The Tree of the Sun (2 page)

Scorched into the paradox of vanished conquistadorial Europe and vanished pre-Columbian America still
surviving
nevertheless in smooth death-masks, smooth
birth-masks
, with their infinite grained capacity for elemental
need
within iron trees and ivory trees of the cosmos.

The winter light in the sky of the womb secretes hidden seasons, hidden carpets, new scars of autumn and spring.

Absolute justice is death’s republic. To step back, before it is too late, through a crack or a crevice in the sky and to begin, all over again, to enfold a resurrection-motif of individual tenderness—born of reflections of victor and victim—individual art of saving powers within each
holocaust
of ancestral rigours of affection, fire to fire, ice to ice, is a conception of the frail kingdom of life.

During the autumn two Indian carpets were laid in
bedroom
and studio. There was a tree design da Silva would walk upon until he came to the branches from which to paint a Mexican sky under his English roof or—as he revolved upon a branch, flew upon a carpet—an English
sky under an alien roof; an inner flight through an outer branched ceiling into a stranger element.

A face stood on each branch as though seen, for the first time, within or through a curtain of stars that stood ajar in the ground of the world under the sky of the house.

Each face on its branch seemed at first wholly identical one with the other. Later however distinctions appeared. One seemed a subtle map, pleasure or pain, on brow, another on lips, a third along both cheeks like the wounds of a needle, a fourth was possessed of a hairline mirror stitched across one eye.

Da Silva saw himself as another face in the carpet on which he stood, another face in the mural he painted, as if he had been parachuted there into that tree by nature’s self, conjuring parachute of self, map of extremities, divisions, alliances between appearance and appearance, past and future.

It made him subtly aware of a network of influences, rivalries, hopes of supremacy, implicit tyrannies and
subjections
they all shared as the notion arose that each was identical
in
the other, each hung on the branching thread of the other’s dominant consciousness. A notion that set up a clamour of protest, like the illness of the living dead as they begin to change and acquire the strangest
resurrected
longing for a principle of justice one can endure, the therapeutic relief, rather than oppression, of otherness. Da Silva was rooted in that clamour or meaningful protest.

The carpet of the tree of the sun symbolised their joint root or tenancy or ownership (his and Jen’s) of the house in which they lived and in which others had lived since the turn of the century and long before.

He recalled many a subtle crack that rolled or secreted itself in wall or room at which he and antecedent tenants, over the generations, may have stared seeingly, unseeingly, within the life of the house of which he and Jen possessed, if that were the truth, but a spark. As though their
existence
hung from almost indecipherable influences he had partly discerned in the branch on which he stood under
the sky he painted, varieties of canvas or painting in
body-work
or house. Varieties of profound malaise that
conditioned
them, even as it re-shaped them, to conceive a therapy of originality within the shell of time, its carpets or walls or beams that cohered nevertheless into patterns of relief or doors through the tree of the sun….

He slipped like a figure of paint himself, painter in sky, almost without realising it, through the door of the tree of the sun into the life of previous, long vanished, now suddenly recalled, tenants of the house.

Their names appeared to be Francis and Julia Cortez. (Long after he was to discover Francis had changed his name by deed poll and this had a bearing on the
ramifications
of a book he had written and on some of the curious deceptions imparted, wittingly or unwittingly, by Julia into a body of letters she had written.)

Francis was half-Spanish, half-black. There were fading photographs of himself and obscure antecedents pinned into his unfinished book. His body from neck to waist was white. His face was tanned or brown like a face to be worn or discarded under different skies and atmospheres.

Julia’s ancestry was difficult to determine despite
photographs
, one notably of her father. Her features were elusive though half-English, half-West Indian creole. She was very beautiful in spite of a long (apparently economic) fever/convalescence of history from which she suffered.

Da Silva had found (rummaging around one day during the conversion work of a bedroom into a studio) Julia’s letters and Francis’s book and from these Jen and he began to piece together a portrait of long vanished lovers. The letters and book were voluminous—they had slipped quite deep into the wall as into a couple of elongated safes—and Jen and da Silva were astonished, as they began to read, by developments they could not have foreseen, astonished by the way it gripped them (as if they too were related characters in a curious drama of creation); astonished at the blind man’s game the lovers played like two books that stood on the shelf of a library, in
continuous 
communication with each other, though neither had been actually opened or read by the other.

He felt guilt and perturbation as he spied upon this curiously involved relationship—until the impression grew that there was an element of resurrected fate in it. He was himself being taken over by them page by page as he began to sketch or paint them; as he became immersed, sometimes apparently fleetingly, in expectations of painting them….

And in the midst of this paradox of visions—implicit and explicit creations—within a universe they traversed, the sensation arose of individual realness reflecting sometimes bearable, sometimes unbearable, degrees of otherness,
mystery
of otherness, outlasting time.

It was a face in the Indian carpet that brought Francis back into mind this morning, the lines like the palm of a hand along both cheeks, a map of pleasure and pain.

Less of a map and more of a nondescript blow,
needle-straight
lines within and upon each other that ran on either side of the face from the eyes down to the jaw. The rest of Francis’s face remained smooth as a dark marble. And that smoothness of taut skin highlighted a sense of
containment
, passion held in rein, remorseless care, restraint,
flight
. Were they the divided features of warrior and priest Francis wore under da Silva’s feet and in the sky overhead?

It was more difficult to enter Julia’s kingdom of the ruses of the imagination though sometimes at the stroke of a match some midnight mornings, against a canvas of dreams, da Silva saw her curiously walled and stark yet implicitly crowned and beautiful, one foot in a wedding, one foot in a funeral.

He lay then against or upon it, upon that beauty or ghostliness of form, held her like a painter of constellations who resurrects the mystery of undying symptoms of
therapeutic
masquerade, until she almost cut invisibly into his flesh and the child Jen conceived was the apparition of a child she (Julia) dreamed to conceive all her life in the letters she wrote….

They were laughing and joking together, Francis and Julia, as he came upon them through the tree of the sun this painted morning. They were talking about a grand costume ball they had attended, given by the Spanish
embassy
, when they were just married at which because of the conquistadorial associations of their name—Mr and Mrs Francis Cortez—he had dressed himself up as
Francisco
and she as a slim and elegant Atahualpa, a feminine Atahualpa, eyes flashing through her mask.

It caused a faint stir in the embassy’s ballroom, a whisper of distaste, even laughter. “Pure fact is a myth,” Julia wrote in one of her letters, “an invaluable myth, a useful myth, but a myth nevertheless since
fact
is susceptible to inevitable enlargement or atrophy in the climate of a
particular
day or age.
Breath
is sometimes the most subtle wreath of truth to tell of vanished faces in substantial masquerades. It links irrational laughter to intimate sorrow, taste to distaste….”

Wisps of smoke arose around Julia’s head as she smoked her only cigarette of the day. (Da Silva was painting breath into his mural.) The scent climbed into foodbearing tree, half-elusive, half-binding, suddenly acrid and
disturbing
, burning fruit or wood. Was it a new pollution he had begun to cook? FIRE. Now it seemed he had stumbled upon creation’s blaze in the walled face of Julia like the seed of Atahualpa plant in a madonna panel transported from an old Peruvian/Francisco Pizarro building or Spanish church or cannibal Carib library into this old London house.

There had been a fire in the house long before he (da Silva) and Jen came into its occupancy. Julia herself was dead, childless and dead, when the fire happened. Francis too had vanished; new tenants were in occupation…. The fire happened ten years after their death; that was fifteen years before Jen and he bought the place and scraped a token of ash from an inner wall to unearth the letters and the book that had apparently escaped by the skin of their teeth; in truth the fire had obviously been put out quickly
and a couple of minor scars had been plastered over by the occupying tenants. Nevertheless a spark had run across the divide between the living and the dead, a spark that touched Julia and Francis in their graves within the flesh of a page. Da Silva counted it a marvel that the book and letters had survived.

Perhaps that was why Francis’s resurrected breath-body leaned forward in room or canvas now and kissed Julia. Her lips opened to him, her teeth caught the spirit of his tongue as he held her close. She was the burning wall of the house he held in his arms long before the fire actually happened, as if it were still happening
now
, and their expedition through it into da Silva’s paintings was a miracle of transubstantial community.

Julia was convalescing when Francis held her to him, hardly fit to fly into or out of the mouth of space. Her thoughts were on the child she wanted to have on earth or in heaven. Youth (or was it divinity’s middle-age?) was still on her side. Francis knew that though she seemed well now she cried at nights and he soothed her hands when they began to burn. She was hardly conscious of this (or hardly recalled it when morning came) and this was a blessing in disguise, Francis reckoned, for on the following day, in broad daylight, he pretended he knew nothing of it at all, nothing of the food of pain, as if he courted a kingdom of oblivion, or release from torment for all animals, at the heart of the elements, with the cunning resources of apparently vanished, blanketed strokes, strokes of the subtlest, deeply penetrative,
intercourse
that befitted her condition.

*

The intensity of care that enveloped him when he held Julia—held all her pregnant dreams to him—became an obsession with him.

Perhaps he had been rough or even cruel, without
intending
it, and that was why she recalled nothing. This was an issue that tormented him.

It was a long convalescence. Sex between them had
become
the exception, not the rule, over the past year and a half, and when it happened a rose bloomed in a winter garden. She grew better each day and seemed to enjoy, without knowing she enjoyed it, his constructive mastery and self-control tinged by daemonic properties when she reached out and claimed him into herself; they drew into a tree of passion through which a psychical forest or
creation
grew and reached up, in its turn, into other forests or unknown creations.

Their bodies became a cradle of the future running hand in hand or mouth to mouth with a vision of nothingness so strong and secure it seemed other than nothingness and to abandon all straitjacketed proportions, to lie
beyond
discourse or memory; to happen, as it were, of its own volition in the wombed voices of space or time.

A cradled angel descended in the middle of the night. Or was it the sky of anima and animus, an ideological carpet laid out for a king and a queen, a queue of forces that drew her thighs apart into a branched living goddess in which faces were schooled like leaves when everything stood upon root and trunk?

Francis moved this morning, as da Silva inspected him through a branch of the sun, crushed his cigarette all at once into a tray like a venomous thread or fig tree of paradoxical war and peace between ancient enemies, victor and victim, man and woman, Christ and blasted nature. It was the dream of the perfect tyranny of love he sometimes entertained—as a misconception of the tree of passion—tree of great wonders into lightning paths of the body’s expectations.

“You’ve stopped smiling, dearest Francis, and grown serious,” Julia said all at once to Francis. She drew her fingers now along the needle-straight lines of his face.

“I love you,” she continued to write. “That is why I mail each letter to you in a hidden safe in the house. You may never see what I am writing. But one day a stranger I feel within my bones will find them and put his arms around me—as if I’m alive—and see and
feel
how much I
knew
, how much I valued your affection. All the world may come to know that I knew what you felt … what daemons you wrestled with … your own hell….”

*

The miracle of Francis’s and Julia’s resurrection upon the tree of the sun, at this moment of time, when da Silva learnt that his wife Jen was pregnant, hung upon a flash of consciousness.

Studio and house were addressed by a flash at the tips of one’s fingers and this was the flight of conception one nursed into being, as an artist or craftsman now, to match the
blow
of shape in a woman’s body.

Da Silva read in Francis’s book how Francis recalled the blow of Julia’s illness like a locked door between them.

“What room is there in the midst of illness for sensuous crafts, sensuous
command
, sensuous futures? And yet I must stand firm, care for you, attend to you through every fabric and circumstance, the tremor of a line, that makes me see the ordinary world we inhabit, built by me, built by you, as a new thing. And this brings home to me, against my own judgement, an imperishable bond I
suppress
but cannot entirely evade between creature and creature, creation and created, however apparently
defeated
, apparently overturned, one or the other may be. And, as a consequence,” he was smiling with an air of authority, “I shall address the world this very morning, invite all persons to read my book. As if nothing at all has happened except that it’s resurrection day.”