The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

  She walked slowly and remembered the green kite their mother had given them one Sunday afternoon. She had described it with great care to Jean as, hand in hand, they had gone running out to the beach, trailing the kite behind them on a short length of string.

  “It flies?” he asked her.

  She laughed at the amazed look on his face.

  “It’s the most beautiful green color,” she told him.

  “But it flies.”

  “Yes. Yes, haven’t I told you it does. It flies . . . well, like a bird.”

  He laughed happily. “Paper!” he exclaimed in the laughter.

  “Why shouldn’t birds.be made of paper as well as feathers?”

  “And we hold this string?”

  “Yes. We can let it go as high as we wish.”

  And as the kite climbed like some mad promise, twisting back and forth in dizzy lurching hard dives, Sygen had described just how high it was now because he kept asking her at least two or three times a minute until she finally burst out laughing and said, “You must let me catch my breath.”

  “But at the end of this string,” Jean had said carefully, “it’s flying now.”

  “Yes, yes, yes . . . I’ve already told you . . .”

  “You said dancing too.”

  “Well, it does appear to be dancing.”

  “A dancing bird . . .”

  “The most beautiful color of green I’ve ever seen . . .”

  “Then watch now . . .”

  “Don’t . . .”

  He let go of the string. “Jean. . . .” He pushed the end of it out ahead of him. “Fly . . .” he said softly.

  She said the word now, walking slowly.

  “Jean . . . you’ve let go of it.”

  “. . . set it free,” he said. “You said it was a bird.”

  “No. . . .” She had gone running off in a child’s panic after it. The string trailed along the sand, down swiftly into high surf, and she followed it into the sea until water reached to her breasts and then she stopped, pushing soaked hair back from her eyes. She watched the end of string skim along over the tops of waves before it finally soared up into a twisting thin white line of flight and soon was out of sight.

  When she came back to the beach, she was soaked. Her dress clung to her body.

  Jean said, “Where is it now?”

  “In China for all I can see of it,” she answered.

  Jean laughed and said, “We made a bird out of it.”

  Sygen removed her wet dress and as she walked by Jean their bodies brushed. He caught her arm, said, “You’re wet.”

  “I chased after it,” she said.

  “The kite?”

  She nodded. Then: “Yes.”

  “Are you cold?”

  “No. . . .”

  And then he said, “You can’t catch birds, little fish.”

  She had been angry, but the anger did not last long. Jean reached up casually and ran his fingers through her hair, but slowly now, as he had never done before. He was looking off to one side as he did this, and Sygen thought, “Doesn’t he know I’m here? It was my kite too.” But as soon as he turned to her, she was alarmed by the ridiculous idea that he could listen to her thoughts.

  Sygen stood before him, watching his eyes, waiting to see if they would open and find her, and when he drew her body close to his, it seemed as if his eyes really were opening and as they lay down on the sand together in this odd, unexpected silence, Sygen was sure that Jean knew what she looked like and she kept thinking that he had held an image of her like a secret behind his eyes and perhaps one day he would tell her what she really looked like just as she had told him that the kite was green and that was the first time they were together, both of them mystified, afraid in the beginning, fumbling deftly with their sudden discovery of who they really were; but so lost in each other finally that there could be no such thing any more as fear and even the white sky over their heads turned to joy and the crying of gulls nearby was a part of this new game they played with that savage innocence that stands at the beginning of man’s history as a monument to all he could have been had he not prized his imagination above his heart.

  All winter long and on through spring they played these games and when summer finally came with all its guests, they had merely held their breath for a season, as if in that way they turned the summer into a moment, and then as soon as the last guest was gone, they would breathe again and run out into the world that belonged only to them.

  Sygen had often heard her mother use the word “love.” But it would be no more than something found behind a closed door that one was not supposed to open. And as she would listen to her mother tell of this love, Sygen always imagined the participants wearing terrible or silly masks, playing a game no one could win, whose only rule was to keep the door closed.

  Once Sygen had asked Jean if he would ever want to leave this house, their beach, to go and live in the world the guests fled from each summer like sardines from a shark, and he had laughed at her question.

  “It sounds like a place where everything is completely dry, where there’s no rain, not even water to drink.” He had said this.

  And after their first time together Sygen had remembered his words because she had felt the sea spray covering her as if it were part of his body. A new pride shimmered through her like sun through the green tops of waves, a pride made of nights to come and days that would follow. No game they had played had ever promised to be so endless. No joy had been so complete. If the world the guests came from had ever fascinated her for even so much as a moment, that fascination was forever spent in her as she felt herself suddenly open in his embrace, like the laughter of a practical cat who sees in his nine lives more shapes to the moon than men have names with which to comprehend such wonder.

  “A young man . . . called me from town.”

  She would say this, and Jean would do no more than burst out laughing at her. She was sure he would. She sighed deeply.

  She could not see anything changed about him, and yet she knew he was changed. Once they had lived in a world no one else could ever enter; during the summers they would watch the guests like actors hiding behind a curtain watching the people in the audience who do not know that they are really the show. Now she felt as if she were alone behind that curtain looking out into no more than an empty theater.

  But then the lie and the curtain and all the summers were wiped from her mind by the sudden realization that she had just sighed in exactly the same manner that her mother always did. She and Jean always joked about the way their mother heaved those very deep sighs of hers. Once Jean had said, “Mother, one day you’ll shake yourself to pieces with one of those sighs.” And the two of them had laughed so hard that finally their mother could not help joining in the laughter, and the three of them had sat about laughing until the tears rolled down their cheeks and their sides ached.

  Sygen could feel the wind cold against her eyes on this morning. She could taste the salt of the ocean spray that would be blown against her face from time to time. She remembered something Jean had once told her about how all life began in the sea, even man. She remembered him telling her how we still carry the sea in us, in our blood and bones. He said we had come out of the sea, fish that grew legs or wings or turned their yellow eyes up to see the astounding sky, another sea. We were the crabs, the lizards and dinosaurs, the birds, the llamas. Millions and millions of years passed. Mountains were made and then destroyed by wind and sea and rains that lasted for centuries, and then other mountains were made. The moon itself was torn out of the sea’s belly. Continents were spewed up and devoured. Creatures unnamed and unnumbered lived their ten billion years and then vanished, never to live again. Even today, every one of us, when we are in our mother’s womb, begins life in an individual ocean and the stages of embryonic development repeat the old evolutionary steps, from gill-breathing in water to being man on earth—all of it like echoes that, instead of fading, grow louder and l
ouder with each new sounding against time.

  Sygen had not understood this. She had asked Jean what it had all really meant, about our having the sea in us, in our blood and bone, how we are still born out of it. And he had said, “There was even another kind of life, one we can hardly even imagine, before there was the sea.”

  They had been sitting in the parlor on a December afternoon. Jean had said, “We’ve taken only a moment of time and yet we think we’re the ones who’ve invented the clock.”

  Sygen had told him she did not understand what he was talking about.

  Jean had laughed and said, “Perhaps because it’s all inside you. Women have that advantage. They hold the tides inside them and men are only sailors.”

  Sygen had laughed at this and said, “Now that sounds very wicked.”

  “Holding the tides . . .”

  “. . . inside me,” she had said. “You make me feel all full of fishes.”

  What Jean said about being born in the sea always remained with her because Sygen loved the sea the way one might love a mother or a child. She did not love the sea the way she loved Jean. Thinking of it now, as she walked along the beach, she thought her love for him, if it could be likened to anything, would be like loving the wind—the summer wind that blew hot over the sands and at the same time with a miraculous cooling breeze from the sea; and then too the wind in winter when it rattled windowpanes and whipped the freezing rain across the glass and so made the fire in the stone hearth that much more beautiful.

  Sygen walked slowly, close to the water’s edge so every now and then a wave, more powerful than the rest, washed up over her naked feet, making her tremble a bit with the cold.

  She walked for a long time, trying to think of all sorts of things like the sea and wind so that she would not think about Jean and Miss Smith walking off together the way they had. She did not really know why this bothered her so, but it seemed to reveal to her for the first time that whenever she remembered herself, she remembered Jean and to merely speak his name was to demand an answer of herself, as if she had been the one addressed.

  Sygen heard the funny, groaning sound before she saw the old man. The sound made her stop and the sight of him made her take a step back. She saw him seated on the sand, his legs crossed under him. He was unaware of her presence for several moments.

  The old man looked like a photograph that had been left on the beach and has been washed out by the waves, soaked through that way, crumpled, faded, edges torn, then washed up onto the beach again to be dried by the sun, curling up, turned yellow and black so that when you bend to pick it up, you cannot possibly recognize that this was once the picture you looked at in a newspaper or magazine.

  The old man with the short white feather in his ruined hat was eating something. Sygen could not quite make out what it was. But then she realized it was a raw fish. She could smell it. The old man’s large mouth opened round the bleeding pink flesh as his hands shoved the body in against his teeth, blood running over his lips, onto his chin; his hands and mouth moving the fish so that it seemed to be still alive even as he bit into it. He had not even bothered to clean the fish, to remove its innards, even to scrape off the white and gray scales.

  The old man continued eating, making that soft groaning sound all the while, and Sygen watched, hypnotized by the sight, as if she had stumbled upon the performance of some ritual so secret that all who witness it are sworn one day to have their own hearts torn out by those who must come after them to the same place.

  When the old man’s eyes saw Sygen’s naked feet in the sand, then looked up to see the rest of her, he cried out in surprise; and the cry, she thought, sounded like the cry of a huge gull.

  The old man dropped the fish into the sand between his crossed legs. He sat there, his arms hanging down limply at his sides, and he stared at Sygen with eyes that were streaked with yellow and green.

  Sygen thought first to turn and run as fast as she could back to the house. But something held her where she was. She was startled to realize that she did not really fear the old man, not as she had when she and Jean had gone running from him as if from some terrible beast that surely would have devoured them. Now there was still fear, but it was as if someone had painted the apple or the blue bowl a different color without changing the shape of either the apple or the bowl. There was a danger, but one that, instead of repelling her, drew her forward; the danger itself became a focal point toward which all of what she was could suddenly aim, a hundred scattered roads converging out of the dark upon a single, terrible destination.

  The old man stared back at her, did not move.

  Sygen stood there, her legs spread firmly apart, toes dug into the cold sand. She could hear the roaring of the sea. She could hear the wind, feel it against her face, in her eyes, blowing her hair and skirt. She saw two gulls glide down onto the edge of the beach and then remain there as if they too had been caught up in some spell.

  Sygen and the old man continued to stare this way in silence for what seemed to both of them a very long time though it was only a matter of moments.

  Then the old man rose slowly, not taking his eyes from Sygen. He pushed his huge body up first with his hands, as if he was going to start walking on all fours. When he stood upright, Sygen saw that his legs were comically short for the rest of his body. She’d never noticed this before. He was round with a flat face that looked like a swollen coin. His arms, dangling at his sides as if they had been broken, looked to be extremely powerful and his fingers were so thick and crowded together that at first glance he did not seem to have any fingers at all.

  The old man cocked his head over to one side now as he stared at Sygen. His mouth trembled into what seemed to be the beginning of a smile, his lips parting slightly to show brown teeth in front.

  Sygen tried to think of something she could say to him, but no words came to mind. She wondered if the old man would come toward her, touch her. She had never before even so much as thought of another man touching her body. It was as if her body had always been a part of Jean, the two of them living one life. But now the old man standing there with his ruined mouth trying to smile seemed to be telling her that she was alone, that she was no part of Jean, that if he so pleased he could come to her, take hold of her, even force her to lie down beside him on the sand. Now there was this old man and there were others; doors seemed to be opening into ever wider rooms; the sea itself stretched out to reach impossibly distant ports that had never existed before. Quite suddenly, all games were finished. A vague deep longing came over her, seemed to rise up out of depths that had once contained no more than sleep.

  Sygen was about to turn, to go back, but the old man made a soft groaning sound, unlike the one he had made while eating. He lifted one hand, held it out tentatively in front of him; it was as if the hand itself, alone, were clumsily imitating the softness of a bird; then the hand fell helplessly to his side again. He shook his head sadly, then turned and started running in a slow lopsided fashion, rocking from side to side, up the beach and away from her.

  Sygen stood there a long time, watching him until he had disappeared behind a line of gray dunes.

  As she turned to go back, she saw the two gulls picking at the remains of the fish the old man had left behind him.

  All the way back to the house, she did not think of Jean and Miss Smith once; her mind was filled with the image of the old man, of the blood dripping from his lips, of the dreadful scarred look of his eyes, of the groaning sound he made that was like nothing she had ever heard before; and she thought too of the helplessly gentle hand that could have torn her to pieces.

  two

  “Well it is my best dish,” Mrs. Orlovski was saying in her own defense.

  She, Sygen, and Jean were seated around the long kitchen table, having dinner. Sygen had remarked that her mother had been making her famous chicken dish a bit too often.

  “Why we’ve been having it at least twice a week,” Sygen had said.

&n
bsp; “I really don’t see anything wrong with my chicken,” Mrs. Orlovski said.

  “It’s not that, Mother,” Sygen said. “But twice a week is just too much, that’s all.”

  “Do you think it is, Jean?” Mrs. Orlovski asked her son. She would always turn to one of her children as a way of either settling or at least quieting down any argument she might be having with the other.

  Jean had a chicken leg in his hands and was chewing. He said, “As long as it’s Mr. Buvelo’s favorite dish, I suppose it’s all right with me.”

  “Now you just stop,” Mrs. Orlovski said, blushing slightly.

  Sygen continued eating, knowing it would do no good to try to argue with her mother.

  The truth of it was that Mrs. Orlovski’s culinary talents had been somewhat limited by the fact that most of her guests came for either one or two weeks and so one special dish had always been sufficient, to be served on Sundays, while the remainder of the week could always be filled out with steaks, chops, broiled fish, or a roast.

  As a final note to the discussion, Mrs. Orlovski said, “Miss Smith commented only yesterday that she liked my chicken very much.”

  Neither of the children spoke, Sygen conscious of the effort it was not to look up at her brother.

  They ate for a while in silence and finally Mrs. Orlovski, a gifted silence breaker, came out with, “I must say we’re all a bit more silent than usual.” And that was the case, since usually their dinners were very vocal affairs. Mrs. Orlovski was usually telling stories about what had happened last summer. Jean would often discuss something Sygen had read him in one of his many books about the sea. As for Sygen, she was the most unpredictable of the three. She could talk about one of the guests who had stayed with them during the summer or about an odd bird she had seen during the day or about how she wished they could all live in this house forever and ever, without having to have the guests come in the summertime.

  This last subject always aroused her mother, and Mrs. Orlovski would never fail to point out that they should all be grateful that their father, the good Captain Orlovski, had seen to it they had a house over their heads before he so tragically went down with his ship in that great storm off the coast of North Africa.