How easy for them to ride into headstrong oblivion after all that had happened between them, to destroy with the glance of an arrow or a word so much that was beautiful and priceless they had actually achieved within a nucleus of far-reaching and shocking illegitimacy and legitimacy of antecedents.
So that as she dreamt they were driving in their car in half-an-hour’s time, the intervening minutes of separation and silence, as if everything had happened, as if nothing had happened, drew her to live the parallel but estranged expeditions of lovers, unravelled motivations that lay in the arts of the future at the heart of present silences and beyond miscarried words or ultimatums.
Theirs was the parallel wound or expedition of bruised affection in time within a renascence of the arts; executions that resembled a rock sentence of ultimate silence, division or death: resembled death in confirming a miracle of achieved life within unlived lives across incredible cosmic distances, a miracle of wounded wholeness implicitly whole in the very beginnings before all parallel stricken beginnings.
Each wounded whole comes to reflect elements of air and water and incredible distances that confused it in new beginnings after old beginnings.
And that confusion burns itself into the collective stone memory and non-memory of the born and the unborn as if to affirm that no escape exists from water’s clan or the clans of air, earth, fire, space, and the elements above space, since the kingdom of the womb from which one comes lies within them all. And the degrees of re-entry into that lost kingdom, through states of lived, unlived, lives, lie in the very cruel elements themselves as insensible substitutes for gateways of awe and blinding wonder.
Re-entry into peace is hemmed around by furies as if to witness to a nameless peace, unlike the names of peace, yet available to the mystery of the self in its inimitable movement into stillness or stillness into unseen movement.
Re-entry into love is hemmed around by apparitions of hate, as if to witness to a terrifying inner repose within the assault of the world, a luminosity, immunity, available to the mystery of the self as unseen shelter from fire within rock fire.
Re-entry into perfection is hemmed around by qualities of distress as if to witness to an otherness beyond captivity yet available to patterns or limits of endurance in the mystery of the self.
No wonder she found herself immersed in minutes that were hundreds of years, in which she felt herself both enlarged and diminished as she waited for Francis to return.
No wonder she smoothed her rock skirt and flesh into enterprises of invented car and re-invented ship on which to sail backwards to revived garden parties of her youth, savage symbols, carnival dances, that were in themselves a form of waiting, a form of anticipation, a form of hoping for a secret lover of infinity buried in ancestral bone and blood, a secret white, a secret black, a secret Carib, a secret Arawak.
At the age of eighteen, the year of her first carnival, she made her first step into the rock of the sky, into Arawak Zemi-land. She followed a procession that wound its way up into the central mountains.
They arrived in the ceremonial playing fields of the zemi-clouds above the Caribbean Sea. Those fields were rectangular and still circular, they were bounded by vertical stones in which the zemi-players crouched.
It was a glimpse by sculptured eyes through the sculptured mountain of the heart that Julia never forgot.
Perhaps it was her first intimation of the distances that were to trouble her, the distances between herself and a lover of infinity, distances of enchantment. Her blood sang, her feet danced, in expectation.
Far below the sea crawled in its wrinkled illusion of a mask battered by the sun but still expectant of the coming of the sky, the divinity of the sky. Far above, yet close at hand, through a crevice in the illusion of the sky, the zemi-players were poised in their three-cornered bodies, three-cornered blood, three-cornered feet.
Each feature enlarged itself into a phallic trinity or ball that bounced from the pitch of Maya-land to the pitch of Zemi-land, from lap-land to crown-land, from ladies-in-waiting to gentlemen-in-waiting.
She was suddenly naked lap-land and crown-land herself save for a fig-leaf of cloud into which had been pinned frogs and birds and bats and fish. Pinned into a mirror of intercourse between the sea and the sky.
And all at once she began to tremble in her leaf of a cloud as the zemi-players advanced from that other kingdom, on the other side of the mountain, towards her.
Screamed. Fell to the ground. High and dry. Between earth and sky.
Did she or was it they who screamed….?
The game had vanished. She was fully clad again, raped yet wholly painted, raped yet clothed in parallel wounded expectations of species and cultures. Torn fig-leaf, torn cloud. And all that remained — as the solicitous mountain party gathered around her — was the memory of her first glimpse of a lover of infinity, of lightning penetration and bliss, of frog angels and bird angels and fish angels, her first substitute carnival gateway into the annunciation of the globe as an absorption of sorrows on a pin or a star or a splinter in the eye of the needle within which unseen populations danced.
8. Embarkation/Wedding Day
Julia’s father died a year after her ascent of Zemi-land on which she left a subtle emotional imprint, an emotional intuition, a weather-madonna, da Silva thought, to match across the years a sculptured madonna as she now sat in her chair in the park.
Perhaps that ascent had been her first adolescent carnival sensation of a hand dissolving the elements, constructing the elements, a hand that could blow fierce and strong backwards from future or past into a created or re-created emotional presence within one and without one.
She was nineteen years old when her father died on the island of Zemi, twenty-nine when she lost her first pregnancy.
In that interval of ten years the outlines of varieties of emotional density or blown paintings of disturbed psyche, charged with the curious humours or immensities of pathos in father time’s agencies of original embarkation across incredible distances of cosmos, seemed to inscribe themselves in her in father time’s lost foetal child within letters of cloud: cloud-letters she had nevertheless meticulously written in which appeared apparently involuntary scribbles of what Julia herself called in a marginal note “father-deity at the door of the womb”. Some were much more than scribbles, da Silva saw when he came to study her letters, they resembled the most sensitive miniature sculptures and were of such delicacy they may have been impressed with a needle into shavings of wood or shell or stone refined into manuscript or paper.
Perhaps they had been peeled from a body of unspoken necessity, perhaps they were a compensation for losses endured, perhaps they were part and parcel of the evolutionary mystery of art in which she was to reside herself, in another age, like an inimitable carving herself in a chair against the papers of grass and water that stirred or evaporated in the park.
Her father’s sudden death had been a blow, her sudden abortion a shock, and something in her, which was originally bruised or torn before it actually appeared-to-be-bruised-or-torn, ran to embark into another beginning of the self. Ran to da Silva; her body of letters fell into him.