Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  It was a small shop, but its interior seemed to defy the laws of physics, seemingly holding more than its numerous shelves and nooks and alcoves than would seem possible. The shop was truly a gestalt experience: a case of the sum of the parts being far greater than the whole. It was so jammed with junk and memorabilia of earlier times, that no one could accurately detail all that was contained in it.

  The prior owner had long-ago stopped keeping track of his inventory, and the acquisition of old junk had merely become a natural part of his life as natural as eating and sleeping. The junk would come in, and some of it would go out. It was the natural order of things.

  The new owner, the youngish widow, was not altogether interested in what might be found in her shop. She simply needed a profession, a place to go each day where she might have the chance to meet interesting people, to talk, and to generally enjoy herself with little pressure or insistence.

  And so it was that she did not know of the thick leather-bound journal that rested in a far corner of the shop, buried halfway down a stack of old photograph albums and bound ledgers.

  The book had been stolen by a housekeeper, after its owner had committed suicide. In the confusion and shock which followed the man’s death, no one missed the journal. The housekeeper had mistakenly thought it might be worth some money someday, but she died without making a franc. The journal was bound up with a stack of other old books, sold to a junk man, and it eventually reached the dusty confines of the shop.

  If anyone might ever have it, they would be in possession of one of the great artifacts of the art world—an additional look into the disturbed mind of a man who signed his tormented paintings with only his first name: Vincent.

  December 12, 1888—I have finally done it! I have left the drab cold landscapes of the north for the hot suns and bright days of the south of France. My friend, Paul Gauguin, has urged me to leave Paris and I have now believed him. He promises to meet me here and says we will share a studio together. That I will believe when it happens. Gauguin is such a bombastic, impulsive ass! And yet I admire him, as he admires me. We shall see if he is good to his word.

  January 4, 1889—I have just received another letter from Theo, wrapped about 150 francs. What a wonderful brother I have in Theo! No man could ever want a better sibling, that is for certain. His “allowance” to me keeps me alive. Is it not crazy to imagine that once I begged him to quit his lucrative position at Goupil’s Gallerie to become an artist with me!

  Then the family would have had two starving wretches to worry about! At least Theo makes my father proud…while I, at the age of thirty-five, am still a problem child, still a crazy dreamer.

  Speaking of dreamers, I am still waiting for Paul, yet a letter says that he is on the way as I write these lines. Somehow, I must confess to believing him. He claims to have a great need to be in the south for the colder months. He claims it is good for the soul, and I believe him. Arles is truly a beautiful place, where even in the winter there are flower gardens of crocus and daffodil, and greenhouses where there are blooms and flowers all year through!

  It is the color—the vibrant living color of this place—that will set me free, that will save me!

  January 17, 1889—He is here at last! Paul arrived by coach with a brace of baggage the likes I have never seen. He claims that he sold a painting in Paris just before he left, and had to wait for payment—thus his delay in arriving. We will work well together, this I am sure. We will fight well together, of this I am also sure!

  January 29, 1889—I have been in this village more than a month and I still have not had one of their women! The southern girls are easily more beautiful than any of the northern peasant stock. Their faces are so finely angled, their eyes so big! They sit on their porches and in their sunny parlors sipping absinthe, and smiling at all the men who pass by. And yet they avoid me like a disease, and I dream of finding the prostitutes of this town. Always the whores for Vincent! Why must it always be this way for me?

  February 18, 1889—I had a terrible fight with Paul. We started drinking early in the day, and we ended up hurling insults, and finally our glasses, at each other. He is off at one of the cafes now, finding a woman, while I sit here with a pen in one hand, my prick in the other!

  If I do not have a woman soon, I feel that I will explode like a cheap bomb. And yet I am painting like a madman already. To count up, I have painted ten gardens in ten days! It is nothing for me to spend fourteen hours a day at my easel. The colors are finally coming to life, and I can feel the energy of my body flood through my brush and alight the colors of my palette!

  I feel that I am painting well, and the thought comes to me that perhaps fucking and painting are incompatible, that a man cannot do both well, and must make a choice.

  For me, the choice is already made! The women won’t have me…not yet anyway.

  February 22, 1889—Paul is truly my friend. He has brought a young woman to meet me from the cafe where he drinks. She wanted to see my work, and she stayed to fuck me! What an experience! She was lean and young and full of energy. Such a rocking and a thumping—she, me, and my straw mattress! She has given me the inspiration and the element in my life which has been missing. Now I feel like I can paint forever. Just give me some tobacco, some drink, and an occasional woman, and I can be the artist of my dreams!

  March 7, 1889—Spring comes early to this part of France! Already the gardens are blooming with color and my palette is aswirl with inspiration. I have been learning to express the passions of humanity by means of reds and greens! There is a relationship between my colors and life itself! I can feel it and I know it! I am painting sunflowers because there is a special essence in the sunshine that these plants have captured, and capturing the flowers on canvas, I will thus capture that special essence of the sun!

  March 9, 1889—Paul and I share a studio where the light pours in like golden liquid. I am supremely happy here. I paint all day and spend my evenings in the cafes and brothels. The prostitutes are like sisters and friends to me. They do not reject me as an outcast because they are themselves outcasts. Yes, the whores give me my pleasure, but I long for a wife! I am filled with energy and the passion of all great art! Thank God for the wine which keeps me from becoming too crazy. When I take another drink, my concentration becomes more intense, my hand more sure, my colors more correct. Sometimes I believe that my painting can do nothing but improve because I have nothing left but my art. Sad? Yes. True? Unfortunately, yes.

  April 14, 1889—Some days I am high as the birds which wheel and keen in the skies above my easel, and then suddenly I led as though I belong with the white, eyeless worms beneath the flat rocks of the garden paths. My life is a jagged run of great joy and great pain. Sometimes I grow so tired of the starving conditions, the wretched life I choose to lead while I wait for the world to recognize me.

  Am I truly crazy, as some say I am? Some of the village children have taken to waiting outside my studio window, only so that they might scream “madman!” when I come to the sill for a breath of air.

  But my thoughts are this: I don’t care if I am crazy—as long as I become that ‘artist of the future’ which I spoke to Theo about.

  April 23, 1889—Today is the most glorious day of my life! My painting, The Red Vine, has been sold! Instead of working today, I have begun drinking as soon as I received the news, and I will no doubt drink up the profits of the sale within the next sunrise. But I care not!

  May 3, 1889—Today, Paul refused to eat at the same table as I because he claims I am a filthy pig and that he risks catching diseases by eating with me. Enraged, I threw my cup at his face and he struck me with his fist before storming off to the cafes. I fear we are incompatible, despite the wondrous atmosphere of this place, despite the stupendous number of canvases we have created here.

  May 17, 1889—I have often felt that if I did not have a woman I might freeze and turn to stone. I may never need feel that way again—Her name is Lyrica Rousseau and she
entered my studio as though coming from a dream. To say that she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen is such a silly cliché I am embarrassed to think in such terms. And yet it is true.

  She was dressed like a woman to the manor born, a woman of social standing, education, and exquisite breeding. She told me she had come from Paris in search of artists, having heard that the truly talented have left the city for simpler climes. I smiled and told her that I was perhaps the finest artist in all of France, but no one yet knew that fact. I showed her my work and I am convinced that she was impressed with its vitality and utter newness. She even told me that she had seen nothing like it in all her days.

  Pressing my good fortune (after all, one does not have an angel walk through his door every day!), I asked her where she would be going, and how long she planned to stay in Arles. To my surprise, she said that she lived by no man’s schedule, and that she traveled freely in search of what she wanted. She said that it was possible she might be staying in Arles for a good while. I told her that there was only one good hotel in the village, and recommended that she stay there. She smiled at this, excused herself, and returned to her waiting carriage.

  I walked to the door of the studio, watching her, trying to imagine what kind of perfect body might be hidden beneath the folds of her dress. I told her to visit me at her convenience, and to my shock and delight, she said that she would be doing so!

  May 26, 1889—Lyrica has come again! And again, she chose a time when she knew Gauguin would be out on one of his binges. She offered to pose for me, but the painting was never begun. As her clothes dropped away, I became overwhelmed with desire and a hardness in my prick I hadn’t known since being fourteen years old!

  To say that we fucked would be a blasphemy, a miscarriage to describe what truly took place. Locked together like a single organism, we aspired to the place of the gods. This woman, this Lyrica, is different, in an almost scary way. I had always thought that only men actually liked sex, and woman merely tolerated our affliction and our hunger for it. But here is a woman who seems to like the sport as much as I!

  June 24, 1889—With Mademoiselle Rousseau as my inspiration, I am painting with a furious, soul-burning energy. When I paint I am not conscious of myself anymore, and the images come to me as if in a dream. When I am painting like that, I know that I am creating beautiful art. Until I met this woman, only when I was painting did I ever feel that totally unleashed, totally free feeling of wanton fulfillment. But now my fucking is like my painting and I soar to the heights of my soul with her. She is an angel, this woman, and she tells me that she knows in her heart that I am a gifted painter, a great artist, and that someday the world will recognize my potent talent, my “special vision.” That is her phrase: my special vision. She says that I see the world differently, that I “feel” the world differently…and that is why she comes to see me.

  August 15, 1889—My entries in this journal—what I have come to call my “secret” journal—have been more erratic lately. Still, I pour forth the letters to Theo as a way of resting and relaxing from the furious pace of my work, but there are things I do not tell him, that I can explain to no one, and those are the thoughts reserved for this separate ledger. Lyrica has been coming to see me less frequently, and when I ask her why, she only smiles. When I ask her where she goes when she is away from Arles, she only smiles. She is the most mysterious woman I have ever known, and she is easily the most self-assured, the most confident. I commented upon this once, and she laughed very musically, saying that she had learned how to act from the best teachers—men. For some reason, this threw me into a wildly depressive state, and I drank myself into a disgusting stupor after she had left my studio that day. I think that I had been entertaining crazy fantasies of marrying this independent woman! I think that I had become terribly possessive about her little “honey-pot,” and the thought of other men dallying about with her drove me into a frenzied state of mind. How silly of me to think that I could possess a woman so magnificent. I should consider myself fortunate to merely use her on the off occasion!

  September 10, 1889—Lyrica visited me today. She has begun the curious habit of inspecting my work, my output of canvasses, from one visit to the next. She seems overly concerned about the chronology of when they were completed, comparing the times to the times of her visits to me. She looked especially hard at a canvas of a row of green cypresses against a rose-colored sky and a crescent moon in pale lemon.

  October 2, 1889—The energy to paint fourteen hours a day is no longer in me. I find that I grow tired so quickly and that the visions and dreamy images of my work are not as clear. This bothers me and when I tell Paul he simply laughs. When I mention it to Lyrica, she only nods in silence, as though she understands perfectly.

  October 27, 1889—I am alone more and more. Paul is so disgusted with me, so angry and passionate all the time, that we can no longer talk. This morning it occurred to me that he has never met my Lyrica…it is uncanny how she has timed her visits to avoid him…and he has accused me of fantasizing the whole affair with this mystery woman. He claims that no one in the village has ever seen her come here, that no one knows of her, and that she probably exists only in my “demented” mind. How bizarre all this is becoming! Could it be that I have imagined such a woman? Could I have imagined such fucking? No, it is not possible—she is as real as I am! And yet the laughing jeers of Paul has set me to thinking that perhaps I am as crazy as everyone says.

  November 23, 1889—This is the worst day of my life, and I am very drunk as I try to pen these words. Lyrica has left me! A messenger delivered her note today: a terse, cold sentence which said that she must leave for Italy, and that she could see me no longer. I can’t believe it! To neither see nor touch that incredible creature ever again! It is unthinkable, yet she states it so simply that there is a part of me which believes it totally. It is to laugh or cry. I don’t know what to do. I know that I feel more sick and more troubled than I have ever felt. And if this is the pain of love then I have finally felt it!

  November 30, 1889—She is truly gone. Of this I am certain. I have tried painting to soothe my pain and suffering, but there is something missing, and I know that I must struggle to regain it. I am tempted to tell Theo of this woman and her effect on me. I am tempted to hire men to investigate her past, to track her down. And perhaps I would do this if I had the funds to finance such a hunt. But alas, for me it is only a fantasy, a fairy tale in which I find her and bring her back to my studio forever. I find myself thinking of painting with very dark colors, with the bloodiest reds I have ever mixed, but I know not what to paint. And I am ill with a list of petty diseases. I cough up terrible gouts of mucous, and I shiver when there is bright sun on my skin. I have terrible fits at night when I lie in my bed in a sweat. I must start sleeping at longer stretches, must stop sitting up in my bed, staring at the moon while Paul grinds on through the night with nose-rattling snores.

  December 19, 1889—A month has passed and I am truly mad for her touch and the lingering smell of her cunt in my beard. My health continues to slide as I do not eat regularly, and I do not take care of what Paul calls my “most basic needs.” But worse, I know I am truly mad. None of the colors look right anymore! My palette is a place of confusion and the colors of the oleanders and the rose-colored twilights come no longer to me on canvas. I thought the absence of her would be good for my painting, but I have seen little to cheer me. It occurs to me again that painting and fucking are not compatible. This fucking weakens the brain. If we really want to be potent males in our work, we must sometimes resign ourselves to not fucking too much! There are times when my thinking seems to clear, when I do not hear the flies buzzing in my ears, when I can think clear thoughts and plan beautiful canvases. It is at those times that I know that she was bad for me, that her fucking was killing something in me. In ways that I can never explain. And then I think about this and I know that this also sounds crazy, and that I am probably so sick and so mad that it
no longer matters what I think or what I feel.

  January 15, 1890—I feel so embarrassed for what has happened, and yet there is no way to show these feelings. After the argument with the whore, I still do not recall cutting my ear, or the first days in the hospital. Only Theo’s face bending over me do I really remember. Upon returning to the studio, I learned that Paul had left, heading for Brittany, says Theo. I am tempted to say that I am happy he is gone, but that would be untrue. More truthful is to tell how lonely it has become without him. Even his quarrelsome nature is preferred to the silence. I don’t even want to think of how much I miss the woman.

  April 13, 1890—The calendar says that it is April so I must believe it. I have lost track of the passing of the days and nights, and even the months. I have only recently broken my silence and written to Theo. I feel used up, like an old, ugly whore! I am mixing colors again, and I am seeing the colors of spring come back to this place with a wild and happy vengeance, but I am not painting good canvases.

  May 16, 1890—The world seems more cheerful if, when we wake up in the morning, we find that we are no longer alone, and that there is another human being beside us in the half dark. That’s more cheerful than shelves of edifying books and the whitewashed walls of a church, I’d swear! And that companionship is something that the Fates have denied me. Lyrica is less than memory, like a half-remembered dream. I cannot imagine ever being happy in my life. Even the village is against me now, having the inspector jail me for being an incompetent. I have been in and out of the hospital so many times that I fear I am becoming a nuisance to everyone. It is only too true that heaps of painters go mad. I shall always be cracked, but it’s all the same to me. When I become a nuisance to me, I will simply kill myself.