ROULIN DIED IN SEPTEMBER 1903, the date to which the scholarly books attest, before Augustine, before Armand and the others, as one would expect. Perhaps he died in the hospital and the very same room in which Rimbaud had died a decade earlier, since we’re romantics; from cirrhosis; from pulmonary afflictions caused by tobacco; from a stroke after a fit of rage, a hangover, or a mild vexation. It would seem too fitting that upon returning too early one evening after having gotten too much sun in his little garden in the low-grown countryside, he had fallen toward Estaque, in a little road that snakes its way above the great gulf, a yew tree at its end, a cypress. So he has fallen there and he knows all too well what’s happening to him, he’s not even thinking; it’s the Grand Soir when he is to die. The sea shimmers; the god topped with azure looks on without blinking: he’s an old captain; from the earth come crows, and seagulls from the sea. There’s gravel in Roulin’s beard; he tries to grab his hat; it has fallen a little farther; he can’t do it; the leeks, he can’t keep hold of them either, he lets them go: and all of a sudden he is dead, immediately elsewhere he drives his boyar through fields of dahlias; as they pass close by, you hear the little bells jingling. Beyond all constraints the unconstrained prince leaps into the blue. Maybe he’s beautiful, but we can’t see him.
Who can say what is beautiful and as a result, amongst men, is deemed worthless or worthwhile? Is it our eyes, which are the same, Vincent’s, the postman’s, and my own? Is it our hearts, which a trifle can seduce, which a trifle can dismiss? Is it you, young man sitting with your hat placed next to you chez Ambroise Vollard, talking animatedly about painting with beautiful women? Or you, paintings roosting in Manhattan, merchandise whose enlightened fads nourish the dollars, doubtlessly drawing them nearer to God as well? Is it you, Browning? Perhaps it’s you, Old Captain topped in blue, looking at a little heap of Prussian blue fallen on a road; it’s you, white beasts, learned and mute, whose very volumes we caress far from here on rue des Récollettes, who know exactly what three francs is worth; it’s you, crows flying up above that no one can buy, no one can command, which do not speak and are only eaten during the worst famines, whose feathers even Fouquier wouldn’t want in his hat, dear crows to whom the Lord gave wings of matte black, a cry that cracks, the flight of a stone, and from the mouth of His servant Linneaus came the imperial name Corvus corax. It’s you, roads. Trees that die like men. And you, sun.
God Is Never Through
WE KNEW FRANCISCO GOYA. Our mothers, or perhaps our grandmothers, saw him arrive in Madrid. They saw him knocking on doors, on all the doors, stooped, benignly; they saw him not be named to the academies, saw him praise those who were, saw him return docilely to his province to paint more of his stiff brand of schoolboy mythologies, and once again saw him present them to our court painters, one year, two years later; only to fail once again, to clear out again, taking a poorly rendered Venus or Moses with him, painted in the open country and brought to town on the back of an ass: all this at seventeen, at twenty, at twenty-seven years old. Our mothers saw him and they remember him little, or not at all. But it’s not possible that they didn’t cross paths with him one day — opening a door, for example, in one of the academies, in a palace where they had a crush on some painter of renown whom they were going to meet, Mengs, Giaquinto, Gasparini, or one of the Tiepolos, or some other who wasn’t one of those but who took himself to be the best of them, a handsome, fastidious little Italian with gray hair and a sweeping touch, with that accent that makes your heart flip-flop, a man in love with women and loved by them, a man busy poking holes in ceilings and filling them with blonde angels falling through endless skies, Italian clouds, trumpets — it isn’t possible that while pushing a door with a fluttering heart, a hand primping hair, fluffing a dress, that they hadn’t found the fat little man from Saragossa behind them — frozen, little more than a statue with sketches under its arm, chubby, stunned, struggling to smile; it isn’t possible that for an instant they hadn’t cast a questioning, perhaps annoyed, glance on this dolt; and so he stepped out of their way a bit too hastily, bowed a bit too low, seemed to want more than anything to disappear and even so remained there revolving around the condesa and the Italian like some fly that won’t stop buzzing around one’s head, like some dog that’s always getting kicked, saying nothing and rolling his bulging eyes, unable to avert them from the fringe of her skirt, where, occasionally, a petticoat might show, or an ankle, and when the maestro at last deigned to look upon a Moses of Aragon or a Venus of the Paseo unrolled before them, perhaps praising them out of good taste, out of politesse, or just to get rid of him, he would stoop further still, appearing ready to collapse into tears and shuffling backward toward the door, bow after bow; and before leaving he didn’t forget to look up again at this infinitely blue ceiling, like some peasant marveling at elephants on a fairground, a peasant who remained wily all the same, even incredulous, irritating, such that if the fat lips on the brink of tears said “What a marvel, Master. A Raphael, a Raphael, really,” then all the while the bulging eyes would be sizing up the woman beneath her dress, calculating the cost of the Italians boots and cuffs, while still passionately venerating the sweeping touch, the talent apparent in such skies, in such Holy Trinities, in the mythological knowledge and the painter’s seductive appeal to ladies, to academies, to ceilings: because with so much hope and so few natural gifts the little dolt from Saragossa couldn’t hope, he couldn’t hate, he could only sit himself down and wait for his time to come, uncertain whether it would come, patient, awkward, and panicked, all in equal measure. They saw that he was afraid like so many others they had forgotten, and we too would have forgotten him had fear been his only attribute. It could also have been that during a stroll sometime one May when the mornings are still beautiful, at la Florida or along the Prado, our mothers or grandmothers had half noticed the dumpy silhouette during one of their strolls, saw him sidle up in his cape, a vestige of winter amidst gladiola, frowning, peering somberly out from the shade of the green oaks at those who were riding in carriages in the sun and were dressed a la Française, women in all their finery, all those most bubbly and best named, and when don Rafael Mengs or Signor Giambattista Tiepolo arrived in their gilded carriages, our mothers and grandmothers then saw the little cape make a mad rush forward, exiting the shadows and appearing in the light, an owl suddenly flushed out with sombrero to his breast, in a bow, his reverent glance fixed high above on the invisible halo of the Master piercing the great ceiling of Madrid’s sky, his trembling face and smile monument to this apparition, panicked, and perhaps miserable. And the master waved to this fat young man who wanted to do well by himself. But it could also be that our mothers had seen something different; that they hadn’t been shocked by all the fawning, the clumsiness, the trembling lips that are features shared by all those who arrive from the provinces with their ignorance, their appetites; that suddenly our mothers noticed how he wore his cape: because when the sombrero was off and his gaze had become deferential before Señor Mengs, whose words overflowed with tired old talk of the Greeks that the little Saragossan lapped up — along with monologues on eternal Beauty according to Winckelmann, on the human face’s tangential relationship to those of the gods, on all the legendary pittura, all the Prussian theories — it could have been that our mothers and grandmothers, who didn’t know a whit about the fads of such serious men, had watched that chubby face over there — concentrating, desperately trying to understand it all as if panic stricken — suddenly come undone and sparkle with a maddening desire to laugh; and it may be that, taken aback, our mothers had paid close attention to this, this blasphemy or this insolent force that Mengs, completely wrapped up in himself, didn’t begin to notice: though the little Aragonese was sincerely, dolorously trying to understand, he didn’t believe a word of it. Our mothers must have momentarily paused to ask themselves why this little man had chosen to paint, if painting were seemingly both punishment and prank, pushing him to the brink of tears and then contorting him with laughter; perhaps not just to get his foot in the door, but to ensure that it was well shod; perhaps also to suffer and to get to make fun of everything, since mankind is curious. They observed all of this, the madness of a man who wasn’t mad: and he wasn’t clumsy at all, taking leave of the master and the beauty on the street by way of bows only made awkward by the paintings he had under his arms, stammering “Leonardo, Maestro, yes, the angels, the smile, the space,” taking great care to pack up his Moses on the packsaddle of his ass, and heading off astride him, leaning over the big ears, stroking his beast to whom he perhaps spoke of Raphael; our mothers and grandmothers wondered if what they heard when the man and the ass reached the end of the road was the ass’s braying or the man’s laughter; but perhaps each one, under the burden of bad paintings and too many allusions, was crying in his own way. He closed the door on himself once again, he plunged back into the Floridian greenery, cropping his ass. He went back to Aragon. He may as well not even have existed.