John Banville - The Blue Guitar

I closed my own eyes, and felt the faint warmth of November sunlight on the lids.

Things in the great world continue to go awry — talk about the pathetic fallacy! Those solar storms show no signs of abating. Corkscrews of fire and gas shoot out into space from fissures in the star’s flaming crust, a million miles high, some of them, it’s said. The shops are selling a thing through which to view these titanic disturbances, a cardboard mask with some kind of special filter in the slitted eye-holes. One comes upon children, and not just children, standing masked and motionless in the street, staring upwards as if spellbound, which they are, I suppose, the sun being the oldest and most compelling of the gods. There are spectacular showers of meteorites, too, free fireworks displays at nightfall as regular as the universal clockwork used to be. Every other day comes news of a new disaster. Terrible tides race across archipelagos and sweep all before them, drowning small brown folk in their tens of thousands, and chunks of continents break off and topple into the sea, while volcanoes spew out tons of dust that darken skies all round the world. Meanwhile our poor maimed earth lumbers along its eccentric circuit, wobbling like a spinning top at the end of its spin. The old world is coming back, retrograde progression in full swing, in no time all will be as it once was. This is what they say, the scryers and prognosticators. The churches are thronged — one hears the massed voices of the faithful within, lifted in quavering chants, lamenting and beseeching.

I must have dropped off for a minute, sitting there on my stone in the sun under the blunt tower’s wall. It’s a thing I do with increasing frequency, these days; mild narcolepsy, it would seem, is one of the consequences of a beleagured and battered heart. Hearing myself addressed, I started awake. He was an ancient fellow, stooped and skinny, with a stubbled chin and a rheumy eye. For a second I thought it was the old farmer himself, he of the lorry and the hair-raising and — did I but know it — prophetic tale of death by water. Come to think of it, maybe it was him. One old man, at that stage of decrepitude, will look much like another, I should think. His trousers, extraordinarily filthy, would have been big enough to accommodate two of him, and swirled freely about his haunches and his scrawny shanks, held up by a pair of what I know he would call galluses. His shirt was collarless, his buttonless coat was long, his boots were without laces and, like his trousers, many sizes too big for him. “Got a smoke, pal?” he croaked.

I said no, that I had no cigarettes, and at once, I don’t know for what reason — unless it was something in the old boy’s milky eye that jogged my memory — I recalled how I used to come up here, years ago, when I was a boy, with a school friend I was in love with. His name, though you won’t believe it, was Oliver. I say love, but of course I’m using the word in its most innocent sense. It would not have occurred to Oliver or to me to so much as touch each other. For the best part of a year we were inseparable. We were the two Ollys, one short and fat, the other tall and thin. I would never let on, but I was fiercely proud to be seen about with him, as if I were an explorer and he some impressively colourful and noble creature, a Red Indian chief, say, or an Aztec prince, whom I had brought back with me after long years of voyaging. In the end, one sad September, he moved with his family to some other town, far away, leaving me bereft. We vowed to keep in touch, and I think we even exchanged a letter or two, but thereafter the connection lapsed.

Not the least of my chum’s attractions was the fact that he had a glass eye. One doesn’t come across glass eyes very often these days, unless the makers have got extremely adept at fashioning them to look like the real thing. Oliver had lost his eye in an accident — though he darkly insisted it was no accident at all — when his brother shot him with an air-rifle. He was very touchy about his disfigurement, and I think had convinced himself that people didn’t notice unless their attention was drawn to it. He was loath to take the eye out, as I dearly wished him to do — who wouldn’t want to see the gadgetry at the back of the eye, all those squiggly purple veins, those tangles of tubelets, those tiny nozzles with suckers on the ends? When one day he gave in — what things a friend will do for a friend, at that age — I was deeply disappointed. He bent forwards and with the bunched fingers of one hand made a quick, rotating movement, and there it was in his palm, bigger than a big marble, shiny, moist all over, and managing to express, somehow, both indignation and astonishment. It was not the eye that most interested me, as I’ve said, but the socket. However, when he raised his head and faced me, with a curious, maidenly shyness, there was not the gaping cavern I had hoped for, but only a wrinkled, pinkish hollow with a black slit where the eyelids did not quite meet. “It’s the getting it back in that’s the tricky bit,” Oliver said, in a slightly injured, slightly accusing, tone.

The old man had moved away, and was mooching about the hilltop, scratching himself and coughing like a goat. What was he looking for, what did he hope to find? The place is littered with crushed cigarette packets and flattened fag-ends, empty naggin bottles, scraps of paper with uninvestigable stains, french letters smudged into the mud. What did we do up here, the other Olly and I? Sat under the wall of the tower, as I was sitting now, and talked for hours earnestly of life and related matters. Oh, we were a solemn pair. My pal had an uncannily still and, in spite, or because, of his glass eye, particularly penetrating stare. I thought him marvellously sophisticated, and certainly he was cleverer and far more knowledgeable than I ever hoped to be. He knew all about the by now infamous Brahma Postulate, before I had even heard of it, and could expound on the theory of infinities until the cows came home. His father had put his name down, Oliver told me, for a place at the Godley Institute of Technology, that seat of technological wizardry, which Oliver referred to, familiarly and with impressive nonchalance, as the Old GIT. I was much too bashful to tell him about my plans to be a painter. Looking back, I suspect he hadn’t much interest in me, for all that we were supposed to be such friends — even among schoolboys there is always one who is loved, and one who does the loving. I wonder what became of him. Some dull job somewhere, I would guess, an assistant managership, perhaps, in a provincial bank. The really clever types rarely live up to their early promise, while many of the dozy ones eventually shake themselves awake and shine. I did the opposite, shone at first and later on went dull.

Gloria is going to have a child. Not mine, needless to say. She doesn’t know what to make of it, and neither do I. No point in talking about rage, jealousy again, bitter sorrow; all that’s a given. We feel acutely, she and I, the slightly farcical aspect of our predicament. We are embarrassed and don’t know what to do about it. We could pretend I am the father, nothing easier, but we won’t, I think. Gloria might go away, as in former times ladies used to do, discreetly, when they found themselves inconveniently in an interesting condition. There’s the house in Aigues-Mortes that she’s still looking into; she might retire to there until she comes to term — how I love these gracious, antique euphemisms — but what would be the good of that? She would have to return eventually, with her bouncing, unexplained babe in tow. She has no intention now of leaving me. She hasn’t said so in so many words but I know it is the case. She has good reason to go, and I suppose technically I have good reason to ask her to be gone, but since when has good reason seemed a good reason for doing anything? It’s not a matter of protecting our reputation — I believe Gloria doesn’t even care what Polly thinks of her — but of doing the right thing. This will seem strange, I know, and I’m not sure myself what it means, but it means something. I don’t believe in much, in the way of morals and manners, but I am convinced that disorder can be, not ordered, perhaps, but arranged, in certain, not unharmonious, configurations. It’s a question of aesthetics, once again. In this too I feel I have Gloria’s tacit agreement.