The Blue Guitar

by John Banville

  Marcus finished whatever it was he had been doing to the car’s plumbing and straightened up and shut the bonnet with a bang that seemed to make the night draw back in alarm. Muttering about carburettors and wiping his hands down his long narrow flanks he got behind the wheel and pressed the starter crossly, and with a cough and a wheeze the machine shuddered into life. He sat there with the door open and one foot on the pavement, revving the motor and listening to the poor brute’s arcing wails. I like Marcus, really, I do. He’s a decent fellow. I think he regards himself in somewhat the way that Gloria regards me, as all right in general but fundamentally hapless, susceptible of being put upon, and more or less risible. As he sat there, his ear cocked to the sounds the engine was making, he kept shaking his head in rueful fashion, smiling tightly to himself, as if the breakdown were just the latest in a series of small, sad misfortunes that had been dogging him all his life and that he seemed incapable of avoiding. Ah, Marcus old chap, I’m sorry for everything, truly I am. Odd, how hard it is to say sorry and sound convincing. There should be a special, exclusive mode in which to frame one’s regrets. I might bring out something on the subject, a manual of handy hints, or even a style-book: An Alphabet of Apologies, A Sampler of Sorrys.

  Gloria and I got into the back seat, me behind Polly, where she sat in front beside Marcus. I could smell the cigarette smoke on Gloria’s breath. Polly was laughing and complaining of the cold, and indeed, observed from where I sat, with her round dark glossy head sunk in that fur collar, she might have been a plump little Eskimo squaw all bundled up in sealskins. As we glided through the silent streets I watched the brooding houses and shut shops as we passed them smoothly by, trying to keep my mind off Marcus’s maddeningly slow and cautious driving. Pierce’s Seed & Hardware, Cotter’s the Chemist, Prendergast’s the Pie Emporium, the hovel once inhabited by the legendary midwife Granny Colfer, with its squinting bull’s-eye panes—an eyesore!—wedged between the Methodist Hall and the many-windowed meeting rooms of the Ancient Order of Foresters. Miller the Milliner, Hanley the Haberdasher. My father’s print shop, as was, with my studio above, also as was. The Butcher. The Baker. The Candlestick-maker. Why ever did I come back and settle here? When a youth, as I’ve remarked, I couldn’t wait to get out of the place. Gloria says it’s because I was afraid of the big world and so retreated to this little one. She may be right, but not wholly so, surely. I feel like an archaeologist of my own past, digging down through layer after layer of schist and glistening shale and never reaching bedrock. There’s the fact, too, the secret fact, that I foresaw myself cutting a new figure in the old place, lording it in my big cream-coloured house up there on Fairmount—Hangman’s Hill, it was previously called, until the Town Council voted, wisely, to change the name—with the world I was supposed to be afraid of making its way in fealty to my door. I would be like Picasso in Vence, or Matisse at the Château de Vauvenargues, though I ended up more like poor Pierre Bonnard, held in hen-pecked captivity in Le Cannet. Instead of honouring me, however, the town thought me a bit of a joke, with my hat and cane and gaudy foulards, my overweening demeanour, my golden, young and utterly undeserved wife. I didn’t mind, so charmed was I to be back among the scenes of childhood, all magically preserved, as if sunk in a vat of waterglass and kept specially for me, in confident and patient expectation of my inevitable homecoming.

  Main Street was deserted. The Humber lumbered along in the wake of the twin beams of its headlights, grumbling to itself. A married couple never seem so married as when viewed from the back seat of a motor car, talking quietly together in the front. Polly and Marcus might have been in their bedroom already, so soft and intimate their converse sounded to me, as I sat there alertly mute behind the backs of their heads. First twinge of jealousy. More than a twinge. What were they talking about? Nothing. Isn’t that what people always talk about when there are others around to overhear them?

  Next thing I knew there was something scrabbling at my knee, and I would have given a squeak of fright—it was entirely possible Marcus’s ancient motor would have rats—but when I looked down I saw the glimmer of a hand and realised it was Polly who had got hold of me there. Without giving the slightest sign of movement she had managed to reach her arm through the gap between the door and her seat, on the side where Marcus wouldn’t see, and was fondling my kneecap in a manner that was unmistakable. Now, this was a surprise, not to say a shock, despite all that had gone on between us at the table earlier. The fact is, whenever I made an overture to a woman, which I seldom did, even in my young days, I never really expected it to be entertained, or even noticed, despite certain instances of success, which I tended to regard as flukes, the result of misunderstanding, or dimness on the part of the woman and simple good fortune on mine. I’m not an immediately alluring specimen, having been, for a start, the runt of the litter. I’m short and stout, or better go the whole hog and say fat, with a big head and tiny feet. My hair is of a shade somewhere between wet rust and badly tarnished brass, and in damp weather, or when I’m by the seaside, clenches itself into curls that are as tight and dense as cauliflower florets and stubbornly resistant to the fiercest combings. My skin—oh, my skin!—is a flaccid, moist, off-white integument, so that I look as if I had been blanched in the dark for a long time. Of my freckles I shall not speak. I have stubby arms and legs, thick at the tops and tapering to ankle and wrist, like Indian clubs only shorter and chubbier. I entertain a fancy that as I get older and my girth increases these stubs will steadily retract until they have been absorbed altogether, and my head and thick neck will flatten out too, so that I’ll be perfectly spherical, a big pale puffball to be bowled along at first by kindly Gloria and then, after she has lost heart, by a stern, white-clad person in rubber soles and a starched cap. That anyone, especially a sensible young woman of the likes of Polly Pettit, should take me seriously or give the slightest credence to what I had to say is still to me a matter for amazement. But there I was, with my knee being felt by this very Polly, while her husband, hunched forwards all unknowing at the wheel, with his nose nearly touching the windscreen, drove us slowly homewards, in his old pumpkin of a car, through this lustrous and suddenly transfigured night.

  Gloria, my usually sharp-eyed wife, noticed nothing either. Or did she? One never quite knows, with Gloria. That’s the point of her, I suppose.

  Anyway, that was that, for then. But I want it understood and written into the record that technically it was Polly who made the first move, by virtue of that fateful feeling of my knee, since my overheated blandishing of her at the table earlier had been a matter solely of words, not actions—I never laid a finger on her, m’lud, not that night, I swear it. When I reached down now and tried fumblingly to take her hand she instantly withdrew it, and without turning gave an infinitesimal shake of the head that I took as a caution and even a rebuke. I was greatly agitated, no less by Polly’s caress than by her rebuff, and I asked Marcus to stop and let me off, saying I wanted to walk the rest of the way home and clear my head in the night air. Gloria looked at me briefly in surprise—I’ve never been much of a one for outdoors, except in my painterly imagination—but made no comment. Marcus stopped the car on the bridge over the mill-race. I got out, and paused a moment and put a hand on the roof of the car and leaned back in to bid husband and wife goodnight, and Marcus grunted—he was still annoyed with himself over the car not starting—and Polly only said a quick word that I didn’t catch and still wouldn’t turn her head or look at me. Off they drove, the exhaust smoke leaving an acrid, saline stink on the air, and I walked slowly in their wake, over the little humpbacked bridge, with the mill-stream gushing and gulping under me, my thoughts in a riot as I watched those rubious tail-lights dwindling into the darkness, like the eyes of a stealthily retreating tiger. Oh, to be devoured!

  —

  Now, as to the subject of thieving, where to start? I confess I am embarrassed by this childish vice—let’s call it a vice—and frankly I don’t know why I’m owning up
to it, to you, my inexistent confessor. The moral question here is ticklish. Just as art uses up its materials by absorbing them wholly into the work, as Collingwood avers—a painting consumes the paint and canvas, while a table is for ever its wood—so too the act, the art, of stealing transmutes the object stolen. In time, most possessions lose their patina, become dulled and anonymous; stolen, they spring back to life, take on the sheen of uniqueness again. In this way, is not the thief doing a favour to things by dint of renewing them? Does he not enhance the world by buffing up its tarnished silver? I hope I have set out the preliminaries of my case with sufficient force and persuasiveness?

  The first thing I ever stole, the first thing I remember stealing, was a tube of oil paint. Yes, I know, it seems altogether too pat, doesn’t it, since I was to be an artist and all, but there you are. The scene of the crime was Geppetto’s toyshop up a narrow lane off Saint Swithin Street—yes, these names, I know, I’m making them up as I go along. It must have been at Christmastime, the dark falling at four o’clock and a gossamer drizzle giving a shine to the mussel-blue cobbles of the laneway. I was with my mother. Should I say something about her? Yes, I should: she’s due her due. In those early days—I was nine or ten at the time I’m speaking of—she was less like a mother than a well-disposed older sister, more well-disposed, certainly, than the sister I did have. Mother always affected a distrait and even slightly dazed manner, and was generally inadequate to the ordinary business of life, a thing people found either exasperating or endearing, or both. She was beautiful, I think, in an ethereal sort of way, but gave little attention to her appearance, unless her seeming negligence was a carefully maintained pose, though I don’t believe it was. Her hair in particular she let go wild. It was russet in colour and abundant but very fine, like a rare species of ornamental dried grass, and in almost every memory I have of her she is running her fingers through it in a gesture of vague and ruefully humorous desperation. There was a touch of the gypsy about her, to the shame and annoyance of her children, excepting me, for in my eyes everything she was and did was as near to perfection as it was humanly possible to be. She wore peasant blouses and billowing, flower-print skirts, and in the warmer months elected to go barefoot about the house and sometimes even in the street—she must have been a scandal to our hidebound little town. She had strikingly lovely, pale-violet eyes, which I have inherited, though certainly they are wasted on me. When I was little we were never less than happy in each other’s company, and I wouldn’t have minded, and I suspect she wouldn’t, either, if there had been only the two of us, without my father or my older siblings to crowd the scene. I don’t know why I should have been her favourite but I was. I suppose, being young, I wasn’t ugly yet, and anyway, mothers always favour their last-born, don’t they? I would catch her watching me intently, with bright-eyed expectation, as if at any moment I might do something amazing, perform some marvellous trick, upend myself in an effortless handstand, say, or launch into an operatic aria, or sprout little gold wings at my wrists and ankles and fly up flutteringly into the air.

  I had announced early on, in my most precocious and grandest manner, that I intended to be a painter—what an unbearable little twerp I must have been—and of course she thought it a splendid notion, despite my father’s anxious murmurings. Naturally the usual crayons and coloured pencils wouldn’t do at all, no, her boy must have the best, and at once we set off together for Geppetto’s, the only place in town we knew of that stocked oil paint and canvases and real brushes. The shop was high-ceilinged yet cramped, like so many of the houses and premises in the town; so narrow was it indeed that customers tended automatically to enter it at a sideways shuffle, insinuating themselves through the tall doorway with averted faces and retracted tummies. There was a wrought-iron spiral staircase on the right, which I always thought should lead up to a pulpit, and the walls were fitted with shelves of toys to the ceiling. The art supplies were at the back, on a raised section up three steep steps. There Geppetto had his desk, also high and narrow, more like a pulpit, really, a vantage from which he could survey the entire shop, peering over the tops of his spectacles with that benign and twinkling smile in which there glinted, like a bared incisor, the sharp, unresting watchfulness of the born huckster. His real name was Johnson or Jameson or Jimson, I can’t remember exactly, but I called him Geppetto because, with his fuzzy white sidelocks and those rimless specs perched on the end of his long thin nose, he was a dead ringer for the old toy-maker as illustrated in a big Pinocchio picture-book that I had been given as a gift one Christmas.

  By the way, I might say many things about that wooden boy and his yearning to be human, oh, yes, many things. But I won’t.

  The various colours, I see them still, were set out in a ranked and captivating display on a carved wooden stand like an oversized pipe-rack. Straight away I fixed on a sumptuously fat tube of zinc white. The tube, by happy coincidence, seemed itself made of zinc, while the white label had the matt, dry texture of gesso, a shade I’ve favoured ever since, as you’ll know if you know anything of my work, which I hope you don’t. By instinct I made sure not to let my interest show, and certainly wouldn’t have been so foolhardy as to pick the thing up and examine it, or even to touch it. There is a particular kind of sidewise regard for the object of his desire that in the first stage of stealing it is all the thief will permit himself, not only for reasons of strategy and security but because gratification postponed means pleasure enhanced, as every voluptuary knows. My mother was talking to Geppetto in her distracted way, gazing past his left ear and absent-mindedly fiddling with a pencil she had picked up from his desk, turning and turning it in her attractively slender though somewhat mannish fingers. What can they have been talking about, such an ill-matched pair? I could see, despite my tender age and his years, that the old boy was greatly taken with this wild-haired, limpid-eyed creature. My mother, I should say, was always seductive in her dealings with men, whether intentionally or otherwise I can’t say. It was her very vagueness, I believe, the slightly fey, slightly frowning dreaminess, that dazzled and undid them. And therein I saw my chance. When I judged that she had lulled the old shopman into a state of glazed befuddlement, I shot out a claw and—snap! the tube of paint was in my pocket.

  You can imagine how I felt, with fright making a burning lump in my throat and my heart banging away. Gleefully triumphant too, of course, secretly so, and horribly. I was in such a state of stifled excitement that it seemed my eyes might pop out of their sockets and my cheeks swell to bursting. Believe me, when it comes to first times, stealing and love have a lot in common. How thrillingly chilly that tube of paint felt, and what a weight it was, as if it were formed of an otherworldly element that had landed here from a distant planet where the force of gravity was a thousand times stronger than on earth. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had torn its way through my trousers pocket and smashed a hole in the floor and gone on plummeting downwards till it came out in Australia, to the amazement of blackfellows and the fright of kangaroos.

  I think what most impressed me about what I had done was the quickness of it. I don’t mean just the quickness of the deed itself, although there was something eerie, something wizardly, in the seemingly instantaneous way the tube of paint got from its place on the wooden stand and into my pocket. I’m thinking of those Godley particles we hear so much about, these days, that at one moment are in one place and the next in another, even on the far side of the universe, with no trace whatever of how they got from here to there. That’s the way it always is with a theft. It’s as if a single thing by being stolen were on the instant made into two: the thing that before was someone else’s and this not quite identical thing that now is mine. It’s a kind of, what do you call it, a kind of transubstantiation, if that’s not going too far. For it did give me a feeling almost of holy awe, on that first occasion, and does so still, every time. That’s the sacral side of the thing; the profane side is if anything even more numinous.

 
Did Geppetto spy me in the act? I had the fearful suspicion that for all that he was in thrall to my mother’s azure gaze, even though it wasn’t fully focused on him, he had spotted my hand darting out and my fingers fixing on that lovely fat shiny half-pound of paint and magicking it into my pocket. Whenever I returned to his shop, and I would return there many times over the coming years, he would give me what I thought was a special, sly smile, quick with knowing. “Here he comes, our little painter!” he would exclaim, snuffling a soft laugh down his greyly hirsute nostrils. “Our very own Leonardo!” That first time I felt so euphoric I didn’t care if he knew what I had done, but all the same he was one person I made sure never to steal from again.