John Banville - The Blue Guitar

You can imagine how I felt, with fright making a burning lump in my throat and my heart banging away. Gleefully triumphant too, of course, secretly so, and horribly. I was in such a state of stifled excitement that it seemed my eyes might pop out of their sockets and my cheeks swell to bursting. Believe me, when it comes to first times, stealing and love have a lot in common. How thrillingly chilly that tube of paint felt, and what a weight it was, as if it were formed of an otherworldly element that had landed here from a distant planet where the force of gravity was a thousand times stronger than on earth. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had torn its way through my trousers pocket and smashed a hole in the floor and gone on plummeting downwards till it came out in Australia, to the amazement of blackfellows and the fright of kangaroos.

I think what most impressed me about what I had done was the quickness of it. I don’t mean just the quickness of the deed itself, although there was something eerie, something wizardly, in the seemingly instantaneous way the tube of paint got from its place on the wooden stand and into my pocket. I’m thinking of those Godley particles we hear so much about, these days, that at one moment are in one place and the next in another, even on the far side of the universe, with no trace whatever of how they got from here to there. That’s the way it always is with a theft. It’s as if a single thing by being stolen were on the instant made into two: the thing that before was someone else’s and this not quite identical thing that now is mine. It’s a kind of, what do you call it, a kind of transubstantiation, if that’s not going too far. For it did give me a feeling almost of holy awe, on that first occasion, and does so still, every time. That’s the sacral side of the thing; the profane side is if anything even more numinous.

Did Geppetto spy me in the act? I had the fearful suspicion that for all that he was in thrall to my mother’s azure gaze, even though it wasn’t fully focused on him, he had spotted my hand darting out and my fingers fixing on that lovely fat shiny half-pound of paint and magicking it into my pocket. Whenever I returned to his shop, and I would return there many times over the coming years, he would give me what I thought was a special, sly smile, quick with knowing. “Here he comes, our little painter!” he would exclaim, snuffling a soft laugh down his greyly hirsute nostrils. “Our very own Leonardo!” That first time I felt so euphoric I didn’t care if he knew what I had done, but all the same he was one person I made sure never to steal from again.

How did I account for the extra and costly tube of paint that my mother would have known she hadn’t purchased from Geppetto? Vague she may have been, but she was always careful with the pennies. Explaining the inexplicable and sudden appearance of an unfamiliar object is always a tricky business, as any recreational thief will tell you — I say recreational when really it’s a matter of aesthetics, even of erotics, but we’ll get on to all that in a while, if I have the heart for it. Prestidigitation comes into it — now you don’t see it, now you do — and I quickly became a dab hand at palming and unpalming my pilfered trifles. People in general are inattentive, but the thief never is. He watches and waits, then pounces. Unlike the professional burglar, in his stripes and ridiculously skimpy mask, who comes home from work at dawn and proudly tumbles the contents of his swag-bag on to the counterpane for his sleepy wife to admire, we artist-thieves must conceal our art and its rewards. “Where did you get that fountain pen?” we’ll be asked — or tie-pin, snuffbox, watch-chain, whatever—“I don’t remember you buying that.” The rules of response are, first, never to speak straight off, but let a beat or two go by before answering; second, seem a little unsure oneself as to the provenance of the bibelot in question; third, and above all, never attempt to be comprehensive, for nothing fans the flame of suspicion like an abundance of detail too freely offered. And then—

But I’m getting ahead of myself; a thief’s heart is an impetuous organ, and while inwardly he throbs for absolution, at the same time he can’t keep from bragging.

My father, as I’ve mentioned, disapproved of my new hobby, which is how he regarded it — painting, that is — and continued to disapprove even when I was older and began to earn, even in the early days, not unappreciable sums for my daubs. At the start he was thinking of the expense, for after all he too made his living in or on the periphery of the art business and would have been aware of the cost of paint and canvas and good bristle brushes. However, I suspect his misgiving was in fact only a terror of the unknown. His son an artist! It was the last thing he would have expected, and what he didn’t expect frightened him. My father. Must I make a sketch of him, too? Yes, I must: fair is fair. He was an unassuming man, lanky, thin to the point of emaciation — obviously I must be a throwback — with stooped shoulders and a long narrow head, like the carved blade of a primitive axe. Rather a Marcus type, now that I think of it, though in aspect less refined, less the suffering saint. My father moved in a peculiar, mantis-like fashion, as if all his joints were not quite attached to each other and he had to hold his skeleton together inside his skin with great care and difficulty. My reddish-brassy-brown hair seems to be the only physical trait I inherited from him. I have his timidity, too, his small-scale fearfulness. Early on I developed a weary contempt for him, a thing that troubles me now, when sadly it’s too late to make up for it. He was good to my mother and me and the other children, according to his lights. What I couldn’t forgive him was his execrable taste. Every time I had to go into his shop my lip would curl in contempt, instantly and all by itself, like one of those old-time celluloid shirt-fronts. How I despised, even as a child, the so many prints of teary urchins and kittens at play with balls of wool, of dappled glades and antlered monarchs of the glen, and, prime object of my loathing, that life-sized head-and-shoulders portrait of a pensive Oriental beauty with green skin, framed in gilt and mounted in unavoidable splendour above the cash register. There was never any question of his stocking my stuff, certainly not — he didn’t ask, and I didn’t offer. Imagine my surprise and some dismay, then, on the day after he died when I was going through his things and came across a burlap folder, which I think he must have made himself, in which he had kept the portrait I did of my poor mother on her deathbed. French chalk on a nice creamy sheet of Fabriano paper. It wasn’t bad, for prentice work. But that he had kept it all those years, and in its own special folder, too, well, that was a facer. Sometimes I have the suspicion that there’s a lot I miss in the day-to-day run of events.

Wait a minute, though. Can I really count that tube of paint as the first thing I stole? There are many kinds of theft, from the whimsical through to the malicious, but there’s only one kind that counts, for me, and that’s the theft that is utterly inutile. The objects I take must be ones that can’t be put to practical use, not by me, anyway. As I said at the outset, I don’t steal for profit — unless the secret shiver of bliss that thieving affords me can be considered a material gain — whereas I not only wanted but needed that tube of paint, as I wanted and needed Polly, and there’s no doubt I put it to good use— Oops! That bit about Polly slipped out, or slipped itself in, when I wasn’t expecting it. But it’s true, I suppose. I did steal her, picked her up when her husband wasn’t looking and popped her in my pocket. Yes, I pinched Polly; Polly I purloined. Used her, too, and badly, squeezed out of her everything she had to give and then ran off and left her. Imagine a squirm, a shiver of shame, imagine two white-knuckled fat fists beating a breast in vain. That’s the trouble with guilt, one of the troubles: there’s no escaping its regard; it follows me around the room, around the world, like, all too famously, the Gioconda’s puffy-eyed, sceptical and smugly knowing stare.