Alred Woolf was 78 years old when he was born, and soon after, he was dead. The body was found cradled in the coffin of an empty corner, while the guitar slept innocently in his arms.
***
Seven years prior, Alred’s wife, Agatha, had died as well after being stamped flat to the post office window by a rogue van. It was evening and Alred had been preparing a paella for the family to share– for cooking was his love language– in the modest kitchen of their Albarracín home when the town official knocked and delivered the news. Because the Woolfs lived 20 miles outside of town, by this time the walkway outside the post office had been restored to the ordinary, as if nothing had changed– except for half of Alred’s world had up and gone. Heartbroken and with little else to keep occupied given he had retired from business two years prior, Alred took to caring for his fifteen year-old daughter, Thea, whose nose, which bent slightly towards her right cheek, was just like Agatha’s. As if to make up for the affection he could no longer offer Agatha, Alred made Thea’s happiness his life’s work. He strummed at his guitar after dinner until Thea agreed to dance, swinging around the kitchen and laughing the way Alred and Agatha had done when they had met, about Thea’s age, in Barcelona. Alred arranged wild flower bouquets to decorate the house and perhaps make up for the lack of Agatha’s liveliness and beauty. At dawn, Alred religiously prepared Thea’s favorite Té Rojo so that each morning she stumbled sleepily into the kitchen to find her green ceramic mug crowned with waving steam.
When Thea turned 24, she left the family home to start a life of her own in Valencia. By this time, Alred had suffered neurodegeneration for four years and was less and less frequently able to reason. The father and daughter had switched roles, Thea now caring for Alred, but Thea increasingly itched for a life larger than the countryside cottage. She regretted leaving her father to live alone but knew that eventually Alred would no longer remember who she was and wouldn’t know the difference between her presence and her absence.
Confused, Alred met Thea’s departure with a grief not unlike mourning a tragic death. Alone in space and time (for he could no longer remember what had brought him to this point; surely an old man must come from something? A boy perhaps, and then a young man, but Alred could not recall being anyone other than his current self), Alred’s whole world flooded with a heavy blue. Day and night, he wore the same navy trousers and shirt, and continued to do so after they wore out and split. He sipped the same indigo air, and consumed nothing else after the pantry ran empty of rice and tortillas. As November stumbled by, his skin stained cobalt with cold. Not that he noticed, anaesthetized with the grief swimming the channels of his chilled veins.
While the great blueness invaded every other aspect of the squattish cottage, from the rocking chair missing one arm to the vacant fireplace to the forgotten flower bouquets now rotting with neglect, Alred’s old guitar remained a mellow chestnut brown. Purchased on a study abroad trip to Italy, the guitar had become a fixture of Alred’s life. It followed him back from Italy to Cardiff University in Wales, where he studied International Business and dabbled in Spanish, French, Italian, and German. The guitar tagged along when Alred was dispatched by his first employer to Lyon, France, in pursuit of a business deal, and it amused and entertained the assortment of internationals lodging in the rental apartment complex. It charmed Agatha when Alred met her on a business trip in Barcelona, and it sang Thea to sleep when she was no larger than a loaf of bread and slept in half-hour spurts. The guitar was the nucleus of Alred’s life, stringing together the moments punctuating his years. So when Alred’s memories left his brain at the age of 78, they still lived on in the immortal, hollow body of the guitar.
One December evening, when the temperature had dropped below freezing, Alred noticed the instrument, perched beside the bedroom dresser, for the first time in months. The amber glow of the wood seemed to promise warmth against the universal frost. Alred pulled the guitar to his chest as if to let it listen to the whisper of his swollen heart– perhaps it could utter back what he needed to hear, as simple as I love you. At this point he no longer remembered his wife and daughter, the losses which had sunk him so low, or even that he grew up in Wales and moved to Spain to be with Agatha. All that he had was an unanchored present drowning in a cerulean infinity. Alred often imagined letting the blueness spill into his body, filling his lungs, his chest cavity, soothing the longing, for what he could not grasp.
Speculatively, Alred’s fingers began to crawl across the fretboard, searching, perhaps, for the comfort of familiarity which he sought. Eventually they settled– raw, spiderlike, and thin– in the shape of a C cord, and his right arm swung, dragging the attached hand across all six strings. Although his mind memory had fled, his muscle memory somehow maintained and guided his limbs in playing his once favorite tunes, the soundtrack of his life. When Alred’s hands struck the chords of a song he once knew, the music itself struck a chord within his brain so that he saw, for less than a gasping moment, the things which once colored his days in so much more than blue– the shocking green of an Italian landscape on a summer holiday; the golden flecks in the irises of strangers speaking foreign languages through their mouths but an eternal understanding through their eyes; the decadent rouge of love with Agatha, caressed in the violet folds of night; the amber pride of watching Thea shoulder his legacy into the horizon of the future.
Each of these memories visited just long enough for Alred to lean forward in hungry anticipation of more, but lasted so briefly that once they passed he couldn’t remember what it was that he so badly needed– What was it? The songs followed one after another but dissolved as soon as they were played, as if spinning on a record that disintegrated at the kiss of the needle. Finally, the last song spilled to a stop.
Alred blinked; while he played, the room had blurred into an undefined blue mass. A cornflower-tinted tear tumbled down his neck as he searched the room for the scenes he had just witnessed, but the more he asked of the past, the more the present obscured into blue blindness; he was lost in his loneliness and longing. Alred bowed his head to the guitar, deferring to solitude.
After a few moments of surrender, Alred lifted his hands and paused as if contemplating where to go next, then dropped them back to the guitar. For the first time, Alred realized it was his own music he had been hearing. Whatever it was that he had recognized in the minutes before, it came from within, a reminder that he was not stranded in time but had arrived on a path that might be traced back to find what he had lost and could no longer recall. Yet the songs were gone– they had run through his fingers and never returned. The path he had taken was a hanging bridge and each plank fell at his step. So here was Alred Woolf, standing between a cliff of oblivion and a future obscured by thicket.
Tiptoeing forwards, Alred plucked out a couple of notes like questions, and when no response came, he kept playing, this time letting the melody run where it chose to, untamed, sublimely tucked into the present. Yes, after 78 years, Alred Woolf was born. Like a bawling newborn furious with the pain of existence, he gulped the steely blue air, his eyes spitting grief for the time he had lost waiting for someone else to explain this raging life. Something seemed to emerge for him out of the blue but before he could give it a name, he had struck his final note.
Maybe he meant it, or maybe it was his unconscious, or fate, or maybe his fingers just slipped in his own tears already rotting the fingerboard. Alred’s left hand landed in the Devil’s Triad. His right arm crested as if to take its last breath, then fell upon the damned strings. As the chord of death screamed out against silence, Alred rode their cursed waves out of his body. The three pitches resisted stillness but lost, and soon after, Alred Woolf was dead.
