The Tree of the Sun (11 page)

Did she hate Francis? Did she love Francis?

Francis never knew how she came to know of his mistresses who were substitutes or approaches to serenity in herself, in his book of life; how she came to elevate them into figures within her grasp, beyond her grasp, as if to overcome the burden of love and hate, of conquest in himself, in her letters of life.

She wrote a letter to lady prime minister Eleanor and confirmed her in lioness office. She wrote a letter to lady of justices Rima and confirmed her in ariel office. She confirmed herself as failed queen of species and Francis as failed king. She wrote a letter to daemon artist Da Silva da Silva in whom she trusted, in some other age, to transform apparent failure into an unfinished prize of unfinished community.

Once again she was drawn to scrutinise the overlapping lineaments in the bird-gate, in the lion-gate, male and female evolutionary bodies. A resemblance existed between her father’s sudden death and Francis’s plunge into the ladder of limbo—as between the hanged man in the carriage or miscarriage of fate and Christ’s freedom on the cross—and these two self-reversible poles, or emblems of “
father-deity’s
strength and weakness at the door of the womb”, drew her forwards to sense the partial self (or selves) in all creations constructed in the teeth of great odds, within
unpromising, perhaps inhospitable, perhaps barren, reaches of time.

*

It was within the construction of the rain’s multiple stick, upon which great-aunt Sky leaned, that the young and ambitious reporter left the island of Zemi with Julia a month or so after the great funeral.

There had been business matters to attend to in
connection
with her father’s estate but at last there they were on their way to the ship. Francis sat in the carriage with Julia and her great-aunt who seemed enraptured by the sudden coolness of the weather. They drove for the last time through the formal, sculptured, gate, with its lions and birds and hanging figures.

(Da Silva had painted himself into Francis’s skin as if it were he who sat in the carriage.)

“An astonishing gate,” he said to Jen, turning to his wife in his studio, pointing deep into his canvases as if they moved within and without these paintings themselves. “Like the entrance to a great theatre. My studio’s a stage. Our world’s a stage.” He kissed her and turned all at once on their world-stage as if the renascence of arts they pursued had run into drama and he was an actor, Jen was an actress; they took their translated (edited, transformed) lines from conjunctions of Francis’s book and Julia’s letters.

“An astonishing gate”, he continued, addressing the mask of Julia as it turned towards him, “in which I have added mutations of character, Rigby and Cortez; I shall change my name to Cortez, you see I’m a little mad, but then it’s becoming fashionable to change one’s name nowadays. As for Leonard and Harlequin, ah well they’re limbo dancers, limbo selves. They hang upon a rope of distances knotted into the rain. Mercator’s children. Family tree, satellite tree, Sky, Rain, Earth. Pricks in the milky way and the stars. Backside of the moon.

“You see,” he said to Julia wryly, “you’ve led me a pretty dance you know. Across oceans. Into the birth of space. Back to where it all started. Our first meeting. So
here I am. How do you put it in your letters? Ah yes I remember. Parallel expeditions and beginnings. So here I am. Seated beside you on our way to the harbour. There we embark with great-aunt Sky.

“You say it was unfeeling of me to break in on you the evening of the funeral but I thought you were leaving Zemi the next day and I couldn’t afford to miss you. And then of course I discovered we were actually booked to travel on the same vessel; I mentioned the book I had started to write about you, when I first heard of you, before we met, called the tree of the sun. A secret book. But when I looked at you then I knew you knew how much I envied your serenity and wealth. And I felt you also knew that envy may lead in god’s good time to the greatest admiration that beauty arouses. Indeed I am deeply in love with you Julia. Fate. Freedom. A chance for me when we marry, as we surely will, I feel it will surely happen, to do something in my book for a world that needs authority and imagination; needs innocence.”

“Innocence?” said Julia startled by his naïveté or
unselfconsciousness
or hubris. She inclined her head a little as if she were listening for a frail stable of truth within the horses’ hooves that seemed to run in the shadow of wombed canvas.

Perhaps the shadow of an intuition possessed her, the shadow of distress or distrust of “will-to-tenderness”; the shadow nevertheless of hope in the wholly creative achievement of authority and imagination, the achievement of beauty. “Innocence is a sea,” she began and stopped as if she were concealing, in a pocket in the carriage, her first love letter to Francis on which the shadows crossed. “It may bear us forward, it may swallow us up, in the cradle, in bed, in the things we grow to idolise.” She sounded a trifle uncomfortable as the carriage swayed and distorted her voice.

“I do not believe it swallows us up,” da Silva said softly.

“I died,” cried Julia, abruptly changing the subject, “according to the records, in my fortieth year.” She spoke
like a translated actress who mimicks the records as
reification
of fact, bed of fact, cradle of fact. And then, in a flash, in another voice, like an actress again, improvising this time, “I have no memory of dying Francis except in an endless procession of turbulences. One disembarks. One embarks again upon another ship. One’s here. One’s not here. My body’s in this carriage. My heart’s back in the old house. Perhaps it will crawl and swim until it catches up. My mind and spirit—they’re with you already on the ship. And the child I so much want to have … Where is he or she I wonder? A procession of turbulences.”

The wheels of the carriage were running smooth as velvet on a new pitched road that ran beside the harbour of Zemi. The rain had ceased. “We’re almost there,” she cried to Francis. “Perhaps if you look out you will see the ship. You will see us leaning over the rail ahead of
ourselves
.”

Francis looked out but he seemed suddenly to grow blind, suddenly to grow a shade lost. Neither in his book, nor in her letters, had appeared a description of the ship upon which they were to sail and this left a gap on da Silva’s stage.

A gap he filled with sudden emotion. They were leaving lives on the island they would never live, local occupations and patterns through which they would never function again. And, in Julia’s case, each spectral occupation or
unlived
life made a breathless hush now that fell upon the land: a breathless construction of the soil by the sea, she would never see again, at the other extremity of the rain when the air grows still.

There was a mist in the sky and when she looked through the other window of the carriage the mountain range vanished. She turned again to the harbour and the island itself seemed about to sail into an extension of a vast continent in space. In that breathless extension each grain of sand or crumb of water was a mirror that had been ploughed, yet smoothed over at the same time at the end of the rain, into each spectral life in its miniature
canvas and frame she would leave behind when they sailed.

Why leave? Why not live forever upon a static gate, static punishment without end, static reward without end, static exile?

Why not stay in a safe mirror, static reflection without end?

Why move at all, why begin to die, across the ages one has constructed from deathless lives? To fulfil perhaps a theatre of nature that appears to be finished yet remains unfinished. To unravel perhaps an assumption of the
deathlessness
of one’s native land with which one clothes one’s deepest fears of a wholeness that lies beyond each
boundary
, or epitaph, or cradle.

Why not stay forever in that breathless hush of
constructed
, unfinished, soil or sea at the extremity of the rain when the air remains cool and still?

But she had no final answer to all these questions, that swarmed about her all of a sudden like a crowd of eager combatants, participants, on their way to a carnival theatre, except that, having raised such an audience herself, she knew it would accompany her in each step she took from stage to stage, sculpture to poem, music to cinema.

Her great-aunt Sky was still descending from the carriage upon each stick of the rain that had rolled itself into a single root or support of sun. Francis assisted her.
Great-aunt
liked Francis Julia felt. And as he held her arm her sacklike, yet stiff, ancient, puritan, body, that was
suffering
a sea-change across the generations seemed all at once, in Julia’s eyes, a safe paradox or depository of children lost and found, a rich part to play on the stage of the world.

“I shall live to a great age like you great-aunt,” said Julia impulsively. “Francis and I shall have a son and a daughter.”

Her great-aunt could not resist a smile as she leaned on Francis. Her sons and daughters were not of her flesh. Or perhaps they were, after all, in every crossing she had made
of oceans, every absorption of unfathomable sorrows curiously rooted, she began to see, in deathless or unlived lives that accompany one back and forth as if to endorse the fascinations of their partial exile from the state of the womb, from the city of god.

She had never married nor borne children. Yet she was married, she did have territorial and oceanic children for whom she cared with the strictest diet of compassion.

Her children were creation’s deathless offspring,
telephone
voices sometimes in a strait jacket of despair,
telephone
annunciations at the other end of the rain on a misty afternoon, or telephone flesh-and-blood rags of ailing
immortality
when the postman rings the bell or taps on the door in Southampton Row.

“I shall be like you, great-aunt,” cried Julia. “I shall glue myself to the telephone. And when my children ring from a static sea or a static mountain I shall tell them to come home, I shall tell them that home is always another journey….”

The words had been written by her in one of her last letters to Francis. They were spoken now by the actress Eleanor (who had been schooled by Jen in one of da Silva’s canvases). The part of great-aunt was played by Rima, the part of Francis by da Silva. They stood in the West End on a stage called
The
Pleiades
of
The
Tree
of
the
Sun.
The time of the performance was the first decade of the twenty-first century.

*

It was a newly-built theatre and the sound of the traffic had been stilled. A sea of faces pressed up from the stalls or pressed down from the balcony. Great-aunt was
descending
from the carriage on Francis’s arm. Time had itself stopped into an approximation to the genius of time within a minute’s breath that spanned years. There appeared, as if from the deck of an unseen ship, a doctor and a nurse who bent down to Julia where she lay on a bed that seemed part and parcel of the pier that jutted out from the land over the sea like the hand of a clock.

Julia was dying from cancer in a large room that was to become, years afterwards, an artist’s studio. She was forty years old.

Julia was leaving Zemi. She was nineteen years old.

Julia was the part Eleanor was playing in
The
Pleiades.
“She would have been”—someone was saying—“I would hazard a guess, were she alive, eighty-four years old today, and there she is, in Eleanor’s shoes, young as a rose.”

“Mr Cortez,” said the nurse to Francis, “your wife is delirious. She believes she’s back in that afternoon in the harbour of Zemi when you left. She believes the
telephone
is ringing and you’re on the other end of the line. She believes her great-aunt is young as a rose.”

“Rigby,” said Francis. “Not Rose. Rigby. My name’s actually Rigby.”

“What did you say Mr Cortez? You are exhausted
yourself
, poor man, you’ve been up for ages without sleep. A century’s rolled past. Please do sleep, I shall be here to wake you if I must.”

“Sleep,” Francis thought. “What a miracle of grace is sleep. I write best after a long sleep.” The doctor and the nurse from the ship were bending over Julia. “My name’s Harlequin,” the doctor said. “Your name’s Leonard
Harlequin
,” Julia said to the captain of the ship. “A young captain. One day I shall have a son like you, a captain or doctor of ships. His father will be proud of him. Are you there Francis? Did you hear that? Are you still on the line?”

She continued—“A ship, a hospital, a pier, a studio, a market, a garden, a house, a factory, are
stages-within-stages
in which one stands at the gate, at the letter-box, and waits for a communication that’s subtle as truth.”

“What is she saying doctor?” asked the nurse.

“She’s telling us of the evolution of serenity….”

“Is that all? What’s serenity?” cried a voice from the audience.

“Creation’s news,” Julia said. “The sea, the land.”

Great-aunt stood by the carriage. In the corner of her
eye she could see, through the open door, the tip of an envelope, in a pocket of the interior, in which Julia had deposited her first letter to Francis.

It was addressed to Francis.

It was written to a variety of spectral audiences whose questions sprang from her own needs.

It reposed, in that pocket of the interior, like a part of herself which travelled towards another turbulence of selves until each page or line began to dance before her eyes.

“What fun,” she thought. “What fun, Francis. We shall enjoy ourselves on our trip.”

She closed her eyes.

“You must rest Mr Cortez,” said the nurse again. “Sleep.”

Francis strained his eyes into the misty harbour to catch a glimpse of the ship. An icy grief blinded his sight. Julia reached up and touched his face as if it were her father’s eyes in the old clown of a coffin in Zemi.