There was no indication as to what in the world that gravicola was, and where it could be found. The web florist sites returned no answers.
After a week, the gravicola-deprived Van Gogh began drooping and wilting, even shedding its leaves.
The artist went to the market and started harassing the old ladies who were selling cactuses and geraniums. The old ladies shook their heads and shrugged in bewilderment.
“Hey, wait! Did you say ‘gravicola?’”
Beside another old lady, an unshaven guy in a jacket with a NASA chevron was sitting. An astronaut.
When engines were invented that enabled flying to faraway planets, the world was swept with an astronautics craze. However, it soon became apparent that space flights, while burning huge budgets, did not bring any substantial gain. The projects of exploring deep space were cut down. Thousands of jobless astronauts had a hard time re-adapting to Earth – bitter and depressed, they could be seen everywhere including flea markets where they were bargaining off their souvenirs to make a little money for booze.
“Did you say ‘gravicola’? Why do you want it?”
“It’s for my flower. Do you have it?”
As it turned out, ‘gravicola” was a slang word which in the language of astronauts referred to some product of high chemistry. The substance helped astronauts cope with the transition from a high gravitation to the zero space one, and back.
“I’ve never heard of gravicola being used on flowers. On the other hand… A friend of mine uses it on his cat – he says it’s good for fleas.”
The astronaut scratched his head.
“I guess, I have a bottle of it stacked somewhere. I got no use for it, seeing that I won’t be doing any more flights.”
The next day, the artist received a bottle of gravicola from the astronaut and hastened back to his studio.
The very first drops produced a magical effect – Van Gogh started spreading out immediately. After forty drops, it was a large, robust plant.
He did not do portraits – maybe exactly because he was a natural physiognomist. It took him just one glance to see through a person. He saw vulgarity, selfishness, greed, envy, and malice – everything that people were carrying around, sometimes being honestly unaware of it.
There was one exception. They went to an artistic school together, and she was perfection itself.
She hated posing. “I’m bored,” she would laugh. “Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go to the cinema. Let’s go somewhere!” That was how she was captured in the portrait – laughing, sitting momentarily, as a bird on a branch, ready to fly off the next second in order to be free and rejoice in life.
It never worked out for them. His youthful belief was that, to lay claim to such a girl, one had to be a successful, wealthy man, which he was far from being.
After they graduated from their school, she became a textile designer. The textiles she created were free and joyous like herself. Then she got married, had children and went away to another country. He has not heard from her since. As a remembrance, he had her portrait which was buried in a corner of his studio, blocked up by other canvasses.
Now necessity forced him to turn again to the portrait genre, so to speak. Try as he might to keep that prospect away, one sunny day he came out onto the boulevard with an easel and camp stool, in order to make impromptu portraits of idle passers-by. That was the bottom, nothing could be worse for an artist. He would have preferred a bullet or a poison, but he was not alone now – he had to take care of Van Gogh.
Surprisingly, he did well in the boulevard-portrait business. He knew that people did not want the truth about themselves – everyone wanted flattery. And he flattered them: he made fat into imposing, scrawny into slender, ugly into special and interesting, and nondescript into mysterious and full of latent content. It was easy with women – they all wanted to be prettier than they actually were, and it only took him a few strokes to fulfill their dreams while preserving a good likeness.
People stood in line for him to depict them. He earned a living for himself and for Van Gogh.