The Blue Guitar Read online

  But, then, what is my true subject? Are we talking of authenticity here? My only aim always, from the very start, was to get down in form that formless tension floating in the darkness inside my skull, like the unfading after-image of a lightning flash. What did it matter which fragments of the general wreckage I settled on for a subject? Guitar and terrace and azure sea with sail, or Maggie Mallon’s fish shop—what did it matter? But, somehow, it did; somehow, there was always the old dilemma, that is, the tyranny of things, of the unavoidable actual. But what, after all, did I know of actual things, wherever they rose up to confront me? It was precisely actuality I took no interest in. So I ask again if that’s what really stymied me: that the world I chose to paint was not my own. It’s a simple question, and the answer seems obvious. But there’s a flaw. To say the south wasn’t mine is to suggest that somewhere else was, and tell me, where might that rare place be found, pale Ramon?

  —

  It wasn’t Gloria’s car I heard stopping outside the gate-lodge that day—no more than half a week after my storm-tossed flight to freedom—when I was finally run to ground and led out of my lair by the ear. My wife wasn’t the only one who had guessed where I was in hiding. I must admit I felt put out to have been recaptured so easily. I would have thought everyone would assume I had made off to somewhere distant and exotic, the kind of place favoured by legendary artistes maudits, Harar in darkest Ethiopia, say, or a South Sea island with flat-faced, big-breasted brown women, and not that I had scurried back to that most banal of refuges, the house where I was born. My first instinct, when I heard the car turning in at the gate and drawing to a crunching stop outside, was to dart to the front door and shoot the bolt home and dive under a table and hide. But I didn’t. The truth is, I was relieved. I hadn’t really wanted to disappear, and my going had been less flight than frolic, however desperate to escape I had thought I was. I had gloried in being out on the roads that night of tempest and black rain, when the stubbled old farmer picked me up in his lorry and told me about the lovelorn lover found drowned under the bridge. It had seemed I was running not away from but towards something, the wildness of the weather matching the storm raging in my breast. But what had seemed bravado was, in truth, pure funk. I had been happy to carry on with Polly in secret, but when the secret was discovered I swept my coat-tails around me and ran, but even then I didn’t have the courage of my actions, and all along had waited in secret anticipation of being caught up with and—what? Reclaimed, or rescued? Yes: rescued from myself.

  Gloria’s arrival on the doorstep, then, was what I had been half expecting and more than half hoping for all along, but anyone else, Marcus, say, or Gloria’s winged and scaly, fire-breathing mother, even an officer of the law, brandishing a warrant for my arrest on a charge of gross moral turpitude, would not have been more of a surprise than what I did find confronting me when I cautiously drew open the front door. For there she was, Polly herself, my dearest, darling Polly—how my blood sang at the sight of her!—with the child in her arms. My jaw dropped—really, jaws do drop, as I’ve had reason to discover, on more occasions than I care to recall—and my heart along with it, my poor old yo-yo of a heart that was so knocked about and bruised already.

  But why the great surprise? Why shouldn’t it have been Polly? I don’t know. I just had not imagined she would be the one to find me. Why wasn’t it Gloria, I wanted to know? Shouldn’t my wife have been the one to come and fetch me? It’s a puzzle that she didn’t. She had phoned me, she knew where I was. Why didn’t she get in her car and drive out to the gate-lodge, as surely any wife would have done? But she didn’t. It’s strange. Can it be she didn’t want me back? That’s a thing I don’t wish to consider.

  Polly has a way, when she’s upset and agitated, of breaking on the instant into unexpected and startlingly rapid movement. These sudden light-footed flurries, remarkable in a young woman as solidly built as she is, must be related to the skittish bouts of dancing that Marcus described her performing about the house, in happier days, before the catastrophe struck and while the pillars of the temple were still standing. Now the door was no sooner open than she fairly flung herself at me, with a stifled sound that could have been an expression of joy, of anger or relief, of recrimination or anguish, or of all these things together, and ground her mouth against mine so fiercely that I felt the shape of her overlapping front teeth through the warm pulp of her lips. I was shocked and confused, and couldn’t think of anything to say. What I felt was something like a happy seasickness, my knees wobbly and my insides heaving. I hadn’t realised how acutely I had been missing her—I find it unfailingly amazing how much can be going on inside me without my knowing. Polly said something similar once, didn’t she, about dreams and the dreaming mind? Now, with her mouth still glued to mine and mumbling incomprehensible words, she pushed me backwards into the hall, while the child, sandwiched between us, wriggled and kicked. It was like being seized upon by a mother octopus bearing one of her young before her. At last I freed myself from that entangling embrace and held both of them, mother and child, away from me—held, mind, not thrust. I was breathing heavily, as if I had been brought to a sudden halt in the middle of a desperate run, which was the case, in a way. The cut that Marcus’s ring had made on Polly’s cheek was healed, but a tiny livid scar remained. How, I asked her, how had she found me, how had she known where to look for me? She gave a brief high laugh, tinged with hysteria, so it seemed to me, and said that of course this was the obvious place for me to have fled to, since I had talked so much about the gate-lodge and being here with my parents and my siblings, long ago. This gave me a shock. I couldn’t recall ever mentioning to her the subfusc life I had led here as a child. Is it possible to say things and not be aware of it, to speak while awake as if one were asleep, in a state of talkative hypnogeny? She laughed again, and said I had made her so curious that she had driven out one afternoon during the summer to have a squint, as she put it, at the scenes of my childhood. I stared at her in dull bewilderment. “You were here,” I said, “here in the gate-lodge?”

  “No, no, not inside, of course not,” she cried, with another wild-sounding laugh. “I just stopped at the gate and sat in the car. I’d have come and looked in through the windows but I didn’t have the nerve. I wanted to see where you were born and where you grew up.” But why, I asked, still at a loss, why would she do that?—why would she be curious about such things? For a moment she didn’t reply. She stood before me, holding the child hitched on her hip, and tilted her head to one side and surveyed me with a fondly pitying smile. She was wearing a heavy woollen jumper and a woollen skirt, and her unruly hair was held at the back of her head by a big broad-toothed tortoiseshell clasp. “Because I love you, you sap,” she said.

  Ah. Love. Yes. The secret ingredient I always forget about and leave out.

  In the kitchen she put the child sitting on the table—from which, need I say, I had already smartly removed to hiding the thick school jotter containing these precious ruminations—and looked about the room and wrinkled her nose. “Smells damp,” she said. “It’s cold, too.” She was right—I was wearing my overcoat and scarf—yet I felt immediately and absurdly defensive. I pointed out stiffly that the place hadn’t been lived in for a very long time, and that there had been no one to look after it. She snorted and said, yes, that was obvious. The harsh light through the window gave to her face a scrubbed, raw look, and standing there, in her jumper and her matronly flat shoes, she seemed, although there was no mirror about, barely familiar, and might have been someone with whom I was no more than distantly acquainted, even though I yearned to take her in my arms and hold her tenderly against me and chafe her cold cheeks back to rosy warmth. She was, after all, and despite everything, my own dear girl, as how could I ever have thought otherwise? Far from cheering me, however, this realisation, this re-realisation, caused in me a sort of plummeting sensation, as if the bottom had fallen out of something inside me. The snares I had thought to free myself
from were still firmly clamped around my ankles, after all. And yet I was so pleased she was here. Happy sadness, sad happiness, the story of my life and loves.

  Polly, eyeing the bare shelves and the cupboards that had the look of being equally empty, asked what I was living on. I said I had been going down to Kearney’s, the pub at the crossroads, where there was soup to be had at lunchtime, and sandwiches in the evening, made up on the quiet and specially for me by the publican’s daughter, Maisie her name, in whose heart I seemed to have found a soft spot. “Is that so?” Polly said, and sniffed. I almost laughed. Imagine being jealous of poor rough-hewn Maisie Kearney, pushing fifty, chronically unwooed and definitively unwed. I said nothing; Polly’s manner now, sceptical and imperious, was making me cross. Isn’t it remarkable how even the most outlandish circumstances will after a minute or two adjust themselves into a humdrum norm? Here I was, surprised by a cruelly abandoned lover, in my formerly parental home, where I had been in hiding from her, as well as from her husband and my wife, and already, after the initial shocking irruption, we were back once more amid the old, accustomed trivia, the squabbles, the resentments, the petty recriminations. Yes, I could have laughed. And yet, such was the jumbled state I was in, at once harried, distraught and desirous, that I could hardly think what to say or what to do. Desirous, yes, you heard me. I ached for my girl’s achingly remembered flesh, so familiar and yet always a new and uncharted land. What a shameless cullion it is, the libido.

  The child began to fret but was ignored. She was still sitting in the middle of the table, pot-bellied and inanely pouting, like a miniature and unsmiling Buddha. I wondered vaguely, not for the first time, if there might be something the matter with her—she was nearly two and yet was showing scant sign of development, was barely at the walking stage and still couldn’t talk. But what do I know about children? “You must be lonely here,” Polly said, in a sulkily accusing tone. “Didn’t you miss me?” Yes, I hastened to say, of course I had missed her, of course I had. But there had been, I said, brightening, there had been my rat to keep me company. She lowered her head, tucking her chin into that notch above her clavicle that I used to love to dip my tongue into, and regarded me with a hard frown. “Your rat,” she said, in an ominously toneless voice. Yes, I said, unable to stop, he was a friendly fellow and often came out of his lair under the gas cooker to see what I was up to. He was, I guessed, of a good age, and solitary, like myself. The front he presented to me was an equal blend of curiosity, boldness and circumspection. Often of an evening I would bring back from the pub the remains of one of Maisie’s lovingly assembled sandwiches, a buttered bit of crust, or a morsel of Cheddar, and set it on the floor in front of the cooker, and eventually, sure enough, he would come nosing out, making little feints and jabs with his snout, his pinkly glistening nostrils twitching and his slender, delicate claws making scratching sounds on the linoleum, so tiny and faint that to hear them I had to sit perfectly quiet and even suspend my breathing. While he ate, which he did with the finical niceness of an aged and dyspeptic gourmet on the umpteenth course of an imperial banquet, he would glance up at me now and then with a speculative and, so it seemed, drily amused expression. I imagine he considered me an accommodating simpleton, only mildly puzzling, and obviously harmless. His tail, lank, nude and finely tapered, wasn’t a pleasant thing to look at; also, in the course of consuming the tidbits that I offered him, he had a way of bunching up and arching his hindquarters that made it seem as if he were preparing to vomit, though he never did, in my presence. These things aside, I was fond of him, wary old-timer that he was.

  Polly’s look had turned beady. “Is that meant to be a joke?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” I mumbled, and hung my head.

  “Well, it’s not funny.” She sniffed again. “So, it’s me, or a rat, one as good as the other.” I made to protest but she wasn’t in the mood to listen. “I suppose you’ve given him a name?” she said. “And I suppose you talk to him, tell him stories? Do you tell him about me, about us? God, you’re pathetic.” She plucked up the child and cradled her almost violently against her breast. “And germs all over the place, too,” she said. “Rats go everywhere, up the legs of chairs, on the table, especially if you feed them—which you’re mad to do, by the way.”

  I could hardly keep from smiling, though I was afraid she would hit me if I didn’t. For all that they made me cross, I relished these brief bouts of domestic badinage that Polly and I used to engage in—or that she engaged in, while I stood by indulgently, aglow with a kind of proprietorial fondness, as if I had fashioned her myself out of some originally coarse but precious primordial clay. I am, as you may guess from all I have to say on the subject passim, an enthusiastic advocate of the ordinary. Take this moment in the kitchen, with Polly and me standing among the gauzy shades of my childhood. The sky in the window was clouded yet all inside here was quick with a mercurial light that picked out the polished curves and sharp corners of things and gave to them a muted, steady shine: the handle of a knife on the table, the teapot’s spout, a nicely rounded brass doorknob. The wintry air in the room was redolent of unremembered things, but there was, too, a quality of urgency, of immanence, a sense of momentous events in the offing. I had stood here as a boy, beside this same table, before this same window, in the same metallic light, dreaming of the unimaginable, illimitable state that was to come, which was the future, the future that for me, now, was the present and soon would fall away and become the past. How was it possible, that I had been there then and was here now? And yet it was so. This is the mundane and unaccountable conjuring trick wrought by time. And Polly, my Polly, in the midst of it all.

  “I want to paint you,” I said, or blurted, rather.

  She looked at me askance. “Paint me?” she said, widening her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I say: I want to paint you.” My heart was thudding in the most alarming way, really thudding, like a big bass drum.

  “Oh, yes?” she said. “With two noses and a foot sticking out of my ear?”

  I ignored this travesty of my style. “No,” I said, “I want to paint your portrait—a portrait of you as you are.”

  She was still regarding me with sceptical amusement. “But you only paint things,” she said, “not people, and even when you do you make them look like things.”

  This, too, I let pass, though it wasn’t without a certain point, a certain sharp point, whether she was fully aware of it or not, another instance of the fact that true insights come from the most unexpected quarters. The truth is, what I wanted, what I was angling for, with this urgent talk of painting and portraits, was for her to take her clothes off, right now, right here, in this chilly kitchen, or better still for her to let me do it, to peel her like an egg and look and look and look at her, naked, in what was literally the cold light of day. Don’t mistake me. I had not been seized by lust, at least not by lust in the usual sense, which is a different class of a thing altogether from desire, in my opinion. I’ve always found women most interesting, most fascinating, most, yes, desirable, precisely when the circumstances in which I encounter them are least appropriate or promising. It’s a matter to me of unfailing amazement and awe that under the dowdiest of clothes—that shapeless jumper, the drab skirt, those characterless shoes—there is concealed something as intricate, abundant and mysterious as the body of a woman. It is for me one of the secular miracles—is there any other kind?—that women are as they are. I don’t speak here of their minds, their intellects, their sensibilities, and for this I’ll be shouted at, I know, but I don’t care. It’s the visible, the tactile, graspable fact of womanly flesh, draped so snugly over its cage of bone—that’s what I’m talking about. The body thinks and has its own eloquence, and a woman’s body has more to say than that of any other creature, infinitely more, to my ear, at any rate, or to my eye. That’s the reason I wanted Polly to be rid of her clothes and for me to look at her, no, to listen to her, rapt and rapturously undone, I
mean listen to her corporeal self, if such a thing could be possible. Looking and listening, listening and looking, these, for one such as I, are the intensest ways of touching, of caressing, of possessing.

  Well, why, you will ask, in your sensible way, did I not invite Polly to step into one of the bedrooms, even the dank and musty one at the back of the house that I used to share with my brothers when I was a lad, and have her undress there, as surely she would have done, willingly, if our recent history together was anything to go by? That only shows how little you understand me and what I have been saying, not just here but all along. Don’t you see? What concerns me is not things as they are, but as they offer themselves up to being expressed. The expressing is all—and oh, such expressing.

  Polly had been gazing at me with a perplexed frown, and now she started, and gave herself a shake, as though she were coming out of a trance. “What are we talking about?” she said, in the fluting, tremulous voice she had been speaking in since she arrived, of so high a register that it kept seeming she might topple over and fall off of herself. “I’m here to find out from you why you ran away, and you’re babbling about painting a portrait of me. You must be mad, or must think I am.” I lowered my eyes, displaying dumb contrition, but she was not to be so easily placated. “Well?” she demanded. She hitched the child higher on her hip—she has a way of flaunting that daughter of hers like a weapon, or as a shield that could be turned into a weapon—and waited, fiercely glaring, for me to account for myself. If her eyes were some more vivid shade than grey I would say they blazed. Still I stood mute. She had every right to be cross with me—she had every right to be furious—but all the same I didn’t know what to say to her, any more than I had known what to say to her suffering husband that other day when he came blundering up the stairs to the studio and poured out all his woes. How could I unravel the complex web of reasons for my going, since I was hopelessly tangled up in them myself? “I know you stopped being in love with me,” she said, with an intensified quiver in her voice, at once sorrowful and accusing, “but to run away like that, without so much as a word—I wouldn’t have believed even you could be so cruel.” She was looking at me with a kind of wounded pleading, and when I still said nothing, only stood there with my head hanging, she bit her lip and gave a cut-off, gulping sob and sat down suddenly on one of the kitchen chairs, plonking the child on to her lap.