The Tree of the Sun by Wilson Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

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-existent 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 readsand 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 …”
    “Out of a kind of cowardice perhaps,” she insisted gently.
    “It was nothing of the kind.”
    “It was Francis. And now he brings us face to face, he edits our secret conversations.”
    “You mean he brings you face to face with him. The arrogant bastard. Who does he think he is?”
    “Francis. Not arrogance. We’re quarrelling again. His hand is there yes. In his interpretation of our lives. But can’t you see it works to diminish a pattern of domination ?”
    “What are you driving at Julia?”
    “He makes us speak to each other so unpredictably, so unexpectedly, that we become the voices we feared or concealed in ourselves most of all in our past lives. He too becomes …”
    “We become strangers to each other Julia. That’s his doing.”
    “You mean we become more aware of the strangers in each other that we fear Francis. Unity is the mystery ofotherness. I and Thou. I actually wrote that in a letter to you which you never read.”
    “Whose fault was that?”
    “Mine of course. I was afraid. As Eleanor’s afraid of your son in the parts she plays. She conceals herself from Harlequin as I concealed myself from you. It’s an immemorial drama. A mirror, a television box, a bed, a stream, a cradle, the tomb one invents. Many a great actress is born out of the stealth with which she