The Tree of the Sun

by Wilson Harris

  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 vol
ition 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.”

  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 wildness (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.