The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

  Miss Smith said, “In my hand, they’re all touching.”

  And Jean said, “It only seems that way. Why, there’s a world of creatures who are so small in the sand we can’t even conceive of it. One tiny droplet of water that separates one grain of sand from another is like a great dark sea.”

  Miss Smith took up another handful of sand and looked at it as if she were seeing it now for the first time. In fact, it was no longer really sand any more. She was holding a world in the palm of her hand and knowing this suddenly made her feel giddy, and for a moment she was sorry she had stopped to talk to the young man.

  But as she let the sand flow through her fingers this feeling left her, and she smiled at Jean and she heard herself say, “You must tell me all about this very tiny world of yours.”

  three

  Sygen could see them from the kitchen window. She stood there holding a dish and a damp green towel in her hands. Her mother was going on as usual about the summer guests they had entertained during the season just past.

  Sygen saw Miss Smith sit down on the sand beside Jean. She saw them talking, and then Miss Smith laughed. The sight of her laughing this way made Sygen feel uneasy, even suspicious. Until this moment she had thought of Miss Smith as a most solemn, even a completely humorless sort of person, incapable of laughter. Now it was as if her laughter were a precious secret she had chosen to confide only to Jean.

  Mrs. Orlovski was folding the blue tablecloth neatly along its original lines, repeating the story of how she had suspected from the beginning that something would happen between Mr. Rolls and that big Mrs. Jameson who was from somewhere in Virginia.

  “Maybe you won’t believe it now,” Mrs. Orlovski was saying as she pressed the tablecloth to her large bosom, “but I knew it was going to happen the minute they stepped into the house.”

  Sygen continued to dry the same dish with a slow, aimless turning of her hands. Off in the corner of the large kitchen stood the great black stove that, as children, Jean and Sygen had often known to be the castle of a wicked black king who ate only fire and whose jewel chests were filled only with glowing coals. Sygen glanced at the stove for a moment, saw only that it would need a cleaning soon, and then she turned her eyes back to the window, to the wide sea and beach. Now Jean too was laughing and Miss Smith was holding up a handful of sand and Sygen wondered whatever on earth there was to laugh at in a handful of sand.

  “Of course,” Mrs. Orlovski said with one of her very deep sighs that seemed to shake her entire being, “I had no idea it would happen the way it did. Imagine that little man thinking up such tricks!” She laughed softly to herself, for no matter how anything shocked her—and she was easily shocked—once that reaction was properly served and done with, she would always be amused by whatever it had been that had shocked her. It was a foolish circle, but it was one that never seemed to end. Mrs. Orlovski believed with a secrecy violated only in dreams that all the past could be mended with laughter.

  “There she was standing at least a foot taller than him,” Mrs. Orlovski said. “And in those terribly high heels and with those . . . black stockings on!” She laughed again, but this time nervously, since this image never ceased to both amuse and at the same time unsettle her just a bit, never sure the danger was completely known. “. . . black stockings,” she repeated. “Can you imagine that? Why they both looked at me as if I were the avenging angel himself, Lord keep us! Of course I just closed the door as quickly as I could and went on my way. Well . . .” She was placing the blue tablecloth back into the drawer now as she spoke. “. .. wouldn’t you just know that neither one of them showed the least sign of being embarrassed when they came down that night for dinner? Wouldn’t you just know it? Why I was good and ready to tell them they could take their shenanigans to somebody else’s house for the summer. But I do hate so to start any kind of trouble. Now isn’t that so, dear?”

  She looked over at her daughter, but she did not really expect any answer from her. She was accustomed to rattling on this way to Sygen, sometimes for as long as an hour on end when the two of them were working about the house, and not to receive any answer.

  The one comment Sygen would make when she was in a grouchy or merely an impatient mood for one reason or another was simply, “Well, if you’d only knock on doors for a change and not just go barging in . . .”

  And that was true; it had always been true. Mrs. Orlovski hardly ever did knock on any door. She was always barging into rooms while people were still there and usually occupied in living out those aspects or possibilities or even hopes of themselves that could exist or be realized only behind closed doors. Of course, she always had a broom or a mop or some clean towels in her hand to show that her intentions were purely honorable. And it was really amazing how few guests really objected to these intrusions, even when they were caught—as they so often were—at their most compromising best or worst, as the case might be. It often seemed to her that they were actually pleased in some secret way that they had been discovered, as if the indiscretion itself had to be known by a third party before it could really exist, the way a holy man who does not believe in any god will pray for years and years in secret and call a halt to his prayers only after he has been discovered by some idiot milk maid or even her goat, just so long as he can be sure that his prayer has been heard.

  Mrs. Orlovski had opened doors even as a child, though she could never remember any more what she had seen in those young days of herself. Now, however, she had a store of memories from her opening of summer doors that could last her a hundred years of constant talking. And that was precisely what she did for most of the winter: tell her stories of the summer that had passed, along with those stories saved from other seasons because they had etched a special place in her cluttered memory.

  “And do you remember when Mr. Jameson would come out for the weekend?” Mrs. Orlovski asked her daughter. “Lord, Lord, now wasn’t that a scene to see! The three of them sitting together at dinner and smiling and talking as if the whole world were rosy pink as a baby.” She laughed at this and sat down at the kitchen table, letting her legs fall apart into a relaxed position under her woolen skirt as if she did not have the strength to control them a moment longer.

  “I used to watch them,” Mrs. Orlovski said. “Mr. Buvelo even commented one evening that it was a terrible thing to behold and you know Mr. Buvelo isn’t a man to be shocked very easily. No . . .” She shook her head and repeated the word “No” to herself as if to reassure herself that Mr. Buvelo certainly wasn’t a man to be shocked.

  “Of course, I for one could never understand how she had the nerve,” Mrs. Orlovski continued, “to show herself in those skimpy bathing suits . . . with that figure of hers . . . with that fat hanging all over her. Why I honestly believe that horse of a woman actually thought she was a raving beauty. She truly did.” Mrs. Orlovski nodded emphatically as if someone had challenged her remark. “It’s just beyond me how some women can look into a mirror and never see themselves. An ugly horse of a woman like that . . . And do you know, dear,” she went on, “that she had the nerve to ask me to save that same front room for her next year. She told me she had never spent such an enjoyable summer. Of course, I was going to tell her just why it had been that enjoyable, but I didn’t see any sense in starting trouble.” She paused and was silent for several moments. Sygen placed the well-dried dish down on the sink board along with the others she had dried.

  “They’ll both be back,” Mrs. Orlovski said, shaking her head and heaving another of her very deep sighs. “They’ll both be back all right. And it’ll be exactly the same . . . exactly the same . . . black stockings and all . . .”

  Then Mrs. Orlovski was silent for a long time because her mind had turned from the black stockings of Mrs. Jameson to the happier topic of dear Mr. Buvelo. And even as his name came to her, she could not help smiling and blushing just a bit as she folded her soft hands neatly in her lap.

  Mr. Buvelo had been coming back to sp
end the entire summer for the past fifteen years. And even though Mrs. Orlovski believed she knew absolutely everyone else’s darkest secret, she was firmly convinced that absolutely no one was aware that she and Mr. Buvelo had been lovers during every one of the fifteen summers he had spent at her house.

  Sygen watched Jean and Miss Smith get up. Miss Smith took hold of her brother’s arm and they started walking off together along the beach. A curlew followed after them and a cloud had the funny shape of a dog’s head. Jean’s red sweater hung over the back of one of the kitchen chairs and Sygen wondered why it was there. Her mind was suddenly filled with the oddest assortment of images, the way old closets are piled high with the years and when, on some rainy afternoon, we open them, time comes falling out in red sweaters, straw hats, shoes, boxes of letters, magazines, feathers, a green mop, a framed photograph, or records that were broken once and not thrown away. Sygen remembered someone telling her how Death was most probably a hairless man whose hairpiece had grown into his skull. But who had told her such a thing? And when? It was an absurd idea and Sygen promised herself that she would never remember this hairless man again.

  It was some time before Mrs. Orlovski broke the silence. When she did, she said, “I’ll fix some lamb chops for supper. That’ll be nice, don’t you think, dear?”

  And Sygen, turning to her mother, said, “I’ll go and get them out of the freezer.”

  “Thank you, dear,” said Mrs. Orlovski, with a quiet smile.

  four

  Pictures were all the old man, Pojo, could remember with any accuracy. If he had found a dead gull only yesterday, a single night might turn the bird into a mackerel or a crab. But he could remember faces he had seen in photographs twenty and thirty years ago as if he had only an hour past encountered that very person in the flesh he had never known to begin with.

  Pojo was a loose-jointed, gangling, lopsided man with a huge trunk perched precariously on top of legs tiny enough to fit a man a third his size; with round face as large as an antique clock, flat, scarred with clay lines of a dozen different emotions no one would ever suspect to find in a man, lines that could have been of smiling, bewilderment or fury in a man, but were something in him too blurred up savagely together and obscure ever to be given names that were defined so easily.

  His skin was burned deep leather-brown by sun and wind; his large black eyes glowed with the dangerous innocence found only in jungle beasts who, despite whatever ferocious hungers may burn every night wildly alive in them, still have never lived in the world of men.

  He spoke in a thick accent that was not clearly of any nation, a tongue rutted out of need to utter some sound, as men once must have called stone a hundred sounds before these hundred became one. There were times too when, instead of speaking, he would make only moaning or hissing sounds, before stone was given even those hundred names.

  But he had been taught the sounds. “Moan now, you bastard. Moan . . .” Then: “Now hiss!” The big black woman said this to him, making the sounds first, moaning, hissing, then saying, “Now you, you bastard.” They had wanted a woman first, but too many towns would send sheriffs to say how a man doing it was foul lousy enough, but a woman doing it was to go further than even the pigs of them could take without going lust-crazy or just plain puking sick. But a circus in small dirt towns had to have a geek like a city show needed stage and lights. The black woman, in yellow stained dress, had her belly as big with some kind of child as if she’d swallowed a boulder or a pile of garbage or a whole live baby to make it her own that way, with no acrobat, clown, polltender, barker, tamer of cats, or whiskey-bum worker of them caring whose it was. She herself said, “It’s my bastard,” letting it go that easy, laughing loud when she’d say it. And taking on any more of them who wanted her whenever and wherever they said just: “Come here, nigger.”

  But she was the one who stood there in the yellow dress, hands on big hips, to teach him the moaning and hissing sounds; and when he got them right, she turned to someone he could not remember and said, “He got it all right now, boss.” And to him the sounds were to become a kind of language, as if someone, even the black big woman, had taught him French or Greek. Since he rarely, if ever, had any occasion now to speak to human beings, it mattered little really whether he made these groaning sounds or if he spoke with words of one language or another.

  Pojo had roamed the beach for nearly twenty years. He had been fired, thrown out of the circus one night for heaving a live snake up at a young redheaded woman who had come on four successive nights outside of Memphis to see the circus, his part of it. The young woman had spent the entire evening on the last three visits watching Pojo in his round sawdust pit, gobbling the live lizards and frogs and toads and snakes just as the black woman had taught him, even laughing as she did, with the two of them on their hands and knees in the sawdust, and her saying, “Maybe yer gonna fill yer fuckin’ belly up like I filled mine on it, white man.”

  He had not seen the young woman until the second night, but when he looked up and saw her smiling at him, he felt a sudden hatred for her twist his insides almost to vomiting up whatever he’d swallowed so far that night, and it was a vicious and consuming hatred he had never felt for anything or anybody in his entire life.

  On the fourth night, after rain, with the air too thick to breathe, the young woman came in, red heels clacking against the boards, in a thin white cotton dress under which she wore not a damn thing, the cloth a little wet still with rain, sticking to bare flesh, looking like flesh itself filled out by thighs, her belly. Looking up at her from the pit, Pojo had been able to see her legs sculptured against the thin material. And when she leaned over, resting her bare arms on the wood railing, he could see her breasts spilling out of the dress, as if she were holding them in cupped palms to say, “Here . . . here . . . here . . .” the words themselves almost becoming laughter.

  He continued with his act for over an hour, crawling on all fours, grabbing a lizard or chicken or frog, biting into it, hissing, moaning, rolling about like a demented beast, as the big black woman had showed him. And all the time he was aware of her standing there over him, aware of her legs and her breasts and the way her painted mouth kept smiling just a little crookedly at him, as if one side of her face had been partially paralyzed.

  He had no idea exactly why he did it, when it began or sometimes now, even if he had done it at all (though he knew he had), but he was seized suddenly with an uncontrollable desire to touch the young woman, to place his hands, his mouth upon that body. But instead of touching her, he reeled about screaming and threw the live snake at her. The snake landed squirming over her shoulder, on her neck, collecting its quick coils across her flesh. She screamed hysterically, twisted away, then fainted onto the boards, the snake, amid screams and shouts of others, gliding slowly over her breasts before one of the men grabbed hold of it by the tail and flung it back at Pojo, who caught it in both hands, laughing up at them all, the fury spent in him, easy again in his dwarfed loins.

  Five of the circus men leaped then into the pit. Pojo swung the snake at them like a whip, feeling the reptile squirm in his hand. He swung it swiftly around his head, charging them, the snake’s head striking flat against one face to bring a howl from the man. But as it bounced off, another of them caught the cold head, yanked it out of Pojo’s hand, and the others rushed him, throwing him back into the sawdust so his mouth choked up full of it and there was no more air for him to breathe. There was great shouting and screams of women and he saw men bearing torches. He remembered the black woman saying they were going to burn him. The snake lost itself between panicked legs. “They’s gonna burn you, white bastard!” she screamed at him. But sometimes he remembered her screaming how they were going to burn the young woman, not him.

  There had been ferocious pain and blood pouring down him as if someone had dumped a bucketful of it over his head. But he could no longer really remember who had felt the pain or even whose blood it had been. But they had driven h
im away: he remembered this.

  He had walked many months until finally reaching the sea. He had never seen the sea in his life and when first he saw it, he could not believe his eyes. He had stood on the beach, had stared out at that rolling vague green space to the sky, then had turned quickly around, pressing his eyes tightly shut, sure it would not be there when he turned around again. But it was always there no matter how many times he tried to make it disappear. And he had never left the sea once since that first moment when he realized that the sea was truly there.

  five

  Miss Smith stood by her window in the dark and watched the full moon burn cold through the still surface of the sea. Her fine profile was caught like the face on a coin—but on a counterfeit coin now, since it had turned the black color of darkness over the years that had lasted only as long as it takes a single day to change into any night.

  She stood there wearing her long white silk dressing gown that was trimmed delicately with lace all the way down the front and at the edges of the sleeves. Miss Smith folded her arms over her breasts, holding her elbows in the cupped palms of her hands. She enjoyed the softness of the silk and she was completely unaware that each move she made in this dark had the quality of ritual set down into a woodcut, the figures moving stiffly out of an ancient memory, forcing the pattern deeper and deeper into the grain of the wood just as her movements seemed to thrust her ever deeper into the dark.

  She often stood for hours by the windows of the houses or hotels where she had come for a night, a month, perhaps even a year, though she could not remember when she had ever remained that long in any one place. She would look out upon all sorts of nights and somehow always see the same thing there in the dark—simply the darkness and nothing more. If she could see the lights of a city or pale clouds colored by the moon or, as now, the black sea drifting in slow silver tides back over the land, these images were always turned into darkness not by the night, but by her own vision of them. She had always thought of God as a great mask that covered the universe; and in this same way, each separate life was spent in the making of a mask that, though never completed, still was able to cover some portion of the world, or of even a single night, with that secret vision whose final dark is the only death a man can die.