The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

  “She’s always opening and closing doors,” Jean said. “Sometimes I think she believes life itself, her life, is hiding from her behind one of the doors.”

  His words drifted by her, hardly a language she could even understand..

  She forced every fiber of her body to remain absolutely still since she was certain that this shame she felt would cause her to tremble, to cry, almost to fall apart.

  Jean started to embrace her again, reaching for her shoulder, touching only the pillow first, then the cool naked flesh of her arm; but she moved back, only a barely perceptible distance, as if she had even lost this courage to tell him she could not bear being touched; he did not follow her. He turned instead, but with no sign that he had noticed her shrinking away, to comforting her, to telling her she must not mind his mother. “Pretend a cat climbed in the window,” he said.

  But the shame echoed again and again in her, each time reaching to a new depth, circles widening on the surface of a pool, black bells tolling their dark cry into the night.

  She sat there beside him in the bed, but as terribly alone as she could possibly have been. The inside of her mouth was dry. It would have been impossible for her to move her legs. The sheet was damp and heavy against her breasts. She felt shame, a withering, cold, gravelike shame, only this.

  And long ago she had felt it too. A summer’s day thick with flies and the smell of horses. Shadows of leaves covered the dry ground. Ants, beetles, a lady bug, caterpillars, a green spider, crawled over rocks and hands and the heavy bark of oak and cedar trees. A young man, speaking in much the same voice she could hear now, faintly told her of love, how women were made for this as birds are made to fly, fish to swim, the very air to be breathed. She stared at a salamander asleep on a gray rock, saw shadows cross the small body as a veil is torn from the face of a dead man, and the sun burned open the creature’s sleep; it moved slowly on over the other side of the rock, disappeared. And she closed her eyes, feeling this boy take her, feeling his arms move in under her hips to lift her gently to him, no pain to it, nothing to feel, rain washing stones smooth as glass.

  It was the first time and she had brought to that afternoon, to that boy, so many nights of dreaming what love would be.

  But there was no love, then as now. There was shame and nothing more.

  But at least it was something to feel. She had come to know this. She let the sheet fall away from her breasts, turned, without purpose really, to the boy at her side. There was something she could feel now. He would be grateful, pleased, thinking it to be love; that it was no more than shame mattered as little to her as what scrap of garbage is stuffed into the mouth of a starving man.

  chapter 9

  one

  THE SEA came down out of ice and rivers and the tangled green deep nights of winter where the land sleeps in a white shell and the sky is not seen.

  The vast stretch of tides no man’s eye or even dream can comprehend rises again in this season when the waters reach for us, when land, whole continents, give barely an inch, not the length of a child’s finger, to the hungry old sea mouths come to devour us.

  Great white masses of foam toss into the wind, are proud as light, as ancient as the dark.

  Calm skies that have stood witness to all this a million times more than we can count, on this day are made of wings, white wings colored a pale blue by the sea shining upon them.

  April knows winter the way a young girl can remember toys and yet it holds summer too the way she dreams of lovers and the children in her great sea belly with its blood tides and its old wisdom of winds.

  Now there is April calm on the green sea and the day moves like a gliding gull.

  Waves wash white bones on the sand, cast empty shells to shore, whisper of kings whose open eyes they have washed clean in other depths.

  The day rises up out of green waters, wearing the mask of the sun, carrying the dark like an old thief who hides a stolen jewel against his heart.

  two

  It was quite clear by now to Mrs. Orlovski that even the worst of disasters—barring death, of course—was not permanent.

  “Good things end and bad things end,” was the way she put it to Doctor Baimer. “And we manage to survive somehow.”

  The doctor had merely nodded at this half-wisdom (accustomed as he was to Mrs. Orlovski’s gift for uttering just enough of the truth to make even the whole truth seem, for a moment, more than a little improbable). He nodded and then turned and walked out of the room, and Mrs. Orlovski could not help commenting to herself that Doctor Baimer might very well know his medicine, but beyond that he was certainly a rather dull man.

  For two months Mrs. Orlovski had been slowly falling to pieces. In the beginning it was so bad that at night when she would try to fall asleep, she would sometimes open her eyes in the dark and think she was in the midst of losing her mind. Of course, she was always sane again in the morning, but it got so that the nights really began to terrify her. She thought once of asking Doctor Baimer for some sleeping pills, but she had never taken a sleeping pill in her entire life, and since she was firmly convinced that the minute you started taking them, you never stopped, she did not ask the doctor for any.

  It had all started when Mrs. Orlovski had found Sygen lying out in the rain, in that terrible state, looking very much as if she had gone out of her mind. She had called to her a number of times, then had searched about the house, and when she did not come home by eight o’clock that evening, Mrs. Orlovski put on her raincoat and hat, took the silver flashlight from the closet, and set out to find her.

  When the doctor came, he told Mrs. Orlovski that Sygen was suffering from shock and he thought she was developing pneumonia. Hearing this, all Mrs. Orlovski could say was, “You think she’s developing pneumonia? You think!”

  Doctor Baimer gave Mrs. Orlovski some sedatives to take, but she did not take them.

  She had spent that entire first night sitting beside Sygen’s bed. She prayed and cried softly and felt herself trembling in the dark. She told herself that if anything happened to Sygen, her own life would be over too.

  But in the morning, exhausted as she was, she was very much aware that her life was not over, and she went downstairs into the kitchen and made pancakes and coffee and squeezed several oranges for juice.

  The doctor had not mentioned it to Mrs. Orlovski, but when he had first examined Sygen, the girl, in her delirious state, had muttered something about being raped. Doctor Baimer told her to tell him exactly what had happened, and she said something about a man dragging her out onto the beach. When he asked her to describe the man, she fell back into a state of unconsciousness for several moments and then she opened her eyes slowly and said, “A tramp . . . a tramp. . . .”

  Doctor Baimer, being an efficient man, told the police in town. They immediately set out to search for this tramp. They found the old man, Pojo, on the beach and told him he was under arrest. He had merely looked up with vacant eyes at them when they said this, as if he did not understand the language they were speaking. According to the story Doctor Baimer finally told Mrs. Orlovski a week later when she was a bit more herself, the old tramp had tried to run away. The policemen had shouted for him to halt. Then they had fired twice over his head as a warning and when he still refused to stop, they shot him in the back and when they picked up his body, he was dead.

  Mrs. Orlovski said nothing about the rape to either Jean, Sygen, or Miss Smith. When Sygen was better and could sit up in bed, Mrs. Orlovski would often catch herself staring at her daughter, and when she would look away she would always begin to wonder just how much of what had happened Sygen could remember.

  Sygen remained in bed for over two months. By the end of the second month, it was clear to both Sygen and the doctor, in whom she had confided, that she was pregnant. Sygen asked the doctor not to say anything to her mother, but the doctor could hold off only for three weeks.

  When he told Mrs. Orlovski the news, she again went to pieces, crying
, trembling, telling the doctor her life was over. This time he gave her an injection that put her to sleep.

  Mrs. Orlovski slept for sixteen hours and when she woke up, she was in perfect control of herself, and as she dressed, she felt the incongruous relief of knowing that the worst was over.

  It took her three more days, however, before she worked up the courage to speak to Sygen. When she did, she was surprised at the firm way she handled the situation. It seemed to her afterward that someone with much more experience than she herself had had put the words into her mouth, even the smile upon her face.

  Mrs. Orlovski told Sygen that she would be up and about in a few days. She told her the weather was perfectly lovely outside. She told her they all missed her at the dinner table. And then she told her that she would, of course, have the child and that she, Mrs. Orlovski, would be very proud indeed to become a grandmother.

  Sygen cried with relief when she heard her mother say this, and the two women fell into each other’s arms and were closer at that instant than they had ever been.

  Of course, Sygen had no way of knowing that her mother believed the father of her child to be an old tramp who had been shot down by the police. And Mrs. Orlovski had no way of knowing that Sygen believed the father of her child to be her own brother, Jean.

  three

  It frightened Miss Smith to watch Jean standing by the windows, looking out at the bright sunlight as if he could really see, as if his blindness had been only a joke he had played on her, like the photographs in her suitcase and the memories that came drifting back over her days as tides washing over old rocks.

  Miss Smith lay in the bed, feeling the sheets tangled around her naked limbs, and Jean stood naked by the windows. They had spent the entire afternoon together. She had told him that this would be their last day. She had put off telling him this for several weeks, thinking to herself that perhaps she would not really leave him and then knowing that this game never worked when she tried to play it with herself. At night she would try to believe she loved him; sometimes she would tell herself this when she would feel his arms around her and his body trying to break her open in their act of love as if this were the only way he could ever really find out if she had a heart.

  But she knew always that this was not true, that she did not love, had never loved; she had given up any hope of loving too long ago for it to really matter to her any more.

  He had taken her so many times on this afternoon, trying to hold her in this way, that she had finally found herself being amused with the simple faith of his youthful passion. She could remember old lovers who might well have given fortunes to feel the passion this boy displayed for her, and yet she could not be moved by it. She played her part well enough; she knew that. It tired her at times, but no more than playing any of the other parts that went to fill out her day.

  Jean stood there. Earlier he had gone walking slowly about the room, tracing the outlines of chairs, the dresser, the windows, the mirror, and finally the bed. She had watched him, wondering what he was doing, finally asking him, and all he had said was, “I want to remember exactly how this room was today.”

  But even before that, when she had said she would be leaving tomorrow, he had said simply, “Then I can go with you.” She had not answered. He had heard himself say the words. But they came from some distant part of the room, out of some other body, even out of some other time. He had heard these words and they had cut him open, saying or hearing them, because for days now he had tried to remember exactly what Sygen had told him. He had come to her bed. It all seemed to cloud together in his mind. Her hand reached out to guide him the last few inches of the way. But as soon as he sat down in the wood chair beside the bed, she let go of his hand and the letting go in itself was like the beginning of the words she spoke after they had first said only meaningless quiet words, the sort that strangers always know. Then she told him. He stiffened with horror. The insides of him became blind as his eyes. A wild rage tore at his heart like the teeth of the tiger. She told him what had happened that night in the rain. She told him about the child too. He did not believe her. He told her to shut up and she said, “Please listen.” He told her she was lying and she said, “Please don’t make me lie.”

  He sat there silent then, hating her because she was a stranger. She was a stranger trying to trick him because she thought you can trick a blind man merely because he is blind. It was then that she reached over, took hold of his hand again, knowing of this stranger who was trying to trick him. She held onto the hand a long time, during which neither of them spoke. They did not need words, both of them knowing this. But both of them knowing also how something had fled from this room where they had only silence now to share in the disbelief and horror that walled them in from the world like prisoners condemned to spend not one, but many lifetimes, in a kind of darkness that must eventually burn just bright enough for the condemned to see their own immortal shadows on the cold wall. Perhaps only magic, only this, had fled from the room, nothing more; magic fleeing to make anything but love impossible.

  Now, when this other woman did not answer him, perhaps because he had only said those words, “Then I can go with you,” to himself, he turned from her as one tries to turn from time itself, walked over straight to the windows, letting his right hand pass over the round smooth table on the way. She was watching him, wondering whether he had actually thought she would lead him about everywhere or had he forgotten for that instant that he was blind. And he was thinking: I have said it now. The words are out of me. She can do with them what she wants. And even beyond this, on some other level of himself or even on some other level of all the time that was closing up now behind him like a net of years, his own past, gathering him into its folds the way the nets of old fishermen once caught sea creatures who were not fish, he was thinking: Perhaps there was never anywhere else to go. But now there cannot be anywhere else.

  He stood there wondering what he would say to his sister. And even the word “sister” itself was something new, a word given a new, even dangerous meaning by all that had happened, was happening now, by all that which was still to come, to be shared between them like a sleepless night.

  Miss Smith watched him. Once in Tangiers, she had been escorted along with a group of at least seven or eight, having left a most fashionable party, to one of the cheapest brothels of the city. There she had been led about the tile-floored, filthy house that smelled of garbage and sweat and cheap scent. “There’s something so delightfully savage about all this,” one of the men had said in a voice that had been on the edge of high, girlish laughter. In one of the rooms they had seen a girl of not more than sixteen, a girl who in the light of day might have been at least pretty, but in this corrupt dark, under the lashing shadows of fat candles, appeared to be the victim of some disease too obscene for the medical profession even to acknowledge. There had been a show that had made some of their party giggle, others ill. And it was only when the show was finished that the Arab who had brought them announced, with a garish pride, that the girl was blind. “She never knows who or what is coming to her bed. Is that not the highest kind of expectation, my friends? Think, please, of all the possibilities.” She watched him and this old memory flashed through her mind with a frightened, halting speed.

  She wanted to tell him how grateful she was for his making her beautiful during this brief season that was now done. But to tell him would be to strip the blindness from his eyes, to make this season of her beauty a lie, when now she would be able to carry it with her always as if it had been true.

  “You won’t ever come back,” Jean said.

  Miss Smith said, “Come here. . . .”

  It was again something forbidden that stirred his blood. First she, this woman, had led him out of the sunlit joys he had shared with Sygen, leading him just deep enough into shadow to make him believe, feel the dread magic of that which is forbidden to flesh and hearts, even to dreaming itself. But if she had led him out of sunlight in
to shadow, his own heart now led him out of that shadow into a deeper dark than even blindness can comprehend. He could not even guess where this dark would end, but somehow he did know that its beginning was before sunlight, that sunlight itself had to grow out of this dark to make shadow and then the dark again.

  “The world,” he said to her, “used to be such a small place. It was easy to move about in. But now . . .” He stopped. He reached up both hands to touch the window, to be sure it was there. He said, “But now, it’s suddenly so huge, tremendous.” He thought: like the sea. And he said, “It used to be only what I could reach out and touch. It was all there. Can you understand that?”

  She said, “Yes,” even knowing he had not asked the question of her. She said, “Yes,” again, lamely, when he did not go on.

  But then he did go on. He said, “Now, I can’t reach out and touch it. It’s gone. Drifting off. Maybe like something you try very hard to remember . . . a day when you were a child. Like that. But you can’t ever really remember it the way it was. Once you wanted something more than anything else in the world, and now you can’t even remember what it was you wanted.”

  “No,” she said, “Jean . . . please come here. Please . . . let me hold you.”

  But it’s not you, he thought, turning. A faint, almost cruel smile twisted his mouth into a shape unnatural for him. He said, “You are beautiful, aren’t you?”

  Miss Smith felt herself tremble, noticing the shape of his mouth even before the words reached her. She turned, hid her face from him, then remembered in an instant that he could not see her; and she said, trying to hide the fear in her voice with laughter, “Of course, I am, my darling.” But even as she said these words, lightly, as if they were part of a joke they could laugh at together, her fingers touched the dry skin around her eyes and the old rotting lie reached into her like dead fingers searching for the face that had long ago fallen to dust behind the mask she wore.