The Blue Guitar by John Banville

Author:John Banville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

WONDERFUL WEATHER WE had for the funeral, yes, a positively sumptuous day. How callous the world can be. Foolish to say so, of course. The world feels nothing for us—how many times do I have to remind myself of the fact?—we don’t even enter its ken except perhaps as a stubborn parasite, like the mites that used to infest Gloria’s myrtle tree. It is late November and yet autumn has come back, the days smeared all over with sunlight dense and shiny as apricot jam, heady fragrances of smoke and rich rot in the air and everything tawny or bluely agleam. In the night the temperature plunges and by morning the roses, flourishing still, are laced with hoarfrost; then comes the sun and they hang their heads and weep for an hour. Despite gales earlier in the season the last of the leaves have yet to fall. At the faintest zephyr the trees rustle excitedly, like girls shimmying in their silks. Yet there is a tinge of darkness to things, the world is shadowed, dimmed as it seems by death. Above the cemetery the sky looked more steeply domed than usual, and was of a more than usually intense tint—cerulean? cyan? simple cornflower?—and a transparent wafer of full moon, the sun’s ghost, was set just so atop the spire of a purple pine. I never know where to position myself at funerals, and always seem to end up treading on some poor unfortunate’s last long home. Today I hung well back, hiding among the headstones. Made sure I had a view of the two widows, though—for there are two of them, or as good as—standing on opposite sides of the grave, avoiding each other’s eye. They appeared very stark and dramatic in their swoop-brimmed black hats, Polly, with a markedly bigger Little Pip—how they grow!—who looked self-important and cross—children do hate a funeral—while Gloria stood with a hand pressed under her heart, like I don’t know what: like the Winged Victory of Samothrace or some such grand figure, damaged and magnificent. There was no coffin, just an urn containing the ashes, but still they dug a grave, at Polly’s insistence, so I’m told. The urn made me think of Aladdin’s magic lamp. Someone should have given it a rub; you never know. Still the penchant for tasteless jokes, as you see, nothing will kill that. They buried the urn along with the ashes. It seemed in bad taste, somehow.

There is a constant ticking in my head. I am my own time bomb.

It strikes me that what I have always done was to let my eye play over the world like weather, thinking I was making it mine, more, making it me, while in truth I had no more effect than sunlight or rain, the shadow of a cloud. Love, too, of course, working to transform, transfigure, the flesh made form. All in vain. The world, and women, are what they always were and will be, despite my most insistent efforts.

We have had quite a time of it, quite a time.

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