The Tree of the Sun

by Wilson Harris

  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 m
an 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….”

  The paint on his lips cracked and much that he said seemed to vanish into the ground as the sensuous bullet Leonard fired hit him on the lips with which he kissed Eleanor with sudden zest, with limbo zest.

  “Perhaps they both aimed and missed each other,” cried Eleanor scrambling up and tidying her dress as she saw Queen Julia turn and begin to descend towards the Serpentine.

  *

  Da Silva’s Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park had been painted with open stretches and with clumps of trees—oak, horsechestnut, ash, elm, cedar, beech, lime, willow.

  Silver-grey roads of marvellous summer light tinctured by autumn and spring ghostly mechanics in the barks of trees wound their way from Bayswater Road to Kensington Road and Knightsbridge, from Hyde Park Gate around the Serpentine canal to Broad Walk.

  Distances in each painting foreshortened themselves or deepened themselves into underground links or streams or rivers.

  He brushed in a number of children’s swings within a hundred yards of Bayswater Road.

  An intimacy of line and tone, the flashing wings of a gull over the Round Pond, shone through a slanting element like the thinnest lines of rain that rocked a miniature ocean upon which to embark around the globe from the sunrise of the early sixteenth century into resurrections of dawn in the late twentieth century.

  It had been a long apparently stable cloud of night over the sun’s delayed apparition and a swan or night-headed duck settled on da Silva’s ocean as though an egg of cosmos were hatching within the hands of the foetus of the gods as it floated backwards and forwards in time….

  These were in part Julia’s thoughts as she descended with Francis from the black/brown/white child clutching a riddled toy ship in which a letter to posterity had been posted. A letter from the grave of the Round Pond to the grave of the Serpentine. A letter from nondescript child to Shelley’s dead wife, Harriet Westbrook, who drowned herself one cold winter night in the early years of the nineteenth century.

  Posterity lies in the past as much as in the future.

  Eleanor was playing the part of Harriet in the glare of television suns. It was an important film that would be transmitted by satellite to America. There was a green summer dress on her breasts like paint and yet it may have been an illusion for as Julia shaded her eyes the floating body of the actress in the water seemed curdled into winter foam and furs.

  Julia stepped back herself from her lady-in-waiting who had flown from a Wild West studio in Italy (as if it were a bench in the park) to the Serpentine; turned away and stepped back herself into deeper recesses of the night-headed duck that sat on Leonard’s head, stepped through shell upon shell of pigmented camera to sail in another time from limbo port to limbo port of romantic oblivion.

  The noises of twentieth-century London were momentarily stilled as the cameras clicked to paint each ghost. A fleet of children’s twentieth-century toy ships and dive bombers sailed on the Serpentine, flew in the air, not far from the film makers, under a gay summer sky. They seemed, all at once, a futuristic negative or painting, slightly unreal, slightly mad, like Picasso’s fashionable Guernica in the backward sky of nineteenth-century horse shining overhead.

  She could still discern the magnificent rider embodying Physical Energy in the near distance of the park. Some said it had arrived in Kensington Gardens from as far afield as Cape Town—that it had broken loose from a Cecil Rhodes memorial and been caught by the hand of a sculptor called Watts.

  Julia was peculiarly aware of all these co-exi
stent features, implicit Guernica in Southern Africa’s cavalry, the smooth barrel of Watt’s horse in the cannonball bed of Picasso, and she gripped Francis’s arm with a profound sense of mourning in this timeless day of judgement/resurrection feuds, Promethean dawn and Serpentine fiery ghost.

  “The present is an unreal letter one writes and conceals … out of a kind of cowardice perhaps.” She gripped Francis’s arm again as if she clung to a line that had been written for her or written by her a long time ago. “And then the letter returns before one loses one’s chance to see how close we are to the truth. Each lady-in-waiting’s alive the moment one sees, has the courage to see an entire body of approximate destinies in the womb of death and life.”

  “Jen’s pregnant and alive, thank God,” said da Silva.

  “What’s that? Whose voice was that? Was it you, Francis? Or did it come from the crowd over there? No. Not you. Nor anyone over there. His, the one who reads and edits my letters, your book, puts lines into my mouth, kisses my mouth with his brush. The future’s unreal until it becomes so real it actually speaks, in a play, in a poem perhaps, in a painting, in a novel. Each day in our lives was a resurrection Francis. And therefore we live backwards into the future until, who knows, the present may become so real we may live forwards into the past. We may live on either side of the grave. I wonder—did he say all of that or did I? I heard him cry ‘Jen’s pregnant and alive’ and I felt suddenly alone and yet on the edge of a sea that could take me to him; to you Francis when you plunge into some other world and leave me on this side of things.”

  Francis held her and steadied her within the canvas da Silva painted. All of a sudden he was filled with irrational jealousy. “Who does he think he is?” he cried, “this other, this editor, this painter? In the first place it’s quite ridiculous really, I never read your letters nor you my book. We wrote and concealed …”