The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

  She herself always approached each performance as a frightened child who has been brought down from her room to perform for company: the child is frightened, even hurt that she has been taken from the safety of her own room and she does not know what to do really for these strangers, but she performs as best she can, not out of any desire to be acclaimed, only so as not to receive the reproachful glance of a parent if she does not perform as well as she is expected to.

  But now all those many fears were gone and she was able to enjoy that afternoon under the desert tent really for the first time after all these years, her life being just this, a vicarious journey backward into memories of nights that had never existed, of days whose bright suns could illuminate only the backs of a blind man’s eyes.

  She could remember how all the papers had been full of stories of a romance between her and her leading man in the picture, Jack Stevens. She remembered the pleasant easy relief she had felt when he had come to her with the stories and had laughed at what foolishness the papers had to print to keep the public thinking all sorts of ridiculous things. “I’m afraid,” he had said, “that we’re no more than fodder for the dreams of imbeciles.” They had laughed together. And then she had gone out to have this picture taken, the one she held now in both her hands.

  In it, she was dressed in a flowing white garment and her hair hung loosely down over her shoulders. The director, Schloss, had said he wanted it to look as if the wind had mussed her hair. And yet it had taken three expert hairdressers close to an hour to muss her hair just the way he wanted it, with tiny Schloss pacing frantically back and forth, muttering, “Sweethearts, be careful, be careful! It should look like the wind mussed it. The wind please, sweethearts, not a washing machine. Ja?”

  She remembered that when they had finished taking the pictures on that afternoon, she had been completely exhausted and had gone to her dressing room to lie down. She had almost fallen asleep when there had been a knock on the door. When she asked who it was, she heard Jack Stevens’ voice say, “May 1 come in?”

  Her memory of it, as always, began to blur now, to become cryptic in the passage of years, everything turning upon itself in her memory so that what had happened in one language was translated by remembering into another language, one she could not understand, one of the dead languages that tells great tales only of fabulous men, sets them down on broken stones dug up by gaunt, perspiring professors who seek only the assurance that the dead were once truly alive.

  He knocked. She spoke. He answered. He came in. A radio outside shattered the air as the door opened, even as she was saying, “Come in.” There was a woman’s laugh that sounded more like an obscene bird cry than human laughter. He sat down on the edge of the bed—or had it been only a sofa—even before speaking. (Memories traveled so swiftly, she often found it difficult to keep up with the quick unraveling of images.) His white shirt of silk was opened to show his hairless chest. His eyes were smaller than they seemed to be on the screen when she recalled that public image of him that was somehow truer than what she could remember of the man’s own flesh beside her.

  He began to talk. His words sounded as if they had been molded not out of any language, but out of the silence itself. He could have been repeating a speech spoken a hundred, ten hundred years ago, listless as a spent echo. She moved in closer to the wall. She always smiled when she was afraid she would not know what to say. Her dressing gown was of white silk; it folded in around her as if it knew her body from long and more than intimate acquaintance. He talked, but not in the laughing easy voice that had told her about the newspapers; in the intense voice he used when they were making the picture, a voice that made every word—beer, love, peach, hairy, circus, old, dear, beloved—sound as if it had been carved in stone by a miraculous toothpick.

  She was surprised at first: she thought that, using this voice, he had come only to play some sort of joke on her. But then she knew this was his true voice, not the laughing one, and when he leaned over to kiss her, it seemed only natural that his bad breath should not bother her since she had never let it bother her on the set.

  He kissed her in a cloying way, as if passion were something that had to be practiced like a musical instrument. He pressed his eyes shut, moaning softly as his lips drew back, paused, found a certain spot on her neck where he let his teeth play lightly, back and forth, carefully.

  She let him kiss her. The moans were funny. She listened for them. She lay back and let his mouth find her body. He would stop. Schloss would call out, “Cut! Very nice, sweethearts.” A clatter of lights moving and the rise of stilled voices would end the scene.

  But his hand reached for her breasts. She turned a little away. A hand held her shoulder so she could not move. The lower half of her body twisted slowly, as if she did not want him to be aware she was moving away from him.

  It kept happening: his hands and mouth and the funny moaning, her drawing away, the sudden heaviness of his legs. But with no word spoken, a mute ridiculous ballet. Chess pieces trying to mate, perhaps to make a lost queen. She waited for him to speak. That would end it. But he would not speak. She could think only of “no” or “stop” or the foolish word “please.” And none of these seemed sufficient to her need. She pushed herself back. He held fast to her. His body fought to draw her into life and this was what she feared, what she drew back in silence from; trying to draw her into life, not knowing she knew, that it would be only far enough to tell her she could not ever really be alive, like trying to force one to swallow a mouthful of the dark. The same this way always as if she had already outlived herself, with some vague dwarfed moment long past having been the last of her life, with no knowledge of the true end or why it had ended. It was always wishing to be nothing, but to know one is nothing: this was the greatest joy she could imagine, the only one. To be free that way, as she imagined rocks and flowers and the grass and sea and stars and most of all, the clouds, are free.

  He tore suddenly at the white gown, ripped it off her shoulder. Her hands fought him with the desperate strength children summon to combat nightmares. She twisted her legs past him. She shut her lips fast, her eyes too. He pulled the gown off. She rolled over. He grabbed her shoulder. She pressed her face into the pillow. They fought back and forth and did not speak a word between them until he said, “You bitch!” Then other words which she could not remember as she saw herself falling so far down into her fear that finally she could fight only the fear itself, not the man who had caused it, letting him take her as if his body, entering her, becoming part of her, even if only for an instant, would hold her back from falling down into this abyss of fear and she wanted only this from him.

  Finished, he began to speak easily once more, as one walking off a battlefield where death has nearly been met, directly, ten yards away, into an August garden party where only tea and lemonade are served.

  He told her she was the most beautiful woman he had ever loved. He asked her to marry him and she laughed pleasantly, not to offend him, rather to escape something in herself that, had she not laughed, might very well have made her cry.

  There had been others like this, other afternoons, other lovers. The fight, over passing years, became less actual fight than ritual, a rite performed that was based on truths long ago forgotten.

  She had so many pictures to remind her of all these incidents, and the remarkable thing was that her memories seemed more real than the actual incidents when they had happened in their own time. Thus she could feel more now, remembering that afternoon, than she had felt when she had been in his arms, letting him finally do with her body as he wished.

  After going through several more pictures in this same way, she laid them aside, took up a movie magazine, and began reading a story about one of the young actresses of the day. As she read, she wondered if this flaxen-haired girl would one day have a suitcase filled with photographs to remind her of who she was.

  But this was really a very silly thought. It was true enough that eventuall
y we move on past the reach of life, our only remaining task to unravel ourselves into death, like puzzles finally solved. Yet only that afternoon Jean had told her she was beautiful. She did not need the photographs any longer, not for a while. He was such a perfect looking glass. She could be alive again in that glass and life did not have to be anything more than a masquerade. She wondered if she could ever really love this boy, but she knew, even thinking it, that love, in her life, was unimportant. She had long ago become accustomed to not feeling any emotion—with the possible exception of fear, sometimes giving fear the withered raw face of shame. At least this boy put her fear aside. She could ask no more.

  She read for several hours. She finished two of the movie magazines. She glanced briefly through one of the comic books. They always made her smile. She bought them for this reason. The brightly colored (all carnival colors) people in comic books lived such outrageously impossible lives. There was no color gray in them, no silence, no end of anything. She wished often all life could be like that, not painted so heavy with gray the way it was, not filled with dying days and dead nights, not a trinket sold for a jewel by some cheat who flees and never shows his face. Life itself, gray life, uncomic, had atrophied and perhaps now required a new species to give it back the limitless spaces that man has filled with no more than the great pompous lie of himself; this knowledge took the form in her of being grateful for sleep and unaware of dreams.

  Finished reading, she shook the magazines off the bed. They tumbled onto the floor, opening, face down, perfect eyes staring up at dark ceilings, tangled together these real faces and these comic kings.

  The pictures she placed carefully on the table beside her bed, caught a quick glimpse of another woman’s face at the edge of one. She too had come to the dressing room, had knocked in the same way, had given her name and mouth and had fought her until fear drowned her into the submission of having to cling to whatever was there. And it seemed much as the other, the same mouth, same words, same fear and falling and dead simple peace to follow merely because silence was always won again when they were gone.

  She took a sleeping pill, switched off the light.

  “You won’t ever see me again. I know that,” the girl had said. “One soon grows accustomed to first encounters.”

  As she stretched herself out slowly under worn blankets, she heard the sea again, murmuring softly in a distance that could be measured only in time. She thought of getting up for a moment to look at it. The sea was like a stranger we can trust with all our secrets, since we will never see those eyes again, never give ourselves to the ancient cruelty of that mouth, to the shattering, corpselike nakedness of that body. And then too the moon was always so lovely shining on dark waters, caught in these gleaming depths, the smile of that stranger.

  But a new fear gripped her, one she had never felt before. And the fear was that if she got up and walked to the windows, she would discover the sea filled not with any moon, but with terrible creatures dragging their obscene wisdom of us out of the sea’s most hidden depths. These creatures, laughing their faceless laughter, would fester upon the eye that found them like open sores pulsing death out of them until the eye itself could never be shut.

  But she did close her eyes. She waited patiently, as always, for the sleeping pill to black out her fears, her memories of desire like a thick brush, with a single stroke turning to darkness a canvas still wet with the soft, false colors of the sun.

  chapter 7

  one

  THE RAIN started shortly before dawn. It came first as mist out of the dark, reaching tentatively from the sea toward many shores, gently, perhaps even with love. Stars had faded only moments before the mist and soon after the moon too was gone. The sky was a gray wasteland ruled by wandering kings who know the world must wear away and black clouds loomed heavy like some weather of flesh itself, twisting in strong winds, holding the rain a long time as tidal debris was turned by gathering tides along the bone-white beach.

  Gulls, other sea birds, took to rock places and tall dunes, their blood knowing what was to come. Waves tossed up white heads to the wind and in shallow places ran strong into the land, rolling bright shells along the wet sand like toys.

  Far out, ships pushed into the swell of rain and old sailors remembered other days when steel sides were wood and the dolphin played the southern waters like gods come to tease men into the depths.

  Fierce dragons the size of fingers drifted along the ocean floor. Tangled green weeds rose up in torn splendor, were cast to shore or to other seas.

  Five petrels seemed to dance on the surface of the sea. Then one spread its swallowlike wings, took to flight, the others following quickly after, and in moments all of them had reached a dark cloud colored silver on one side by the hidden moon.

  Rocks that were weathered by stern centuries into sand were building again, familiars to doom, knowing it cannot last, mountains in one grain of sand. Deathless creatures clung to sargassum where winds do not come and where tides are walled out by mysteries a billion years deeper than man.

  The mist covered sea and land and turned into rain first with the gentleness of a young girl growing and then became fierce like the girl’s passion when her womanhood rages with all mysteries contained in her womb’s blood.

  The rain fell in silence a long time and then the wind came and drove it against windowpanes, rocks, the sides of houses, the naked limbs of men.

  The old man sat by his ruined shelter, the broken-off stern of a square-rigger carried up on the beach many years ago, laden now only with sand, the moonlight its cargo. The rain washed over him and he made no move to escape it. His eyes blinked into the wind and his huge body trembled with cold, but the cold did not really reach him, the trembling like an anesthetized patient’s fear of pain when he can feel nothing at all, but can see the gleaming steel blade enter his flesh.

  The rain poured down over him, as he gazed off into the dark to where he knew some sun would be, but it did not come.

  A mongrel dog wandering along the beach found him where he was and stood in front of him.

  The old man did not see the dog. The dog watched him. The dog too trembled, but, unlike the old man, felt the cold and was sick with it. The small bones rattled inside the fleshless skin. The gray eyes, streaked with hunger, seemed blind, but they were not blind.

  When the old man saw the dog, he was not surprised. He merely nodded as if that were the only way he knew how to greet a stranger.

  The dog came closer and sat down in front of the old man.

  They stared at each other with a helpless and confused kind of compassion. The rain ran down both their faces like tears big enough to flood a world.

  two

  In the house Jean heard the rain. He rolled over in bed, knew the dawn had not come yet. But he would not fall asleep again.

  He lay there and listened to the rain.

  There were now not many things left whose appearances still puzzled Jean. From Sygen’s accounts he had constructed an image of the world that satisfied him. But there were some things that even her most detailed explanations could not solve completely for him, and the rain was one of these.

  He often told himself it should have been one of the simplest images to form. He could see faces and ships and clouds and pots and apples and rose bushes and rocks. But he could not see the rain.

  Often he would stand out in it, feel it with all his body. Sometimes he would even go out swimming in the rain, and then it became a little like the sea.

  But it puzzled him that one could look up, as Sygen had explained it, and for as far out into the sky as you could see, there was the rain. Books said it fell down out of clouds, but when you looked up into the rain, it was falling down, not out of clouds, but out of the sky itself. The rain fell from where God was and that was what Jean could not comprehend because the image of God to him was as the image of his own blindness.

  three

  Sygen knew she was awake because she could hear th
e rain, but she pretended, as she often did, that she was still asleep and the rain’s sound was no more than a dream. And this was not difficult for her, since making dreams was a game she had played with Jean for as far back as she could remember.

  As children they had ruled kingdoms, had followed gray gulls into the sky, had found fishes made of pure gold, had discovered China three feet down in the wet sand.

  Their games had constructed such a rich and sound reality for them that everyone else in the world soon was as a guest arriving at some final masquerade without a costume, people without secrets, flat panes of glass to see through while she and Jean were as crystals cut to catch the light a thousand different ways and to transform it into shapes and shadows that were even more beautiful than God Himself could imagine.

  Other people had always seemed to Sygen like shoemakers making imaginary shoes that somehow did manage to keep their feet dry in the rain. Their lives were made of moments that never became hours, hours that never became days. One of them could drop a pin on the floor and an entire lifetime could be spent in no more than picking up that pin. They were people who did not know that games existed.

  Sygen now recalled many of the games she and Jean had invented, for every game, to be real, must be invented every time you begin to play it.

  Once she told Jean that she would be blind on this day and he would be the one who could see. And this game had turned out so successfully, they had played it countless times over the years, so often, in fact, that on certain days she was really able to believe she was the blind one of the two and the world Jean saw in his imagination was the real world.