The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

  Soon stars began breaking out of the dark, first one by one, then clusters of them together, until finally the sky was covered with them as with a tattered sheet of light. The moon was new and a faint silver color.

  She could hear the Offenbach waltz coming from the living room downstairs, but it did not disturb her. Nothing ever really disturbed her, as long as she was allowed to remain by herself.

  Once, she had been staying in a small village on the French-Spanish border, in the hills. The Spanish Civil War was being fought in those days, but there had been no fighting anywhere near where she was.

  On one morning, however, a group of Rebel soldiers, all of whom were drunk, apparently lost, had come to the village, riding horses whose sweated flanks were streaked with the red dust of the road. Thinking themselves to be in Spain, the soldiers had started to shoot at civilians in the streets, certain they were all Loyalists.

  The shooting had lasted, sporadically, for almost an hour and she had been able to hear all of it from her hotel room.

  But it had not frightened or disturbed her. She thought that the noise, even the shots, even the screams, was no more than the beginning of some sort of celebration, perhaps a saint’s day or a national holiday.

  She had sat in bed after finishing her breakfast of rolls and coffee, reading an American movie magazine she had purchased in Nice.

  She left the room only when it was time for dinner; there had been no answer when she had tried to get room service. The entire hotel staff, she told herself, would no doubt be drunk and dancing in the streets. She dressed, went downstairs to the dining room.

  There she saw two hotel clerks lying dead, one behind the desk, the other in the middle of the lobby. Both had been shot. One of the waiters who had apparently been carrying a tray through the lobby had also been shot. His white jacket was spotted in many places with blood and his mouth was opened in a way that made her think he was about to speak. The tray had rolled across the worn tan carpet to the wall and stood leaning against it at a precarious angle, as if it were suspended in the middle of a trick that had not been completed.

  There had been no one about to serve dinner, and she had been forced to return to her room and open a box of chocolates. She then waited for more than an hour, until finally a small boy dressed in a bellhop’s uniform that was much too big for him came, with tears dried on his cheeks, to tell her what the disturbance had been.

  Now there was an Offenbach waltz in the parlor downstairs and the sound of waves to be heard from her windows.

  Miss Smith got up, went to the closet where her suitcases were. She found a box of chocolates and placed it on the night table beside her bed.

  eight

  The sea this night was calm. Its black surface was covered with the reflections of a countless number of stars. Breakers fell in on the white sands, reached up as high as they could upon the beach as if they had crossed thousands of miles on some mission and were now only failing by a matter of inches to reach their final destination.

  Shells that were older than continents were washed in haphazardly, tossed one way or the other, often sucked out again into the sea by the edge of a retreating wave.

  Small pools formed on the beach in holes and gullies that had been left by footprints or a castle or a washed-out piece of driftwood.

  Miss Smith took a sleeping pill, two chocolates, and then lay down in her four-poster bed, thinking how curious it was that whenever she came back to the sea it always took her several nights to become accustomed to its sound.

  Sygen stood by her window and thought she heard a gull cry in the distance.

  Jean slept easily, the first one in the house to fall asleep.

  Mrs. Orlovski, wearing a white dressing gown, went down quietly to the kitchen. She closed the door before she turned on the light. She then went to the large refrigerator in the pantry. She shivered a bit as she stepped into the long room. She took a piece of boiled beef, an apple, and several slices of bread and put them in a paper bag. She folded the bag neatly across the top and placed it on the porch just outside the back door. She paused only a moment. The nights now were much too cold to remain outside. She looked across the long dunes that were colored dark gray by the moon’s light. She saw no sign of any movement. She sighed, pulled her gown in tighter around her, and returned to the kitchen, locking the door.

  On her way upstairs to her room, Mrs. Orlovski thought that perhaps it was a good omen a winter guest had come. She believed in omens. That was why she always placed the bag of food on the back porch. She told herself she did not know who the food was for. But she did know that it was always gone in the morning.

  She paused outside her daughter’s room and in a whisper said, “Are you asleep?” She waited a moment and when there was no answer she smiled and moved on to the door of her son’s room, where she asked the same question in the same voice, and again when she received no answer she knew he was asleep and so her day was done.

  chapter 2

  one

  MISS SMITH saw the sun rising out of the green sea. It startled her. One might see dragons this suddenly. But then she saw it was not the sun. It was something golden. She could not make out what it was. It touched clouds and frayed edges of sky. It kept rising, then falling under impatient waves.

  The sea with its golden mystery on this morning was a picture framed in her window, stained glass, an image trying to break through long silence as saints and unicorns do on cathedral windows or caught in the tapestry that hangs on the wall of some high castle chamber.

  And yet the picture was incomplete. A faint mist drifted across the sea and beach. If she were to open her window and reach out a hand, she was certain she would be able to touch, feel that mist: faint as it was, there was something solid about it, something you could be sure would never fade up forever into the impossible white depths of the sky. And it was this mist that made the picture incomplete. It was as if the painter had not been sure just how to finish his picture and so had left it standing for months, even years, and in that time the mist had settled about it like dust or the webs spiders weave in deserted rooms. It needed only a touch or two to be finished. But where was the painter? And what would he finally decide to do? What colors were still possible? What truth could be snatched out of the air, like trying to catch a gull in flight?

  Miss Smith was about to turn from the window when she saw that the golden object in the sea was not the sun, but the head of someone swimming. At first realization of this fact, she shuddered, almost felt the cold herself. It was much too cold to be swimming. October was almost over. She was wearing her gray woolen suit and it was not too warm. She would put on a sweater or her light coat before she went outside. And there someone was actually swimming. Why, it was madness, she thought. But then she shrugged as she turned from the window. She had, of course, seen much stranger things in her life, and it was time to take her morning walk.

  two

  Jean rolled over on his back and let the sea carry him. He drifted easily, no stranger. Waves sprayed up over his head, a light shower always falling into his eyes and mouth, but this did not bother him.

  The water was warm, filled, teeming with endless life, ten thousand creatures still unnamed washing against him. There was too a softness to this sea that no other part of earth possessed, a softness of all one could ever wish for, desire of all time turned green under the cold stars. You could go diving down into these depths, feel currents whirl about you like ancient wild dancers celebrating, as they always were, the birth of one god or another.

  Jean swam this way every morning, even in winter. The sea was another home to him. But more than a home, it contained all journeys, touched all destinations. Jean had often thought God himself would be like the sea if the sea had no shore and no bottom.

  He had started swimming this way when he had been little more than a baby, as he now remembered it. The doctor who had first treated his eyes in the early years, when there had been some hope of hi
s being cured, told his mother one day how he envied her living by the sea as she did. Jean had been in the room, had listened to all the doctor had said, though he could hardly understand any of what either the doctor or his mother had to say, so much remembered from those days spoken in a foreign tongue he grew in slow time to understand.

  The doctor told his mother how as a young man he had grown up by the sea. His father had been a fisherman off the California coast near Monterey. Every single morning, in all seasons, he and his father would go swimming together. And Jean, as a child, had often thought the sea to be full of fathers.

  Jean’s mother had commented that it would be much too cold in winter where she lived. She told this story. The doctor had merely laughed.

  “We moved east to the Cape, you know,” the doctor said. “I was thirteen then. But we still went swimming every morning. My mother would always be telling us that one day we’d freeze to death, but we never did. It’s so fine in the winter. You have the feeling the sea belongs to you.” He had laughed here, and Jean even now could remember the happy quality of that laughter: it was a quality so few people ever had when they laughed; it was the laughter of a man who knows the price of his own freedom and who has paid the price.

  “Every morning,” the doctor had said. “There were even times we had to push pieces of ice aside, you know. But you get used to it. Actually it builds you up. Why, would you believe it—I never had a cold in my life until I moved to the city and stopped swimming every morning. Would you believe that?” He’d laughed again and had added, “Men die of all their damn fool comforts.”

  As a child, Jean had thought that swimming this way would have some effect on his eyes. Hadn’t the doctor said he had never had a cold as long as he had gone swimming every morning? Perhaps the sea would help him too, not in the matter of colds, but as far as washing the darkness out of his eyes.

  At first Jean had spent much of his time swimming underwater, always with his eyes opened wide. The salt had stung the dead tissue, had made his eyes red, so his mother would tell him he was never again to go in swimming that way. And somehow, when he would open his eyes underwater, he often felt as if he actually could see. Here was a dark kingdom that existed for just such as he, for those who could carry the darkness with them like a legacy. Jean would see fishes and flowers and great rocks and drifting seaweed clouds colored as no man or even God could ever color them. He would hear strange singing sounds, echoes that had traveled as far as the tides, a kind of music that was made of time itself.

  “One day you’ll swim out in the wrong direction,” his mother once told him. She rarely spoke of anything that had to do with his being blind. She had used this only as a final argument when nothing else she said would work.

  “I can feel the tides going in,” Jean said to her.

  “One day if no one is there with you, you’ll just start swimming to . . . well, to Africa, for all you know,” she said.

  Jean had laughed at his mother, and Sygen had said, “He couldn’t ever find his way to Africa, Mother. You’ve nothing to fear.”

  Jean rolled over again and started to swim. He was a powerful swimmer. His body moved through the green waves indeed as if he were some fabled sea creature and not a man at all.

  three

  “... my golden-haired children,” Mrs. Orlovski was saying. “Yes. Yes, they don’t look a thing like me.” She always used that phrase—“my golden-haired children”—as a joke, but no one she said it to ever thought she was joking and some thought her pretentious when she said this.

  She had been dusting in the living room when Miss Smith had come down from her room. Miss Smith had asked her who on earth could be swimming on such a cold morning and Mrs. Orlovski had explained that Jean, her son, went swimming every morning.

  “I try to stop him, of course,” Mrs. Orlovski said. “But he won’t listen to me. A mother’s words soon become like the chirping of a sparrow.” She shook her head with a faint smile of knowing it must be this way, that there is nothing at all to be done about it. “But then I suppose it’s safe enough,” she went on. “He’s an excellent swimmer. He’s been doing that ever since he could walk.”

  “It makes me shiver just to think of it,” Miss Smith said and she smiled. It was the first time Mrs. Orlovski had seen her guest smile.

  She took this smile as a sign that they could speak freely now and so she proceeded immediately with her description of her golden-haired children who looked nothing at all like her.

  “Their father was a sea captain,” Mrs. Orlovski explained. “Yes. Golden-haired the way they are. But with a fierce look to him. His face was covered by a beard and he had hands that could break a woman in two.” She laughed happily at this memory. “When I first met him—I was only a girl, of course—he actually frightened me. Oh dear yes. I’d had my dreams of what a man would be, of what my man would be, the man who would one day have me. I had such dreams. All girls do. But how could I ever have dreamt of that beard or those hands. And his hair grew so long and his voice was deep, so deep. I’d never known anyone at all like him, not even in these girl’s dreams.” She paused a moment, then went on in a softer, more thoughtful voice. “For the longest time, I couldn’t believe anyone really looked like that,” she said. “I thought perhaps he had been to a masquerade, and I was always expecting him to take off his costume, his mask. So strange, you know,” she said. “Yes. I was walking on the beach one Sunday and he came up to me. He said, ‘Are you looking for a way to cross that sea, girl?’ ”

  Mrs. Orlovski was silent again; then she sighed, glanced over toward the door and finally back to Mrs. Smith, and said, “Now isn’t that a strange thing for a man to say? . . . to cross that sea . . . Yes . . . Well . . . I think it would have frightened me if any other man would have said that. I mean frightened so that I would have run away. But not with him, not with Captain Orlovski. There was something about him that made me feel as if I would never be frightened—not that way—again for as long as I lived. Or perhaps I just fell in love with him as soon as I saw him and so the only fear I did feel was not to make me run away, but a fear that he would not love me. Only that kind of fear. Oh, my, he was such a man! He’d been around the world dozens of times. He’d seen China and Europe and Australia and even Africa. He had such stories to tell. . . . why, when he’d come home from one of his voyages, the children and I would sit about him and listen for hours while he told us of the people he had seen, the ports he had visited. He’d bring us back all sorts of gifts—jewelry and toys and pieces of silk to make dresses. Why there were times I actually believed there was no real world out there . . . only the world that existed in the stories Captain Orlovski told us. He could bring back Africa and hand it to you the way someone else might hand you a pearl or a spool of thread.” Mrs. Orlovski paused and smiled. “And he was the gentlest man in the world,” she added.

  Miss Smith stood there, silent, waiting for Mrs. Orlovski to go on.

  Sygen came to the kitchen doorway. She stood there, also waiting for her mother to go on with her story.

  But all Mrs. Orlovski said was, “Now I’m dusting tables and chairs.” And the smile hung like a faded photograph of itself upon her lips as she continued with the work she had been doing.

  four

  Miss Smith was startled by the sight of the half-naked young man coming up out of the water. She had been walking on the beach. She had looked out at the ocean to see if the swimmer was still there. When she had not seen him, she had assumed he had finished his morning swim and had returned to the house.

  A wind had started up from the south and was blowing handfuls of spindrift along the beach. She watched them roll and tumble by her like acrobats practicing old, simple tricks. She was amused by them at first. If they were men, she thought, they would be fat and you would be very surprised to see how graceful they were. But then she thought how empty a fate that must be, as the acrobats dissolved, to be blown one way and then the next by any wind that com
es along.

  Then, not more than twenty feet from her, the man’s figure suddenly appeared. It was the blond young man she had seen from her window. She stopped in her tracks, turned toward the water as if she would be expected to say something.

  The young man swam in until his hands scraped the sand bottom, then he stood up slowly, letting the ends of waves break in a splash of foam around his legs.

  He shook the water from him as an animal might, pushed his blond hair back, and started to walk in toward the shore.

  As soon as he was on dry land, he stopped and looked first one way, then the other. He waited for several moments. Miss Smith turned and started to walk away when the young man called out, “Sygen . . .’

  Miss Smith stopped, and as she turned, she gasped, hand quickly to her mouth to cover it, because the young man was walking straight toward her, and before she could get out of his way he bumped right into her.

  “Playing your games, eh?” he said.

  And before Miss Smith had a chance to answer him, the young man took her in his arms and kissed her on the side of the face, then moving his mouth until it was on hers, and he kissed her a long time.

  For some reason she did not understand, Miss Smith did not fight to free herself from the young man’s embrace. She was not even really surprised by his action. She let him kiss her and though she felt nothing really, she was aware of his desire, as if she were watching a scene in a movie.

  When he let go of her, he said, “Where’s my towel?”

  Miss Smith looked around, saw a red-and-white towel lying on the sand some ten yards down the beach.

  “It’s over there,” she said.

  The young man was silent. He stood facing her, his hands hanging at his sides, powerful hands, but looking strangely helpless now.

  Miss Smith was about to point to where the towel was when she realized that the young man was blind.