No Such Thing As Genius Without A Little Pain

He dipped his bread in a muddy cup of coffee and munched on it with the good side of his teeth. His right side, that is. The left one was no good, filled as it was with wobbly nubs, bent and crooked like old tombstones. Some probably still held the indents of Paul’s hungry knuckles.

He relished the soggy bread, wrapped his pointed tongue around it, formed it into a ball, then crushed it against his right side teeth, savouring the yeasty taste. Between the searing rays of the setting August sun and the cooling coffee, it was as warm a dinner as he was ever going to get.

After each bite, he took a long drag of air out of an empty pipe to make the meal last longer then gave the charcoal lump in between his fingers a good lick and filled more of the page on his lap with swirls of smoke like the ones he’d have loved to inhale if only the coffee and lump of bread hadn’t cost so much. Instead he sketched all the smoke he dreamed of filling his lungs with, those old parched things, until the page was twisting and turning with the life his eyes took in. A cobbled street, like any other cobbled street, sprawled in front of him, curling upwards on a hill and into the inflamed sky of the city evening. On both sides, rows of identical tables stood straight with the patience of soldiers awaiting a general, but only encountering the honey glazed look of hurried passers-by, all alike, all flicking sweat at their well-scrubbed tops, as they ran home to a more welcoming dinner.

The stones underneath his feet must have witnessed hundreds, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of identical scenes just like the one he was scratching away at in the little black book splayed on his lap.

He breathed in the air and it was thick like dough. As his bony chest puffed up underneath a stained linen shirt, a man in a yellow felt coat struck the bench he sat on with the silver tip of his walking stick. Sweat must have run down his back in trickles under such an ostentatious garment.

“Vincent, you old fox,” he said in a voice amplified by youth and insecurity. “I thought you were dead in some country ditch.”

The name rolled around in his head and produced little more than an echo, but the man’s voice did manage to pry open one of the drawers of his memory and drag out the oaken scent of a family home, permeated by pungent turpentine that leaked from every crack. The paint hadn’t had time to dry so the young man’s portrait had been propped up wet against his coffin. That yellow coat had barely fit inside the narrow slab of wood.

He flipped the little black book on his lap to the first page to check if his name was indeed Vincent and would you look at that, it was. He flipped back to the sketch and signed it hurriedly before the name slipped through the cracks and into another locked drawer. When he lifted his head, the youth was gone as if his only purpose had been to remind him to sign off the scene. Vincent took another drag of the empty pipe, wiped the bottom of the cup with the last bit of bread, and flipped to a new page in the book, while running the soft pads of his fingers over the sooty cover. He started another sketch of the cobbled street, this time invoking the colors to bleed inside him and committing the stains they left to memory, his mind’s eye working strictly in cheap yellows and browns.

His hands moved of their own accord in charcoal, letting the world wash over him, until the heel of his foot hit against something.

Vincent bent to look under the bench waiting to see nothing. These things happened. But from between soft leather folds, the color of swirling cognac, a bag seemed to wink at him, eager to deceive his expectations. He pulled it out and looked around to see if anyone was looking for it but none of the passers-by spared him a glance. The bag weighed too much to lift it up so he hunched over and unlocked the buckle right there, on the pavement, his blackened fingers leaving prints all over the belt.

When he pulled the handles apart to peek inside, a smell of fresh paper hit him long before his mind wrapped around what he was seeing. What exactly was he seeing? Vincent ran his hand through a mound of green bills, all displaying a balding man with a smile that did not reach any further than his mouth. A folded letter fell out of the bag and when he opened it, all it read was a number: 20 000. It didn’t take much to figure out the green bills amounted to 20 000 dollars of the American kind. Paul had shown him some paper like that from his past life as a businessman, except that one featured a man with a lot more hair.

From the corner of his eye, Vincent caught a shadow encircling his bench, and closed the bag just in time to shield the multitude of balding men from the woman who was just plopping down at the other end. A thin blouse the color of sprouting bulbs was the only thing covering the sagging skin of her shoulders. Mousy brown hair lay like dry straw on top of her head, with runaway clumps shielding her eyes from him. Her whole being carried the scent of soil and the sap of freshly carved bark. The woman opened her mouth to say something but all that came out was a wheeze. Red blotches sprawled over her cheeks, dipping in and out of the folds encircling her neck.

His said nothing because he could say nothing but his hand moved of its own accord to sketch the woman, so compelled he was to learn what she was hiding, to pry the folds of her skin open and lay them on a page for everyone to see. He had to capture it before it vanished from him like so many other things in his life. But before he could touch charcoal to fresh page in his little black book, tendrils of sweat that had nothing to do with the sun started to creep down Vincent’s back. What if the woman noticed the bag and knew somehow that it was filled with money and tried to take it away from him? He bent again to check if it was fastened closed and when he saw it was, he climbed back to take the woman in again and make sure he got the arch of her forehead right. His fist opened and close around the lump of charcoal. The other end of the bench was empty.

Vincent rubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand then back at the page, letting the lines of the woman's body make their way back to him. But his heart kept skipping beats when he remembered the bag. He reached towards it again, soft and supple and heavy with the promises of the highest skies, the deepest waters, the heaviest royal robes. Lapis lazuli pigments would never stop flowing.

He sneaked out one of the bills to stare at it in the dimming evening sun. Could it be a fake? He was no expert. Coins were all the money he'd seen for a very long time.

He grabbed the sleeve of a passer-by. At first, the man tried to pry him away, his face scrunched up, his body tense, but with a sudden green-tinted gleam in his eyes, he shouted:

“Where did a bum like you get his hands on money like that?”

So it must be real, Vincent thought.

“Leave me alone,” he yelled at the passer-by who, in turn, muttered: “Crazies everywhere these days,” and left, but not before his hand gave an impotent spasm in the direction of the bill.

Try as he might, Vincent couldn't argue with him.

He looked down at the few lines he'd managed to commit to paper. A head, some shoulders, a pair of eyes, they were all there, but the woman was nowhere to be seen. When he flipped to the other page, the cobbles reached back to him, as warm and coarse as the ones underneath his feet.

Shoulders trembled and eyes leaked, as Vincent understood and mourned the woman he would never bring to life.

When the sun had hid behind the hill, he flipped his book closed, trying not to rub the pages together too much, then stuck it in his back pocket, and fastened a button he always made sure to mend whenever it came loose. This way, it wasn't about to fall off any time soon. He got up and almost tripped when his foot caught in one of the bag's handles. Holding onto his back pocket, he untangled the leather vines, and extracted his limb.

As he made his way home, Vincent scratched at his singing stomach and his face stretched out like rubber into a smile because on the waves of hunger travelled the sketch from his little black book, all in a glorious haze of yellow and brown.