The Blue Guitar

by John Banville

  Someone. Someone else.

  Marcus once more cast about the room helplessly, then fixed his stricken gaze on me in a kind of mute beseeching, like a sick child looking to a parent for relief from its pain. I licked my lips and swallowed. “Who,” I asked—croaked, rather—“who is it she’s in love with?” He didn’t reply, only shook his head in the same dull, wounded way that he had done a few moments ago. I hoped he wasn’t going to start pacing again. I considered getting out the brandy that I keep in a cupboard behind bottles of turps and tins of linseed oil, but thought better of it: If we started drinking now, who could say what it would lead to, what tormented revelations, what stammered confessions? If ever there was a time for a clear head, this was it.

  Drooping again, as if physically as well as emotionally exhausted, Marcus crossed to the sofa, unwound his glasses from behind his ears, and sat down. I winced inwardly, thinking of all the times Polly and I had lain together on those stained green cushions. I was sweating, and kept digging my nails spasmodically into my palms. A faint continuous tremor, like an electrical current, was running through me. When he is excited or upset Marcus has a way of winding his long legs around each other, hooking one foot behind an ankle, and joining his hands as if for prayer and thrusting them between his clenched knees, a pose that always makes me think of that sign outside chemists’ shops showing the Rod of Asclepius coiled about by a serpent. Twisted up like that now he began to talk in a slow, toneless voice, gazing blankly before him. It was as if he had escaped some natural calamity unscathed in limb but numb with shock, which was, come to think of it, the case. I was glad I was standing with the window behind me, since from where he sat he would not be able to make out my face clearly: it would have been quite a sight, I’m sure. He said that for a long time now, for many months—all the way back to last Christmas, in fact—he had suspected that things were not right with Polly. She had been behaving in strange ways. There was nothing definite he could have pointed to, and he had told himself he was imagining things, yet the niggle of doubt would not be stilled. Her voice would trail off in the middle of a sentence and she would stand motionless, with something forgotten in her hand, lost in a secret smile. She had become increasingly impatient with Little Pip. One day, he said, when she was in a hurry to go out she had screamed at the child because she was refusing to lie down for her nap, and in the end she had thrust the mite into his arms and told him he could look after her since she was sick of the sight of her. As for her attitude to him, she swung between barely restrained irritation and overblown, almost cloying, solicitude. She was sleepless, too, and at night would lie beside him in the dark, tossing and sighing for hours, until the bedclothes were knotted around her and the bed was steaming with her sweat. He had wanted to confront her but hadn’t dared to, being too much in fear of what she might tell him.

  Above me the rain was whispering against the window-panes with stealthy, lewd suggestiveness.

  But what had happened, I asked, again convulsively licking my lips that by now had gone dry and cracked, what was it exactly that had happened to convince him that Polly was betraying him? He gave a despairing shrug, and corkscrewed himself around himself more tightly still, and began rocking backwards and forwards, too, making a soft, crooning sound, limp strands of damp hair hanging down about his face. There had been a fight, he said, he couldn’t remember how it had started or even what it had been about. Polly had shouted at him, and had gone on shouting, as if demented, and he had—here he faltered, aghast at the memory—he had slapped her face, and his wedding ring, of all things, had cut her cheek. He held up a finger and showed me the narrow gold band. I tried to picture the scene but couldn’t; he was talking about people I didn’t know, violent strangers driven by ungovernable passions, like the characters in, yes, in a particularly overblown operatic drama. I was simply unable to imagine Polly, my shy and docile Polly, shrieking in such fury that he had been goaded into hitting her. After the slap she had put a hand to her face and looked at him without a word for what seemed an impossibly long time, in a way that had frightened him, he said, her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together in a thin, crimped line. He had never known such a look from her before, or such a silence. Then above their heads a wailing started up—the fight had taken place in Marcus’s workshop—and Polly, white-faced except for the livid print of his hand on her cheek and the smear of blood where his ring had cut her, went away to tend the child.

  I felt as if a hole had opened in the air in front of me and I was falling into it headlong, slowly; it was a not entirely unpleasurable sensation, but only giddy and helpless, like the sensation of flying in a dream. I have known the feeling before: it comes, a moment of illusory rescue, at the most terrible of times.

  “What am I going to do?” Marcus pleaded, looking up at me out of eyes that burned with suffering.

  Well, old friend, I thought, feeling suddenly very weary, what are any of us going to do? I went and opened the cupboard. Prudence be damned—it was high time to break out the brandy.

  —

  We sat side by side on the sofa and between us over the space of an hour drained the bottle, passing it back and forth and swigging from the neck; when we started it had been at least half full. I was sunk in silence while Marcus talked, going over the highlights of the story—the legend!—of his life with Polly. He spoke of the days of their courtship, when her father had disapproved of him, though the old boy would never say why; snobbery, Marcus suspected. Polly was not long out of school and was helping on the farm, keeping chickens and in the summer selling strawberries from a stall at the front gate, for the value of land had fallen, or some such, and the family had subsided into a state of genteel penury. Marcus had finished his apprenticeship and was in the employ of an uncle, whose watch-repair business in time he would inherit. Polly, he said, his voice shaking with emotion, was everything he could have hoped for in a wife. When he began to speak of their honeymoon I braced myself, but I needn’t have worried: he’s not a man to share the kind of confidences I feared, even with the friend he thought me to be. He couldn’t have been happier than he was in those early days with Polly, he said, and when Little Pip came along it had seemed his heart would burst from such an excess of bliss. Here he broke off and struggled to sit upright and tears welled in his eyes, and he gave a great hiccupy sob and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. His grief was grief, all right, lavish and unconstrained, yet, as I couldn’t help noticing with interest, it might as well have been a kind of euphoria: all the signs of it were the same.

  “What am I going to do, Olly?” he cried again, more desperate than ever.

  I still had that sense of buoyant falling, which intensified now, due to the brandy having its inevitable effect, into a growing and wholly inappropriate lightheartedness. How could he be so sure, I asked again, that what he suspected of Polly was really the case? Wasn’t it possible he was imagining the whole thing? The mind when it starts to doubt, I said, knows no limits, and will credit the most outlandish fantasies. I should have shut up, of course, instead of which I kept on tugging at that loose end of yarn. It was as if I wanted it all to come unravelled, wanted Marcus to pause, and think, and turn and stare at me, his eyes widening in astonishment and gathering fury as the terrible truth dawned on him. Some desperate part of me wanted him to know! Yet how perverse to dread one’s fate while at the same time reaching out eagerly to draw it close.

  At this point Marcus did pause, did turn to me, and with another lugubrious hiccup put a hand on my arm and asked in a voice thick with emotion if I realised how much my friendship meant to him, what a privilege it was, and what a comfort. I mumbled that I, of course, in my turn, was glad to have him for a friend, very glad, very very very glad. I had a feeling now as of everything inside me slowly shrivelling. Encouraged, Marcus embarked on an extended soliloquy in praise of me as trusted companion, stout soul and, incidentally, world-beating painter, all the while looming into my face with eager sincerity. I wan
ted, oh, how I wanted, like the buttonholed wedding guest, to make myself turn aside from that glittering eye, but it held me fast. Yes, he declared, more fervently still, I was the best friend a man could hope for. As he spoke, his face seemed to swell and swell, as if it were being steadily inflated from inside. At last, with a mighty effort, I managed to tear myself away from his brimming, soulful stare. His hand was still on my arm—I could feel the heat of it through the sleeve of my coat, and almost shuddered. Now he broke off his peroration and leaned his head far back and sucked a final drop from the bottle. It was clear he had a great deal more to say, and would certainly say it, with ever-increasing passion and sincerity, if I didn’t find a means of distracting him.

  “You were telling me,” I said, with demurely lowered eyes and fiddling at one of the sofa buttons, “you were telling me about the fight with Polly.”

  Some distraction.

  “Was I?” he said. He heaved a fluttery sigh. “Oh, yes. The fight.”

  Well, he said, putting on his spectacles again—I am always fascinated by the intricate way he has of looping them on to his ears—after he had slapped Polly and she had gone off upstairs he had stalked about the workshop for some time, disputing with himself and kicking things, then had followed her, angrier than ever, and confronted her in their bedroom. She was sitting on the side of the bed with the child in her arms. Was there, he demanded, someone else? He hadn’t imagined there was, not for a second, and had only said it to provoke her, and expected her to laugh at him and tell him he was mad. But to his consternation she did not deny it, only sat there looking up at him and saying not a word. “The same look again,” he said, renewed tears springing to his eyes, “the same look, only worse, that she gave me in the workshop when I hit her!” He hadn’t thought her capable of such blank remoteness, such calm and icy indifference. Then he corrected himself: no, he had seen her look like that once before, a little like that, in the early stages of her pregnancy, when the baby had begun to kick and be a real presence. That was a case too, he said, of someone coming into her life, of a third party—those were his words, a third party—getting inside her—those too, his very words—and absorbing all her concentration, all her care; in short, all her love. At the time he had felt excluded, excluded, yes, but not rejected, not like now, when she sat on the bed like that with her cold and frightening gaze fixed on him and the realisation came to him that he had lost her.

  “Lost?” I said, and attempted a chiding laugh, even as a hand with freezing fingers was laying itself on my heart. “Oh, come now.”

  He nodded, sure of what he knew, and screwed his legs around each other more tightly still, and thrust his hands between his knees and again made that thin mewling sound, like an animal in pain.

  The rain had stopped and the last big drops were dripping down the window-panes in glistening, zigzag runnels. The clouds were breaking, and craning forwards a little and looking high up I could see a patch of pure autumnal blue, the blue that Poussin loved, vibrant and delicate, and despite everything my heart lifted another notch or two, as it always lifts when the world opens wide its innocent blue gaze like that. I think the loss of my capacity to paint, let’s call it that, was the result, in large part, of a burgeoning and irresistible and ultimately fatal regard for that world, I mean the objective day-to-day world of mere things. Before, I had always looked past things in an effort to get at the essence I knew was there, deeply hidden but not beyond access to one determined and clear-sighted enough to penetrate down to it. I was like a man come to meet a loved one at a railway station who hurries through the alighting crowd, bobbing and dodging, willing to see no face save the one he longs to see. Don’t mistake me, it wasn’t spirit I was after, ideal forms, Euclidean lines, no, none of that. Essence is solid, as solid as the things it is the essence of. But it is essence. As the crisis deepened, it wasn’t long before I recognised and accepted what appeared to me a simple and self-evident truth, namely, that there was no such thing as the thing itself, only effects of things, the generative swirl of relation. You would beg to differ? I said, striking a defiant pose, hand on hip. Try isolating the celebrated thing-in-itself, then, I said to a throng of imaginary objectors, and see what you get. Go ahead, kick that stone: all you’ll end up with is a sore toe. I would not be budged. No things in themselves, only their effects! Such was my motto, my manifesto, my—forgive me—my aesthetic. But what a pickle it put me in, for what else was there to paint but the thing, as it stood before me, stolid, impenetrable, un-get-roundable? Abstraction wouldn’t solve the problem. I tried it, and saw it was mere sleight of hand, meremost sleight of mind. And so it kept asserting itself, the inexpressible thing, kept pressing forwards, until it filled my vision and became as good as real. Now I realised that in seeking to strike through surfaces to get at the core, the essence, I had overlooked the fact that it is in the surface that essence resides: and there I was, back to the start again. So it was the world, the world in its entirety, I had to tackle. But world is resistant, it lives turned away from us, in blithe communion with itself. World won’t let us in.

  Don’t misunderstand me, my effort wasn’t to reproduce the world, or even to represent it. The pictures I painted were intended as autonomous things, things to match the world’s things, the unmanageable thereness of which had somehow to be managed. That’s what Freddie Hyland meant, whether he knew it or not, when he spoke to me that day of the inwardness he had spotted in those dashed-off sketches of mine. I was striving to take the world into myself and make it over, to make something new of it, something vivid and vital, and essence be hanged. A boa constrictor, that was me, a huge, wide-open mouth slowly, slowly swallowing, trying to swallow, gagging on enormity. Painting, like stealing, was an endless effort at possession, and endlessly I failed. Stealing other people’s goods, daubing scenes, loving Polly: all the one, in the end.

  But does that world exist, what I have here called world? Maybe the man on the railway platform is running towards someone who will never arrive, who will always be the distant beloved, an image he formed for himself, an image lodged inside him that he keeps trying to conjure into being, trying and failing, the image of a person who never boarded the train in the first place.

  You see my predicament? I state it again, simply: the world without, the world within, and betwixt them the unbridgeable, the unleapable, chasm. And so I gave up. The great sin I am guilty of, the greatest, is despair.

  Pain, the painster’s pain, plunges its blade into my barren heart.

  Marcus beside me had fallen asleep. Dazed by alcohol and exhausted by his own misery he had let his head slump back on the sofa with his eyes closed, and now he was snoring softly, the empty brandy bottle lolling in his lap. I sat and thought. I like to think when I’m a little drunk. Though maybe thinking is not the word, maybe thinking is not quite what I do. The brandy seemed to have expanded my head to the size of a room, not this room but one of those vast reception halls that court painters used to be required to do in drypoint, rafters and leaded lights and groups of courtiers standing about, the gentlemen in thigh-high boots and fancy hats with feathers and the ladies flouncing in farthingales, and in the midst of them the Margrave, or the Elector Palatine, or perhaps even the Emperor himself, no larger or more strikingly attired than the rest and yet, thanks to the painter’s skill, the undoubted centre of all this grand, unheard talk, all this unmoving bustle.

  How my mind wanders, trying to avoid itself, only to meet itself again, with a horrible start, coming round the other way. A closed circle—as if there were any other kind—that’s what I live in.

  Marcus was bound to wake up sooner or later, and meanwhile I was again casting about desperately for something I might say to him, something neutral, plausible, calming. One has to say something, even if the something is nothing. To keep quiet would have been my best, my safest, recourse, but guilt has an irresistible urge to babble, especially in the early, hot stages. I knew the game was up. Polly, bless her honest heart,
would not withhold for long the identity of her lover—she wouldn’t have the tenacity for it, would weaken in the end and blurt out my name. And what about me? I had been lying all my life, I swam in a sea of minor deceptions—thieving makes a man into a master dissembler—but could I trust myself now to keep my head above water, in these turbid and ever-deepening straits? If I flinched, if I made the merest flicker, I would give myself away on the spot. Marcus might be self-absorbed and generally unheeding, but jealousy when it really got its claws into him would give him a raptor’s unblinking, prismatic eye, and with it he would surely see what was, after all, plain to be seen.

  I rose quietly, though not entirely steadily, and crossed to the window. There was a big, scouring wind blowing and by now it was a Poussin sky all over, blue as blue with majestic floatings of cloud, ice-white, bruise-grey, burnished copper. I would have done it with a thin cobalt wash and, for the clouds, big scumblings of zinc white—yes, my old standby!—dark ash and, for the glowing copper fringes, some yellow ochre toned up with, say, a dash of Indian red. One can always allow oneself a sky, even at one’s most determinedly inward. An airship was sailing past, at a considerable height, its battleship-blue flank catching the sun and the giant propeller at the rear a diaphanous silver blur. Would I include it in my sky, if I were painting it? Preposterous things, these dirigibles, they remind me of elephants, or rather the corpses of elephants, bloated with gas, yet there is something endearing about them too. Matisse put one of the now outmoded flying machines—how I miss them, so elegant, so swift, so thrillingly dangerous!—into a little oil study, Window Open to the Sea, that he did after he and his adored new wife, Olga, returned to France from London in 1919—see the facts I have at my fingertips?

  Next thing I was rummaging among scores of old canvases stacked against the wall in a corner. I hadn’t looked at them in a long time—couldn’t bear to—and they were dusty and draped with cobwebs. I was after that still life I had been working on when I was overtaken by what I like to call my conceptual catastrophe—how much nakedness they cover, the big words—and my resolve failed me and I couldn’t go on painting, trying to paint. I must have done a dozen versions of it, each one poorer than its predecessor, to my increasingly despairing eye. But I could find only three, two of them merely exploratory studies, with more canvas showing than paint. The third one I pulled out and carried to the window, blowing at the dust on it as I went. It was a biggish rectangle, some four feet wide and three feet high. When I had set it down in the daylight and stood back, I realised it must have been the sight of the airship whirring past that had put me in mind of it. At the centre of the composition is a large, grey-blue kidney shape with a hole more or less in the middle and a sort of stump sticking out at the upper left side. When Polly saw the picture one day, before I had turned its face finally to the wall in disgust, she asked if the blue thing, as she called it, was meant to be a whale—she thought the hole might be an eye and the stump a finny tail—but then laughed at herself embarrassedly and said no, that when she looked more closely she could see that it was, of course, an airship. I wondered how she could imagine I would want to paint such a thing, but then thought, why not? When it comes to subjects, what’s the difference between a blimp and a guitar? Any old object serves, and the more amorphous its shape the more the imagination has to work with.