The Blue Guitar

by John Banville

  Anyway, back to that night at the weary close of a long day’s work. At the time I was embarked on something historical, what was it?—yes, Heliogabalus, I remember, Heliogabalus the bulbous boy. For months I was fascinated by him, that extraordinary head like a ripe pomegranate about to burst and shoot out its seeds in all directions. In the end I turned him into a minotaur, who knows why; you see what I mean about darkness. Where was I living at the time? In that festering den on Oxman Lane I rented from Buster Hogan’s mother? Let’s say it was, what does it matter. This was long before Gloria—have I mentioned how much younger than me she is?—and I was running after a girl who wouldn’t have me, another one out of Hogan’s harem, as it happens. Lot of water under that bridge, let’s not drown ourselves in it. There I was, with pins-and-needles in my painting arm and my legs like petrified tree trunks from standing for so long in front of Helio’s shining head, when suddenly it came to me, namely, the true nature of my calling, if we can call it that. I was to be a representative—no, the, I was to be the representative, the singular, the one and only. This was how it was put to me—put to me, yes, for it did seem to come from somewhere else, the injunction, the commission. At first I was nonplussed, that’s the word. The Virgin herself, discovered at her devotions by the genuflecting youth with flaxen wings, could not have been more at a loss than I was that night. What or whom was I to represent, and how? But then I thought of the caves at Lascaux and that famous prehistoric hand-print on the wall. That would be me, that would be my signature, the signature of all of us, the stylised mark of the tribe. This wasn’t, I should say, good news. It wasn’t good or bad. In a way, it wasn’t even to do with me, not directly. Stags and aurochs would leap from my brush, and what say would I have in the matter? I would be merely the medium. Yet why me? What do I care about the tribe, what does the tribe care about me? That, I suppose, was the point: I was no one, and still am. Just the medium, the medium medium, Niemand der Maler.

  I think of these days, these present days, as the post-war period. The sort of exhausted calm that has descended has a lingering whiff of cordite, and we who did not die have the shocked air of survivors. My second return home, no more than a matter of weeks ago, was a démarche for peace. That’s how it is with me. I’m like an artilleryman who every so often glimpses through a rent in the flying cannon smoke a devastated landscape where wounded figures stumble blindly, coughing and crying. Sometimes you have to surrender, just walk out on to the battlefield with your hankie tied to the barrel of your musket. At the beginning, I mean at the beginning of my homecoming, I felt myself to be a displaced person, a refugee, one might almost say. After the débâcle at Grange Hall and that subsequent grisly confrontation with Polly—bloody skirmishes on all sides—I hid for a few days in the studio, bunking down as best I could on the love-stained sofa, where sleep was impossible and all I could manage were intervals of fitful dozing. Oh, those ashen dawns, when I lay under the big bare window in the roof, skewered to the worn plush, like a moth pinned to a pad, watching the rain falling in swathes and the gulls wheeling, and listening to their forlorn screechings. It was worse when I heaved myself over on to my front, for then my face was pressed into the worn green velvet that smelt so pungently of Polly.

  Did I miss her? I did, but in an odd way that perplexes me. What I came to feel at the losing of her, at the loosing of her, wasn’t the furnace blast of anguish that might have been expected, but rather a kind of pained nostalgia, such as, oddly, I knew in childhood, sitting by the window, say, on a winter eve, chin on fist, watching the rain on the road like a corps of tiny ballet dancers, each drop sketching a momentary pirouette before doing the dying swan and collapsing into itself. Remember, remember what they were like, those hours at the window, those twilight dreamings by the fire? What I was yearning for was something that had never been. By that I don’t mean to deny what I once felt for Polly, what she once meant to me. Only now when my mind reached out for her it closed on nothing. I could recall, and can recall, every tiniest thing about her, in vividest and achingmost detail—the taste of her breath, the heat in that little hollow at the base of her spine, the damp mauve sheen of her eyelids when she slept—but of the essential she only a wraith remained, ungraspable as a woman in a dream. What I mean to say is, the loss of my love for Polly, of Polly’s love for me, was—something something something, hold on, I’m groping towards it. Ah, no good, I’ve lost the thread. But love, anyway, why do I keep worrying at it, like a dog gnawing at its sores? Love, indeed.

  A TREATISE ON LOVE, SHORTER VERSION

  All love is self-love

  There, does that nail it?

  I couldn’t remain for long at the studio, sneaking out to buy the few essentials for survival and scuttling back again and huddling at the cluttered table drinking milk straight from the bottle and nibbling on crusts of bread and bits of cheese, like old Ratty, my friend and mascot from gate-lodge days. There was no Maisie Kearney nearby to make clandestine sandwiches for me. Also it was very cold. The heating system, such as it was, seemed to have broken down entirely, and if it hadn’t been for the fug of warmth seeping up through the floorboards from the laundry below I might have died—is it possible to be indoors and yet perish from exposure? And there was nothing to do, either, except brood, surrounded by what seemed the rubble of my life; the canvases stacked against the walls looked as if they had turned their faces away in shame. Conditions were primitive, as you would expect. Don’t enquire about hygiene. I hadn’t even a toothbrush, or a clean pair of socks, and for some reason never thought to purchase such items on my hurried outings to the shops. Mrs. Bird, the launderer’s wife, very kindly came to my rescue. I relinquished my clothes to her, passing them to her round the doorpost in a bundle, and she washed and dried and ironed them while I sat upstairs wrapped in a rug, sighing and sneezing. That was a low point, the very nadir, I would say, except that there was worse to come.

  In desperation I thought of returning to the gate-lodge and lying low there again for a while, but there are only so many times one can revisit scenes of childhood; the past gets worn out, worn down, like everything else.

  Anyway, after I had been three or four days on the run, Gloria turned up. Don’t know how she knew I was at the studio; wifely instinct, I expect. Or maybe Mrs. Bird told her I was there. Mrs. Bird has some experience in these matters, flighty Mr. Bird being a notorious philanderer and frequent bolter. I was cleaning brushes that didn’t need cleaning when there was a tap at the door. I froze, and caught sight of myself in the big mirror over by the door of the lavatory, round-eyed with fright. I knew it couldn’t be Mrs. Bird: she would not call on me unbidden. Good God, could it be Polly, returning to give me yet another piece of her mind, or the Prince, perhaps, old sad-eyed Freddie, to slap me across the face with his driving gauntlets and call me out for pinching his precious book? I crossed to the door on tiptoe and put my ear against the wood. What did I expect to hear? Someone fuming out there, the cracking of knuckles and the impatient tapping of a foot, or maybe even the repeated slap of a truncheon into a callused palm? Deep down I have always been terrified of authority, especially the kind that comes knocking on my door in the middle of an otherwise uneventful afternoon.

  Gloria, when she is not quite at ease and feels called on to show her mettle, adopts a sort of swagger that I have always found endearing, and at the same time a little sad and, I have to confess it, a bit embarrassing, too. Of course, I do not let on that I can see through her pose—that wouldn’t do: we must allow each other our little subterfuges if life is to be lived at all. So into the studio she came sashaying, not quite but almost with a hand propped insouciantly on her hip—that’s how I always see her in my mind, hand-on-hip—and gave me as she passed me by one of her wryest, most knowing, most withering, small smiles. She is at the best of times a woman of few words, a thing in which she differs markedly from me, as you will know by now. That stillness, the air she has of keeping her own counsel and of having a lot of counse
l to keep, was one of the traits that attracted me to her in the first place, long ago. I suppose it lent her a certain sibylline quality. Even still I always feel, with her, that I’m in the presence of a large secret studiedly withheld. Have I said that before? Nowadays it all feels like repetition. Think I’ve said that, too. Where will it end, I want to know: the painster in a padded cell, straitjacketed and manacled to the bed, muttering in a monotone the one word over and over, me me me me me me me me me me me.

  Gloria stopped in the middle of the floor, turned and stood in her fashion model’s pose, head back, chin up, one foot thrust forwards, and looked about. “So this,” she said, “is where you’re skulking now.”

  Skulking? Skulking? She was trying to provoke me. I didn’t mind. I was surprised at how pleased I was to see her, despite everything, including the thick ear I was bound to get at any moment now. There was something almost playful in her manner, however, something even flirtatious. It was very puzzling, but I was glad of the glimmer of warmth, wherever it was coming from.

  Yes, I had been staying here, I said, with a sniff, standing on my dignity, what shreds of it were left. Needed time to think, I said, to consider my options, arrive at some decisions. “I thought you’d come for me before now,” I said.

  That elicited a dry chuckle. “Like Mummy fetching you home after school?” she said.

  I had been gone, in all, for little more than a week, first at the gate-lodge, then briefly at Grange Hall, then here. What had she been doing during that time? Certainly not watching by the window with a candle lit for my return, if her scathing look and brittle manner were anything to go by.

  I could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had been to the studio, and it gave me an odd feeling to see her there now. She was wearing a big coat made of white wool. I dislike that coat: it has a deep collar, like an upside-down lampshade, inside which her head sits very high, as if it had been severed bloodlessly at the neck. She was regarding me coolly, still with a smile of amused reproach that was hardly more than a notch at one corner of her mouth. Well, I must have been a sorry sight.

  “Are you growing a beard?” she asked.

  “No,” I answered, “I’m growing stubble.” The bristles, I had noticed, with a shiver, in the mirror that morning, were strewn with silver.

  “You look like a tramp.”

  I said I felt like a tramp. She considered me in silence, rotating one foot in a half-circle on the point of its shoe’s high heel. I recalled the empty brandy bottle Marcus had dropped on the floor. What had become of it? I couldn’t remember having picked it up. What a strange, furtive life it is that random objects lead.

  “Perry has been calling again,” she said. She narrowed her eyes at me in merry spite. “He’s threatening to come over.”

  Perry Percival, my dealer, former dealer. I am convinced she summoned him, just to annoy me. Though Perry does have a habit of turning up out of the blue—literally, since he flies his own aeroplane, a dinky little craft, nimble and swift, with a silver fuselage and the tips of the propellers painted red. If she did call on him, what did she expect him to do, be a sort of flying stand-in for my wingèd muse? She thinks my inability to paint is a pretence, a piece of irresponsible self-indulgence. I should never have married a younger woman. It didn’t matter, at first, but increasingly it does. That dismissive briskness of hers, it can’t be borne at my age.

  Soft rain was falling on the glass above our heads. I’m fond of that kind of rain. I pity it, in my sentimental way; it seems to be trying so hard to say something and always just failing.

  Gloria took a slim silver case from the pocket of her coat, thumbed it open with a click, selected a cigarette, and lit it with her little gold lighter. She’s such a wonderfully old-fashioned creature, both chilly and warm, like one of those vamps in the old movies.

  I was very much in need of a drink, and thought again with mournful longing of that emptied brandy bottle.

  Gloria has a way, when she lights a cigarette, of drawing in the smoke very quickly between her teeth, making a sharp sound that might be a little gasp of pain. The last time we had spoken, though it could hardly be called speaking, was the day when she telephoned me at the gate-lodge. Had she talked to Marcus in the meantime? Of course she had. I didn’t care. Is there in other people too an inner, barren plain, an Empty Quarter, where cold indifference reigns? I sometimes think this region is, in me, the seat of what is popularly called the heart.

  Marcus would have told her everything. I could almost hear her saying it, letting it swell in her throat and giving it a histrionic throb. He told me everything.

  She turned and strolled across to the table and began picking things up and putting them down again, a brush hardened with old paint, a tube of zinc white, a little glass mouse. Watching her, I saw all at once, distantly but distinctly, as it is said patients sometimes see themselves on the operating table, the true measure of the mayhem I had caused, saw it all in all its awfulness, the operation gone fatally wrong, the surgeon swearing and the nurse in tears, and I floating up there under the ceiling, with my arms folded and my ankles crossed, surveying the shambles below and unable to feel a thing. General anaesthesia, that’s the state I’ve always aimed to live in.

  I asked her if she was all right. At this she dilated her already large blue eyes.

  “What do you mean, am I all right?”

  “Just that. I haven’t seen you for a while.”

  Now she snorted. “A while!” Her voice was not quite steady.

  “Gloria,” I said.

  “What?” She glared at me, then crushed the last of her cigarette on one of my paint-encrusted palettes, nodding angrily, as if she had succeeded in confirming something to herself, at last.

  I said I wanted to come home. It was only when I was saying it that I knew it was the case, as it had been all along. Home. Oh, my Lord!

  —

  So it was as simple as that: me, tail between legs, back in the dog-house. It seemed I had hardly been away. Or, no, that’s not quite true; in fact, it’s not true at all, I don’t know why I said it. Years ago, when we were living in Cedar Street, Gloria and I were motoring back one afternoon from somewhere down the country and got caught in a freak summer storm, the tail-end of a hurricane that against all the forecasts had come whipping in from the Atlantic, knocking things down and causing havoc on the roads. There were floods and felled trees, and we were forced to make four or five complicated detours that added hours to the journey. When at last we got home we were in a state of trembling exhilaration, like children at the end of an unsupervised and gloriously disorderly birthday party. The house, too, although it had suffered nothing more than a couple of broken slates, had a tousled, dizzied air, as if it, like us, had been out in the storm, battling through wind and rain, and, though it had gained once more the shelter of itself, would never be quite the same again, after its wild adventure. That’s how Fairmount seemed, when Gloria brought me home, at the close of my brief but tempestuous frolic.

  We settled down as best we could, not, as I say, to life as it had been before, but to something that to a stranger’s eye would have looked very like it. I kept indoors. I saw nothing of Polly, of course, and certainly not of Marcus, and heard nothing from them. Their names weren’t mentioned in the house. I thought of the Prince and his poetry and the fragment of it that Polly’s father had recited. World, invisible! I felt that something had been imparted, that something had been delivered specially to me. Wasn’t that what I had struggled towards always, wasn’t that the mad project I had devoted my life to, the invisibling of the world?

  After leaving it I stayed away altogether from the studio, for reasons that were not as obvious as may seem.

  Presently there appeared, as threatened, the unavoidable Perry Percival. He landed his plane out by the estuary, on the disused famine road that the farmer who owns the fields round about, thinking to make his fortune, had transformed into a makeshift airst
rip in the days when everybody was still flying. It was a blustery morning and the little machine buzzed down out of a lead-blue cloud bucking and swaying, the tips of its propellers flashing lipstick-red in the pallid sunlight, then settled as delicately as a moth, ran on gaily for some way, and bumped to a stop. Gloria and I were waiting in the shelter of the wooden hangar that used to be a barn. Perry, with his leather helmet in his hand, descended daintily from the cockpit. Farmer Wright’s two under-sized sons, in cardboard-coloured boiler-suits, one of them trailing a set of chocks, scuttled out to the plane and began swarming all over it, checking and tapping. Perry, a compact chrysalis, was peeling off his airman’s overalls as he tripped his way towards us, revealing in stages, from top to bottom, as if by an act of conjuring, his short, plump, immaculately suited self in all its burnished, dove-grey glory. I’m certain that in the depths of Hell, where he and I shall most likely end up together, Perry will manage to find a decent tailor. He wore a blue silk shirt and an electric-blue silk tie. I noticed his shoes of dark suede; he could have done with a lend of Freddie Hyland’s galoshes.