The Blue Guitar

by John Banville

  I wouldn’t have thought the child had been with us long enough to make her presence, or her absence, rather, so strongly felt. She was so young, she went so soon. Her death had a deadening effect in general on our lives, Gloria’s and mine; something of us died along with her. Hardly surprising, I know, and hardly exclusive to us; children die all the time, taking a part of their parents’ selves with them. We—and in this instance I think I can speak for Gloria as well as for myself—we had the impression of standing outside our own front door without a key and knocking and knocking and hearing nothing from within, not even an echo, as if the whole house had been filled to the ceilings with sand, with clay, with ashes. There were subtler effects, too, as when for instance I struck a fingernail against even the lightest and most potentially musical of objects, the rim of a wine glass, say, or the lid of that little Louis Quatorze rosewood box I stole from the desk of an art dealer in the rue Bonaparte years ago, and there would come back to me no ringing resonance. Everything seemed hollow, hollow and weightless, like those brittle casings of themselves that dead wasps leave on window-sills at the dusty end of summer. Grief was flat, in other words, a flat dull empty ache. I suppose that’s why when children die in sultry desert zones, where feelings are more readily freed, the parents, along with siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins at multiple removes, all wind black rags around their heads and rend the air with ululating shrieks and throaty warblings, determined their loss shall have its terrible and noisy due. I wouldn’t have minded a bit of rending and shrieking myself; better that than the restrained snivels and snuffles that we felt were all that the rules of decorum would allow us, in public, at least. There must be, it seemed to us, a limit to the mourning we could do for a life not lived. That, however, was the point. What we were sorrowing for was all that would not be, and that kind of vacuum, believe me, will suck in as many tears as you have to shed.

  Grief, like pain, is only real when one is experiencing it. Up to then I hardly knew what it was to grieve. My mother had barely entered on her middle years when she fell ill and simply drifted away, her death seeming hardly more than an intensification, a final perfecting, of the general distractedness in which she had passed her lamentably brief life. My father, too, went quietly, after that moment of violent protest on his last visit to the shop, when he kicked over the print stand. He appeared less concerned for his own suffering than for the distress and disruption he was causing in the lives of those around him. In his final moments on his deathbed he squeezed my hand and tried to smile reassuringly, as if it were not he but I who was launching out into uncharted distances with no prospect of return.

  Gloria and I had a fight one day not so long ago. It was strange, for we rarely even argue. Our disagreement, let’s call it that, was over a potted ornamental tree she keeps by the window in the kitchen. I’m not sure what variety of tree it is. Myrtle, perhaps? Let’s say myrtle. I didn’t realise how fond she was of it, or how fiercely she would cling to it, until, seemingly for no reason, it began to decline. The leaves turned grey and drooped despondently, and wouldn’t revive, no matter how lovingly she watered the soil or fed the roots with nutrients. At last she discovered what the matter was. The tree had been invaded by parasites, minuscule spider-like creepy-crawlies that flourished on the undersides of the leaves and were gradually sucking the life out of them. I was fascinated by this teeming, relentlessly devouring horde, and even bought a powerful magnifying-glass the better to study the little beasts, so industrious, so dedicated, so disregardful of everything around them, including me. Particularly impressive was the intricate filigree of webbing, strung in the angles of the leaf-stems, in which the young, no bigger than specks of dust, were suspended. Gloria, however, white-lipped and with eyes narrowed, went immediately and mercilessly about the business of eradication, dousing the tree with a powerful insecticide spray and afterwards taking it into the back yard and throwing pitcherfuls of soapy water over it to wash away any possible survivors. I, unwisely, protested. Had it not occurred to her, I asked, that she might have her priorities in the wrong order? True, the tree was alive, but the mites were more so. Why should they not be allowed to go on living, for as long as the tree could sustain them? Was the pretty spectacle the tree provided for us more important than the myriad lives she was destroying in order to protect and preserve it? For a long minute she looked at me in silence from under lowered brows, then flung the spray bottle at me—she missed—and stalked out of the room. A little while later I found her sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, her head down and her hands plunged in her hair, just like my mother, weeping. I thought to apologise, I wasn’t exactly sure for what, but instead went away quietly and left her there to her tears. What did it mean? I don’t know, though it must have meant something—many of the real things I meet with in waking life are to me as baffling as the fantastical apparitions I encounter in dreams. I tried to talk to her about it, when her temper had cooled, but she cut me off with a sidewise slice of her hand and rose from where she had been crouching and walked away. I have the notion she was thinking of our lost Olivia. The tree recovered, but refuses to flourish.

  Speaking of death—and I hardly seem to speak of anything else, these days, even when the subject is supposedly the living—I want to tell of a fatal accident that I witnessed as a young man, more than witnessed, and that haunts me still. It happened in Paris. I was there as a student, working in the atelier of a third-rate academician who had grudgingly taken me on for the summer through the good offices of an older Francophile painter whom my mother somehow knew, and whom she had charmed into giving me a letter of introduction to Maître Mouton. I lodged in a cheap hotel on the rue Molière, in a maid’s room on the fifth floor, directly under the roof. It was stiflingly hot, and the ceiling was so low that I couldn’t stand fully upright. Also the flights of stairs, that were of a normal width lower down, grew steadily narrower the higher they went, and coming home at night, when the minuterie on the second landing had clicked off, I would have to negotiate the top flight in darkness and on hands and knees, feeling as if I were scrambling up the inside of a chimney. I was penniless, hungry, and mostly miserable, passing my days in that state, one that is peculiar to the young, I believe, of torpid boredom mingled with thrashing desperation. One overcast, airless afternoon along the quays I was waiting at a corner for the traffic lights to change. A young Frenchman of about my own age was standing beside me, in a splendidly crumpled white linen suit. I remember how that suit glowed, giving off a sort of aura, despite or perhaps because of the day’s humid gloom, and, envious, in my imagination I made him into the spoiled son of a rich plantation owner sent home to pretend to finish his studies at some impossibly exclusive grande école. His head was turned back and he was speaking over his shoulder, volubly and gaily, to someone close behind him, a girl, I imagine, though I don’t remember her. The traffic clanked and rattled past in the way that it does on those broad thoroughfares, seeming to be not a series of individual vehicles but one immense ramshackle engine, welded together from innumerable ill-fitting components, a clamorous, smoking and endlessly extended juggernaut. The young man in white, laughing now, was turning to face forwards again, and somehow lost his footing—whenever, passing into sleep, I seem to misstep and start awake, it’s him I see at once, in his impossibly shining garb, there on the quai des Grands Augustins, opposite the Pont Neuf—and stumbled off the pavement just as an olive-green army lorry was approaching, close in to the gutter and travelling at breakneck—the apt word—speed. It was high and square with a rapidly shuddering tarpaulin stretched over the back of it. A big mirror stuck far out at the driver’s side, riveted in place on two or three steel struts. It was this mirror that struck the young man full in the face as he teetered on the side of the footpath, trying to regain his balance. I used to wonder if there had been time for him, in the last instant, to catch a glimpse of himself, startled and incredulous, as self and reflection met and annihilated each other in the glass, until I
realised that, of course, the mirror would have been turned the other way, and that it was the metal back of it that had hit him. And did I really see a perfect corona of blood exploding around his head at the moment of impact? I’m doubtful, since it’s the kind of thing the imagination, ever eager for a gory detail, likes to imagine; also it’s suspiciously an echo of that halo of light I had noted surrounding his suit. As he toppled backwards, it was into my instinctively offered arms that he collapsed. I recall the damp warmth of his armpits and the tap-dancer’s brief, rapid tattoo that his heels played on the pavement. Slight and slender though he was I hadn’t the strength to support him—he was already a dead weight—and when he slipped out of my arms and flopped to the ground his smashed-up head fell back between my splayed feet and struck the pavement with a soggy thud. One leg of his trousers, the right one, had been neatly severed above the knee, don’t ask me how, and the bottom part of it was concertinaed around his ankle. The leg that was thus exposed was tanned, smooth and hairless; he wore, I saw, no socks, in the casual French way that I emulated, if Polly’s memory of me the first time I called into Marcus’s workshop can be trusted. The unfortunate fellow’s face—ah, that face. You’ll have seen it in more than one of my early things, particularly that awful Bacchae triptych—how the mere thought of my past work taunts and shames me!—where it looms low above the corpse-strewn plain, a featureless disc, ghastly and glaring, the bluish-red of a freshly flayed side of beef and dripping gumdrops of glistening pink gore. I went blue in the face myself from having to assure purblind commentators over and over that this smeared and ruddied blob wasn’t a case of deliberate distortion in the manner of Pontormo, say, or Bosch the devil-dreamer—and many did say it—but on the contrary was a careful and accurate rendering of a real sight I had seen, with my own eyes, and felt called on to commemorate, repeatedly, in paint.

  Everything up to the moment of the young man’s death I remembered with stinging clarity, but everything after it was wiped from my mind. People must have gathered round, there must have been police, and an ambulance, all that, but for me the aftermath of the accident is a blessed blank. I do remember the army lorry careering on regardless—what to it was one more death, among the so many it must have witnessed in its time? But what about the girl the young man had been talking to, if it was a girl? Did she crouch beside him and cradle his poor pulped head in her lap? Did she throw back her own head and howl? How protectively the mind suppresses things. Some things.

  It fell to me to get rid of our Olivia’s effects—does a child of three have effects?—her suits and smocks and pink bootees. I was supposed to take them to the church round the corner for distribution to the poor, but instead I rolled them into a big ball that I tied up with string and dropped into the river on a tearily indistinct midnight hour. The ball didn’t sink, of course, but bobbed away on the tide towards the docks and the open sea. For months afterwards I worried that it would wash up on the riverbank somewhere and be found by a rag-picker, and that one day I, or, worse, Gloria, would spot a toddler in the street, all togged out in a heartbreakingly familiar outfit.

  One of the phenomena I sorely miss, from the days when I was still painting, is the stillness that used to generate itself around me when I was at work, and into which I was able to make some sort of temporary escape from myself. That kind of peace and quiet you don’t get by any other means, or I don’t, anyway. For instance, it differed entirely, in depth and resonance, from the stealthy hush that accompanies a theft. At the easel, the silence that fell upon everything was like the silence I imagine spreading over the world after I am dead. Oh, I don’t delude myself that the world will shut down its clamour just because I’ve made my final brushstroke. But there will be a special little corner of tranquillity once my perturbations have ceased. Think of some back alley, in some dank suburb, on a grey afternoon between seasons; the wind whips up the dust in spirals, turns over scraps of paper, rolls a bit of dirty rag this way and that; then all stops, seemingly for no reason, a calm descends, and quiet prevails. Not amid celestial light and the voices of angels, but there, in that kind of nothingness, in that kind of nowhereness, my imagination operates most happily and forges its profoundest fancies.

  You will want to hear about our time down there in the warm south, with the mistral snapping those sunshades in the place du Marché, and our hands entwined on the table amid the dishes of olives and the glasses of greyed pastis, and the delightful strolls we took and the colourfully disreputable people we encountered, and the straw-coloured wine we used to drink with dinner in that little place under the ramparts where we went every evening, and the funny old house we leased from the eccentric lady who kept cats, and the bullfighter who took a shine to Gloria, and my brief but tempestuous affaire with the expatriate titled Englishwoman, the lovely Lady O.—all that. Well, you can want away. I grant you it’s an earthly paradise in those parts, but a tainted paradise it was, for us, with many a serpent slithering among the convoluted vines. Don’t misunderstand me, it was no worse there than anywhere else, for two poor numbed souls lost in listless mourning, but not much better, either, once the bloom wore off the fabled douceur de vivre and the beaded bubbles winking at the brim had all winked out. Forget your ideas of an idyll. I seem to have spent most of my time in supermarket car parks, baking in the passenger seat of our little grey Deux Chevaux and listening to some heart-stricken chanteuse sobbing about love on the car radio, while Gloria was off in a shaded corner having a smoke and yet another quiet cry.

  Damn it, here’s another digression: there must surely be something or somewhere I don’t want to get to, hence all these seemingly innocent meanderings down dusty by-roads. One summer when I was a boy and we were staying at Miss Vandeleur’s, a circus came to town. At least, it called itself a circus, although it was more a sort of fit-up travelling theatre. Performances took place in a rectangular tent where the wind made the canvas walls flap and boom like mainmasts. The audience sat on backless wooden benches facing a makeshift stage, under multi-coloured light-bulbs strung on tent-poles that swayed and lunged, creating a lurid and excitingly inebriated effect. There were no more than half a dozen players, including a hot-eyed girl contortionist, who at the intervals sat on a chair in front of the stage and sang sentimental ditties, accompanying herself on a piano-accordion, the pearly lustre of which illumined for me many a nocturnal fantasy. The circus stayed for a week and I went to all seven nightly shows and the Saturday matinée as well, entranced by the gaud and glitter of it all, though it was the same experience every night, since the acts never varied, except for the odd fluffed line or an acrobat’s unintended tumble. Then, on the morning after the final performance, I made the mistake of hanging about to watch the magic being dismantled. The tent came down with a huge, crumpling sigh, the benches were heaved like carcasses on to the back of a lorry, and the girl contortionist, who had exchanged her sequins for a high-necked jumper and rolled-up jeans, stood in the doorway of one of the caravans with a vacant stare, smoking a cigarette and scratching her belly. Well, that’s just how it was in the south, at the end. The iridescent glow went dull, and eventually it was as if everything had been folded up and shunted away. And yes, that’s me all over, for ever the disappointed, disenchanted child.

  My chronology is getting shaky again. Let’s see. We stayed down there for, what, three years, four? There was the first visit, when we sneaked off for a holiday together and I proposed and Gloria accepted, after which we returned home and lodged in Cedar Street. It was to Cedar Street that Ulick Palmer, my louche father-in-law, would come knocking at dead of night, drunk and tearful, to beg for a bed, and Gloria, against my hissed protests, would bring him in and put him to sleep on the sofa in the living room, where he would pollute the air with an awful stench of stale whiskey and sulphurous farts, and puke on the carpet too, as often as not. Ma Palmer also was a frequent visitor, alighting unheralded, in her crow-black coat and her hat with a veil, to sit for hours on the same living-room sofa
, her back ramrod-straight, her nostrils dilating and seeming always about to shoot out dragon-jets of smoke and flame. Then the child came, unexpectedly, and as unexpectedly went. After that there was nothing for it but to abandon everything and flee south in desperation to the one place where we had been unequivocally, if briefly, happy. Foolishness, you’ll say, pathetic self-delusion, and you’ll be right. But desperation is desperation, and calls for desperate measures. We thought our pain would be in some way assuaged down there; surely, we thought, even grief couldn’t hold out against all that Provençal mirth and loveliness. We were wrong. Nothing more cruel than sunshine and soft air, when you’re suffering.

  As a matter of fact, I think that sojourn in the south was one of the things that set me on the road to painterly ruin. The light, the colours, drove me to distraction. Those throbbing blues and golds, those aching greens, they had no rightful place on my palette. I’m a son of the north: my hues are the hammered gold of autumn, the silver-grey of the undersides of leaves in rainy springtime, the khaki shine of chilly summer beaches and the winter sea’s rough purples, its acid virescence. Yet when we abandoned the salt flats and the strident song of the cicada and came back home—we still called it home—and settled here at Fairmount, on Cromwell’s hill, the bacillus of all the sun-soaked beauty we had left behind was still lodged in my blood and I couldn’t rid myself of the fever. Is this so, or am I scrambling again after explanations, excuses, exonerations, all the exes you can think of? But take that last thing I was working on, the unfinished piece that finished me for good: look at the blimp-coloured guitar and the table with the checked cloth that it rests on; look at the louvred window opening on to the terrace and the flat blue beyond; look at that gay sailboat. This was not the world I knew; these were not my true subject.