The Blue Guitar

by John Banville

  We stood beside the hangar, Gloria and I, and watched the plane climb the murky air until it vanished into a cloud, the same one, it might be, that we had seen it descend from that morning. The shroud of silence that had fallen over the darkening field spoke somehow of deserted distances, forgotten griefs. Far at the back of the hangar a bare bulb was burning, and one of the Wright boys was hammering finically at something, making a metallic, melancholy tinkling. The night massed around us. I shivered, and Gloria, putting her arm through mine, pressed my elbow tightly against her ribs. Had she felt my sense of desolation, and was it comfort she was offering me? We walked away. I thought of Perry, bustling out of the lavatory after a final visit there, kneading his damp hands and giving me a disapproving, disappointed, frown. Yes, he had washed his hands of me. He need not have bothered: I had already washed my own hands of my own so-called self.

  —

  One day on my aimless rambles about the town—yes, I’ve become quite the walker, despite myself—I dropped in to see my sister. She is called Olive. I know, outrageous, these names. I don’t often have cause to visit her, and didn’t have that day. She lives in a little house in Malthouse Street. The narrow thoroughfare, hardly more than an alley, falls away at either end, but there is a rise in the middle, where her house is, and this, along with the fact that the footpath outside her door is very high, for what reason I do not know, always gives me the impression that access to the house entails a desperate scramble, as though it were a shrine, a fabled outpost, the way to which had been purposely made arduous. At the far end of the street is the malt store, long disused, a squat building of pinkish-grey granite with low, barred windows and big medallion-like rusted iron braces sunk into the walls. When I was little it was a place to avoid. There was always an unpleasant sour smell of malting barley that made my nostrils sting, and sounds of shifting and scurrying could be heard from within, where the rats, so Olive enjoyed assuring me, swam freely about like otters in the knee-deep stores of grain.

  The tiny house is made tinier still by Olive’s great height. She’s much taller than I am, though that’s not a hard thing to be, and moves at a slow stoop, looming in doorways or at the foot of the stairs with her head thrust out and her bowed arms dangling behind her, so that her progress seems a permanent state of incipient toppling over. Of the four of us she is the one who most resembles my father, and as the years go on and her few womanly lines become ever less pronounced the likeness grows more and more marked. Her nickname in school, of course, was Olive Oyl. What an emblematic contrast we must have looked, she and I, back then: sceptre and orb, wishbone and drumstick, whip handle and little fat top. In her young days she had a reputation for outrageousness and rebellion—she wore a jacket and tie, like a man, and for a while even smoked a pipe—but in time all that became mere eccentricity. The town has many Olives, of all genders and varieties.

  “Well well, if it isn’t the genius of the family,” she said. Answering my knock she had put her head around the front door cautiously and peered at me out of my mother’s—mine, too—large, blue and, in Olive, incongruously lovely eyes. She wore an apron over a brown cardigan; her skirt was hitched crookedly on the two knobs of her hip-bones. Someone should introduce her to Polly’s mother, they would make a matching pair, like Miss Vandeleur’s porcelain beauties, only in reverse. “What brings you down among the common folk?” She always had a sharp tongue, our Olive. “Come through,” she said, walking ahead along the hall and flapping a hand the size of a paddle behind her to beckon me on. She chuckled phlegmily. “Dodo will be delighted to see you.”

  The house inside was redolent of fresh-cut wood and varnish. My sister’s latest hobby, as it would turn out, was the cutting and assembling of miniature crucifixes.

  In the kitchen a wood stove burned with a muted roar, and the soupy atmosphere was heavy with heat. The smell here, where the air seemed to have been used many times over, was a medley of stewed tea, floor polish and a tarry reek from the stove, and came straight at me out of childhood. A square table covered with patterned oilcloth took up most of the room; it stood there on its four square legs, stubborn as a mule, to be edged around awkwardly and with caution, for its corners were sharp and could deliver a painful prod. There were dented pots and blackened pans on hooks over the stove, and on the windowsill stood a jam-jar of flowers, which, even though they were made of plastic, somehow managed to appear to be wilting. The ceiling was low and so was the metal-framed window that gave on to a concrete yard and a mean-looking stretch of overgrown garden. Windows are so strange, I find, seeming no more than a last-minute concession to the incarcerated, and always if I look for long enough I will seem to make out a trace of the missing bars. “See who’s here, Dodo,” Olive said, or shouted, rather. “It’s the prodigal brother!”

  Dodo, whose full name I have forgotten or perhaps never knew—Dorothy somebody, I suppose—is my sister’s companion of many years. She is a stout though compact person with a bullfinch’s sharp little face and an unsettlingly piercing gaze. A concoction of frazzled pure-white hair sits proud of her tiny head, like a halo fashioned from spun sugar. I greeted her warily. Her disapproval of me is deep, bitter and abiding, for reasons I can only begin to guess at. That eye of hers, I suspect, sees deep inside my soul. She used to be a bus conductress until she was forcibly retired—something to do with a shortfall in the fare returns, I seem to remember Olive confiding to me, in an unaccustomed access of frankness.

  Olive drew a chair out from the table for me, its legs scraping on the uneven, red-tiled floor, and once again the past tipped its hat to me. Olive herself rarely sits, but keeps sinuously on the move, like a large lean stoop-backed creature of the trees. She produced a packet of cigarettes from somewhere about her person, lit up, took a drag, then leaned forwards with her hand pressed on the table and treated herself to a long, racking and, in the end, seemingly satisfying bout of coughing. “Look at you,” she gasped at last, turning to me with teary eyes, the lower rims of which pinkly sagged, “look at the state of you—what have you been doing to yourself?” I said blandly that I was very well, thank you, determined to keep my temper. “You don’t look it,” she said, with a rasping snort.

  Dodo, wedged into a small upright armchair beside the stove, watched me with a vengeful glitter; she is somewhat deaf, and is always convinced that she is being talked about. Her years of standing about on the buses left her with enormously swollen legs, and by now she has almost entirely lost the power of locomotion, and has to be helped everywhere. How Olive, whose own legs are as meagrely fleshed as a heron’s, and as complicatedly jointed, manages to joggle her friend out of her chair and manoeuvre her about the narrow confines of that gingerbread house I can’t imagine. I once offered to pay out of my own pocket—it was quite deep at the time—for the two of them to move to somewhere roomier, and in reply got only a terrible, white-lipped stare. Olive for many years worked as a clerk for Hyland & Co., in the timber factory, until it shut down. I suspect Dodo has a little stash of money put away—those fares again, I don’t doubt. They get by, somehow. Olive is fiercely protective of what she is pleased to think of as her independence.

  “That wife of yours,” she said, returning to the attack, “how is she?”

  Gloria also was well, I replied, very well. To this Olive said, “Huh!” and glanced across at Dodo with a lopsided grin and even, if I wasn’t mistaken, the shadow of a wink. Tongues in the town, it seemed, must have been wagging.

  “She don’t come round,” Dodo said loudly, addressing me. “Not round here, she don’t.” Have I mentioned that Dodo is, or was originally, a Lancashire lass? Don’t ask me how she landed up in these parts. “I can’t say as I’d even recognise her,” she shouted, sounding more aggrieved than ever, “that Mrs. Orme.”

  “Now now, Dodo,” Olive said scoldingly, but with a merry glint, as if indulging a favoured though misbehaving child. “Now now.”

  I sat on the straight chair at an awkward angle to the
crowding table, my hands on my knees, which were splayed, necessarily, to accommodate the pendulous soft melon that is my lower belly. I don’t like being fat, it doesn’t suit me at all, yet whatever I do I can’t seem to lose weight. Not, mind you, that I do much in the weight-losing line. Maybe I should give Perry Percival’s colourless diet a try. My father, for his amusement, used to call me Jack Sprat, however many times I informed him, with icy contempt but in a voice that shook, that it was Jack Sprat who would eat no fat, and therefore must have been thin, while his wife was the obese one. Odd, and oddly out of character, those flashes of cruelty he subjected me to, my dad; they had the power, some of them, of reducing me to tears. Perhaps he didn’t mean to be cruel. My mother never remonstrated with him over his teasing, which makes me think him innocent of malice. I think him innocent in general, and I believe I’m not wrong.

  “Having a picnic, outside, in this weather,” Dodo yelled, more loudly still, in the tone of a town crier. “I ask you.”

  How strange to think that I shall never see myself from behind. It’s probably for the best—imagine that waddle—but all the same. I could rig up an arrangement of mirrors, though that would be to cheat. Anyway, I would be conscious of looking at myself, and self-consciousness, that kind of self-consciousness, always leads to falsity, or misconception, at least. Is that true? In this context it is, the context of my looking at myself. The fact is I’ll never see myself, back or front, in the round, so to speak—aptly to speak, in my case—and certainly not as others do. I can’t be natural in front of a mirror; I can’t be natural anywhere, of course, but especially not there. I approach my reflection like an actor stepping on to the stage—as don’t we all? True, on occasion I get the odd unprepared-for glimpse by accident, in shop windows on sunny days, or in a shadowy mirror on the return of a staircase, or in my own shaving glass, even, on a morning when I am fuddled with sleep, or crapulous from the night before. How anxious I look in these moments, how furtive, like one caught out in some base and shameful act. But these glancing encounters are no good either: the unprepared I is no more convincing than any other. The inevitable conclusion being, in my reading of the case, that there is no I—I’ve definitely said that before, and so have others, I’m not alone—that the I I think of, that upright, steadfast candle-flame burning perpetually within me, is a will-o’-the-wisp, a fatuous fire. What is left of me, then, is little more than a succession of poses, a concatenation of attitudes. Don’t mistake me, I find this notion invigorating. Why? Because, for one thing, it multiplies me, sets me among an infinity of universes all of my own, where I can be anything that occasion and circumstance demand, a veritable Proteus whom no one will hold on to for long enough to make him own up. Own up to what, exactly? Why, to all the base and shameful acts that I am guilty of, of course.

  Once, when I was in the middle of a particularly vigorous bout of guilty self-laceration, Polly said to me, not without a touch of impatience, that I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was. I might have pointed out, but didn’t, that what this really meant was that she thought I wasn’t as bad as she thought I was. There’s no limit to how finely Orme’s Razor can slice. Gloria the unwitting sophist said to me one day, “At least be honest and admit you’re a liar.” Kept me mulling for days, that one did; I mull over it yet.

  I looked about. The rim of the sink was chipped, its brass taps were flecked with green. I gazed at a blackened kettle, a tarnished teapot, at the dresser with its cups and plates—delph, we used to call it—and felt, unwillingly, dismayingly, and with awful complacency, at home.

  Olive asked if I would like a cup of tea. I said I could do with a drink. I was acutely conscious of Dodo’s baleful monitoring—it was giving me the fidgets. “I don’t think we have any drink,” Olive said, frowning. It was as if I had asked for a draught of laudanum, or a pinch of moly. She rummaged through cupboards, making a great clatter. “There’s a bottle of stout here,” she said doubtfully. “God knows how old it is.” I watched her glug the blackish-brown stuff into a glass that was fogged all up the sides with the grime of ages. Yellow froth like sea spume, the taste of wormwood. I thought straight off of my father, whose tipple was a pint at evening, just the one. Sometimes the self, the famously inexistent self, can sob all of its own accord, inwardly, without making a sound.

  Olive, leaning at the sink, watched me as I drank. She was smoking another cigarette, with one arm folded across her concave chest. “Remember how I used to make a googy-egg for you?” she said. “A boiled egg chopped up with breadcrumbs and butter in a cup—remember? I bet you don’t, I bet you’ve forgotten. I know you, you only remember what suits you.” This was said with amused forbearance, which is the way in which she habitually treats me. She regards me, I think, as a sort of guileless charlatan, who early on mastered a set of cheap though effective tricks and has been getting away with them ever since, fooling everyone except her, yet all the while remaining, like my father before me, essentially innocent, or just plain dim. “Ah, yes,” she said, “you’ve forgotten who took care of you when you were little and our Ma was off gallivanting.” She laughed at my look. An inch of cigarette ash tumbled down the front of her apron; it always seems to me that ash when it falls like that should make a sound, the far-off rush and rumble of a distant avalanche. “You didn’t know about that, did you, about Ma and her fellas? There’s a lot you didn’t know, and don’t, though you think you’re such a clever-boots.”

  She bent and opened the stove and fed a log into the sudden inferno of its mouth, then kicked the iron door shut again with one of her slippered, foot-long feet.

  Dodo was keeping an unremitting watch on me with her bird’s little glossy black eye. “And him not taking a bit of notice,” she said, disdainful and indignant, and looked from Olive to me and back again, setting her mouth in sulky defiance.

  This time Olive ignored her. “Come out and I’ll show you my workshop,” she said to me, plucking me by the sleeve.

  She dropped the butt of her cigarette into the sink, where it made a hiss that to my ear sounded a definitely derisive note.

  We picked our way across the garden. Under a stunted, forlorn and skeletal tree a cloud of tiny flies, gold-tinted in the chill sunlight, were shuttling energetically up and down, like the fast-running parts of an intricate engine made of air. Wonderful little creatures, to be out and so busy this late in the season. Where would they go to, when the real cold came? I imagined them letting the engine wind down as they subsided slowly into the sparse shelter of the winter grass, where they would lie on, little scattered flecks of fading gold, waiting for the spring. Pure fancy, of course; they’ll simply die.

  “Are you still doing your stories?” Olive asked.

  The pathway was uneven and muddy, and I had to watch the ground to keep from slopping into a puddle or tripping over my feet.

  “Stories?” I said. “What do you mean, stories? It’s pictures I do—did. I’m a painter. Was.”

  “Oh. I thought it was stories.”

  “Well, it isn’t. Wasn’t.”

  She nodded, thinking. “Why?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Why did you stop? Painting pictures, or whatever.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, well, it makes no odds anyhow.”

  This, I should say, was a perfectly typical exchange between my sister and me. I don’t know if she gets things wrong on purpose, to annoy me, or if she really is becoming confused—she’s a good ten years older than I am. And living with Dodo, of course, can hardly be conducive to mental agility.

  What, I wonder, does she make of life, my gangly and unlovely sister, or does she make anything of it at all? Surely she has some notion, some opinion, of what it is to be a sentient being, alive on the surface of this earth. It’s a thing I often ask myself about other people, not just Olive. When she was young, seventeen or so, she was sweet on a boy who wasn’t sweet on her. I can’t remember his name; a grinning lout with crooked teeth and a quiff,
is what I recall. I saw her weeping over him, the day she finally had to admit to herself that he would not have her. It was high summer. She was in the parlour. There was a seat there, in the bay of the front window, no more than a built-in bench, really, hard and uncomfortable, covered with fake leather that had an unpleasant, slightly faecal and yet oddly reassuring smell, like the smell of an elderly pet. It was there Olive had flung herself down, in an awkward pose, seated squarely, with her big feet, in a pair of pink sandals—I see them, those sandals—planted side by side on the floor, while her torso was twisted violently sideways from the waist and draped along the leather-covered bench. She was facing down, with her forehead pressed on her folded arms, sobbing. My mother was there too, kneeling on the floor beside her, stroking with one hand her daughter’s tangled, wiry mop of hair, in which already there were premature streaks of grey, while the other rested on the girl’s heaving shoulder. The sun through the window fell full upon them, bathing them in a great harsh blaze. I remember my mother’s expression of almost panic-stricken helplessness. Even to my young eye, the scene—fey matron comforting weeping maiden—seemed quaintly overdone and much too brightly coloured, like something by Rossetti or Burne-Jones. Nevertheless I looked on agog with fascination and mortal fright, hidden behind the half-open door. I had never seen anyone weep with such passion, such unselfconscious abandon, unashamedly; suddenly my sister had become transfigured, was a creature of mysterious portent, a sacrificial victim laid out upon an altar, awaiting the high priest and his knife. For a long time afterwards I was haunted by a sense of having seen something I should not have been allowed to see, of having stumbled clumsily upon a secret ritual that my presence had grossly polluted. Even a little boy, or a little boy especially, has an eye for the numinous, and out of such instances of transgression and sacred terror the gods were born, in the childhood of the world. Poor Olive. I think that day marked the end of what hopes she might have had for even a half-contented life. Thereafter, the tobacco pipe, the jacket and tie, the mannish lope, these were the ways she found of spitting in the world’s eye.