The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

  Sygen went to the table, slowly untied the packet of photographs, and started to look through them.

  Miss Smith turned away, stood by the windows looking out at the rain and sand and the vast black stretch of sea that seemed in itself to be no more at this instant than an echo of something she herself now felt.

  Sygen examined several of the photographs before she realized that they were all of the same woman. The woman she saw was one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen, and she could tell by some of them that she was a movie star since there were stills out of old movies and others had been taken on movie sets with cameramen and directors and other actors and actresses about.

  Without turning, Miss Smith asked, “Have I grown so old you can’t even recognize me?”

  Sygen raised her eyes from the pictures. She could only see Miss Smith’s back outlined against the windows, but she knew, without seeing her face, what she meant. Miss Smith was the beautiful woman in all the photographs.

  Sygen felt a heaviness settle around her heart like a fog that covers even the hand you hold up before you.

  Miss Smith said, “But I can’t blame you. I used to look at these pictures myself and hope they were really me. I used to look at them when I was still that girl. Long, long before I became old and dry. . . .”

  Sygen shook her head helplessly, trying to say no.

  But Miss Smith went on and there was a wild, a ferocious grief in her voice, a grief made somehow impeccable by long practice, long, inevitable knowledge. “Sometimes in the beginning,” she said, “I was afraid they were a horrible joke someone was playing on me. It was as if millions and millions of people all over the world were playing this joke on me and I could never understand why they would want to do such a thing.” She paused. Sygen saw her lift a hand to her eyes and thought she was crying now, but there were no tears in her eyes; actually, as she spoke, a faint, plaintive smile rested gently at the corners of her mouth.

  “I was a goddess, you see,” Miss Smith continued, and as soon as she said this word she wondered if the girl would understand her or would she think such talk to be completely absurd. She had never really spoken like this to anyone, and she wondered why she had started now, here, in this strange place, with this girl. Perhaps she should have said it in a different way. She remembered once a tiny boy who was a very famous writer had sat at her feet and told her that her tragedy was that she was like a great painting that was already finished. It was a masterpiece, he had said in his high-pitched, sweet voice, staring up at her with the soft wide eyes of a young deer. She was a masterpiece and there was not a single stroke to be added, nothing more to be said or done. “You see,” he had said, “you are perfect now and you must stay that way. That is your burden, your calling, if you wish, just as mine is to make books out of all the children my belly will never feel. You must imagine yourself hanging in a gallery, perhaps in Florence, who knows, my dear, and around you hang the greatest works ever created by man . . . they are all silent and motionless because they know they are perfect, and that is the way you must be . . . in that gallery or some other. . . .”

  But Miss Smith went on now to say, “These millions and millions of people all over the world weren’t playing a joke at all. Perhaps it was I who was playing the joke on them.” She laughed softly, but without joy, and Sygen could see the beauty of the photographs still desperately alive behind this face she had not recognized; it was a beauty that was the illumination of all a person is and can be, a beauty thus made limitless in time in the way it seemed to make mortality itself hang its old head in shame.

  Miss Smith said, “I don’t know. I was called—it sounds silly—but I was called the ‘love goddess.’ ” She paused again and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Men wrote about me in newspapers and magazines and that was what they called me . . . a love goddess. Even great men called me this—not only fools. Great men came to me, not as a man goes to a woman, but as he goes to stand before an idol. The most famous painters in the world wanted to paint me. There were hundreds, even thousands of poems written for me. . . .” She laughed again, but this time as if she were really amused at what she was saying. “And I couldn’t understand any of them,” she said. The tiny young man had told her that it did not matter whether she understood the poems or not. He would come often in the afternoon to sit at her feet, and she would stroke his blond hair the way one would stroke a warm cat and she remembered now for the first time in years that the tiny young man had committed suicide one autumn evening in Rome. He had killed himself in such a horrible way, and she had received a very humorous letter from him two weeks later, a letter describing a party he had been to in one of the great old palaces that had fallen to ruin and how he had danced on top of a table wearing the gold slippers of the American ambassador’s wife.

  Miss Smith turned to face Sygen and she was smiling in a terribly lost and sorrowful way. “You see,” she went on, “I am nothing. I am only what they think I am. I am no one to myself. I can hardly remember what I was like as a girl, the things I did, the faces of those who were dear to me. I can’t even remember the things I must once have wanted that all women want. . . . My own life seems to be no more than a dream, while the life they have made for me is the real one . . . the life they have made into . . . they call it ‘a myth.’ ” She was embarrassed by the word. “And now I must remain by myself so they will not see me, so they will not know that there is no myth at all, but only a woman—perhaps not even that any more. Now they still have the photographs to look at, just as I do myself. I am not old and dry to them. I am still very beautiful. To them I will always be beautiful. And goddesses must never grow old, you see. I try to be so careful.” She stopped. Her face looked as though she were about to either cry or smile, but she did neither and in another moment the calm, dry, old mask was again in place.

  Sygen said, “Forgive me. . . .”

  Miss Smith said, “No, no! Please. . . . You were right. I am old and dry. You were perfectly right, my dear. But I did want so to be beautiful again. You must forgive me. It was a very foolish wish. But there are so many nights . . . so many . . . and I look at these pictures and I’ll never be that way again . . . never those eyes . . . that mouth . . . Can you understand that? Can you?”

  Sygen nodded. She muttered, “Yes . . .” wanting to say much more.

  “Even if only for a little while,” said Miss Smith. “For a season, no more than that.”

  Sygen felt completely helpless. As she stood before this woman, she felt afraid, deeply afraid, for the first time in her life. She had never known fear before this moment, and now it ate at her heart like the mouth of some obscene beast.

  Miss Smith said, “Your brother is blind and I am no one. Don’t you see what a fine pair we make? He can’t see that I am not really there.”

  Sygen turned quickly and fled from this room, and her face was covered with tears.

  four

  Tico Reeves could hardly believe his eyes when he saw her come running from the house like a wild beast escaping from a cage, a madwoman trying to flee the very wind itself. He told himself: I have waited in this place knowing she would come out. She had to. Sooner or later. But even this knowledge seemed now to reach back far beyond his coming to this place, reaching to swamps and red dirt roads and the sniggering, crazed truth-telling of bone-dirty men squatting on their heels to gossip while crapping comfortably under the white sun. It reached back and could not quiet the surprise he felt seeing her this way. It was like the amazement of stars that we see and wonder at and that is already over as far as the stars themselves are concerned, having happened maybe even centuries past, and the star we fix our eyes on this night can have been dead that long, the amazement like some corpse of beauty traveling through ways of time that the bold philosophies of men will never comprehend. But he stood there, caring nothing for centuries or stars, watching, holding his flesh still. I must have known she would come. Or else why would I have walked these miles, waited
these hours, months, years. This was to say the old man, Joe Tom, was right. “There is only one,” he said.

  Now she wore no coat. The rain soaked her blue dress down on her like the hide of a fragile beast. He could make out the full length of her legs and her breasts too clearly sculptured in the blue cloth. He could hear wind and the sea. He could feel life, his own life so long dead, coming alive again in him. Her golden hair clung to her face, whipped across it by wind. She did not bother even to push it back out of her eyes. He stood, watched, knowing what would come next like a man living his life a second time and calling his not being able to remember it clearly “fate”—the big, frayed, surging word that was always torn at by dreams the way hawks tear at the sky itself to find freer space for their flying.

  She came running toward him where he stood in his black jacket, soaked through to his skin but not feeling the cold.

  This too had happened before.

  He waited for her, knowing it deeper and deeper as she approached, because he had seen it in the dream, that she would come to him, perhaps already had come to him, life remembering itself the way a man remembers; tides are like that.

  But now that the dream had found its real shape, Tico Reeves felt a gutted fear at his heart, like this memory trying to warn him, and yet he could not make out what the memory was.

  There had been his father too wild for a man’s skin, so only the pale daughter of a shoemaker with God nibbling at her heart like a mouse at a bit of cheese, of all the town’s women, would take him, and then she knew no joy under his flesh, but only fear until he ran off and left whatever he was inside her to grow like the dead branch that finds roots in abandoned earth.

  There had been Joe Tom and the moonlit ax and the great madness reaching into him to find love in that impossible dark.

  There had been years of desire to suffer and know too well the way true holy men who see the face of God cannot speak of it, for that face to human eyes is much too terrible for anything as small as the belief of men to comprehend or even to accept.

  There were these hours trapped on the skittish earth, and there were many more that had made him, and yet the fear had no part in any of them.

  She came running blindly toward him and Tico Reeves wanted first to turn and flee from her. She was himself running toward him out of a mirror that could reflect no light. “There is only one.” And that was the reason: to search through madness and the earth only for oneself. Of course there is only one, he thought, putting it together this way. How in hell could there ever be any more unless we are worms so they can cut us up and all the pieces go on crawling away in different directions through the dust, mating a moment in any dungheap, moving on, dividing, meeting oneself at every comic turn of the journey that can have no true destination or repose.

  So many times he had come to find her and, now that he had, the fear masked his desire, turned it to bitter confusion and, for an instant, even to hate.

  He took a step back in the sand like a matador who sees, just in time, that the horn will catch him if he remains where he is. He took that one step. But he went no further.

  When she saw him, she stopped running. He waited. She paused, stared at him. She said, “Jean . . .” But even before that brief name could be completely spoken, she had stopped saying it. Her mouth hung open. Her eyes looked wounded to him. He was waiting for her to say, “I’ve never seen you before.” Or perhaps even: “You look like you been walkin’ a long way, young man.” Those were the words he said for her. But when she came walking again slowly toward him, he knew she would not say them. She pushed the hair back out of her eyes. He could see the rain on her face like a melting mask and could tell from the loose expression of her mouth that there were tears, too, mixed with this rain.

  The sea came slithering, rolling down, crashing upon the wet sands with magnificent roaring splendor, old kings of a thousand magic shapes finding their strength again, come back to conquer the conqueror.

  The sky overhead was dark and deep as death and gallant without stars in its fury. The rain washed over the land, was sucked down into its dry great womb to find seas again. The wind blew down cold and full of life against them. A lone gull made circles slowly to the east. She stopped when she came to where he was. They stood facing each other in a kind of silence that must be at the beginning of all things.

  When he did not move, his flesh, not his mind, recalling still another time, she came closer, a puzzled vague smile at the edges of her mouth. “There is only one.” He tried with these words to silence all others. His arms hung at his sides, useless and baffled, beginning already to feel naked, even raw under the black, wet, heavy leather.

  Then she reached up to touch his face as if she had never seen a face before, something wild and innocent in the way she moved now, having been blind perhaps and given sight in this instant. The tips of her fingers touched his cheeks, the corners of his eyes, reaching then for his mouth. She said, “I just want to be away from here.” It sounded as if she were finishing something she had started to say a long time ago and only now had remembered to continue, to try to finish what she thought had to be said. “From this place,” she said. He thought: Then the talk that goes with it must be as strange, as incredible, as unknowable as the act itself. She said, “Just take me from this place. I have to . . . be away. . . .” The words sounded broken, every one of them, like if you poured any sense into them, that sense would run out between the cracks and holes.

  When he still did not move, she came even closer to him. Through the rain her face kept changing. It took on shadows and shook them off as if the sun were whirling about, gone crazy, but there was no sun. He wiped the water out of his own eyes. He tried to see the color of hers, but they were swamped full with the gray of the day itself that colored sea and what clouds there were and the sky and sand and the flesh of both their bodies. She came closer and stood up on her toes and kissed his mouth like something done at a great distance that we can see and still not be sure it is happening, only touching his lips first with hers, fumbling, flat, then letting her own lips open slowly as if to say to him: It is this way. This is what’s to be done.

  “Women know it all before they even know the words to say or comprehend what it is they do know.” The old man said this.

  When he did not move this time, her face grew angry and hard and she said, “Don’t you want me?” It was not the pride of a woman, but the petulant anger and need of a child.

  He said, “I’ve been waiting here. . . .”

  “I’ve seen you,” she said.

  “Yes. I know.”

  “I’ve seen you, but I never thought you’d be here.”

  He thought of saying, “There is only one.” But instead of that he said, “Come,” as if it meant the same thing, and he took gentle hold of her hand and even her eyes showed the surprise she felt at his gentleness because she had expected no mercy of him and certainly nothing as kind as this. She had fled from the cruel house that had become so suddenly and completely empty. She had come into the rain, into what she had thought could be the cold of a world she had never known, not knowing of course that women sense, comprehend, feel all that’s to be known of any world that contains a man, that pride-fool flesh that is the other half of them, their wisdom geared to this as the wisdom of men must gear itself to fables of stars and continents and great kingdoms that can never bear their name; thinking how this other man, not the one standing before her, but the savage idiot with his raw mouth would be there and he would be the end of what despair in her sought now with the blind final need of love turning back into no more than flesh in this gray air. She had fled to that danger as if to fire that could burn away, purge all feeling and remembering and need out of her heart.

  He led her back to the dunes. She followed so there was some slight straining between their hands, but there was no pause, no holding back, only the need now to be led because they were not children any more, but man and woman, and it was only the slight s
training between their hands that told her this.

  They came to a place she knew well, but now did not know. It was behind one of the high dunes (where he had hidden) where they could not be seen from the house. She paused only to look at his eyes, only a moment before she went slowly to her knees on the wet sand. Then he did the same. They did not touch, but knelt there facing and blind and silent as statues that had long been abandoned to the old elements out of which they had first come.

  She was the one who finally let her legs move to one side so she had to support her body with one hand before he took hold of that hand and, drawing it to him, caused her to lie back, her head turned to one side, facing his face, looking again at his eyes, not into them, holding her own vision motionless at that point like catching a swift bird in a snapshot to hold it still.

  He moved now with his hands knowing more than he himself knew about what was to be done. And she lay there perfectly still, seeming weightless, without will ever to move again, perfect that way. And she was beautiful.

  But his hands moved, caring nothing for beauty or what could be perfect. They touched warm flesh, the warmth like a miracle in this cold rain.

  Then the hand would not move. He moved it but it did not move. She began shaking her head, a barely perceptible motion from side to side. The hand would not move because the blue dress was caught, tangled tight around her legs just past the knees, and the hand not being able to move now, the skirt alone holding it back, struck him like a blow across the eyes while he gazed at the suppliant beauty of her.

  He worked the hand hard until finally the cloth ripped. She cried faintly, no word. A bird or animal sound. He worked the hand quickly. But then silk again tangled round her, clung to bare legs and belly. Her goddam pants won’t come off! He’d never thought of this. The thought struck, rang out as a factory whistle blown in the middle of a symphony. He began to feel panic and like a fool and like a joke the squatting wisebone men would tell at their comfortable crapping. He ripped the silk down with one savage muster of all his strength, yanking with his entire arm and body weight so he toppled back off his heels, spinning. He cursed and rolled forward then, falling on her and in a too-quick, desperate, clumsy way, he entered her finally and in little more than an instant he felt his body shatter open a hundred times to fill all the spaces she was made of.