The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  Stan Parker drove in his high, ridiculous car along those roads. Most of the flesh had left his face. He drove past Halloran’s Corner, and the turn off to Moberley. People who did not know what had happened were continuing to live their lives. An old woman in a big hat was cutting dahlias, convinced that this momentarily was the activity of mankind. She looked up, shading her eyes to see, but her sun had yellow petals. And Stan Parker drove on. Two children near Bangalay were looking at something in a tin, from which soon they would begin to tear the wings. Under their cold gaze the universe had shrunk to the size and shape of a doomed beetle.

  The man drove on. He entered and left suburbs of distinct similarity. People walking in the streets turn their heads sharply to look at anything that does not convince. Was there perhaps something in that car, something to fear, or hate, or just to stare at curiously, a soul exposed?

  The car drove on too quickly over one crossing, then across several. At one corner a woman tilting a pram did almost scream. But asphalt was apathetic in that glare. The old but deliberate car drove on. In it a man in middle age, rather upright, in best clothes. Neither a drunk nor a madman, by any evidence; it appeared rather that some vision of actuality had got the better of him, and he was stuck in it, rigid, forever.

  So the car ran on, into the city, to which Stan Parker had not come since that visit on his son’s account, and which began now to swallow the loose and dusty car by devious channels. Time trickled down the man in sweat, and particularly behind the knees. It was a long time, he felt. Some walls of grey concrete had sweating pores, the cement pointing of others, in brick, had crumbled and fallen in places, the hugger-mugger shopfronts on the other hand were too intricate and brittle, and stood back beneath awnings. So he drove on, sweating with cold ooze of concrete almost, and remembering the grey face of his mother as she lay on the bed, an old woman with her eyes closed. The dead were moistening their lips as he drove that old rattle-box along, choosing a moment.

  If I drive it, if I drive it now, he said, swerve in, into any wall, now. But he continued. One wheel was wobbly. He was continuing. Bitter, agonizing sweeps of grass with the frost on it, with the sun on it, trees turning up silver in a wind, or just the dead trees, to which he had always been mysteriously attracted, consoled as he rode amongst their silences, through a silence of grass, drifted this side of glass and concrete. So his life was continuing. His wife was walking in grass. Amy came up the dead grass, the long leafy switches trailing from her hands, that she threw down afterwards, after telling him those lies which were apparently necessary at the moment.

  Everything is necessary, though it is important to discover why.

  He stopped the car then. It drew up neatly and soberly at a curb, after failing to rise to the heights of tragedy and passion. I could not kill myself, like that bloke Gage, Stan Parker knew, I do not know why, but I could not. All round him were the terribly deliberate faces of the inhabitants of the city, going on the errands of their peculiar lives. The man in the car, whose hands were empty now that they had given up the wheel, did not know much, except possibly his wife’s form and those glimpses he had had of her soul, and those experiences in which he and she had been interchangeable. For a moment he saw Amy’s face, that had died in some dream, and in the streets of sleep he was calling to her, his tie flying, and the streets were empty.

  Then he got out quickly, out of the old car, bumping his head, because he was tall, and invariably forgot about opening up too soon. He got out, and went into the pub that was on that corner, and ordered a glass of pale beer with thin froth on the top, and drank it down. It tasted sour. He drank several of the wretched beers, with pauses of recognition for his act. Then he was drinking. And continued for some time.

  Several men talked to him in that swill pot, which was lined with white tiles for the greater resonance of memory. Men who held their faces close to his were convinced by the jerky pageantry of all they had done. This conviction shone from their faces, sometimes spilling over in tears for motives or gestures of the past, that they had not recognized till now, in recitation. They had grown. They were heroic. All these men, rocking on their heels or inclining gravely, were anxious for Stan Parker to assume their size, to tell them something from his own heroic life. So they inclined, and waited. There was one thing to tell. But he could not.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, shaking the hands from off the sleeve of his coat. ‘Leave me. There’s nothing to tell.’

  Several surprised gentlemen mumbled through respectable lips of purple grapeskins, ‘What’s got into yer, mate?’

  ‘Tell what?’

  ‘The flickin truth is not told, so nobody asked for it, or nothin. See?’

  Stan Parker looked round at the place, seeing that it was now pretty full, and writhing, yet he was alone with his thoughts, could look at a wall, if he chose, between the heads of eels. So that the water, which was flowing where the grass had been, rowed past, and he could have caught at the old ram by the horn. But it was now too late. This is the key to me, Amy, he said, I cannot see things in time.

  Ah, she was laughing and gurgling, it was all water in there, and slapping her tiles with strange hands that were wearing veins and rings. He could not look closer because of the extreme bestiality of what he already saw. This was the worst yet because until now his thoughts had not put on flesh.

  After this he began to go outside, many coats and yellow, thin overcoats opening willingly for him to pass, until he was out, or his legs had carried him there. He was tittuping. He was opening and closing. He got round the corner to some side street, of which he could not read the name, while trying; it seemed so necessary to locate a degradation. And old banana skins. There was a paper sky, quite flat, and white, and Godless. He spat at the absent God then, mumbling till it ran down his chin. He spat and farted, because he was full to bursting; he pissed in the street until he was empty, quite empty. Then the paper sky was tearing, he saw. He was tearing the last sacredness, before he fell down amongst some empty crates, mercifully reduced to his body for a time.

  When he returned to himself a man with a wart and some mission for night-watching was looking above crates and saying, ‘Hi, mate, you fell down.’

  The purple lights of night were drifting in the side street.

  ‘Get up,’ said the man, whose form could have been large, but it was nightbound.

  ‘You have soiled yer good suit,’ the man said.

  Stan Parker got up. There was nothing to do now but go away, which he did, on older legs, away from his soothing saviour, whom he would never know better on account of the circumstances.

  The city was adrift with lights, purple and red. He drifted with them. He found the old car. Events had passed over it and left it standing. Until he made it flow. Purple and red, blossoming, fell. The white lights, though, burned from the brain. The tunnels of trams burrowed clumsily into other tunnels, of darkness, going somewhere.

  So the man Stan Parker went in a direction that was chosen for him, driving round the night, on a curve, it seemed. Sometimes tramlines guided him into a groove, giving his conscience a jerk, but for the most part he just drove. Now he was less drunk than blurred. He was benign now, if unhappy. Sea air began to eat into the landscape, as into metal. He touched the sticky damp on metal, and mist on the windscreen. A violet efflorescence hung along the coast, on which soft waves sensuously destroyed effort. Here too, he remembered, some people came to kill themselves, leaving their lives on the sand together with a little heap of clothes, and swimming out to sea till the water entered into their mouths.

  But this man had grown too soft in the night to endure such tensions. Nor is it necessary to kill to destroy.

  He got out somewhere on the esplanade, which followed the beach round. He was looking for something. His legs were wambling for the time being, but at that age he was still a good figure of a man, without a hat, which he had lost somewhere. Walking along concrete, he looked into windows, sometimes pressing his face
against them, to focus the blur in those caves into something precise and consolatory. He liked to see people sitting at tables, when they had left off doing anything and were merely sitting in each other’s presence. Then he knew them so closely he could have taken part in their lives as it is not possible ordinarily.

  So he was looking into the windows, and in one a face was forming in more than fact, in memory, was speaking to him out of thick lips. It was a milk bar evidently, in which the thick man stood pouring glasses of green and pink for youths to drink. Youths showed their behinds, and sipped sweet draughts, and belched because they had learned how. While the man poured, his black eyelids entranced above the silver cups.

  Why, bugger me, said Stan Parker, if it isn’t Con the Greek.

  Ah, he was glad to find the Greek on those shores. Night and the sea breezes flowed in with the stranger through the sucking door, as he went forward quickly to touch something that he knew.

  ‘It is Mr Parker,’ cried the Greek, emerging from behind his eyelids. ‘Go on! Waddayerknow! It is Mr Parker, Riní, Sosó, Kos-táki, that I spoke about, the boss, remember, when I first came ere, an was workin. Go on, Mr Parker, it is you then. An how is Mrs Parker? Good? How do you like it here? This is my place, that my wife brought. This is my wife.’

  Other people quickly came to investigate what had happened. They were talking in their bird calls, mature, frizzy girls and rippling younger ones, the livery, damp boys with early moustaches and night eyes.

  ‘Pleased to meetcher, mister,’ said Mrs Con.

  Her breasts were glad beneath an apron, and her prosperous teeth smiled.

  ‘You stay,’ said Con the Greek, dashing his friend against his chest, ‘an we shall eat.’

  ‘No. Not stay,’ said Stan Parker, who had not yet rediscovered what is possible. He said, ‘Only for a little. I can’t stay.’

  His bones were feeble. He sat abruptly on an iron chair.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ they cried.

  ‘I make nice spessel dinner,’ smiled Mrs Con.

  ‘Soodzookákia,’ spattered a long girl.

  ‘Kephtérdes,’ shrieked a plumpy one.

  Then they were all screaming, and pushing, and settling it.

  ‘You wait,’ smiled the wife.

  Her buttocks were quite confident that went out through a bead curtain. Soon the oil hissed.

  ‘These are all the children of my wife,’ said Con the Greek, for whom the time had arrived to give the shape and content of his life. ‘All ready-made. Like this business. I come here to get rich, and I done well.’

  The Greek, who had grown a stomach, was stirring his pocket, which was full of money and keys. He began to give details of his business, the mathematics of success, which in that chant became like the words of the songs he had sung, mystical.

  Then Stan Parker, who had lost his substance, and who was holding his knuckles to stop the cavern of his mouth, asked, ‘Do you still sing, Con, those Greek songs, from the islands?’

  ‘Sing?’ laughed the Greek, shaking his stomach, which was still rather small. ‘Nao! What do I wanter sing for? Young men sing. They walk around and stand at corners. I leave it to the kids. They gotta use their breath up somehow. They’re too hot.’

  Then the Greek slapped his friend on the shoulder with his now fat hand, and went outside to give some direction, or make water. He was the owner there. He could please himself. He was hard and invulnerable, if also soft and fat.

  Stan Parker, who was no longer certain what he owned, if anything at all, found this wonderful.

  ‘You must like music then?’ said a girl, coming to the circle of marble at which the stranger sat.

  ‘Music? Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose so. I never thought about it much.’

  He had not. His eyelids felt old and dry. Things had a habit of occurring to him for the first time.

  ‘I like music,’ said the girl, who was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, it was difficult to tell, but blossoming in an old blue jumper that someone had knitted for her, or even for someone else. ‘I am studying music,’ she said, ‘and poetry, and domestic science. I have also won a state prize for an essay on Soil Erosion.’

  ‘You are leaving nothing to chance,’ said the dry man. ‘What do they call you?’

  ‘Pam,’ she said.

  ‘That isn’t her name,’ shouted a couple of lean boys who were passing just then.

  ‘Pam!’ they taunted, showing their gums.

  Brothers will wrestle the truth from a sister.

  ‘It is,’ she burned back. ‘I am going to be Pam.’

  ‘She is Panayóta,’ laughed the boys, pointing their fingers at her.

  So that the girl was forced to sit humbly beneath her eyelids, sitting with the tips of her fingers placed together on the rim of the table.

  ‘Panayóta? That could be worse,’ said Stan Parker, when the boys had passed on.

  ‘But I don’t want to be Panayóta,’ burned the girl. ‘I want to choose for myself. I am not Panayóta. I don’t know what I am. But it is not Panayóta. I do not know what I shall be. So I study everything. I want to do everything.’

  She was feverish.

  In the kitchen the oil was hissing.

  ‘Don’t listen to Panayóta,’ laughed the moist teeth of the mother, who had stuck her head for a moment through the strands of her bead curtain. ‘She is crazy,’ she said approvingly.

  The girl, whose hair had been washed that day and was fresh and brittle, got up from the table, so that her dark hair brushed past the face of the stranger, who was fixed there for the time being.

  ‘I shan’t speak any more,’ she said gravely. ‘I shall play you something. That will be better.’

  The man, who had smelled her hair, remembered the white roses that smell of tobacco when you crush them, but very faintly, translated into rose. So he drew back from the brink of his unhappiness, and cleared his throat, which was the dry throat of a man of a certain age.

  ‘This is lovely,’ said the girl, taking a record and sticking it on an old gramophone that stood there on the counter, beside a nickel container that held the straws. ‘It makes you feel sad,’ she said, winding the box with a groggy handle. ‘But it is beautiful.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said.

  Then the disc began to slur. It was going perpetually over a bump, but something did come out. The deathless voice was singing wordlessly. A faint silveriness of sea air and waves sluiced the counter. All acts, past and present, stood transfixed in that light.

  The girl, who had come and got into her seat again, sliding past the man into the circle of his companionship, said intimately, ‘I wrote a poem once.’

  ‘Was it any good?’ he asked in a loud voice.

  ‘At first,’ she said. ‘Then it began to look terrible.’

  She was talking against the deathless song. She would have liked to listen, but she could not. Her own poetry was warmer, more actual, more compelling.

  ‘I want to get hold of enough money to go to Athens,’ she said. ‘To visit some relatives. And see the Parthenon.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Stan Parker.

  ‘You know the Parthenon?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘It is a temple,’ she said. ‘It is all marble. It is, oh, I don’t know, the Parthenon,’ she cried desperately, flinging out her arms to embrace something that was too big.

  And that cold moonlight of the song was falling out of the box on the counter.

  Stan Parker, sitting at the small, cold table, had by this time achieved permanence of a kind which the song could not dissolve, ebbing and flowing though it was at the iron roots of the table. But this permanence was not worth having, he knew. All things of importance, in the liquid light of the silver song, are withheld or past. All figures that he recognized were turned to marble. So he lay with his wife upon the iron bed, which still grew from the rose carpet, but their limbs were marble. They were frozen together in each other’s eyes. Their vision was fixed historically on t
hat point.

  ‘You don’t say much,’ said the girl, who was tired of listening to the song.

  She had listened many times. She had heard most things, she had done most things that it was possible for her, within the limits of her years, to do and hear, so that she longed for the expansive mysteries of other people’s lives.

  ‘I say enough,’ said the man.

  His mouth was growing resentful. He could have taken a hammer and smashed the marble world. And this girl, of what age, in her stretchy jumper, who had appeared touching at first, was now repellent to him, because of his thoughts.

  She had rested her breasts on the rim of the table, and they were the breasts of a woman.

  ‘Did you get drunk?’ she asked.

  She had a gap in her teeth, at the side.

  ‘Mind your own business,’ he said. ‘You’re only a kid.’

  So that immediately she was a little girl, with fingers pointing at her.

  Just then the song finished, and Panayóta had to jump up and release the needle from the final groove. The man continued to sit. They were both exposed now to the loud silence of that room, of which the walls were pink and yellow. The girl, who was a little girl when she forgot, biting her nails and scratching herself in those places which needed it, went to the mirror to see what the man had seen. She had begun to hate the oldish man. Who was watching her. In the mirror she assumed the positions of women, sticking out her breasts in the sagging jumper, and following the line of her lips with her tongue.

  ‘How old are you?’ asked the man, leaning forward across the table.

  His own voice sounded lewd, but he was not surprised, sensing he had not reached the depths.

  ‘How old?’ asked the girl relentlessly.

  So that the gap in her teeth showed.

  There were saints on the ceiling, with pointed, painful faces, and heaps of fruit.