The Blue Guitar
Page 4
Tico Reeves was not tall, but he was built well, with heavy arms and broad shoulders that were hardened from carrying rocks and timber and sometimes the body of another prisoner who had collapsed in the insatiable heat. His face had a square look to it as if a sculptor had started on a square block of stone, had fashioned eyes, nose, mouth, and then had stopped without trying to round out the rest of the face properly. His sandy hair, almost the color of soiled gold, was cut short, and since he did not bother to comb it, it grew forward on his head, giving him a boyish or a Roman look, and when he smiled, he did not seem to be much out of his teens.
The world to Tico Reeves was a mysterious place, unfathomable as a hall of mirrors; but it was wild too and blind with wonders and darkest when the sun high at noon illuminated everything to be seen with light that only touched the surface of the stone, like some chameleon crawling over it.
He had spent all his boyhood on a poor-dirt farm outside of Allemands, where he’d been born with two sisters who married, one already with child, the other too drunk at her wedding to remember after it was all over that she was a bride, so she came crawling in the back window the next morning as if she’d been out on a juking party the night before and feared being discovered by a mother who would have whipped the skin off her bones. There were three brothers too, silent big men, two with wives, one with whiskey. Tico Reeves had worked the fields with his father before that man had run off one June night taking only whiskey and his derby hat with him, never to return to a woman he had despised even before taking her as his bride; then he had worked the same fields with the three brothers and sometimes even the man-armed mother herself, until he’d taken off to New Orleans on that day of the loose white dress and the knifing that put him into prison for the remainder of his youth. Now he looked young enough and was only twenty-nine, but the inside of him had died in too many ways ever to be young again, and he knew this and he had become old enough not to care.
But as he stood now on the empty tall dunes, the mere sight of the sea pounding in on the beach like ten hundred prison hammers on that many stones, thrilled, stirred him, made him smile, almost tremble with the excitement of it, and once, as if he thought the sea was challenging him in some way, he shouted out to it, “O.K.—come on in, damn you!” And then he had laughed out loud into the fine great roaring sound of the breakers that filled his ears.
He continued walking along the dunes that, having crossed mountains on foot, made him think these were the remains of mountains, ruins, ghosts blown by the wind, the land crumbling back into the sea the way infants cry, howl to return to their beginnings.
He walked and felt no weariness. His feet dug into the loose sand, his shoes filling with it. The farther he walked, the stronger he seemed to become. This world was so different from the world he had come out of, the very freshness of it, the clean free look and absence of decay and then too, the distance out across chopping waves that could not be followed to its end; all this gave strength to him and joy tore open silent new places in him to let light in and the thousand sounds that were as that many wild birds let out of a single cage in an instant.
When he saw the bodies on the sand, Tico Reeves stopped as if he had walked into a wall. He was amazed first, then frightened. He felt his insides double up as if twisting back from a hard blow. He thought immediately to hide, but caught himself in time, realized he no longer had to hide from anything, from anybody.
But he did not want them to see him, so he circled down below the dunes, his feet pushing through windswept brown beach grass, until he came to where he figured they were, and then he crawled on his belly to the edge of the dune, just a little to one side of where they were.
As soon as he saw them this close, Tico Reeves felt his blood explode inside him. They were making love. “God damn Jesus . . .” Then, “God damn . . .” He groaned to himself as he made fists and pressed his eyes shut and hated the two he saw there wildly taking each other and with a joy that ached in his flesh like those agonies we know only in dreams.
But even with his eyes shut he could hear them. There were no other sounds in all the world, the thousand become one. He could hear their soft cries, their moaning, the girl laughing once, the words they spoke, even the very movement of their bodies.
He opened his eyes again and watched them. He pressed his body down as hard as he could into the sand. What he felt was like hatred and yet it was not hatred; it was like fear too and a terrible need to destroy, and yet it was neither of these. It was an open huge awful space that had to be filled, and it was as if he had to hold his body back from falling into it the way a man fights to keep from drowning.
The girl was more beautiful than any he had ever seen, more beautiful than the pictures other prisoners tore out of newspapers and magazines for purposes far beyond love. Her long blond hair was tangled about her face, across her wide, green, almond eyes, strands of it even caught at the corners of her mouth. Her body was still tan from summer, even her breasts that looked to be the very softest things in the world. And her legs had such strength in them as they held the body of the boy she was with that Tico Reeves was sure they could, if they so wished, break that boy’s body right in two.
Tico Reeves lay there on his belly in the sand, watching the lovers. With both hands he gripped the wood cross that hung at his neck, gripped it so hard, with so fierce and blind a need, that he could feel the edges of it cutting into the palms of his hands. And then he rolled over onto his back with a soft moan and let his hands fall helplessly to his groin and he watched clouds the color of dead flesh move slowly by overhead and felt like a man in a coffin who can see the sky and yet cannot cry out to those who would bury him that there is still this much life left in him.
chapter 3
one
FOR SEVERAL DAYS MISS SMITH waited at her window each morning to watch Jean go running into the gray sea. He seemed free as an animal the minute he touched the water. He seemed, in fact, not to be blind any more. There was absolutely no hesitation about his movements when he went running swiftly down the beach, and then as soon as the water broke in around his waist he would dive into a tall breaker and disappear for what seemed to her an impossible time before rising up golden as on that first morning, and he would swim out always farther than Miss Smith thought was really safe, but she never once thought of calling him back or telling him he was in danger.
She would stand by her window and watch him swimming, watch his golden head disappear, then rise out of the waves again, and each time he reappeared this way she felt pleased, almost as if she herself had achieved something and once even because she had stood there watching and wondering how men drown.
She thought him to be a remarkable swimmer. And that was exactly what she said one morning when Mrs. Orlovski came into the room without knocking.
Miss Smith was startled as she turned from the window to see Mrs. Orlovski standing in the doorway also with a surprised expression on her round face and a mop in her hand.
“I thought you were out,” Mrs. Orlovski said. “I was sure I’d seen you go downstairs. Isn’t that funny?”
Miss Smith said, “It’s all right. I’m just going out now.”
“Please don’t let me chase you,” said Mrs. Orlovski.
Miss Smith smiled and in her deep voice said, “Your son is a remarkable swimmer. I see him sometimes from my window.” She felt greatly relieved as soon as she said this, as if she had freed herself from any possible suspicion.
Mrs. Orlovski, however, was not at all pleased with this compliment for her son. On the contrary, she seemed troubled, even angry, and she said, “I’ve tried so many times to make him stop this swimming of his. It frightens me.”
“But he swims as if he had been born a fish,” Miss Smith said, smiling emptily, hoping to make Mrs. Orlovski laugh with this remark.
But all Mrs. Orlovski said was, “I’m so afraid of losing him.”
Miss Smith, quite accustomed to not being able to make peo
ple laugh, now merely waited for Mrs. Orlovski to go on.
“I have dreams sometimes of Jean swimming out in the wrong direction,” Mrs. Orlovski said. “Thinking he’s swimming back to land, but swimming straight out to sea instead. And then when he realizes he’s going in the wrong direction, it’s always too late. He has no more strength left, and he drowns.”
“You really dream that?” Miss Smith asked. She was always rather surprised whenever she heard that anyone dreamed anything at all, for she herself never dreamed.
Mrs. Orlovski was silent a moment. Then she smiled faintly and said, “Now here I am bothering you with my silly dreams.” She sighed, leaned the mop against the wall. “I don’t really know whatever got into me this morning. I’ll come back later to do the room.” She started to go.
Miss Smith said, “No, please. I’m going out now. I do love the sea air. It makes one feel so completely alive.”
As Miss Smith put on her gray tweed coat, Mrs. Orlovski seemed to forget the dream that had troubled her and she said, “Yes. Yes, I remember my late husband, Captain Orlovski, always saying that the sea gave a man new life. He always used to tell me that as long as a man stayed close to the sea he would never grow old.”
two
Miss Smith, on this morning, started to walk away from that section of the beach where Jean would come out of the water. She saw his sister sitting on the sand waiting for him. When Jean came out, his sister went to fetch him, the towel in her hand, and as soon as she led him up the beach to where his clothing was, she started to walk back to the house.
When Miss Smith saw this, she turned and walked toward where Jean was instead of away from him. She walked slowly, gazing every now and then out to sea or at gulls that were always circling slowly overhead, crying out in shrill, beaten voices like old women at a market.
As she approached Sygen, Miss Smith felt a flush of embarrassment. But when the girl said good morning to her, Miss Smith smiled easily and said, “It’s so pleasant to walk on the beach.” And that was all there was to it and Miss Smith was very pleased, as she always was when she would discover to her eternal surprise that so many things one had to do in life were so much easier to accomplish than she had ever thought they could be.
When she came to where Jean was, she thought to glance back and see if Sygen had reached the house, but then she was afraid that if she did this and the girl was watching, somehow the girl would know something she did not want her to know.
She stood there for several moments, watching Jean. He had put on his trousers and a white shirt he did not bother to button.
Finally Miss Smith said, “Good morning.”
She was startled when Jean looked directly at her as soon as she spoke. It was as if he could really see and was using the blindness only as some sort of trick.
“Have you come down for a swim?” Jean asked with a smile.
Miss Smith laughed nervously and said, “I’d freeze to death.” She shivered as a way of illustrating what she meant, but stopped this almost immediately when she realized that he could not see what she was doing.
“Actually the water’s very warm,” Jean said.
Miss Smith said, “Even if I found that it was, I wouldn’t believe it.”
Jean laughed at this. He lay back, resting on his elbows. His blond hair was mussed and hung over his forehead. Miss Smith had never realized what a strong face he had before this moment as she stood there looking down at him. It was strong and at the same time the strength seemed to be composed of delicate shadings like a tall building that is made of glass.
“You know,” Jean said after a silence, “I really owe you an apology.”
“Me?”
He nodded. “The other morning,” he said.
“But what for?” she asked him.
She stood there with her hands shoved down into the pockets of her coat, her feet set firmly apart, as if to brace herself. The wind blew the hair back off her face and tiny pale veins showed at her temples like the wing markings of a butterfly.
“When I kissed you,” Jean said. He shrugged the way a child might when an answer seems incomplete to him and he knows no way of doing any better.
“I thought you said——”
“... Sygen,” said Jean, nodding. “Yes. I said I thought you were Sygen. But I knew you weren’t. The blind see more than most people think they do.” He said this easily, in a way that made blindness almost like having blond or black hair. “I knew it was you and still I kissed you.”
Miss Smith was surprised to feel herself smiling; in a gesture that was typical of her, she placed her right hand lightly to the barely painted corner of her mouth to be sure the smile was really there. She was often surprised at things she did or said or felt. She was always surprising herself in the oddest ways. She sometimes thought of herself as someone who had been lent another soul and body and so, of course, she did not know this soul, this body, and everything she did was new, often amazing. Her life thus assumed the guise for her of a vague spectacle, hushed somehow, always bordering on that edge of silence that touches the beginning of death itself.
She did not think until much later that night how strange it was that this boy spoke so simply of kissing his sister as he had kissed her, as only lovers kiss. But when the idea came to her it seemed mixed up with her remembering the smile, all of it blurred together, diminished, calm as she wished all aspects of her life to be. It also drew this golden-haired boy into a world of night she had always found comfortable, a world inhabited, she had once thought, by those who live out no more really than a haunting memory of some other life they have lived in some other time. She remembered one of her leading men once telling her how he was certain that in another life he had been the wife of some poor, hard-cursing, smoke-colored man and had spent that life mending his socks, boiling his meat and potatoes, and giving him children enough to keep his walloping hands busy so that he would finally leave her with some small measure of final peace. “We’ve all lived other lives,” he had told her. “But there are only a few of us who can remember and we always turn out to be the haunted, the terrible, the mad ones—the creatures who must turn an entire lifetime into either a grotesque or a laughable charade.” But then she had only been amused that this mourning memory of a smoke-colored housewife was the love-idol of millions of other smoke-colored housewives who had his darning to do and his sad children to bear upon their knees.
Now on the beach, with this wind touching them that had perhaps touched those other lives, he was apologizing for having kissed her and she said, “I don’t think that makes anything to be sorry about.”
Jean seemed pleased by her reply and said, “Won’t you sit down for a while?”
“I was taking a walk,” she said.
“I often sit here for hours,” he said. “I listen to the sea the way other people listen to music. Once you get to know it well enough, the sea makes a million different sounds. Little by little you’ll be able to pick them out. You’ll see. . . .”
Miss Smith turned to watch the waves breaking down with somnambulic ease upon the white sands. She saw a crab at the water’s edge. The crab was trying to walk up the beach, but twice, spent edges of the tide sucked it back into the sea. Each time, the crab returned and finally, struggling fiercely against a third rushing of the green tide, the crab escaped it and was safe on the dry sand. It scurried in its crazy, lopsided way up the beach several yards and then started burrowing down into the dry sand, and in a matter of minutes it completed a task that seemed as if it would have taken such a tiny creature hours at least and it was gone from sight.
When Miss Smith turned back to Jean, he was no longer looking at her. He was staring out at the sea and for an instant she wondered whether perhaps he thought she had walked away. This made her feel sorry as if she had wronged him with her silence.
Miss Smith sat down on the sand beside Jean, but still he did not turn to her.
Miss Smith said, “I was watching a funny
crab run up out of the ocean.”
Jean said, “There’s a whole world right under us.” “In the sand?”
He nodded.
Miss Smith took a handful of sand and examined it as it ran slowly through her slender fingers. She saw nothing in the sand.
Jean said, “The sand, I’m told, has a lifeless look to it. But underneath it’s full of all sorts of creatures. There are moon snails, sea mice, heart urchins, hundreds of creatures.” Then he smiled and added, “The moon snail is even blind. But it has no need of eyes, you see. Nature, oddly enough, knows very well what she’s doing most of the time. The moon snail lives almost his entire life in the sand, buried in it. He only uses his feelers to find his way about.”
“And I can see only the sand,” Miss Smith said.
“Did you know that a grain of sand is practically indestructible?” Jean asked her.
“A grain of sand?” Miss Smith laughed, delighted with this news, like a child hearing some part of a story that is marvelous.
“This is what mountains become,” Jean continued. “Mountains are the great towers of the earth, and yet sooner or later they all become no more than a grain of sand. There are so many things about it, just about the sand, without even bothering about the creatures who live in it. For example, each grain of wet sand has a film of water around it. No matter how hard the surf pounds down, it can’t cause one grain of sand to rub against another.”