John Banville: The Blue Guitar

Gloria, my usually sharp-eyed wife, noticed nothing either. Or did she? One never quite knows, with Gloria. That’s the point of her, I suppose.

Anyway, that was that, for then. But I want it understood and written into the record that technically it was Polly who made the first move, by virtue of that fateful feeling of my knee, since my overheated blandishing of her at the table earlier had been a matter solely of words, not actions — I never laid a finger on her, m’lud, not that night, I swear it. When I reached down now and tried fumblingly to take her hand she instantly withdrew it, and without turning gave an infinitesimal shake of the head that I took as a caution and even a rebuke. I was greatly agitated, no less by Polly’s caress than by her rebuff, and I asked Marcus to stop and let me off, saying I wanted to walk the rest of the way home and clear my head in the night air. Gloria looked at me briefly in surprise — I’ve never been much of a one for outdoors, except in my painterly imagination — but made no comment. Marcus stopped the car on the bridge over the mill-race. I got out, and paused a moment and put a hand on the roof of the car and leaned back in to bid husband and wife goodnight, and Marcus grunted — he was still annoyed with himself over the car not starting — and Polly only said a quick word that I didn’t catch and still wouldn’t turn her head or look at me. Off they drove, the exhaust smoke leaving an acrid, saline stink on the air, and I walked slowly in their wake, over the little humpbacked bridge, with the mill-stream gushing and gulping under me, my thoughts in a riot as I watched those rubious tail-lights dwindling into the darkness, like the eyes of a stealthily retreating tiger. Oh, to be devoured!

—

Now, as to the subject of thieving, where to start? I confess I am embarrassed by this childish vice — let’s call it a vice — and frankly I don’t know why I’m owning up to it, to you, my inexistent confessor. The moral question here is ticklish. Just as art uses up its materials by absorbing them wholly into the work, as Collingwood avers — a painting consumes the paint and canvas, while a table is for ever its wood — so too the act, the art, of stealing transmutes the object stolen. In time, most possessions lose their patina, become dulled and anonymous; stolen, they spring back to life, take on the sheen of uniqueness again. In this way, is not the thief doing a favour to things by dint of renewing them? Does he not enhance the world by buffing up its tarnished silver? I hope I have set out the preliminaries of my case with sufficient force and persuasiveness?

The first thing I ever stole, the first thing I remember stealing, was a tube of oil paint. Yes, I know, it seems altogether too pat, doesn’t it, since I was to be an artist and all, but there you are. The scene of the crime was Geppetto’s toyshop up a narrow lane off Saint Swithin Street — yes, these names, I know, I’m making them up as I go along. It must have been at Christmastime, the dark falling at four o’clock and a gossamer drizzle giving a shine to the mussel-blue cobbles of the laneway. I was with my mother. Should I say something about her? Yes, I should: she’s due her due. In those early days — I was nine or ten at the time I’m speaking of — she was less like a mother than a well-disposed older sister, more well-disposed, certainly, than the sister I did have. Mother always affected a distrait and even slightly dazed manner, and was generally inadequate to the ordinary business of life, a thing people found either exasperating or endearing, or both. She was beautiful, I think, in an ethereal sort of way, but gave little attention to her appearance, unless her seeming negligence was a carefully maintained pose, though I don’t believe it was. Her hair in particular she let go wild. It was russet in colour and abundant but very fine, like a rare species of ornamental dried grass, and in almost every memory I have of her she is running her fingers through it in a gesture of vague and ruefully humorous desperation. There was a touch of the gypsy about her, to the shame and annoyance of her children, excepting me, for in my eyes everything she was and did was as near to perfection as it was humanly possible to be. She wore peasant blouses and billowing, flower-print skirts, and in the warmer months elected to go barefoot about the house and sometimes even in the street — she must have been a scandal to our hidebound little town. She had strikingly lovely, pale-violet eyes, which I have inherited, though certainly they are wasted on me. When I was little we were never less than happy in each other’s company, and I wouldn’t have minded, and I suspect she wouldn’t, either, if there had been only the two of us, without my father or my older siblings to crowd the scene. I don’t know why I should have been her favourite but I was. I suppose, being young, I wasn’t ugly yet, and anyway, mothers always favour their last-born, don’t they? I would catch her watching me intently, with bright-eyed expectation, as if at any moment I might do something amazing, perform some marvellous trick, upend myself in an effortless handstand, say, or launch into an operatic aria, or sprout little gold wings at my wrists and ankles and fly up flutteringly into the air.

I had announced early on, in my most precocious and grandest manner, that I intended to be a painter — what an unbearable little twerp I must have been — and of course she thought it a splendid notion, despite my father’s anxious murmurings. Naturally the usual crayons and coloured pencils wouldn’t do at all, no, her boy must have the best, and at once we set off together for Geppetto’s, the only place in town we knew of that stocked oil paint and canvases and real brushes. The shop was high-ceilinged yet cramped, like so many of the houses and premises in the town; so narrow was it indeed that customers tended automatically to enter it at a sideways shuffle, insinuating themselves through the tall doorway with averted faces and retracted tummies. There was a wrought-iron spiral staircase on the right, which I always thought should lead up to a pulpit, and the walls were fitted with shelves of toys to the ceiling. The art supplies were at the back, on a raised section up three steep steps. There Geppetto had his desk, also high and narrow, more like a pulpit, really, a vantage from which he could survey the entire shop, peering over the tops of his spectacles with that benign and twinkling smile in which there glinted, like a bared incisor, the sharp, unresting watchfulness of the born huckster. His real name was Johnson or Jameson or Jimson, I can’t remember exactly, but I called him Geppetto because, with his fuzzy white sidelocks and those rimless specs perched on the end of his long thin nose, he was a dead ringer for the old toy-maker as illustrated in a big Pinocchio picture-book that I had been given as a gift one Christmas.

By the way, I might say many things about that wooden boy and his yearning to be human, oh, yes, many things. But I won’t.

The various colours, I see them still, were set out in a ranked and captivating display on a carved wooden stand like an oversized pipe-rack. Straight away I fixed on a sumptuously fat tube of zinc white. The tube, by happy coincidence, seemed itself made of zinc, while the white label had the matt, dry texture of gesso, a shade I’ve favoured ever since, as you’ll know if you know anything of my work, which I hope you don’t. By instinct I made sure not to let my interest show, and certainly wouldn’t have been so foolhardy as to pick the thing up and examine it, or even to touch it. There is a particular kind of sidewise regard for the object of his desire that in the first stage of stealing it is all the thief will permit himself, not only for reasons of strategy and security but because gratification postponed means pleasure enhanced, as every voluptuary knows. My mother was talking to Geppetto in her distracted way, gazing past his left ear and absent-mindedly fiddling with a pencil she had picked up from his desk, turning and turning it in her attractively slender though somewhat mannish fingers. What can they have been talking about, such an ill-matched pair? I could see, despite my tender age and his years, that the old boy was greatly taken with this wild-haired, limpid-eyed creature. My mother, I should say, was always seductive in her dealings with men, whether intentionally or otherwise I can’t say. It was her very vagueness, I believe, the slightly fey, slightly frowning dreaminess, that dazzled and undid them. And therein I saw my chance. When I judged that she had lulled the old shopman into a state of glazed befuddlement, I shot out a claw and — snap! the tube of paint was in my pocket.