John Banville - The Blue Guitar

I’ve forgotten so much about our child, our little Olivia — very handy, these sink-holes I’ve sunk in the seabed of memory. She has become mummified, for me. She endures inside me like one of those miraculously preserved saintly corpses that they keep behind glass under the altars of Italian churches; there she reposes, tiny, waxen, unreally still, herself and yet other, changeless through the changing years.

We had her when we were living in the city, in a rented house on Cedar Street, a poky place with tiny windows and ill-fitting floorboards that squealed in fright when trodden on. The attraction for me was an attic with a north-facing roof-light under which I set up my easel. I was working a storm in those days, half the time in awe of my gift and the other half in a blue terror, fearing I was getting nowhere and fooling myself that I was. The worst of Cedar Street was that our landlady was Gloria’s mother, the Widow Palmer. She’s ill-named, for there’s nothing in her of the palm tree’s polish and languid poise. On the contrary, she’s a stiff old bird of hawk-like aspect — she’s on her perch even yet — with iron curls and a clenched and bloodless mouth, and one of those noses — retroussé, on dit, though that’s far too handsome a word for what it describes — that offer an unwelcome view into the caverns of the nostrils even when the face is viewed full-on. But I’m being hard. Hers wasn’t an easy life, not only in her widowhood but even more so when her husband was still around to torment her. This rakish fellow, Ulick Palmer of the Palmers of Palmerstown, as he used straight-facedly to style himself, was a waster who scorned her while he was alive and at his death left her as good as destitute, except for a few bits of property scattered about the city, hence the Cedar Street house, for which I was compelled to pay an outrageously disproportionate rent, a matter of smouldering resentment on my part and of bristling defensiveness on Gloria’s. Incidentally, how such a pinched pair as Ma and Pa Palmer managed between them to produce so magnificent a creature as my Gloria I’m sure I don’t know. Maybe she was a foundling and they never told her; it wouldn’t surprise me.

It was sorrow that drove us to the sun-dazed south. Sorrow encourages displacement, urges flight, the unresting quest for new horizons. After the child’s death we made ourselves into moving targets, Gloria and I, in order to dodge, to try to dodge, the fiery darts the god of grief shoots from his burning bow. For loss and love have more in common than might seem, at least so far as feeling goes. I suppose it was inevitable we would hurry back to the scenes of our first dallyings, as if to annul the years, as if to wind time backwards and make what had happened not happen. Gloria took our tragedy harder than I did, and that also was inevitable: it was a part of her, after all, flesh of her flesh, that had died. My role had been not much more than to release, three trimesters previously, the tiny mad wriggler whose one intent had been to kick his way free of me and go tadpoling towards his disdainful yet in the end all too receptive target. Another piercing, among piercings. How neatly it all seems to hang together, this life, these lives.

I wouldn’t have thought the child had been with us long enough to make her presence, or her absence, rather, so strongly felt. She was so young, she went so soon. Her death had a deadening effect in general on our lives, Gloria’s and mine; something of us died along with her. Hardly surprising, I know, and hardly exclusive to us; children die all the time, taking a part of their parents’ selves with them. We — and in this instance I think I can speak for Gloria as well as for myself — we had the impression of standing outside our own front door without a key and knocking and knocking and hearing nothing from within, not even an echo, as if the whole house had been filled to the ceilings with sand, with clay, with ashes. There were subtler effects, too, as when for instance I struck a fingernail against even the lightest and most potentially musical of objects, the rim of a wine glass, say, or the lid of that little Louis Quatorze rosewood box I stole from the desk of an art dealer in the rue Bonaparte years ago, and there would come back to me no ringing resonance. Everything seemed hollow, hollow and weightless, like those brittle casings of themselves that dead wasps leave on window-sills at the dusty end of summer. Grief was flat, in other words, a flat dull empty ache. I suppose that’s why when children die in sultry desert zones, where feelings are more readily freed, the parents, along with siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins at multiple removes, all wind black rags around their heads and rend the air with ululating shrieks and throaty warblings, determined their loss shall have its terrible and noisy due. I wouldn’t have minded a bit of rending and shrieking myself; better that than the restrained snivels and snuffles that we felt were all that the rules of decorum would allow us, in public, at least. There must be, it seemed to us, a limit to the mourning we could do for a life not lived. That, however, was the point. What we were sorrowing for was all that would not be, and that kind of vacuum, believe me, will suck in as many tears as you have to shed.

Grief, like pain, is only real when one is experiencing it. Up to then I hardly knew what it was to grieve. My mother had barely entered on her middle years when she fell ill and simply drifted away, her death seeming hardly more than an intensification, a final perfecting, of the general distractedness in which she had passed her lamentably brief life. My father, too, went quietly, after that moment of violent protest on his last visit to the shop, when he kicked over the print stand. He appeared less concerned for his own suffering than for the distress and disruption he was causing in the lives of those around him. In his final moments on his deathbed he squeezed my hand and tried to smile reassuringly, as if it were not he but I who was launching out into uncharted distances with no prospect of return.

Gloria and I had a fight one day not so long ago. It was strange, for we rarely even argue. Our disagreement, let’s call it that, was over a potted ornamental tree she keeps by the window in the kitchen. I’m not sure what variety of tree it is. Myrtle, perhaps? Let’s say myrtle. I didn’t realise how fond she was of it, or how fiercely she would cling to it, until, seemingly for no reason, it began to decline. The leaves turned grey and drooped despondently, and wouldn’t revive, no matter how lovingly she watered the soil or fed the roots with nutrients. At last she discovered what the matter was. The tree had been invaded by parasites, minuscule spider-like creepy-crawlies that flourished on the undersides of the leaves and were gradually sucking the life out of them. I was fascinated by this teeming, relentlessly devouring horde, and even bought a powerful magnifying-glass the better to study the little beasts, so industrious, so dedicated, so disregardful of everything around them, including me. Particularly impressive was the intricate filigree of webbing, strung in the angles of the leaf-stems, in which the young, no bigger than specks of dust, were suspended. Gloria, however, white-lipped and with eyes narrowed, went immediately and mercilessly about the business of eradication, dousing the tree with a powerful insecticide spray and afterwards taking it into the back yard and throwing pitcherfuls of soapy water over it to wash away any possible survivors. I, unwisely, protested. Had it not occurred to her, I asked, that she might have her priorities in the wrong order? True, the tree was alive, but the mites were more so. Why should they not be allowed to go on living, for as long as the tree could sustain them? Was the pretty spectacle the tree provided for us more important than the myriad lives she was destroying in order to protect and preserve it? For a long minute she looked at me in silence from under lowered brows, then flung the spray bottle at me — she missed — and stalked out of the room. A little while later I found her sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, her head down and her hands plunged in her hair, just like my mother, weeping. I thought to apologise, I wasn’t exactly sure for what, but instead went away quietly and left her there to her tears. What did it mean? I don’t know, though it must have meant something — many of the real things I meet with in waking life are to me as baffling as the fantastical apparitions I encounter in dreams. I tried to talk to her about it, when her temper had cooled, but she cut me off with a sidewise slice of her hand and rose from where she had been crouching and walked away. I have the notion she was thinking of our lost Olivia. The tree recovered, but refuses to flourish.