El Maguey y Leon

My father has adopted a Mexican boy named Maguey; 

Eight years old, he speaks no English. 

Brown skin, black eyes, white smile—

We talk about his animal friends. Who are you? I ask.

Your friend many days, he replies. The cats all like him, and I.

Driving out along a country road 

I’ve driven many times before but 

The wheel goes rubbery in the rutted mud. 

Then a canyon, the road narrows, slopes down 

Through closing walls of rock I no longer know. 

Suddenly a creek, limestone shelves, pools of water. 

I can’t navigate the drop-offs and step out into knee-deep water.

I climb the canyon wall, behind me 

Maguey, sandy-haired and grown into a man 

Midwest style. I call him Mike. 

We climb up over green-mossed white granite 

Boulders until we come out at the castle.

The grillwork, a briarpatch of rusted spikes, 

and carved in the stone the bipartite shield still shows 

Castil y Léon, the moss undisturbed since 1600. 

Below, the Spanish coastal plain 

spreads out, further still the gray Atlantic. 

From the abandoned cemetery above the city, the ancient canons 

fire. 

We talk about death. There’s a defeat in Mike’s voice 

I don’t know, a new tone of weariness and hurt. 

Yet he strides ahead of me over the rocks, 

and I follow, heading down toward the plain. 

He has been this way since Leon died.

"Van Gogh and the Fortunes of Art" by Ueno Wayne

When the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert visited Arles in Provence in 1958

He meets an old man at the Cafe de l’Alcazar who remembers Van Gogh
and Herbert draws him out with American cigarettes and wine. 

The old man opens the dialogue.

“You are interested in Van Gogh?”

“Very much.”

“Why?”

“He was a great painter.”

“So they say. I ain’t seen nary a one of his pictures.”

His bony fingers tap his empty glass. Herbert fills it.

“Well then. Van Gogh. He’s dead.”

“But you knew him?”

“Nobody knew him. He lived alone, like a dog. People were sceared of him.”

“Why?”

“He ran around the fields with them huge canvases. Boys'd throw stones at him. I didn’t. I was too small. Three or four.

“So you didn’t like him?”

“He was very funny. His hair was the color of a carrot.”

The old man laughs long, heartily, and with evident satisfaction.

“He was a very funny man. Il était drôle. His hair was like a carrot. I remember it well. You could see it from a distance.”

The cafe’s patron didn’t know Van Gogh but he remembered a family story told by his mother. One afternoon this crazy painter rushed into their vineyard shouting for them to buy a painting. They just managed to shove him outside the gate. “He wanted only fifty francs,” the patron concluded with a deep melancholy.

During his stay in Arles and nearby St Rémy, Van Gogh completed hundreds of paintings and drawings. Not one remains in the city whose citizens petitioned the authorities to place the madman in an asylum. The petition was published in the local newspaper and may be seen in the Arles Museum. The grandsons could easily excuse their grandfathers’ cruelty, but not the melancholy fact that they let a fortune slip through their fingers.

[Author's note: This story must derive from Herbert, but I no longer remember where or when I read it.]