“And every apparent victory or defeat he suffers at their hands seems to make him into other progenies of suffering, disadvantaged, creation I never dreamt to reside in my hands. Take the case of Leonard. At first sight that is, I confess, quite an unpromising skeleton with which to wrestle, with whom to wage war and to suffer defeat.”
Da Silva could no longer restrain his curiosity. “Was Leonard Greek or Trojan or Caribbean miscarriage? Or was he orphaned by Auction Block, Middle Passage, antecedents?”
Francis was startled by the question, then amused. “I thought you knew everything,” he said, “all the orphans of the head and the heart.”
Da Silva was properly chastened and rebuked. Where before he had felt gratification and remorse in disclosing to Francis an intimate translation of elements from Francis’s own book now he felt — on his side — the shock of mystery to bought-and-sold character that added an invisible cubit to Francis’s hidden achievements. In Leonard he was suddenly impulsively aware of a dark kiln, a dark horse of a cradle (in which armies secreted themselves in the name of purgatory and creativity) or inner furious skeleton to flesh-and-blood woven from the Industrial Revolution.
That very moment — a mile or so away from where Eleanor sat — Leonard was boiling, in a sudden burst of sun around the dancing globe, to make his way to her from the bottle kiln facing Avondale Park.
“Come on, let’s go,” said da Silva. He had turned a page in Francis’s book and was beginning to unveil and construe some of its limbo elements. “There’s a sudden, perfectly normal, plunge — accentuated by shock — one takes from the ladder of fate into limbo. A state of abstraction, a state of immersion, in page or text, that takes one into another’s bones.
“Like the sudden, perfectly normal, plunge — coincidental to shock — one takes in absentmindedly turning a key in a door until one forgets one’s skeleton hand and finds one’s been locked into an antagonist’s flesh.
“A sudden, perfectly normal, sensation of sinking by degrees into a table or a wall as into the slow enveloping folds of a lake, the whiteness of the surface perhaps, the glint of rose colour from a shaded lamp or the smoothness of a wall, that blots out, for an instant, all other immediate anchorages — lowered threshold of awareness, extensive horizon — heightened threshold of awareness, intensive depths, unfathomable memories.”
They had arrived at the translated threshold or word of Leonard’s skeleton bottle kiln face to face with Avondale Park.
LEONARD’S CRADLE OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY IMMIGRANT ANTECEDENTS
Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
THIS KILN
is a reminder of the nineteenth century when potteries and brickfields were established here amid some of the poorest housing conditions in London; it is one of the few examples of a bottle kiln left in London. The name of the mews behind is the only surviving evidence of the hippodrome race course which stretched around Notting Hill in the mid-nineteenth century.
“Ah yes,” said Francis as though his tongue were further loosened in his skull. “I remember this. I remember how I drew it into my book like an esoteric flower of economic horizons when Europe was expanding around the globe. I feel the constriction still of the rose of the sun in my head, the volcanic industries, the larger-than-life sensation.” He stopped. And da Silva drew him across the road into Avondale Park. They sat on a bench as within Leonard’s recalled ancestral immigrant body, immigrant room, in which the brickwork of the kiln (against which Leonard had deposited a twentieth-century milk bottle) loomed like a refined milestone or epitaph to an extinct volcano within the sky of time and place. The heat and burden of a past century had vanished and yet something pathetic, yet penetrative and illuminating, curiously naked and sad, seemed to relate the mystery of constellations to a re-dress of appearances in the comedy of the cosmos.
It was one’s perception of an economic scar that ran through new blocks and houses springing up on every hand, through the stratifications of materials, the spare use of glass, the tight balconies on which a line of washing, here and there, hung like flags.
It was one’s perception of the apparent dissolution of economic miscarriage or scar on every bed of place and time in the filtered light of embracing seasons, a new pathos, a new detachment, a new hope, an old scepticism that conserved implicitly the humour and toughness of implacable generations….
The unveiled pages of Francis’s book in da Silva’s canvases of Avondale Park and its neighbourhood seemed to move from the oceanic light of mild half-winter, half-spring, descending from the sky, into half-boiling curtains of summer in a new body of building complexes….
Leonard had retrieved his milk bottle from under the kiln and da Silva drew Francis up from their bench in the park which had seemed, in the subtle shock of translated elements, a dimension of native as well as half-forgotten immigrant body.
Leonard was a tall black Englishman and da Silva and Francis trod on his heels (in his heels) as he made his way from the kiln along the grey-black carpeted road. He was dressed in a loud check coat to echo subconsciously perhaps a ribald, yet religious, commentary on Harlequin antagonisms unveiled in Francis, painted in da Silva. Recreation of the trade winds of psyche blown into common-or-garden squares or fabrics or colours. Twentieth-century comedy of divinity.
They passed a priest cycling to work and were approaching a doctor’s surgery, at the corner, flanked by an old fragmented wall in this curiously historic neighbourhood. Then, on their left, came an open area with a low building which housed a new swimming pool.
Leonard stopped for a moment on an open concrete pitch that bordered the pool to shout a word of encouragement to a limbo dancer from the West Indies who swept under a pole held horizontally by two white youths.
First the dancer merely lowered his head and shoulders as he passed under the bar but gradually as the pole was taken inch by inch, foot by foot, closer to the ground, he began to bend his trunk and limbs backwards; his legs and feet acquired astonishing agility and protean spirit.
In the background, perhaps a mile away, above pool and pitch, four or five high-rise buildings ascended into the sky like elongated dancers themselves in tune with a bottle-necked kiln of populations. The limbo dancer beside the pool re-fashioned himself into a series of distortions as he kissed the deck of symbolic slave ship, symbolic free ship, with the back of his head between pole and ground.
“Middle passage ritual,” said da Silva to Francis as he made a series of rapid sketches, a series of dancing shapes in pursuit of a universal architectonic or self.
Francis was astonished—“Middle passage …?” he asked. And then he remembered his book. His eyes were opening in his skull. “On every urban ship the gods are there in each new building programme like implicit dancers, horizons as well, under which history moves by global degrees. Cramped economic degrees, dwarfed economic degrees, embedded nevertheless in the womb of space as in a canvas of deeds that lag behind a universal conception of the body of truth. In a limbo dancer or building or monument one glimpses chains and broken chains, divided spaces, wounded angles in resurrections, movement and distortion towards the inimitable (never-to-be-wholly-achieved) re-assembly of limbs into high rise Osiris, god-beetle, anancy spider, mast of new Christian ship, unfinished land, unfinished pier in the sea and the sky on the precipitate ladder of fate.”
Leonard picked up his heels in Francis’s book; they moved on, turned a corner into an unfinished housing estate, and made their way through it towards Clarendon Road, Lansdowne Road and St John’s Gardens.