The Tree of the Sun (4 page)

“I have come through nothingness,” Francis thought, wishing to assert his own naked manuscript, from which da Silva painted, even as it flashed on him that the
bowler-hatted
youth was father time’s self-made son conceived twenty-five years ago on that bitter honeymoon day when he (Francis) had seen him (the ironmonger) dressed to death in his shop.

The ironmonger began to air his views across the years. The centrality of nothingness lay in the shadow of the womb. The strength of nothingness lay in the shadow of
the grave from which one steps back with a sense of having gone forward to an unborn yet old-born existence clad in all durable ages and rags.

“And therefore,” said the ironmonger, “we return to life out of invincible nothingness possessed of a model of strength.” His eyes were fixed on Francis with a profound and tormenting question.

Model of strength, Francis thought, and scepticism clouded his mind now about his own striking resurrection body. To go through extinction, as if it were a growing seed, towards a solid truth should signify, he suddenly saw, a capacity to cast off an
obsession
with models of strength (or weakness for that matter).

“And therefore”, said the ironmonger, “to return to life with such obsessions, however admirable in some respects, born of immersion in invincible nothingness, is to return to the labyrinth of history from a death we dream we have had but not yet completely known in its ultimate passage to truth. A
something
rubs off on us, chains us, obsesses us still, and brings us back to life a step closer to truth
perhaps
but far from it nevertheless. And that is all
you
can claim….” His eyes were fixed on Francis, in da Silva’s painting, as though they stared through a new-found mask or vizor in the great conquistadorial ball Francis and Julia had attended and which he recalled so vividly now, in the presence of the ironmonger, on a day of a wedding and a funeral twenty-five years ago.

“But I tell you”, said Francis, “that what I sought to do in my book was to relate myself through you—through others who may come to read it—to the prick of a pin upon which populations move against the inscrutable
canvas
of the stars. Perhaps a minute, in this context, bridges centuries, on either side of which we stand, as an index of how buried we are in time.”

The ironmonger was still. He was drawn by the humour and the pathos of the cosmos, tall or thin bowler-hatted son, black milk bottle son, larger-than-life fixity of father time’s body in a suit of armour. It half-opened, it
half-closed
upon him into a measure of escape or freedom from grotesque attachment, a measure of the transparent,
therefore
half-bearable, domination of the past in the present and future, a measure of groping conception and truth, as native to oneself and foreign to oneself, with which one returns to the body of this life.

Julia had arisen from bed, bathed and dressed. She wore a long skirt that swept around her ankles. Da Silva tried to fathom her appearances through the tree of the sun but they eluded him again as if her mask in the partial lives and deaths of history remained as elusive and perfect as ever. A curious combination perhaps of extinction and vacancy and the refinements of aroused presence. He
continued
to paint her like a figure in a wall, a fire that was other than fire with whom father time, sun-king,
snow-king
, ironmonger-king, communes in his search for a
resurrected
self in the womb of the elements.

There is a fire to spring, a fire to winter, a fire to autumn, a fire to summer, as though the sun’s pregnant shapes,
reflected
in windows and skies, relate to various illuminated banks of the image-less (yet image-haunted) pool of the cosmos upon which we seek ourselves in every renascence of the arts.

She opened the curtains and sat at a desk by the window to await the return of Francis from Shepherd’s Bush Green, Francis the family-man saint, Francis the lover and warrior,
Francis the writer, Francis the mourner and sculptor of pleasures and griefs (behind whom, like hovering posterity, was da Silva the painter and editor of Julia’s letters and Francis’s book).

She half-opened the window now and was struck by a breath of marvellously painted air, as subtle as an egg or shell of creation, at which a painter takes aim again and again in creating the parentage of earth.

What a refinement of the stake of the sun one embraces, da Silva thought as he painted Julia, on a wedding day, on a resurrection day.

What a task is the translation of the cinders of dawn into oceanic depths of musical flesh-and-blood, into seasons, into climates, into illuminated banks and islands.

She was indeed an incredibly lovely woman, one
apparitional
foot in the early twentieth century, the other in the late twentieth century. And he was tempted to speak to her now himself (he was sure she knew he was
here
, brush in hand), to place himself between Francis, the family-man saint, and Francis, the lover and king, as aroused subject, aroused reporter of approximate existences within the eye of the needle’s gate in each delicate brushstroke he inscribed upon earth and heaven.

But at that moment came the sound of a step in the hall. Francis was back. He came into the room, flung his hat and coat upon a rack where they half-clung, half-bulged, into ghostly armour like refined charcoal. Julia laughed, with that incredible touch of gaiety men and women
irrationally
possess, in the darkest or brightest times, at the dressed cinders of noon, black afternoon diamond hat, black morning illustrious coat.

A body of mutated associations seemed to cluster and arise out of wedding day, resurrection day, carnival as Francis held her to him and kissed her on the lips as if he had lost her and found her again on the minute speck of a star that shivered in her eyes.

“Dear Francis,” she wrote from that minuscule star as his hand slid down her back, on to her legs and thighs, into
animate gold, dark refined gold as into a variety of
exaggerated
premises.

She disentangled herself. In the light of the room the black diamond hat, the black morning coat, shone with answering humour.

“Where have you been?” she demanded.

“Into another universe,” he said flippantly yet apparently quite seriously.

“Did you buy the fruit and the vegetables?” she asked, equally seriously.

“Fruit? Vegetables?” His voice was suddenly blank, naïve. Perhaps he had forgotten, in that instant, the
necessity
for foodbearing tree in the shiver of a star from which she posted her letters to him around the universe. Their inner reflections joined and swam. She shook him suddenly, her breasts moved like the implicit wave of a ship, a
melting
ship from which horizons grew to translate each living word.

“Let’s remember today,” she said suddenly, sombrely, from within that wave that descended to her waist and left her suddenly naked like a flurry of pages of surf da Silva unbound around a rescued body.

Francis drew her into bed. The sound of a faint call in the distance, a telephone beak in the shell of the sea, a telegram, rather than a letter, drew them into each other’s arms. Perhaps they were attuned to living ink as the surf ascended once again, to charcoal voices of birds in
foodbearing
tree at the heart of fire, to midnight eyes in the middle of broad daylight.

“I spent the morning writing letters,” she confessed inwardly. Their bodies clung together into the language of a living tool, cultivated living bed, carpentered living tables and chairs in the room around them like attendant yet
invisible
courtiers, flesh-and-blood wood, grassgrown parks and ponds, carven benches, milestones of penetrative flesh in the theatre of a bed that secreted the memories of lives lived or unlived a generation and more ago, a generation and more to come.

It was a strategy of wedded apparitions in each postbox of memory within a quest for the resurrection of the self….

They arose from bed, took the car and drove to
Bayswater
Road; parked and went for a stroll in Kensington Gardens.

Da Silva aimed his brush at a cloud in the sky shaped like Mount Olympus on which a god and a goddess sat. A drop of paint as subtle as the star that shivered in Julia’s eyes, or intangible as the bruise that ran on Montezuma’s brow, within creative and re-creative approximations of resurrected self, descended and clothed Francis and Julia now. Twinkling eyes, fingertips, eyebrows. Fleeting seasons. One world and another.

They were astonished at their newfound powers. Prick a newborn stone, smooth as the forehead of time, and fly across chasms of sensibility and insensibility.

And a tendency arose in da Silva’s paintings—as if his misgiving was theirs—for winter to extend beyond each envelope they wore, or autumn to appear suddenly in a carpet of leaves, convicted or bruised in a flash for natural indolence, and for the trees to part into the sculpture of a horseman riding magnificently and motionlessly into a
falling
horizon that seemed to embrace the Serpentine.

Thus there was summer around them impressed with the latent bruises of winter. There was the judgement of autumn upon them led by a bridle of fate. There was the smitten light they wore of refinements of water and fire. They paused in the shadow of the beautiful trees close to the Round Pond. A hubbub arose, an outcry, a rushing of legs and arms that seemed one with the harness of
expedition
they had witnessed.

A crowd was gathering at the edge of the pond which stretched a hundred yards or two from bank to bank.

Francis and Julia quickened their pace. At last they stood at the edge of the water and saw nothing but their own mountainous shadow there on cloud Olympus.

And then the light flashed upon a log. It seemed a log
until it disclosed the knuckles of a hand. A child’s hand around a child’s toy or ship. The body in the water was so submerged it may have been brown or black miscarried foetus of the gods within Olympus. Save for the white gloves or blossoming skin of its hands where these emerged like paint on the glittering dark surface of sky in water. Was this the harlequin pigmentation of oceans resurrected backwards into toy ship or fleet? “Let me … let me …” cried Julia, secreting a letter there she intended for Francis across a generation and more “
hold
it
. Let me rescue it.”

But the crowd was oblivious of the cry she raised, of the spontaneous irrationality of posted letter and saved or hoarded communication. There came a long-drawn-out
insistent
siren that dimmed the telephone beak in the sea, the rush of an ambulance towards resurrected pond, the
speeding
away of wheels. Then a vacancy in da Silva’s body of the globe as populations melted or vanished.

“When did it all happen?” said Julia in bewilderment. “My unborn … I was taken ill.”

“Your unborn … Our unborn … Their unborn …” He seemed to be waving at an elusive target.

Da Silva murmured soothingly to a shadow on the
mountainous
reflection of heaven. “Perhaps a spiritual fleet is implied that will take us.”

“Take us where?” Julia cried.

“To a coronation,” said da Silva.

Francis listened too. He heard, as da Silva spoke, the faint sigh or rattle of milk bottles coming across the park as though to announce the arrival of ladies-in-waiting to Queen Julia.

The magnificent sculptured horse and horseman called
Phy
sical
Energy
continued to move motionlessly above the Serpentine.

And across the water Epstein’s Rima flew close to the ground above implicit rivers and bodies of water from continent to continent, South America to Europe.

Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park were characteristic English parkland, designed for a queen, in which apparently alien, apparently archaic, apparently natural, freedoms and fates reside, with a degree of serenity, at the heart of the universal city da Silva loved.

Queen Julia possessed three ladies-in-waiting.

One was da Silva’s Jen who came towards her, it seemed, in the humour of cosmos, from a bank of posterity.

Then there was Eleanor Rigby, implicitly clad in furs, who had already appeared, it seemed (Francis seemed
uncertain
of the resemblance as he cast an eye upon her charms within da Silva’s paintings), that very morning with the painted bowler-hatted young man and with the black milkman in Holland Park Avenue. Perhaps she had been taken by surprise when Julia pricked a stone and summer flew out of a winter grave enveloped in animal skins and furs in the humour of the cosmos.

Lastly there was Rima, in her bird sanctuary, goddess of nature and of fire, in Hudson’s
Green
Mansions
, transported abstractly by Epstein into Hyde Park.

Jen (who was herself of royal Inca blood like a bird of sun) possessed the spirit of the sanctuary in her body as well as she approached the Round Pond from Bayswater Road in the comedy of da Silva’s coronation of the womb. Two months and a day pregnant she was and da Silva had
insinuated
both the mimesis of catastrophe and the recovery of the foetus of the gods in the elongated feather he planted in her body from within his own loins (as if he dreamt of his own native animal resurrection—animal approximation to the divinity of the rescued self—in a body of art to which he was married).

Dreamt of the shadowplay of a majestic principle of light, that billowed effortlessly, in a rich complication of judgement day honeymoon between universal gods and goddesses one painted as approximations to resurrected
selves, across centuries, across islands and continents, on this bank of heaven or that bank of earth.

He had, out of religious necessity, religious privacy, put Jen—his own wife—into the canvas for without the
down-to-earth
, day-to-day, night-to-night, games they played, he had no gateway himself into the serenity of the queen he painted (or into the recovery of father time’s solemn funerals, and wakes of honeymoons, in which one is
involved
, within the human abyss, each minute of the day and night).

In the same token without the grotesquerie of animal instinct, that clothed Eleanor Rigby in furs, without the indolence of a winter grave, which had been smitten in a flash, until it bled a new creation or summer sun, he
possessed
no foothold in the unpredictability of the seasons, the savage lightnings of Christ, the tiger.

Lady-in-waiting Eleanor had been joined by her husband, the bowler-hatted young man, Harlequin Rigby. In the distance, under the trees, stood Leonard, the black
milkman
, as if to accentuate an intensity of approximations built into resurrection day carnival.

A close look again confirmed, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Eleanor
was
none other than the lady-in-furs and Harlequin none other than self-made ironmonger’s son whom Francis had buttonholed that very morning on his way to Shepherd’s Bush Green, when he dived into an accumulative masque of tradition with a page from his book to be lodged there, out of instantaneous rebellion, out of instantaneous grief, twenty-five years ago when Julia died and the ironmonger’s wedding began.

Eleanor’s behaviour now seemed both rich and
marvellously
eccentric as Francis’s pen dug into the page of masques of tradition on the other side of the grave (in the land of the living), on this side of the cradle (in the land of the unborn), until both positions became co-existent with day-to-day lives on the prick of a pin where
populations
danced in immensities of time since the earth began. Each letter or line was furred and thick. It may have been
father time’s grief, it may have been father time’s lust, that set in train a pattern of subconscious and unconscious pages on that memorable day of loss and pain he endured. Until he was driven to write into existence—as fruit of his own body—a self-made/self-created son and self-made/
self-created
wife for that son.

Where
his
lost peerless Julia was all delicacy and foam in the sea of time,
this
half-accursed Eleanor was all
thickness
and coarseness of soil on the reluctant beach of
harlequin
natures. As though he needed the thunder and
lightning
of a sexual revolution to shake Eleanor out of Julia’s resurrected sea until her breasts grew large as clay yet rich as waves of gold.

Clay and gold are premature spirits of awakening
perhaps
, da Silva thought, as he turned another page in
Francis’s
book, premature pre-existent beginnings to property and wealth, premature post-existent beginnings to creation, that summon up therefore a harsh spur or reminder of potentialities mixed into fields of indifference to life, callousness mixed into hope, war into peace, reluctant or unfulfilled lives into apparently lived or living or born lives.

And thus he was drawn to Eleanor and Harlequin and distant Leonard as to his own children, his own
half-created
past and half-uncreated future, peculiarly tragic, peculiarly hopeful, in its capacity to relate to strangers, to the gaiety and the madness in others who are utterly strange to oneself yet utterly true to oneself as to a dialogue between creator and created….

Eleanor and Harlequin had stopped and were sitting on a bench in the park as if to reconnoitre their approaches to Queen Julia.

Harlequin began to change his winter morning gear and to put on flannels and an open-necked shirt. He executed this with such ritual propriety that no one spotted the slightest impropriety on his part.

On the other hand all eyes in the park were rooted in Eleanor’s thick golden flesh as if to imbue her with
self-made
projections and characteristics. Perhaps she was a
fortunate film star come back from the dead to play a nude scene, as she stripped out of her furs in broad daylight into a voluptuous body and a light grassgreen summer dress.

Harlequin was naturally an indolent man with a curious suppressed twinkle in his eye, blue, black, sometimes red, like an inner (minuscule and elusive) mask of blue, black, red blood he wore within flesh and bone.

His affairs with his wife were normal, even inhibited, in tone. “Sex is a complex theatre”, Francis wrote, “in which father inhabits son, rebukes son, fights with son over the possession of a resurrected property of lust….”

All eyes were rooted in the half-open field of paint that Eleanor wore. Was it the beginnings of a gateway into the fantasy of a queen, into a genuine mystery of serenity, as father time fought with the sons of time, played
rhapsodically
with the daughters of time …?

“My father was fascinated by handguns,” said Harlequin suddenly, “duelling pistols, revolvers, rifles, the lot. He had quite a collection which included the replica of a
fifteenth-century
European handcannon of a type probably used at a later date in the conquest of Peru and Mexico. It was
certainly
used in Europe as we know from recent excavations. My father told me he acquired it from a gentleman who lived in Holland Park Gardens with his black queen and wife a long time ago—one Francis Cortez Esq. My father told me
she
died the day
he
was married, the year
I
was born.
Born.
” He was smiling inwardly at himself. “It’s all a fiction Eleanor, I’m sure, a recurring dream in which
something
happens, grips one, tends to release one…. My life’s a page in another man’s gun or book.”

Eleanor wasn’t listening. She had heard it all before
except
the matter of Julia’s pigmentation. This interested her, this aroused her.

“Black? Was Julia black?”

“
Black
with the flame of the sun when it shines in snow. A painter would give his eye-tooth … Black. White. My father said she was a creole beauty from the island of Zemi in the West Indies. A long time ago. He—I mean Francis—
apparently vanished within a month or two of her death. My old man was intrigued by the whole affair. All sorts of stories circulated. She was quite wealthy you see. My old man was able to secure quite a collection of guns from the Cortez estate. It all seems an age ago like the Spanish Civil War and all that in which my father enlisted. So you see he was in his forties or fifties—and that’s a body of years I would think—when he met my mother. An old man in fact. If he’d been killed as a young man in Spain where would I be now? Indeed sometimes I wonder …” He half-smiled at Eleanor who had caught sight, in that instant, of Leonard under the trees. “A body of years and yet it’s as fleeting as a bullet. My old man used to say a hundred years are as fleeting as an arrow that flies from hand to heart.”

“I always think of cannon as huge beasts,” said Eleanor expressing an implicit preference for the hand in the cradle,
coup
d’état
by Leonard’s milk bottles. Yet she shuddered a little in the canvas da Silva was painting as though a cat’s rippling tread of populations moved upon her flesh in Leonard’s dancing tread as he seemed to advance towards her from under the trees. The breeze strengthened and the painting fell upon a mimic battlefield. (It was a fantasy of love and hate Harlequin entertained when they were out in the open together.)

She lay there, lovely and prostrate, half-slain, her legs raised to the bullet of history until da Silva lifted her into an upright position against the foot of his easel. An
advancing
army, on milk-bottle horseback, applauded and
Harlequin’s
inner eye, in painted canvas, took aim at Leonard. He (Harlequin) elected to coffin himself in space, as she (Eleanor) reclined at his feet, and to be at liberty to patrol the air above her like a brilliant centaur in his own right in the sky; a brilliant conversion of wizards and witches into broomstick technologies and metamorphoses of
resurrection
in science.

Nothing was demanded of him except a satellite of appearances and disappearances, the trick of terrestrial and
super-terrestrial battlefields, an opera of love and war through clay and gold and bottle-necked glass and rockets to the stars.

His apparent detachment—his air of non-existence in the upper air as Eleanor reclined on the ground (and Leonard bestrode a bottle), the air he cultivated that he had never been born, had been extinguished by a phantom bullet from a gun in the middle of a modern or ancient war his father fought—ignited a sensual flare, a sensual target of undreamt-of promiscuities, bodies and limbs scattered far and wide on a painting of green.

Perhaps an element of summer telepathy was at stake which inscribed his thoughts into a sculpture of
non-existences
, a sublimation of existences, grounded in meaningful obscurities of motive or action, gunplay in the ancient Wild West, film of violence, escapism through violence.

Shared thoughts of the box in his head, the bed in his sky, centred on his father’s handcannon as uncertain cradle or trigger of annunciation to smite the world with the lightning madness of the human species, the lightning gaiety of the human species, obsessional codes of the lost king (the lost queen) of space that Francis mourned in
backward
resurrections of Harlequin’s body before he was born and had been conceived to die….

“I always think of cannon as huge beasts,” Eleanor
insisted
.

“Huge beasts? Are they?” Harlequin caught himself. “Not at all. Three-handed but not huge. We’re back in the fifteenth century, remember? The issue then was not size but the additional component one required in order to take aim, to fire. Each target one slew, each body one killed, survived in a ghostly mechanic at one’s side. That was my father’s vision of the future in the past.”

“I always think of cannon …” Eleanor insisted.

“Handcannon,” Harlequin cried. “Handcannon my love. Quite small really. The bore is less than an inch, the barrel just over a foot. Devil to fire. And so an additional hand, called a serpentine, an ‘S’-shaped piece, was built
against the stock.
There
stood one’s ghostly mechanic, my dear lady-in-waiting Eleanor. It was he or it who held the lighted match—as if it were the first or last star or sun in the hand of creation—and moved it by degrees to ignite the powder one had primed into the barrel of one’s gun. And so one’s hands were free to devote themselves to aligning the gun, to taking aim, some sort of rudimentary aim. One aimed at the enemy with both hands. In the meantime a fraction of a second’s evolutionary delay in the serpentine hand of the mechanic at one’s side, in
igniting
the ammunition of a star, could make all the difference between life and death. The third hand at one’s side
became
the enemy—a fraction of a second’s delay made
him
(or it) into the enemy. And the third hand on the enemy’s gun became yourself, your friend. A fraction of a second’s delay
there
might save your life, by allowing you to fire first. That was my father’s theory of targets of genesis through which to assemble a maker of worlds within the premature or precipitate materials in the very beginnings of creation. It was nothing to do with the size of the blanket of death or life (or the size of the gun, the size of the thunder) but rather with the mystery of survival, the mystery of conception in a third hand or ghostly recruit at one’s side. All evolution is the subtlest marriage of opposites within a scene of conflict….”