unprepared canvas; at night he mixed the plaster in a little bowl and spread it over the canvas he planned to paint the following day.

Georges Seurat had made him sensitive to the sort of frame his work was to rest in. When he sent his first Arlesian canvases to Theo, he explained just what sort of wood had to be used, and what colour it had to be painted. But he could not be happy until he saw his paintings in frames that he made himself. He bought plain strips of wood from his grocer, cut them down to the size he wanted, and then painted them to match the composition of the picture.

He made his colours, built his stretchers, plastered his canvas, painted his pictures, carpentered his frames, and painted them.

“Too bad I can’t buy my own pictures,” he murmured aloud. “Then I’d be completely self-sufficient.”

The mistral came up again. All nature seemed in a rage. The skies were cloudless. The brilliant sunshine was accompanied by intense dryness and piercing cold. Vincent did a still life in his room; a coffee pot in blue enamel, a cup of royal blue and gold, a milk jug in squares of pale blue and white, a jug in majolica, blue with a pattern in reds, greens and browns, and lastly, two oranges and three lemons.

When the wind died down he went out again and did a view on the Rhône, the iron bridge at Trinquetaille, in which the sky and river were the colour of absinthe, the quays a shade of lilac, the figures leaning on their elbows on the parapet blackish, the iron bridge an intense blue with a note of vivid orange in the black background and a touch of intense malachite green. He was trying to get at something utterly heartbroken and therefore utterly heartbreaking.