The Blue Guitar

by John Banville

  He called out a greeting, and came up and kissed Gloria quickly, rising on tiptoe to do it. For me he had only a deprecating frown, by which I knew Gloria must have told him all about my latest escapades. “I have”—he drew back a cuff and consulted a watch that was almost as big as his hand—“some hours. I’m due in Paris at eight, to dine with—well, never mind who with.” It is Perry’s policy to be always on the way to somewhere else, a place much more important than here. Every time I see him I’m impressed anew by the show of lofty magnificence he affects. He is ageless, and very short, with stubby arms and legs, like mine only even shorter, and a paunch in the shape of a good-sized Easter egg sliced in half lengthways. He has a disproportionately large head, which might have been fashioned from pounds and pounds of well-worked putty, and a large, smooth face, slightly livid and always with a moist, greyish sheen. His eyes are palely protuberant, and when he blinks the lids come down with a snap, like a pair of moulded metal flanges. His manner is brisk to the point of crossness, and he treats everything he encounters as if it were a hindrance. I’m fond of him in principle, although he never fails to vex me.

  We turned towards the car. Perry stepped between Gloria and me and put an arm at both our backs, drawing us along with but slightly ahead of him, like a conductor at the triumphal end of a concert sweeping his soloists forwards into a storm of applause. He smelt of engine oil and expensive cologne. The wind from the estuary was ruffling everything except his hair, which, I noticed, he has started to dye; it was plastered back over his skull, tight and gleaming, like a carefully applied coat of shellac. “Damn fool air controllers tried to stop me landing here,” he said. “Now they’ll think I’ve crashed, of course, or gone into the drink.” He has a plummily refined accent with a faint Scots burr—his father was something high up in the Kirk of Canongate—and the barest trace of a Frankish lisp from his Merovingian mother. Very proud of his grand origins, is Perry.

  Behind us, Orville and Wilbur were wheeling the plane effortfully towards the barn, one pushing while the other pulled.

  In the car I sat in the back seat, feeling like a child being punished for naughtiness. The sunlight was gone now, and luminous veils of what was barely rain were drifting aslant the streets. As we went along, Perry, perched sideways in the front seat, turned his neat round head this way and that, taking in everything with appalled fascination, exclaiming and sighing. “Was that your name I saw over that shop?” he asked. I told him it used to be my father’s print shop, and that my studio was upstairs—my studio as was, I didn’t say. Perry turned all the way round and gave me a long look, shaking his head sadly. “You came home, Oliver,” he said. “I would never have thought it of you.” Gloria gave a soft laugh.

  I encountered Perry Percival for the first time in Arles, I think, or was it Saint-Rémy? No, it was Arles. I was very young. I had come down from Paris, at the end of that summer of study, so-called, and was morosely wandering in the steps of the great ones who would never, I was gloomily convinced, invite me up to join them, sitting before their easels on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. There was a market on and the town was busy. I had been amusing myself by strolling from one crowded café to the next, swiping the tips that departing customers had left behind on the tables. It was a thing I had become adept at—talk about sleight of hand—and even the sharpest-eyed waiters missed me as I flitted among them with a muffled, tell-tale jingle. Although I was penniless, I wasn’t taking the money because I needed it; if I had, I would have tried to make it by some other means. It was at the Café de la Paix—don’t know why I’ve remembered the name—as I was pocketing a fistful of centimes, that I happened to glance up and caught, through the open doorway, deep in the brownish darkness of the interior, Perry’s sharp bright eye fixed on me. To this day I don’t know if he spotted what I was up to; if he did, he certainly never said so, and I’ve assumed he didn’t. My instinct was to run away—isn’t it always my instinct?—but instead I went into the café and approached Perry and introduced myself; when one is threatened with discovery, effrontery is the best defence, as any thief will tell you. I hadn’t a shred of a reputation yet, but Perry must have heard my name somewhere, for he claimed to be familiar with my work, which was patently a lie, though I chose to believe him. He was wearing the usual rig-out of the northerner holidaying in the south—short-sleeved cotton shirt, absurdly, indeed indecently, wide-legged khaki shorts, open-toed sandals and, bless your heart, stout woollen socks—yet still he managed to convey a lordly hauteur. You see me here mingling among tourists and other riff-raff, his manner said, but even as we speak, my man is laying out tie and tails for me in my suite at the Grand Hôtel des Bains. “Yes yes,” he drawled, “Orme, I know your things, I’ve seen them.” He invited me to sit, and ordered for us both a glass of white. To think that from this chance encounter there developed one of the most significant and—etc., etc.

  I pause here to say that I never got the hang of being an exile. I don’t think anyone does, really. There’s always something smug, something complacently self-conscious, about the expat, as he likes to style himself, in his offhand way, with his baggy linen jacket and battered straw hat and his sun-bleached, sinewy wife. And yet once you go away, and stay away for any extended length of time, you never entirely return. That was my experience, at any rate. Even when I left the south and came back here, to the place I started out from and where I should have felt the strongest sense of being myself, something, some flickering yet intrinsic part of me, was lacking. It was as if I had left my shadow behind.

  Is Perry a fraud? He certainly looks and sounds like one, but examine any soul closely enough and you’ll soon see the cracks. For all that he may be a bit of a crook, he has an eye. Put him in front of a picture, especially a picture in progress, and he will fix on a line or a patch of colour and shake his head and make a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue. “There’s the heart of the thing,” he will say, pointing, “and it’s not beating.” He is always right, I find, and many’s the bloodless canvas I stabbed with the sharp end of a brush on the strength of his strictures. Then he would shout at me for wasting all that work, saying pointedly that it wouldn’t have been the first flawed piece of mine that he, or for that matter I, had ever offered for sale. Barbs like that went in deep, and lodged fast, I can tell you. Well: if I’m the pot, he is surely the kettle.

  “How is your friend?” Gloria asked him. “I can’t remember his name. Jimmy? Johnny?”

  “Jackie,” Perry said. “Jackie the Jockey. Oh, he died. Horrible business.” He rolled a mournful eye. “Don’t ask.” He mused a while. “You know all these nasty new germs are coming from outer space, don’t you?”

  Gloria was smiling through the windscreen at the rain. “Who says that, Perry?” she enquired, glancing at me in the driving-mirror.

  Perry shrugged, arching his eyebrows and drawing down the corners of his wide mouth, thereby taking on a momentary and startling resemblance to Queen Victoria in her failing years. “Scientists,” he said, with a dismissive wave. “Doctors. All the people who know.” He sniffed. “Anyway, the germs got Jackie, wherever they came from, and he died.”

  Poor Jackie, I remembered him. Young, swarth, good-looking in a ravaged sort of way. Huge eyes, always slightly feverish, and a mass of curls, shiny as black-lead, tumbling on his forehead; think of Caravaggio’s sick young Bacchus, though less fleshy. He wasn’t a jockey—I don’t know how he came by the nickname, though I suppose I might hazard a guess. He was a filcher, like me; unlike me, he stole for gain. He and Perry were together for years, the unlikeliest pair. I should say that besides a succession of catamites, of which Jackie had been the latest one that I knew of, Perry also had, and has, a wife. Penelope is her name, though she is known, improbably, as Penny. She is a large, muscular, relentless woman, and I have always been a little afraid of her. Strange thing, though: when we lost the child, it was to Perry and his mighty missus that Gloria fled for shelter and succour. I never got to the bottom of that
one. She stayed with them for a month and more, doing who knows what, crying, I suppose, while I solitarily stewed in Cedar Street, reading a vast study of Cézanne and every evening drinking myself into a stupor.

  Cézanne, by the way, has always been a bone of contention between Perry and me, though the marrow should have been well sucked out of it by now. Perry thinks the master of Aix unsurpassed, I suspect for all the wrong reasons, while I have always resented him. I see the greatness, it’s just that I don’t like the things it produced. I confess I’m quietly at one with the old codger in certain matters, such as his insistence that emotion and what-have-you cannot be expressed directly in the work but must exude, like a fragrance, from form at its purest. I’m certainly with him there—see my own things, seriatim, through the years. They called me cold because they were too dense to feel the heat.

  When we got to the house Perry dropped his leather flying helmet on the hall table, where it subsided slowly like a deflating football, draped his airman’s overalls on the back of a chair, and retired for a lengthy session to the downstairs lavatory, from which there issued upon the air a pulsating, spicy stink that would take a good quarter of an hour to disperse. Then, lightened and refreshed, he came bustling into the kitchen, where Gloria was preparing the pot of herbal tea he had ordered. He drew forwards a chair and sat as close up to the stove as he could get, rubbing together his little neat white hands. “I’m so cold,” he said. “My blood is thin. I’ve started taking regular transfusions, did I tell you? There’s a place in Chur I go to.”

  Gloria, pouring water into the teapot, laughed. “Oh, Perry,” she cried delightedly, “you’ve become a vampire!”

  “Very amusing,” Perry said stiffly.

  Over his tisane he talked of this and that, who was selling, who was buying, how the market was behaving; to my ear, he might have been gossiping of the latest dealings on the Rialto, or assessing the state of the silk trade in Old Cathay. At one point in the tittle-tattle he paused and looked at me sternly. “The world is waiting on you, Oliver,” he said, wagging a finger.

  Was it? Well, it could wait.

  Gloria made an omelette, discarding the yolk of the eggs, at Perry’s behest, and using only the whites. It was his latest fad to eat only colourless foods, chicken breast, sliced pan, milk puddings, suchlike. Nor would he drink anything other than tea. He really is a wonderful type, as he would say, with a click of the tongue and a smacking of the lips, in the Frenchified manner that he affects. He is for me, now, the very breath of a lost, a relinquished, world, a place distant and quaint, like the background of a Fragonard, or one of Vaublin’s dusky dreamscapes, a place I know well but happily know I shall never return to.

  “And how goes the work?” he asked, getting down to business. He was seated at the head of the table with a napkin tucked into the collar of his exquisite, iridescent, dragonfly-blue shirt. He looked at my blank face and sighed. “I presume you are about the making of some grand new masterpiece, hence the long silence.” That’s how he speaks, really, it is. “This is the reason I’m here, after all, to view the state of the edifice.”

  Crumbling at the base, Perry, crumbling at the base.

  “Olly is still on his sabbatical from work,” Gloria said. “From life, too.”

  I threw her an injured look, but wasn’t she right, about me and life and the living of it? The truth is, I think, I never started to live in the first place. Always I was about to begin. As a child I said that when I grew up, that would be life. Next it was the death of my parents I secretly looked forward to, thinking it must be the birth of me, a delivery into my true state of selfhood. After that it was love, love would surely do the trick, when a woman, any woman, would come along and make a man of me. Or success, riches, bags of banknotes, the world’s acclaim, all these would be ways of living, of being vividly alive, at last. And so I waited, year on year, stage after stage, for the great drama to commence. Then the day came when I knew the day wouldn’t come, and I gave up waiting.

  Just remembered: last night that dream again, of me as a giant snake trying to swallow the world and choking on it. What can it mean? As if I didn’t know. Always the disingenuous pose.

  Perry glanced at his watch again, and frowned: France awaited, France and his dining companion too important to name.

  After lunch we walked together to the studio. He had not been there before, I had made sure to keep him away. Why did I bring him now—what was there for me to show him, except elaborate failures? I had to lend him an overcoat, comically too long for his little arms. The rain had stopped and the sky was overcast and the streets had a watery sheen. Perry, his hands lost in the sleeves of my coat, cast a deprecating eye about him, taking in again the paltry scene. The houses and the shops, the very streets themselves, seemed to flinch before him. “You know what a fool you’re making of yourself,” he said, “don’t you, skulking in this ridiculous place and pretending you can’t paint?”

  Skulk: that foxy word again. I answered nothing—what should I say?

  When we got to the studio he flopped into a corner of the lovelorn sofa, complaining anew of the cold.

  “Well, show me something,” he said crossly.

  “No,” I said, “I won’t.”

  He bent on me an injured glance. “After I flew all this way?”

  I said I hadn’t asked him to come.

  He got up moodily and began poking about the room. I watched as he made for the canvases standing against the wall. I could swear his little bloodless nose was twitching. The manner he adopts towards his trade is a calculated mixture of disdain and long-suffering impatience. On everything offered to his regard, everything, he turns at first a jaded eye, as if to say, Oh, what further dreary piece of trumpery is this? He doesn’t fool me: he’s ever on the lookout for something to hawk. Now he picked up that big unfinished thing, my last effort before lapsing into silence—this is silence? you ask—and held it up before him, drawing his head back and grimacing as at a bad smell. “Hmm,” he said, “this is new.”

  “On the contrary.”

  “I meant, it’s a new departure.”

  “It’s not. It’s the end of the line.”

  “Don’t be absurd.” He carried the canvas into the full fall of light from the window. “Are you going to finish it?” On the contrary, I said, it had finished me. He wasn’t listening. “Anyway,” with a sniff, “I can sell it as it is.”

  I leaped from the sofa and ran at him across the room, but he saw me coming and whisked the canvas aside, pouting back at me over his shoulder. I made a grab, he trotted out of my reach; I reached further, caught him. There followed an unseemly tussle, with a lot of heavy breathing and muffled grunts. At length he had to concede. I snatched the canvas from him and raised it high above my head, meaning to smash it down on something. However, as anyone who has ever tried to hang a picture will know, they are damnably unwieldy things, big and flat and frail as they are, and I had to content myself by flinging it from me into a corner, where it landed with a satisfying clatter and crunch, like the sound of bones breaking.

  “For God’s sake!” Perry, panting, cried. “Have you gone mad?”

  I am thinking yet again of that dream, the world lodged in my gullet. They say a baby screaming for its bottle would destroy all creation if it could. My picture was smashed. What was I now, maker or breaker? And did I care?

  “Look here,” Perry said, putting on a bluffly fraternal tone, “what’s the matter with you, exactly, will you tell me that?” I laughed, a sort of wild hee-haw. Brother donkey! Perry was not to be put off. “Is all this about some woman?” he said, trying not to sound overly incredulous. “I hear you’re having an affaire, or had. Is that the trouble? Tell me it’s not.”

  One of the things from my painting days that I sorely miss is a certain quality of silence. As the working day progressed and I sank steadily deeper into the depths of the painted surface, the world’s prattle would retreat, like an ebbing tide, leaving me at the c
entre of a great hollow stillness. It was more than an absence of sound: it was as if a new medium had risen up and enveloped me, something dense and luminous, an air less penetrable than air, a light that was more than light. In it I would seem suspended, at once entranced and quick with awareness, alive to the faintest nuance, the subtlest play of pigment, line and form. Alive? Was that life, after all, and I didn’t recognise it? Yes, a kind of life, but not life enough for me to say I was living.

  I wished Perry would go away now, just go away, be taken up into the air, and leave me here, alone and quiet. How tired I was; am.

  Perry was prodding exploratively with the toe of his shoe at the wreckage of my poor painting. There it lay all in a heap in the corner, a tangle of wood and torn canvas, my final masterpiece. I was reminded of the giant kite that when I was a lad my mother paid Joe Kent the hunchbacked cobbler to make for me, from laths and brown paper, in his cave-like workshop down Lazarus Lane. It turned out to be too heavy, and I threw it on the grass and danced on it in a rage when it refused to fly. Yes, breaking things, that has been for me one of life’s small consolations—and maybe not so small—I see that clearly now.

  “Have you nothing at all to show to me?” Perry asked, sounding both peevish and plaintive, eyeing again the dusty stacks of canvases against the walls. Yes, I said, I had nothing. I could see him losing heart; it was like watching the needle of mercury in a thermometer sliding down its groove. He consulted his watch yet again, more pointedly this time. “Such a shame,” he said, “to destroy a painting.” The pleasures of acquisition are well known—says the thief, the former thief—but who ever mentions the quiet joy of letting things go? All those botched attempts stacked there, I would gladly have stamped on them, too, as long ago I’d stamped on Joe Kent’s flightless kite. When Perry went, there would go with him my last claim to being a painter—not that I claim it, but you know what I mean—he would be yet another bag of ballast heaved out of the basket. You see how, with these figurative tropes, my fancy turns on thoughts of ascent and heady flight? And indeed, an hour later, when Gloria had driven Perry and me out to Wright’s field, and Perry had strapped himself into his neat little craft and was taxiing along the grassy runway, I had a sudden urge to race after him through the twilight and grab on to a wing and swing myself up into the seat behind him and make him take me with him to France. I imagined us up there, whirring steadily through the night, suspended above deeps of blue-grey darkness, the clouds below us like motionless thick folds of smoke and overhead a sky of countless stars. To be gone! To be gone.