The Tree of the Sun (9 page)

Re-entry into perfection is hemmed around by qualities of distress as if to witness to an otherness beyond captivity yet available to patterns or limits of endurance in the mystery of the self.

No wonder she found herself immersed in minutes that were hundreds of years, in which she felt herself both
enlarged
and diminished as she waited for Francis to return.

No wonder she smoothed her rock skirt and flesh into enterprises of invented car and re-invented ship on which to sail backwards to revived garden parties of her youth, savage symbols, carnival dances, that were in themselves a form of waiting, a form of anticipation, a form of hoping for a secret lover of infinity buried in ancestral bone and blood, a secret white, a secret black, a secret Carib, a secret Arawak.

At the age of eighteen, the year of her first carnival, she made her first step into the rock of the sky, into Arawak Zemi-land. She followed a procession that wound its way up into the central mountains.

They arrived in the ceremonial playing fields of the zemi-clouds above the Caribbean Sea. Those fields were rectangular and still circular, they were bounded by
vertical
stones in which the zemi-players crouched.

It was a glimpse by sculptured eyes through the
sculptured
mountain of the heart that Julia never forgot.

Perhaps it was her first intimation of the distances that were to trouble her, the distances between herself and a lover of infinity, distances of enchantment. Her blood sang, her feet danced, in expectation.

Far below the sea crawled in its wrinkled illusion of a mask battered by the sun but still expectant of the coming of the sky, the divinity of the sky. Far above, yet close at hand, through a crevice in the illusion of the sky, the
zemi-players
were poised in their three-cornered bodies,
three-cornered
blood, three-cornered feet.

Each feature enlarged itself into a phallic trinity or ball that bounced from the pitch of Maya-land to the pitch of Zemi-land, from lap-land to crown-land, from
ladies-in-waiting
to gentlemen-in-waiting.

She was suddenly naked lap-land and crown-land herself save for a fig-leaf of cloud into which had been pinned frogs and birds and bats and fish. Pinned into a mirror of intercourse between the sea and the sky.

And all at once she began to tremble in her leaf of a cloud as the zemi-players advanced from that other
kingdom
, on the other side of the mountain, towards her.

Screamed. Fell to the ground. High and dry. Between earth and sky.

Did
she
or was it
they
who
screamed
….?

The game had vanished. She was fully clad again, raped yet wholly painted, raped yet clothed in parallel wounded expectations of species and cultures. Torn fig-leaf, torn cloud. And all that remained—as the solicitous mountain party gathered around her—was the memory of her first glimpse of a lover of infinity, of lightning penetration and bliss, of frog angels and bird angels and fish angels, her first substitute carnival gateway into the annunciation of the globe as an absorption of sorrows on a pin or a star or a splinter in the eye of the needle within which unseen populations danced.

Julia’s father died a year after her ascent of Zemi-land on which she left a subtle emotional imprint, an emotional intuition, a weather-madonna, da Silva thought, to match across the years a sculptured madonna as she now sat in her chair in the park.

Perhaps that ascent had been her first adolescent carnival sensation of a hand dissolving the elements, constructing the elements, a hand that could blow fierce and strong backwards from future or past into a created or re-created emotional presence within one and without one.

She was nineteen years old when her father died on the island of Zemi, twenty-nine when she lost her first
pregnancy
.

In that interval of ten years the outlines of varieties of emotional density or blown paintings of disturbed psyche, charged with the curious humours or immensities of pathos in father time’s agencies of original embarkation across incredible distances of cosmos, seemed to inscribe
themselves
in her in father time’s lost foetal child within letters of cloud: cloud-letters she had nevertheless meticulously written in which appeared apparently involuntary scribbles of what Julia herself called in a marginal note “
father-deity
at the door of the womb”. Some were much more than scribbles, da Silva saw when he came to study her letters, they resembled the most sensitive miniature
sculptures
and were of such delicacy they may have been
impressed
with a needle into shavings of wood or shell or stone refined into manuscript or paper.

Perhaps they had been peeled from a body of unspoken necessity, perhaps they were a compensation for losses
endured, perhaps they were part and parcel of the
evolutionary
mystery of art in which she was to reside herself, in another age, like an inimitable carving herself in a chair against the papers of grass and water that stirred or evaporated in the park.

Her father’s sudden death had been a blow, her sudden abortion a shock, and something in her, which was
originally
bruised or torn before it actually appeared-
to-be-bruised
-or-torn, ran to embark into another beginning of the self. Ran to da Silva; her body of letters fell into him.

As such he dreamt, in the minute she came, that three skeleton mothers pencilled him into her receptive flesh and he knew her as if he received himself within her feminine flesh.

As such she dreamt, in the minute he came, that three skeleton fathers pencilled her as his penetrative phallus and she knew him as if she became a masculine pay or rope of selves.

One masculine pay of self was a conical brow of music, elongated epitaph (her father’s face), the other fused Francis, Harlequin and Leonard, the third was da Silva (whose pencilled receptivity confirmed a feminine bank of universe).

And so a grossly dogmatic character of economic rape, in father time’s manuscript species, repudiated itself into a variety of contrasting features, in dialogue one with the other, as if to affirm that the
quest
for the gods and the
being
of the gods were breached fatherhood, motherhood, illegitimate/legitimate husbandhood, wifehood, expectations and novel confrontations, in which one appeared to move towards a central garment of penetrated stillness (as one fell) or to be still within a central unravelling movement or never-ceasing womb (as one ascended).

Thus the quest for the gods was a turning
in
into others within infinite particularities of universal lived, unlived, lives, infinite suffered or eclipsed pencil, infinite enjoyed or abrasive brushstroke, infinite ink, infinite unspoken word
or wounded whole in all its sexual instincts, in all its mathematical, abstract, equations.

Her conversation with her father across the years from her chair in the park was as much with conical, fused, creator-males as it was with the mysterious bodies of
bird-woman
Rima, lioness-woman Eleanor in them, in da Silva’s rocking chair canvases.

“I do not see”, da Silva thought rebelliously, as he painted Jen’s pregnant body in his studio, “why I am
driven
to make all this sacred fuss (involving my own
unknown
mother) about a foetus, an unborn creature. Pencils. Bones. Rocks. Sheets of music. Brushes. Paints. Canvases. Legends. Maps. It’s quite an expensive undertaking to bring a spiritual brat into the world. It’s rot. Life is dirt cheap, has always been. Who cares? Sure enough I care for
you
Jen. For you and your physical offspring-to-be. You’re my immediate family. But why should I bother beyond that?”

“Fuss? Is spirit fuss? I protest….” Julia cried and stopped. She dug into him fiercely, into his flesh that was now her flesh in the degree that he received her into his canvases as a woman receives a man. Their climax made him suddenly confused—even angrier still—at the dividing line between spirit and creation. His tools sang
nevertheless
, painter’s brush and sculptor’s hammer, singing flesh of a bird, the spirit of a bird. There was the rhythmic stab of a sculptured song, there was a sound of soundless crying, as the songbird lit in her body and inserted its beak into her flesh, into his flesh, into a piercing thrilling musical wire.

Her father had been a divided man, a wired man, Julia recalled as she sat in the park with a sense of being
re-made
in the depths of a climacteric quarrel of states of spirit and matter. The songbird thrilled within her as if it had suddenly crossed the dividing line; and in crossing had left her vaguely amused at da Silva’s anger and father time’s predilection for incurable romance. She could hear the singing quarrelsome beak tapping coded conversations into the woven ear within her, telling her that in token of
da Silva’s receptivity—in token of his flesh becoming her flesh—he, father time, possessed a heart of gold and would make a generous buyer of their mutual child’s, woman’s, bird’s, man’s, body in the park were it (that body) put up for auction.

It was typical of him, Julia recalled, to launch into a ribald or cryptic jest on the metamorphoses of flesh. (Did skeleton metamorphose flesh or flesh skeleton in order to initiate an elaborate spirituality or spectre of
materialism
?)

It was the sort of question he jestingly asked on occasion but never quarrelled about. His was no quarrel of painter or poet. And his jests or questions were signs, nothing more, of an instinctive appreciation of the necessity of the arts, the comedy of the arts. His divided nature’s generous complicity with a heart of gold to serve both politics and art with singular devotion or innocence, may well have earned him—had he lived—a knighthood or a peerage in the Businessman’s Commonwealth.

Indeed it was that generosity that captivated Julia from her earliest years until her tycoon father grew
larger-than-life
into the kindest of fathers and a patron of libraries, hospitals, universities, colleges, schools, playing fields, all over the world.

“Perhaps”, da Silva prodded her, with a trace of jealousy in chisel and hammer, as he capitalised afresh on her quarrel with Francis which occupied a large place in her letters, “your father would have done even better in the cradle of the sixteenth century and may have acquired a kingly reputation for saintliness as a renaissance trader, lover, priest. Is it the genetic carriage or miscarriage of saint or sinatra that croons and warbles in my tooled radio beak as I sculpt you abstractedly, expectantly …?”

She was suddenly furious, almost resistant, rebellious, under the vicarious hammer and the brush, and then she yielded to him, curiously glad he had raised his
half-mocking
, half-jealous, question. Her father would have been amused, would have laughed almost appreciatively at
such just, unjust, deserts. Yes, she was not ashamed of her father nor of the deep well of emotion that stood between them. He would have adored a grandchild of whatever
pigmentation
, half-sinner, half-saint, half-capitalist,
half-socialist
. It would have made no difference to him. No wonder in the midst of eulogies there had been an unflattering question or two raised in some of the obituary columns of newspapers. She was prompted to ask as she scanned a batch of clippings—“It is said”, she looked at him, “that you paid low wages father and the housing on some of your estates was bad.”

“I paid higher wages”, said her father, “than were
standard
practice in any colony in which I invested all I had in the tools of a new humanity, in a golden age. I love the people.”

The concreteness, almost mythical tone of his reply, made her conscious of the hierarchies he served at the peak of which stood a robust puritanism allied to a golden romance. “I love the people.”

The higher a god ascends the more curious becomes, in some instances, his love of the people whom he draws up with him into heaven until the lines are eclipsed between their poverty and his wealth. (His mistresses may even become angelic orders of woman.) And the maternity of the globe begins to value every complex bird-song, in its theories of language, as if to raise dialectal accents to hymns of praise. It was to her father’s eternal credit that an earthiness of communication obsessed him, within his genius for making money, and he saw all creatures as frail and grounded, claws and wires, through which to sound the brambly niches of heaven in earth, the niches of
esoteric
emaciation in the voices and bodies of young and old goddesses destined for ultimate refinement or
elevation.

As flesh began to age he still clung to it. Here lay his incorrigible innocence, his generosity of heart, despite his divided nature. Flesh in a heart of gold. Flesh mirrored in gold. And even, at the very end, when he collapsed, in a
black woman’s bed, flesh was mirrored in bone, flesh was metamorphosed bone.

That was the first condition of the new heaven of
mankind
he took with him to his grave. Egg of humanity. An egg
rich enough, in all its circumstances and prizes of heaven and limits of hell, to become an issue of earthy wholeness, of representative numbers of the living and the dead in each global society one takes to bed with oneself at any minute of the blind day or darkest night, at any minute when one is born without memory of the state of birth, or dies without memory of the state of death it seems, within the capital resources of an heroic extension of oneself into all unconscious races and climates of original emotion.

*

It had been a hot and stifling day on the island of Zemi when her father was buried at three o’clock in the
afternoon
. The sun rested on a lower peak in the mountains of the west.

Her almost childlike love and esteem for him had grown over the years.

She had invested a wealth of emotion in him in the leaden age of twentieth-century industry when fathers were
obsolete
and gods were dead. Her mother died when she was two years old. And—though she retained no conscious memory of her—she dreamt of her as someone who had been carved into a chair, a rocking deity in which she sat and conversed with the other rock-epitaph deity, her father, in whose great shock or nest of hair it sometimes seemed a bird’s gentle wings flapped.

Every summer, from the age of five until her father’s death, she spent the long summer holidays with a
great-aunt
in England, a stiff-limbed kind-hearted lady-in-waiting who walked with a slight limp upon a stick. She was seventy when Julia first met her but so active in mind she ran a Samaritan office in Southampton Row near Holborn to help people who were in desperate emotional straits and had come to the edge of suicide.

That great-aunt arrived in Zemi (she was now
eighty-four
years old) a fortnight after her father was buried to take Julia back to England.

She wore black and Julia instantly recalled the mourners who came to her father’s funeral. They too were dressed in black under the drum beat of the sun. They were—quite a large section of them—inhabitants of Zemi, isolated civil servant faces, some seafaring painted faces,
businessman
painted faces, varieties of nondescript faces. And—here and there—the remote buried-sky-faces from the top of the mountains.

There was a nondescript reporter from the
Zemi
Chronicle
who stood at the gate and noted each arrival in his book. Nondescript and yet on a second, a third, a fourth, glance, he may have been a disguised Da Silva da Silva in advance of his time.

A funeral was an extraordinary occasion in Zemi and its effects were heightened now in Julia’s sculpture of mind that bridged, it seemed, centuries as well as days and years. She felt alone. It seemed an impossibility that her father was dead. How could he be
dead
? She thought of her great-aunt in London and of the stick upon which she leaned with apparent exhaustion at the end of a long day after interviews and telephone conversations. She thought of her rocking-chair mother upon whom she (Julia) leaned now herself in a state of numbness akin to sleep. They all grew into insensible props now built into the greater insensibility of death which was an uncanny prop itself, or furniture of tradition, upon which future generations would come to lean.

They were (great-aunt’s stick, rocking-chair mother) an implicit form of the curious carriage and miscarriage of a lost granddaughter or grandson fate had designed for her in which dwelt an apparition of freedom and truth
nevertheless
that flashed upon her, all of a sudden, in the body of her aloneness.

That flash modified the bulk of insensibility and gave her an inner, however frail, steadfastness, an inner
detachment
,
with which—or through which—to witness to the mighty coffin of an age borne in the capital limbs and in the furnitures and in the labour and apparatus of variegated mourners.

First of all the sense of blackness in the coffin of god, in the apparatus that signified “capital father”. The serge suits the bearers wore were black. The white dresses the women wore in the wake of the coffin highlighted a passion that was black. The glare of the sun at two-thirty in the afternoon painted faces
black
, deepset faces, filled them with a rich density of tone, all colours, all pigmentations, all illuminations, all creatures, so rich in frail contrast that they seemed to
live
with the
flash
of wings that flew through her father’s hair in the midst of a solid wreath of paint that seemed
black.