Her father’s mistresses stood in a group there at, or in, the gate and her linkage of them with a painter-lover-apparitional-canvas, in the tomb of the future, sprang from a curious editorial function exercised by extremities in all cruel or kind bodies in the book of time (judgement day time). So that they became the perennial postmistresses of god who received, translated, stored, distributed, messages of a terrifying resurrection.
A cross-section of the message they stored was built into the gate; was a preservation of their ambivalent youth, their ambivalent adventures or metamorphoses of rider and ridden. And as Julia read this complex sentence in their half-parchment, half-wooden, faces — shrouded now in mourning — she seemed to acquire a capacity herself to slip through the gate of life and death into another kingdom of life that resembled unconsciousness in its radical divinity of attachment to unselfconscious motivations of abandon and joy in truly lived god-like innocent lives within one’s grasp, beyond one’s grasp, in its radical divinity of attachment to truly lived god-like lusts and hates within one’s grasp, beyond one’s grasp.
And, in the same token, she was drawn towards the future, as unanswered question, husband, enemy, friend, whose hiatus in hierarchical absolutes (joy or hate) lay in a tension of realities, within one’s grasp, mercifully beyond one’s grasp, hiatus in divinity’s cloak upon skeleton frameworks, hiatus in scaffoldings, hiatus in codes of absolute justice, absolute innocence, absolute lust, and in all the unbearable punishments, unbearable prizes or deserts, one associates with a radical divinity upon the human frame. In that hiatus was grace to make the unbearable bearable.
It was as if she espied a rope that encircled a hanged man’s neck, in her father’s gate, a fluttering bonnet, an eye in a needle, a subtle hiatus in stitched hatred or violence or murder, a subtle pity, a subtle helplessness, in cradled, executed child of spirit, seed of mourning wood, confused madonna relating inexplicable evils to inexplicable goods.
She had never been told the confusing origins of the noose in the gate of the womb, middle passage, capital punishment in Zemi.
Perhaps sentence had been passed on the buried-sky-faces that had raped her a long, long, legendary time ago, it seemed.
Did she hate Francis? Did she love Francis?
Francis never knew how she came to know of his mistresses who were substitutes or approaches to serenity in herself, in his book of life; how she came to elevate them into figures within her grasp, beyond her grasp, as if to overcome the burden of love and hate, of conquest in himself, in her letters of life.
She wrote a letter to lady prime minister Eleanor and confirmed her in lioness office. She wrote a letter to lady of justices Rima and confirmed her in ariel office. She confirmed herself as failed queen of species and Francis as failed king. She wrote a letter to daemon artist Da Silva da Silva in whom she trusted, in some other age, to transform apparent failure into an unfinished prize of unfinished community.
Once again she was drawn to scrutinise the overlapping lineaments in the bird-gate, in the lion-gate, male and female evolutionary bodies. A resemblance existed between her father’s sudden death and Francis’s plunge into the ladder of limbo — as between the hanged man in the carriage or miscarriage of fate and Christ’s freedom on the cross — and these two self-reversible poles, or emblems of “father-deity’s strength and weakness at the door of the womb”, drew her forwards to sense the partial self (or selves) in all creations constructed in the teeth of great odds, within unpromising, perhaps inhospitable, perhaps barren, reaches of time.
*
It was within the construction of the rain’s multiple stick, upon which great-aunt Sky leaned, that the young and ambitious reporter left the island of Zemi with Julia a month or so after the great funeral.
There had been business matters to attend to in connection with her father’s estate but at last there they were on their way to the ship. Francis sat in the carriage with Julia and her great-aunt who seemed enraptured by the sudden coolness of the weather. They drove for the last time through the formal, sculptured, gate, with its lions and birds and hanging figures.
(Da Silva had painted himself into Francis’s skin as if it were he who sat in the carriage.)
“An astonishing gate,” he said to Jen, turning to his wife in his studio, pointing deep into his canvases as if they moved within and without these paintings themselves. “Like the entrance to a great theatre. My studio’s a stage. Our world’s a stage.” He kissed her and turned all at once on their world-stage as if the renascence of arts they pursued had run into drama and he was an actor, Jen was an actress; they took their translated (edited, transformed) lines from conjunctions of Francis’s book and Julia’s letters.
“An astonishing gate”, he continued, addressing the mask of Julia as it turned towards him, “in which I have added mutations of character, Rigby and Cortez; I shall change my name to Cortez, you see I’m a little mad, but then it’s becoming fashionable to change one’s name nowadays. As for Leonard and Harlequin, ah well they’re limbo dancers, limbo selves. They hang upon a rope of distances knotted into the rain. Mercator’s children. Family tree, satellite tree, Sky, Rain, Earth. Pricks in the milky way and the stars. Backside of the moon.
“You see,” he said to Julia wryly, “you’ve led me a pretty dance you know. Across oceans. Into the birth of space. Back to where it all started. Our first meeting. So here I am. How do you put it in your letters? Ah yes I remember. Parallel expeditions and beginnings. So here I am. Seated beside you on our way to the harbour. There we embark with great-aunt Sky.
“You say it was unfeeling of me to break in on you the evening of the funeral but I thought you were leaving Zemi the next day and I couldn’t afford to miss you. And then of course I discovered we were actually booked to travel on the same vessel; I mentioned the book I had started to write about you, when I first heard of you, before we met, called the tree of the sun. A secret book. But when I looked at you then I knew you knew how much I envied your serenity and wealth. And I felt you also knew that envy may lead in god’s good time to the greatest admiration that beauty arouses. Indeed I am deeply in love with you Julia. Fate. Freedom. A chance for me when we marry, as we surely will, I feel it will surely happen, to do something in my book for a world that needs authority and imagination; needs innocence.”
“Innocence?” said Julia startled by his naïveté or unselfconsciousness or hubris. She inclined her head a little as if she were listening for a frail stable of truth within the horses’ hooves that seemed to run in the shadow of wombed canvas.
Perhaps the shadow of an intuition possessed her, the shadow of distress or distrust of “will-to-tenderness”; the shadow nevertheless of hope in the wholly creative achievement of authority and imagination, the achievement of beauty. “Innocence is a sea,” she began and stopped as if she were concealing, in a pocket in the carriage, her first love letter to Francis on which the shadows crossed. “It may bear us forward, it may swallow us up, in the cradle, in bed, in the things we grow to idolise.” She sounded a trifle uncomfortable as the carriage swayed and distorted her voice.
“I do not believe it swallows us up,” da Silva said softly.
“I died,” cried Julia, abruptly changing the subject, “according to the records, in my fortieth year.” She spoke like a translated actress who mimicks the records as reification of fact, bed of fact, cradle of fact. And then, in a flash, in another voice, like an actress again, improvising this time, “I have no memory of dying Francis except in an endless procession of turbulences. One disembarks. One embarks again upon another ship. One’s here. One’s not here. My body’s in this carriage. My heart’s back in the old house. Perhaps it will crawl and swim until it catches up. My mind and spirit — they’re with you already on the ship. And the child I so much want to have … Where is he or she I wonder? A procession of turbulences.”