Although months seem to have passed since I’ve been here, it has only been weeks. I am able to understand the Señora and her daughters now from my limited Spanish, providing they speak clearly and not too fast. I am at the stage of language learning where I’m too busy mentally dissecting verbs and categorizing social interactions into statements or questions, to engage in a true conversation. Inés and Yolanda have learned enough from my lessons to have simple conversations in English, and the Señora seems pleased with their progress.
I first touched brush to what passes for canvas here a week ago. The oil colours mix on the page before me at noon to form the outline of a boat, the stilts beneath it gleaming in the sun. That was a difficult effect to achieve, and I have a dozen ruined pages to prove it. The colours blend on the page to produce the background which surrounds fishing boats in the distance, a man splashing in the water nearby beside umbrellas and lemonade vendors. The clouds are simply brushstrokes, dotted first and then rotated. In my dreams these brushstrokes, even before I produced them on paper, turned from dragons to butterflies to the portrait of an elderly man, my father, holding onto his bagpipes, with his kilt and all of his associated accoutrements.
I put my paintbrush down and examine a letter Yelena has just sent:
You know that Van Gogh was once a preacher? His first sermon, it was said, could only have been written by an artist. It was too descriptive for anyone else. He lived with evangelicals, sleeping on straw mats and wearing rags. His only reflection later, about being a preacher, was that he missed shapes and pictures.
You might say he was insane. Everyone believed that his mind had gone, and not without reason. Others say he was just epileptic.
He lived on absinthe, bread and coffee, and he also consumed paint as he licked his brush so frequently. He lived in constant malnutrition and poverty and was institutionalized not because he tried to swallow his paints as a form of suicide, and not because he wore a hat full of candles when he painted at night, but because of an incident with Gauguin. He knew Gauguin, and might have lived with him in Paris. The incident involved a brothel, Gauguin, and a severed ear.
You can say that Van Gogh was an insane man among the sane, or maybe you would say the reverse. His last painting went for eighty-four million dollars—
I begin another painting, one of Annabelle, after setting up her ultrasound picture on the edge of the desk. I add swirls and flecks of grey skin to the page and, growing suddenly tired, I close my door and fall through the mosquito netting, now shimmering in the midday sun, and into my lumpy bed, away from the absurdity of the world that is now awake outside, and into the world of dreams.…