John Banville: The Blue Guitar

—

Just down from the roof. Whew! The storm earlier this morning lifted off half a dozen slates and dashed them to the ground, smashing them to bits, and now the rain is coming through the ceiling in one of the back bedrooms, having already caused who knows what havoc in the attic. The house is only a ground floor over a basement so the roof isn’t all that high, but it’s steeply pitched and I can’t think what possessed me to shin up there, especially in this weather. I was negotiating my shaky way across the slates when I slipped and fell on my belly, and would have slithered all the way off and plunged to the ground had I not managed to grab on to the roof-ridge with my fingertips. What a sight that would have made, if there had been anyone to see me, wriggling and gasping like an impaled beetle, my pudgy legs thrashing and my toecaps searching desperately for purchase on the greasy slates. If I had fallen on to the concrete in the back yard would I have bounced? In the end I managed to get myself to calm down, and lay motionless for a while, still clutching on by my cold and stiffening fingers, being rained on, with a flock of jeering rooks wheeling about me. Then, closing my eyes and thinking of saying a prayer, I released my hold on the ridge and let myself slide slowly, clatteringly, down the slope until my toes, clenched inside my by now badly scuffed shoes, encountered the guttering and I came to a blessed stop. After another brief rest I was able to get up and scramble sideways at a crouch along the edge of the roof — amazing the gutters didn’t give way under me — with the hopping, rolling gait of an orangutan, hooting softly in terror, and gained the relative safety of the tall brick chimney that juts up at the north-west corner of the roof, or is it the south-east? Stupid to have gone up there in the first place. I might have broken my neck and not been found for weeks. Would those rooks have plucked out my corpse’s staring, shocked and disbelieving eyes?

I don’t know why I came here — I mean why here, to this house. This is where I grew up, this is where the past took place. Is it a case of the wounded rabbit dragging itself back to the burrow? No, that won’t do. It’s I who wounded others, after all, though certainly I didn’t get away unscathed. Anyway, this is where I am, and there’s no point in brooding on why I chose to come here and not somewhere else. I’m tired of brooding, it availeth naught.

I was wary of the woods, when I was young. Oh, I used to love wandering there, especially at twilight, under the high, darkling canopy of leaves, among the saplings and the sprays of fern and the big, purplish clumps of bramble, but I was always afraid, too, afraid of wild animals and other things. I knew the old gods dwelt there still, the old ogres. There is felling going on today — I hear it down in the distance, in the deep wood. Hard weather for that kind of work. There can’t be much timber left that’s worth cutting. All the property round here is still in the hands of the Hyland clan, though it’s mostly stripped by now of its erstwhile abundance. I feel its barrenness, as I feel my own. I expect the woodsmen will make their way up here in time and then the last of the old trees will be gone. Maybe they’ll fell me along with them. That would be a fitting end, to go down with a flailing crash. Better, at any rate, than sliding off a roof and cracking my pate.

My father bore a smouldering contempt for the Hylands, whom out of their hearing he referred to, witheringly, as the Huns, a reference to their Alpine origins. A hundred or so years ago the first of the Hohengrunds, which was their name originally, one Otto of that ilk, fled the towering, war-torn heights of Alpinia and settled here. In those days of plenty the by now pragmatically renamed Hylands — Hohengrund, Hyland: Get it? — soon became extensive landowners, and not only that but masters of industry, too, with a fleet of coal ships and an oil-storage facility in the town’s harbour that supplied the entire province. Their long heyday ended when the world, our new-old world that Godley’s Theorem wrought, learned to harvest energy from the oceans and out of the very air itself. Yet even as times got hard for them the family managed to cling on to their acres, and a pot or two of gold besides, and to this day in these parts the name of Hyland will cause some among the older denizens instinctively to doff a cap or tug a hoary forelock. Not my dad, though. A timid spirit he may have been, but my goodness when he got going on our self-styled overlords — whose precipitous decline had only begun when his was finishing — he was what folks round here would call a Tartar. How he would execrate them of an evening, bringing his fist down on the table with a bang and making the tea-things jump and rattle, while my mother turned ever more dreamy and plunged her fingers into her bird’s-nest of hair in vague-eyed distraction. Yet for all their ferocity I never quite believed in those rants. I suspect my father didn’t care tuppence about the Hylands, and only lit on them as an excuse to shout and thump the table and that way alleviate a little the sense of disappointment and failure that ate at him like a canker all his life. Poor old Dad. I must have loved him, in my way, whatever way that might have been.

It didn’t help his temper that the gate-lodge in which we lived — lodged, in fact — should be the property of those same Hylands and rented to us by the year. What a grim hush would fall upon the household when the time came, in the first week of January, for my father to don his best suit of shiny blue serge and make his muttering, chagrined way into town to the offices of F. X. Reck & Son, solicitors, land agents and commissioners for oaths, to submit himself, like some churl or vassal of yore, to the ceremonial renewal of the lease. The mansion that this house used to be the gate-lodge to was acquired in the last century by the first Otto von Hohengrund himself. By our time the big house was in the possession of one of Otto’s numerous descendants, a certain Urs, who was indeed of bearish aspect and wore lederhosen, I swear it, in the summer months. I would glimpse his children in the wood sometimes, delicate, pale-haired creatures but imperious withal. On a never-to-be-forgotten occasion one of them, a little girl with earphone braids and a perfect Habsburg lip, accused me of trezpazzing and slashed me across the face with a hazel switch. You can imagine my father’s rage when he saw the weal on my cheek and heard how I had come by it. However, retribution sometimes falls even upon the mighty, and the following autumn the same little girl was savaged by a wolf, one of a supposedly tame pair that her father had imported here, out of nostalgia no doubt for the terrible forests and mountain fastnesses of his ancestral lands. The thing had got out of its pen and come upon the child picking berries in a dell not far from the spot where she had slashed my face that day. My father pretended to be shocked like everyone else by this gruesome incident, but it was plain, to me at least, that in his secret heart he felt that justice, admittedly disproportionate, had been done, and was duly gratified.

I wonder what my first painting was of. Can’t remember. Some sylvan scene, I imagine, with leaves and stiles and moo-cows, all laid out perspectiveless under a goggling egg-yolk sun. I’m not sneering. It’s true I was merely happy at first, dabbling and daubing, and happiness, of course, in this context, doesn’t do at all. I spent more time, I think, in Geppetto’s treasure-house than I did in front of my easel — yes, she bought me an easel, my mother did, and a palette, too, the elliptical curves of which caused in me, and cause in me still, for I still have it, a secret amorous throb. The smell of paint and the soft feel of sable were to me what marbles and toy bows-and-arrows were to my coevals. Was I only at play, then, all innocently? Maybe I was, yet I did better work then, as a child, I’ll wager, than later on when I got self-conscious and began to think myself an artist. My God, the horror of trying to learn even the bare essentials! To re-learn them, that is, after the lucky flush of my carefree years came to an end. Everybody thinks it must be easy to be a painter, if you have some skill and master a few basic rules and aren’t colour-blind. And it’s true the technical side of it isn’t so difficult, a matter of practice, hardly more than a knack, really. Technique can be acquired, technique you can learn, with time and effort, but what about the rest of it, the bit that really counts, where does that come from? Borne down from the empyrean by plump putti and scattered upon the favoured few like Danaëan gold? I hardly think so. An early facility is cruelly deceptive. It was as if I had set off heedlessly up a gentle grassy slope somewhere in old Alpinia itself, plucking edelweiss blossoms and delighting in the song of the lark, and presently had come to the crest and stopped open-mouthed before a terrifying vista of range upon range of flinty, snow-clad peaks, each one loftier than the last, stretching off into the misty distances of a Caspar David Friedrich sky, and all requiring to be climbed. I suppose I could flatter myself and say I must have been wise beyond my years to recognise the difficulties so early on. One day I saw the problem, just like that, and nothing was to be the same again. And what was the problem? It was this: that out there is the world and in here is the picture of it, and between the two yawns the man-killing crevasse.