The Tree of the Sun (3 page)

Julia was smiling ironically in the game they played as she replied to him in her theatre of a bed this morning. Francis had left for Shepherd’s Bush Green to buy a week’s fruit and vegetables as if nothing at all in the world had happened.

She half-reclined on a heap of pillows embroidered with spring flowers.

“Dear Francis,” she wrote, “How does one cultivate the dawn’s flowering when our time to leave each other, our
time to return to each other, comes? Is everything the same or has everything changed beyond our wildest dreams as we slept? Is this the new thing of which you speak? Imagine the streetlamps on a crisp winter morning just before the sun rises.” She was staring into space. “Have they become a flowering garden or a callous artifice?”

She paused to sip from a glass of water. It sparkled like a bulb in its own right, the flicker of a letterhead, ghostly flowering or callous lips in touch with another’s glass lips in the tree of the sun.

“One nurses each electric signal as if a trial run
commences
of the resurrection of the body, petal, leaf, stem, one tastes as one drinks from a cup as bitter as hell or lightning body beyond a shadow of doubt like the lazy fig tree smitten by Christ before
he
came to the cross
himself
and the nails were driven into his hands.”

Perhaps she was herself on the edge of tears as if she wrestled with a confusing yet blessing shadow.

“Sometimes, in the wake of a rainy morning, as the streetlamps fade in the carpet of the earth, the sky descends and bandages each nail or wound until it glows through the very bandage of spirited circumstance like fruit or flower. The first signal of a pregnant rose brings a taste of
wildness
, visionary wildness, to each purchase of life.”

She stopped again and da Silva pondered
taste
of 
wild
ness
(or was it
wilderness
?).

“I am smitten by the stars as I lie here, their seed on my lips.” She sipped the water again and his painter’s brush smoothed her lips.

“Is it wrong,” she demanded, “to conjure up a lightning body of reflections re-made by forces, a lightning desert or a lightning garden? Is it a violent universe we inhabit (or impose upon ourselves) as conquest by deity? Is it a savage formula entangled in the origins of human culture,
I
mean
conquest
, to which we unwittingly subscribe in all our elaborate projects of soul conscripted by structure? Doubtless it is—who would deny it—” she stopped again, then continued softly as if a chorus of voices dwelt in her
throat, “a violent universe in many of its uniform faces but there’s another inexplicable face within the carpet that’s utterly different, that’s
not
violent. Close to it, yes, because of the
expedition
, or apparently ruthless pace, of features of compassion so woven within a stricken moment that it seems to
strike
, even as it
rescues
; fierce rescue of line into incredible eyes drawn by holy and daemonic masters schooled for timeless ages by the hand of god.”

She sipped again from a transparent pool on da Silva’s palette.

“In the meantime I am content to be glanced at by those eyes in my stricken moments.” She conjured up Francis’s resurrected face in the shadow of a walking canvas on his way to Shepherd’s Bush Green. “Sometimes I know dear Francis that you envy those eyes and dream of the perfect tyranny of love one needs to imitate, it seems, in the chaos of human freedom, human laziness.”

She paused for a moment and then continued in another voice—“I see it differently for my part within myself. I see the eyes of god, the ruthless hand that paints one’s breath to save it, as a measure of the incompatibility of my understanding. And that leads me to prize freedom above all else in time; to restrain from investing in absolutes. I have been ill I know for some time, wretched fever, wretched delirium. Incompatibility is an ugly word. It breeds intolerance. Less ugly however if one accepts the many faces of a conjurer’s universe. To accept
incompatible
visions, to accept what is like and unlike oneself, to accept the tricks of nature as a versatile warning that truth exists but stands on unfathomable foundations, and still to believe in the unity of the self, is to run fleetingly (but sometimes securely)
in
a presence of glory….”

She fell back on her pillows exhausted. Glanced up at the clock on the mantelshelf. Francis would be home in an hour or so. The clock’s design was a fossil spider
separate
and distinct on the wall of the room yet integral to the reflection of her hands as they paused timelessly on each minute of the hour before advancing again and again
through each apparent respite or lull within the seamless constellation they wove blown across spaces into each niche or grave or womb or cranny of existence.

She roused herself, folded the pages she had written, arose from bed, crossed over to her postbox. It occurred to her then to wonder whether Francis possessed his own postbox, perhaps near at hand, somewhere in the sky of the house and whether she moved in it, like a character in space, for other eyes in a coming time to read or see in many moods and lights. Perhaps at the end of the day an apparition of truth would ascend, very frail, yet incapable of being extinguished.

*

Francis turned from Holland Park Gardens into Holland Park Avenue and began to walk towards Royal Crescent on his way to Shepherd’s Bush Green.

He was filled with a sense of absurd contentment, absurd peace, that was nevertheless profound and real though susceptible to uneasiness like the memory of a pool when a stone smites each reflected brow or cloud-creature that hovers over it. The absurdity arose from the notion of a trial run for “the resurrection of the body” this winter morning in London. What a long way one has to go to begin all over again through a tissue of masquerades and self-deceptions….

What would passersby say if he came up to them and explained—“I have a page from my book (I have been working at it as far back as I can remember) addressed to you that I wrote this morning when the sun rose and Julia slept. Let me read it to you.

*

Dear Passerby,

Here I am. I died twenty-five years ago. But here I am. I shall die twenty-five years from now perhaps and here I am, large as eternal life, on this side of the grave. It’s such a fraction of time, a pinprick of time, in the age of the universe—twenty-five years—that wherever one stands and lives (on this bank or the other of the grave) one is
resurrected
.
Wherever time flies—on this bank or the other of the trench of the sky—the centuries are pinpricks of
implicit
otherness or implicit wholeness or incalculable
extension
in and beyond each prison of existence. That is freedom, that is the
royalty
of freedom, all men are kings, women queens. I shall crown Julia.”

Francis had buttonholed a couple, a tall young man in a black bowler hat and a lady in furs, and was reading his manifesto of revolution to them. It was a misty day, quite mild, as if it were already spring. They stared hard at him, murmured something, words of incredulity mixed with courtesy. Perhaps they could not believe their eyes or ears. He turned from them to another passerby dressed in a loud check coat who carried two bottles of milk—one in each hand—that he raised almost threateningly, abusively, as Francis began to read. Francis stopped and the black milkman proceeded along the pavement.

“
Coup d’état
of a queen, the voluntary surrender of powers by a king, by myself, is easier to accomplish with a hand that waves a milk bottle in the cradle of space”, Francis murmured and laughed at himself, at the absurdity of himself, “than by my resurrection’s striking body. I shall give Julia the child she needs. I swear it.”

The bowler hat shone, as it too receded along the
pavement
, to bestow on him a sense of being clothed or
re-made
, of being painted by da Silva across distances on either side of a cradle or a grave, the furs the lady wore began to melt into human skins, the bottles of milk vaguely twinkled like stars half-smothered in a blanket of cloud. They vanished into a queue of passengers who had been standing for some time now at a bus stop, further along the pavement, close to a hole in the ground in which workmen were descending.

Not absurdity really he thought as he arose with their fractured soil on him. An unexpected shaft hit him all at once, like another blow from da Silva’s brush, as he came half-way along the half-moon park of Royal Crescent on the Holland Park Avenue side.

Across the road from him rose the façade of the
unfinished
hotel situated on a site that had previously held, in Francis’s other lifetime, a garage, ancient offices or residences. Its rectangular face looked brown in the misty winter morning like dressed earth. A spirit of everyday craftsmanship, low-keyed sophistication, ascended there out of a trench of previous buildings and Francis wondered again about the shaft in his limbs, about his manifesto or revolutions and lives. And it seemed, all at once, in being painted anew into existence, into resurrection, one comes
alive
to a humour of cosmos that distances one from
oneself
… in drawing one back to oneself … one’s need for oneself, one’s blindness to oneself. So that the very
geography
of divided circumstance, on this bank or that of the reflected cosmos, creates a stranger population in a self that seeks to return to itself as a new creation.

He stopped and examined the premises closely and it came home to him that he had been hit by the apparently unschooled hand in the four naked trees that ran along the pavement before the face of the new hotel. (Perhaps it was another assault by a painter’s brush, a number of which da Silva kept by his palette.) They seemed equally neither to stir nor to sing and yet they ran with a song of the earth, song of a melancholy homecoming to a universal city he loved on both banks of father time.

He moved on again with the inner sense of that shaft or song until he came to the junction of Holland Park Avenue and Holland Road. The sky pressed down upon a recently constructed roundabout that swept into a new highway towards Marylebone.

The atmosphere was inclined to thicken but intimate traceries of light ran nevertheless through the clouds like curtained branches upon curtained branches of space
reflected
in the Thames, beneath a Chelsea horizon, in which the faces of the three passersby, to whom he had read his book, seemed all at once quite vividly there within him, within a suspension of incredulity, courtesy, abuse, laughter.

A fruit shop and a bank he recalled in his previous
lifetime
,
over twenty-five years ago, on this side of Holland Road, had sailed away or vanished.

So had the pub, the barbershop and the ironmonger’s on the other side.

And yet he could see them as if they were
there
forever pooled in his own consciousness.

Francis dodged between a line of cars as he crossed Holland Road towards the place on which the ironmonger’s store had stood.

The area of thick buildings he used to know there had vanished and the land ran clear to an old railway line at the back. And yet he could see….

The ironmonger used to stand in the door of his shop quite close to where Francis’s foot now stood. On a hot summer day he was often coatless and the buckles on his braces shone. He would stand there with his eyes fixed on the stream of people making their way to the pub or to the barbershop or coming from Kensington or going to Kensington. There was an embarrassing fixity in his gaze as if he were bored with the business of the day or as if he needed to test a theory of his own about the tree of existence.

Francis recalled seeing him dressed one memorable and sad day (the day that Julia died twenty-five years ago) in a very black hat above the trunk of his limbs with the air upon him of a solemn wedding and a honeymoon. He seemed as formidable as a human safe in which to lodge the wild oats of god, the wild griefs of god.

He thought of the bowler-hatted young man (who looked in his early or mid-twenties) to whom he had read a page of his book less than twenty-five minutes ago, a page he had concealed in the ironmonger’s body
twenty-five
years today—or was it twenty-five years tomorrow—griefs and joys are timeless—as it registered upon him (within or across a divide of time built into a flash of sorrow); he was caught
then
as
now
upon a projected page, resurrected in da Silva’s canvases, like a stranger father of
self-made sons, never-to-be-made sons, suspended in
himself.

“Can god father himself”, Francis wrote, “in iron masques of tradition, constellated milk bottles, nondescript bowler hats, furred mistresses, unseen populations, unborn heirs?”

There was an odd, a disconcerting seed of resemblance between father time and self-made son, between incredulity of branch in the young man and fixity of gaze in the older, though in point of fact the bowler-hatted youth was thin and tall, the ironmonger’s eyes bulky and large.

There was an odd, a disconcerting seed of rebellious upward movement, in Francis, towards the ironmonger’s foot in a wedding whereas he (Francis) stood in a grave. And, as a consequence, he was drawn to conceal a page of consciousness there, to invest in ironmonger sculpture as a backward resurrection of father time. As though the past is itself the resurrection of feuds of consciousness in the present and the future, in the stress of immediate
circumstance
, since the present and the future inevitably begin to conceive and to die….

“Am
I
my own father?” said Francis. “That’s nonsense.”

“Is it nonsense? Is it?” said the ironmonger. “There’s a central, apparently invincible, nothingness to all material existence out of which time runs backwards and
forwards
….” He paused and continued—“And it is this that imbues us with a capacity to cast off a conviction that imprisons us or to acquire a conviction that determines us.”