The Blue Guitar

by Ireland Ann

  Lucia lets go of his hand, then steps out onto the porch with him. Her expression has changed. She looks afraid, and when she speaks, it is in a whisper.

  “Eric is in trouble.”

  This is the helpful nephew, a brilliant boy who already manages kitchen operations at one of the sprawling beach resorts.

  “How?” Manuel asks. He sees the vein in her neck pulse. She is wearing a cotton sweater and jeans rolled up mid-calf. The tiny stud earrings were a present he brought back from Italy.

  He touches her thin shoulder. This is like old times, when he would comfort her through her nervous episodes.

  “He’s been apprehended,” she says.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Yes?”

  She tosses her hands into the air. “A total squalid mess.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We’re all sorry, Manuel.”

  “Can your parents help?”

  “Of course, they’re making submissions to certain people. They’re coming over tonight to discuss tactics.” She checks her watch, the fake Bulova he bought off a street vendor in Paris. “But because the hotel is owned by Spain, our government ...” She doesn’t need to fill in the rest of the sentence. Manuel understands perfectly: the state must show itself to have no patience with illegalities or the resorts might disappear, leaving the island even more destitute.

  “What has Eric been accused of?” he asks. The list of possibilities is long: diverting kitchen supplies being the most obvious. Manuel has sampled its offerings many times. But it could be something nastier, procuring women for conventioneers, or robbing suppliers.

  “I can’t say,” Lucia tells him.

  That is how he leaves her, a small-framed woman, no longer young, standing in the doorway of the house they once shared.

  Guillermo is no help. Manuel’s colleague at the Foundation for Filmic Arts stares at the computer screen, hand on mouse, editing his latest masterpiece. “I need two more minutes of music,” he says. “Ending’s reshot and your score doesn’t work.”

  “Write me a letter I can take to the Department of Immigration,” Manuel urges, while his friend presses a key, and swoosh, the figure on the monitor disappears.

  Mónica saunters in, holding two mugs of coffee. “You look terrible,” she says, giving Manuel a quick once-over. Then to Guillermo: “Delete the reaction shot. No, next one.” She leans over his shoulder, sipping one coffee and recklessly setting the other next to the precious keyboard. She points at the screen. “Too obvious. Flash back to the kid instead.” She straightens and says to Manuel, “Have you brought us the final two minutes?”

  Guillermo, without lifting his gaze from his work, says, “I just told him about it.”

  Manuel leans against the concrete block wall — this building was built during the Soviet era — pressing his shoulder blades against a poster advertising Neptuna’s most recent triumph, a documentary about the revival of certain antique grain cultivation processes. He moans. “No one is listening to me!”

  “You’re in a state,” Mónica observes.

  “My flight for Montreal takes off on Monday, but they’ve denied me a visa.”

  Guillermo finally twists around on his stool and glances at his colleague. “Tough luck, brother.” He uses the resigned tone that is much in fashion.

  They work in a converted elementary school classroom that used to be open air on one side but has long since been boxed in. Guillermo and Manuel rigged up the trestle table that the computer rests on.

  “Tough luck?” Manuel snorts. “It’s a catastrophe!” He hovers over his friends, smelling the coffee no one has offered. “I could be blacklisted, never able to leave. The only reason I can survive in this backwater is because I get out whenever I please.”

  “Lucky you,” Mónica says.

  Guillermo is silent.

  “You two are used to being stuck here,” Manuel rails on. “But I’m not. They might as well haul me off in a straitjacket.” He knows how this sounds, but he’s too upset to care. They’re jealous of his privileges, but he’s earned them, and through his travels he brings honour to the country.

  Guillermo taps on the keyboard, slurps coffee, and peers at the screen, which is fast-forwarding through the garden scene: Papa and the boy find the bleating goat, look up to see a man with knife in hand. This is where Manuel composed a sprightly arrangement of the children’s song “Señora Santana, Why Does the Boy Cry?”

  “I’ve been invited to attend festivals in Madrid, Seville, Lyon, and Zurich next year,” he says. “It’s inconceivable that they can hold me prisoner here.”

  He waits for reassurance.

  Mónica, without glancing up, repeats, “Inconceivable.”

  Her tone, inflected with irony, enrages Manuel. “Lucia is gouging me. She must have her trips to the massage therapist and special shoes for arch support. I can’t possibly survive on the pittance of my conservatory salary.” Realizing that his colleagues are forced to survive on a similar pittance, he quickly adds, “When I go abroad, don’t I bring you domestic items and computer software and —” He searches for an item that made Guillermo shout with joy. “This external hard drive, super-megabyte —”

  “Which got fried in last week’s electrical seizure,” Guillermo reminds him.

  Blackouts are a regular occurrence, often followed by a sudden disruptive surge as power returns. Mónica rubs her husband’s shoulders. “Pobrecito.”

  Again the resigned tone. It is this attitude that Manuel must regularly flee, or he, too, will be drawn into the sinkhole of passivity.

  An idea strikes him, an old one, many times courted and just as many times denied: this time if he wangles a visa, he may never return. It would serve them all right for not appreciating his talents. With Lucia on the warpath, recent life has been a misery. Their daughter is well placed as receptionist at the hotel. His job here as father and husband is over.

  Mademoiselle Gagnon from Montreal has been trying to reach Manuel all day. “Is something wrong with your phone down there?” she asks.

  Manuel has to laugh. He’s talking over the din of late-afternoon conversation at Café Bohemia, a place frequented by tourists that features an operating telephone.

  “We’ve pulled it together,” Mademoiselle Gagnon tells him. Her French accent is musical, sliding into his ear like Afternoon of a Faun. The knot in his stomach finally begins to uncoil.

  “Thank you,” he says after a moment, realizing he is close to weeping. His future is in the hands of others. The patrons of the café, mainly tourists and local guides, watch with interest. He’s become a familiar figure in recent days, darting in and out to use the phone.

  Mademoiselle Gagnon says, “Of course you must finalize things on your end.”

  Manuel doesn’t feel a shred of guilt about Eric’s arrest. Until three months ago when Lucia booted Manuel out of the house, his only involvement in Eric’s shenanigans was eating the roast chicken that magically appeared on his plate several times a week. Since then it’s been rice and beans with a scoop of Chef Ana’s unnamed fish when he’s desperate for protein. He pictures Montreal’s shiny streets and bustling bistros, a riot of flavours. Fortunately, he’s been granted a generous per diem. His attendance as judge at the festival guarantees a higher quality of competitors. This is not vanity but simple fact.

  Manuel spends the following day cycling between state funcionarios in their cubicles, watching them laboriously type the necessities of his case. None seems to share his sense of urgency. Of course, he hides this urgency by sitting with an arm slung over the back of the chair and legs crossed. One must be slightly haughty and never reveal a hint of desperation.

  He is sent to the next office and the next carrying his growing dossier and multiple copies of his passport until he ends up in a tiny cabinet where a young man earnestly dabs at a cracked keyboard and stares at the monitor that remains blank. Without speaking to Manuel, he disappear
s for twenty minutes and returns with a plug-in hard drive retrieved from another office, but soon realizes there is no cord to attach it to his own computer and begins to rummage around in a box at his feet, pulling out wires and cords and tossing them onto the floor. Tourists find such poverty quaint, along with the crumbling facades of the once-noble colonial buildings.

  Manuel clears his throat. “I have business with you,” he reminds the functionary who has worked himself into a sweat. Startled, the young man pulls himself up. He is light-skinned, almost blond, with blue eyes. Manuel has copperish hair, what’s left of it, and freckled skin.

  The lad grabs his file, then begins to scrutinize each page for an interminable length of time.

  Manuel shifts in his seat. “I understand there will be a further tariff to pay,” he says with the proper mix of pride and obsequiousness.

  The young man rises from his chair, closes the door, and returns, pressing his buttocks against the edge of the desk. Now he is facing Manuel.

  “Fifty dollars,” he says, meaning the convertible pesos worth twenty-five times the national currency.

  Without moving a hand toward his wallet, Manuel says in an equally calm tone, “Shall we say thirty?”

  The youth considers, drops onto his chair, and puts his feet up on the desk. “Forty-five.” He stares at the ceiling, the picture of patience.

  Manuel peels off the bills and slides them under a coffee cup on the desk.

  Suddenly, the computer screen springs to life, and Manuel spots his own name printed on the monitor. A rash of typing ensues, then without a word the functionary disappears from the room, clutching an ancient floppy disk and leaving Manuel to cool his heels for another twenty minutes. Will there be another “tariff” to pay? He’s half asleep in the airless little room when his tormentor returns with a freshly printed form.

  “Your visa,” the youth announces, handing the paper to Manuel with reluctance. The precious tarjeta blanca.

  Nine

  Mark’s uncle has finally pushed off. Out the door he goes, spry as a bird, tossing his vinyl suitcase down the front steps, not bothering to thank Lucy or Mark for their hospitality, nor offer a farewell to the boys who’d already left for school. His forehead shines as he smiles. In his mind he’s already disappeared from this sorry excuse of a city. The limo idles curbside, plumes of exhaust meeting autumn air while Uncle Philip’s suit jacket whips in the wind.

  He wears no overcoat, having left this bulky item stashed in the cupboard down the hall. It is an unnecessary burden in the torrid climate he is about to enter. He will return in six months to reclaim it. Mark’s uncle insists on limousine service to Pearson International because he likes plenty of leg room before the arduous flight to Southeast Asia. Of course, he was too cheap to pitch in for food or wine when he stayed here en route.

  Lucy feels a faint spasm of guilt on thinking these thoughts, for it was Uncle Philip, music lover extraordinaire, who quite unexpectedly mailed her a cheque last year with the note: “If you’re going to enter this competition, you’ll need an excellent teacher. I hope this will help.”

  Thanks to him she’s been working with the divine Goran.

  Lucy watches the driver fit suitcase into trunk, then hold the passenger door open for Uncle Philip who, once settled, rolls down the window and calls out in his sunny voice, “Back in the spring, dear.”

  As if she’ll be counting the days.

  She shuts the front door, twists the lock, and breathes clove-scented aftershave mixed with breakfast bacon, a now-familiar brew. With luck there will be no interruptions until four o’clock when the twins amble home from high school. Her husband, Mark, works as a security guard at the Art Gallery of Ontario and doesn’t get off shift until suppertime. It’s his dream job, or so he claims. He loves standing in the eighteenth-century room surrounded by lacquered paintings by little-known artists, making sure school kids don’t jostle or touch anything, or some jackass doesn’t take a knife to the brittle canvases. He claims to thrive on the long stretches of nothing, punctuated by bursts of activity. It gives him time to think — about what, Lucy has no idea. She pictures him standing guard in front of the portrait of some long-forgotten Cornish merchant whose manicured hand rests on a globe.

  Uncle Philip is on his way to Thailand. He flies first to Toronto from his home in Halifax to break up the trip, and he’ll stay here again during his return, only then he will be tanned and relaxed rather than snippy with excitement as he was during this visit. It’s Lucy who gets roped into preparing hot breakfast and lunches because she is the one with a flexible schedule. Uncle Philip sits at the kitchen table and reads her copy of Harper’s, dripping sugary coffee over its pages, making early-morning throat-clearing noises. He combs his hair over the butter dish, and after eating, holes up in the bathroom for a marathon flossing session. She hears pops of loosened string and later finds herself sponging dislodged food particles from the mirror.

  Yet Uncle Philip was the one who slipped an arm over her shoulder last night and said, “I have great faith in you, my dear.”

  But now he’s gone, they are all gone, and Lucy has the house to herself. Beginning at noon she will practise her guitar. No point in trying to do this once the boys come home. They play their own music: Megadeth and Slayer at a deafening volume, and bound around the kitchen shoving drawers in and out and snapping open the fridge door.

  The competition starts in four days, and she figures she’s as ready as she’ll ever be. The idea of it sends a thrill of anticipation through her body, so intense she can hardly stay upright. Twenty-five years of playing weddings and bar mitzvahs, reaching an age when most women accept “their limitations,” as her own mother puts it, and she is charging into the centre of the cyclone.

  Goran told her, “Just play your best.”

  “But is that good enough?”

  Bemused, he looked at her and said, “Good enough for what? You make music, people listen. Why make it more complicated?”

  First task is to collapse the fold-out bed where Philip parked his slim and limber self for the past four nights, get rid of all signs of the guest who will soon disappear into the steamy coastal villages of Thailand. He’ll return, chipper as always, sporting a grizzled beard and tanned hands, the creases of his palms a dental white: seventy-six years old and going strong.

  It infuriates Lucy that Philip refuses to make up his own bed, which means putting the couch back to rights so it won’t stick halfway across the living-room floor. She’d asked him to do it several times, as had Mark, and they’d even demonstrated how. Uncle Philip professed great interest in the task, marvelled at the ingenuity of the sofa’s mechanism, and never tried it on his own, not once.

  Lucy tosses his pillows and blankets onto a chair, then begins to yank off the sheets. She feels something trapped in there, tangled in the bedding. A brisk shake tosses up a manila envelope, and Lucy curses, thinking he’s left behind his passport and soon she’ll receive a panicked call from the airport and have to drive up there in morning rush hour to perform the rescue. So much for running through her program. So much for dipping into the series of right-hand rasqueado exercises, crucial for the first compulsory piece. She dangles the envelope over the exposed mattress and watches its contents slide out.

  A series of black-and-white snapshots tumbles onto the bed, images of boys half-dressed or almost entirely without clothes. Boys — she holds the photographs by their edges — about the same age as the twins, approximately fifteen, with developed bodies, yet still lean and innocent-looking. Slick dark hair — undoubtedly Asian.

  She carries the photos over to the window and tilts them toward the morning light. Are they professionally posed shots, something one might pick up in a shop, or — and here she feels her mouth pucker — are they Philip’s own handiwork, using his vintage Leica?

  The top picture is at first ambiguous. A teenage boy stands by a market stall, wearing a decorated robe, one hand cradling a melon. His face is ex
pressionless, although he appears to be gazing at something, or someone, to his left. It’s his face that draws Lucy’s attention, for he is extraordinarily beautiful, high cheekbones and large eyes possibly outlined by kohl. He holds himself upright, shoulders thrown back and chin tilted.

  Oh.

  Now she gets it.

  The robe has swept open just a little, enough to let an erect penis peek out, sly yet knowing. Suddenly, that castaway glance and jutting chin assume new meaning. Uncle Philip’s whorled fingerprints are all over the emulsion, and now, so are hers. She thinks of Philip lying on the hide-a-bed while the rest of them sleep, staring at this picture and — well, yes.

  She doesn’t drop the photograph. If anything, she holds on to it more tightly. The image looks posed and at the same time carelessly set up, with rudimentary lighting. The exposure is grainy, very fast film that pixilates the subject’s skin and robe. The photos are saturated with the same clove aftershave that lingers in her hallway — spritz of the marketplace. She thinks of Uncle Philip’s tapered nails and visualizes his earnest unblinking attention when someone speaks. He’d been, until he retired, chief inspector of restaurants and food-serving sites for Halifax and liked to say, “If you’ve dreamed it, it exists, and I’ve seen it.”

  She always thought this referred to rodent hairs floating in the bouillabaisse.

  Has he dreamed these boys, or is he on the way to meet them now, the Airbus ripping across continents of sky while his pale hands tap his trousered knees? He refuses to eat airplane food and packed his own bag of fruit and nuts, mindful of his bowels. He won’t bother watching the movie. He has his own theatre playing behind those clear blue eyes.