*
It had been a hot and stifling day on the island of Zemi when her father was buried at three o’clock in the afternoon. The sun rested on a lower peak in the mountains of the west.
Her almost childlike love and esteem for him had grown over the years.
She had invested a wealth of emotion in him in the leaden age of twentieth-century industry when fathers were obsolete and gods were dead. Her mother died when she was two years old. And — though she retained no conscious memory of her — she dreamt of her as someone who had been carved into a chair, a rocking deity in which she sat and conversed with the other rock-epitaph deity, her father, in whose great shock or nest of hair it sometimes seemed a bird’s gentle wings flapped.
Every summer, from the age of five until her father’s death, she spent the long summer holidays with a great-aunt in England, a stiff-limbed kind-hearted lady-in-waiting who walked with a slight limp upon a stick. She was seventy when Julia first met her but so active in mind she ran a Samaritan office in Southampton Row near Holborn to help people who were in desperate emotional straits and had come to the edge of suicide.
That great-aunt arrived in Zemi (she was now eighty-four years old) a fortnight after her father was buried to take Julia back to England.
She wore black and Julia instantly recalled the mourners who came to her father’s funeral. They too were dressed in black under the drum beat of the sun. They were — quite a large section of them — inhabitants of Zemi, isolated civil servant faces, some seafaring painted faces, businessman painted faces, varieties of nondescript faces. And — here and there — the remote buried-sky-faces from the top of the mountains.
There was a nondescript reporter from the Zemi Chronicle who stood at the gate and noted each arrival in his book. Nondescript and yet on a second, a third, a fourth, glance, he may have been a disguised Da Silva da Silva in advance of his time.
A funeral was an extraordinary occasion in Zemi and its effects were heightened now in Julia’s sculpture of mind that bridged, it seemed, centuries as well as days and years. She felt alone. It seemed an impossibility that her father was dead. How could he be dead? She thought of her great-aunt in London and of the stick upon which she leaned with apparent exhaustion at the end of a long day after interviews and telephone conversations. She thought of her rocking-chair mother upon whom she (Julia) leaned now herself in a state of numbness akin to sleep. They all grew into insensible props now built into the greater insensibility of death which was an uncanny prop itself, or furniture of tradition, upon which future generations would come to lean.
They were (great-aunt’s stick, rocking-chair mother) an implicit form of the curious carriage and miscarriage of a lost granddaughter or grandson fate had designed for her in which dwelt an apparition of freedom and truth nevertheless that flashed upon her, all of a sudden, in the body of her aloneness.
That flash modified the bulk of insensibility and gave her an inner, however frail, steadfastness, an inner detachment, with which — or through which — to witness to the mighty coffin of an age borne in the capital limbs and in the furnitures and in the labour and apparatus of variegated mourners.
First of all the sense of blackness in the coffin of god, in the apparatus that signified “capital father”. The serge suits the bearers wore were black. The white dresses the women wore in the wake of the coffin highlighted a passion that was black. The glare of the sun at two-thirty in the afternoon painted faces black, deepset faces, filled them with a rich density of tone, all colours, all pigmentations, all illuminations, all creatures, so rich in frail contrast that they seemed to live with the flash of wings that flew through her father’s hair in the midst of a solid wreath of paint that seemed black.
Then there was the sense of wood, a great carving of flesh-and-blood in the bodies of the bearers and the processional mourners. The glare of the sun on those bodies was like a fire that highlighted the earlier sensation she had had of insensible props of grief built into the greater insensibility of death. Except that, in this moment that subsisted upon a flash, those props seemed actually slighter than before as if their function had altered into a thread in the evolution of insensibility in some of the mourners’ faces which were unfamiliar to her. It was the custom at great funerals for people one scarcely knew, or did not know at all, to attend on the slenderest thread of excuse, a fleeting acquaintance with the deceased, or with a member of the deceased’s family.
“A fleeting acquaintance with god”, Julia wrote afterwards in one of her letters, “is enough to claim an intimate rapport with the mighty insensible coffin of an age that engages what is fleeting and insubstantial as if to endorse the secret, the most sensitive, origins of life in the apparent death of life.”
Thus the sense of wood possessed its grain of incalculable irony or humour, incalculable spark of compassion, and the very gatecrashers who came to her father’s funeral, out of stranger curiosity, rather than familiar sympathy, seemed to modify a block of insensibility, in the depths of familar helplessness (rocking chair, walking stick or crutch) one sensed in one’s best friends or relations, by equating the tree of evolutionary death with a fleeting conception of sorrow that became profoundly meaningful in ultimate relief or perspective in the seed of unfamiliar life.
In addition to limbs of blackness and wood arose a bulk of construction embodying a variety of features. There was the painted, almost planed, quality of her father’s brow above the burly frame that lay in state. There was the huge nose; the life-like almost speaking lips; the grey moustache and the veined leaflike character of the closed eyelids. His death had been so sudden that it had caught a breathless instinct of life on the tree of the sun that splashed within the room.
There was the red waving rose in the button-hole of his coat. For some reason he had had an attachment to the red of roses, had worn them (or it) in his office and in his drawing room as if the colour of a fruit or a vegetable or a flower were capable of being skinned alive, of being born alive, in spite of apparent incapacitation. The red rose seemed to highlight an illogicality of drifting construction embodying a variety of features whose lifelikeness was the frailest straw, the most remarkable assumption of all, in the heavy architecture of the Zemi afternoon.
As the coffin was closed and raised on the shoulders of the bearers, like a felled tree, the other features of evolutionary construction arose like a modified abstract centaur. Elongated box or horse with human legs began to move within a space of attendant bodies so that the entire implications of the waving procession were metamorphoses of cavalry. The huge procession formed and re-formed to charge but was held by the reins in the beak of a bird that fluttered in the dark air between the sun on its mountain and the earth in its saddle of space.
Thus another modification of insensibility occurred in the imprint of expedition or flight, the imprint of immaterial reins, built into a huge tree — apparently irrelevant to that huge tree — yet expressive of the secret origins of life pitted against great odds before time or evolution itself began. Indeed that imprint of expedition or flight was here now in the multiplication of great odds into formidable patterns of helplessness, that drew one into an endless procession of overlapping cones and spheres, bodies and saddles, numbers, branched faces and veined eyes, valleys and mountains, that seemed to swarm around one on the way to the black cradle or to the blind grave….