The wheels of the carriage were running smooth as velvet on a new pitched road that ran beside the harbour of Zemi. The rain had ceased. “We’re almost there,” she cried to Francis. “Perhaps if you look out you will see the ship. You will see us leaning over the rail ahead of ourselves.”
Francis looked out but he seemed suddenly to grow blind, suddenly to grow a shade lost. Neither in his book, nor in her letters, had appeared a description of the ship upon which they were to sail and this left a gap on da Silva’s stage.
A gap he filled with sudden emotion. They were leaving lives on the island they would never live, local occupations and patterns through which they would never function again. And, in Julia’s case, each spectral occupation or unlived life made a breathless hush now that fell upon the land: a breathless construction of the soil by the sea, she would never see again, at the other extremity of the rain when the air grows still.
There was a mist in the sky and when she looked through the other window of the carriage the mountain range vanished. She turned again to the harbour and the island itself seemed about to sail into an extension of a vast continent in space. In that breathless extension each grain of sand or crumb of water was a mirror that had been ploughed, yet smoothed over at the same time at the end of the rain, into each spectral life in its miniature canvas and frame she would leave behind when they sailed.
Why leave? Why not live forever upon a static gate, static punishment without end, static reward without end, static exile?
Why not stay in a safe mirror, static reflection without end?
Why move at all, why begin to die, across the ages one has constructed from deathless lives? To fulfil perhaps a theatre of nature that appears to be finished yet remains unfinished. To unravel perhaps an assumption of the deathlessness of one’s native land with which one clothes one’s deepest fears of a wholeness that lies beyond each boundary, or epitaph, or cradle.
Why not stay forever in that breathless hush of constructed, unfinished, soil or sea at the extremity of the rain when the air remains cool and still?
But she had no final answer to all these questions, that swarmed about her all of a sudden like a crowd of eager combatants, participants, on their way to a carnival theatre, except that, having raised such an audience herself, she knew it would accompany her in each step she took from stage to stage, sculpture to poem, music to cinema.
Her great-aunt Sky was still descending from the carriage upon each stick of the rain that had rolled itself into a single root or support of sun. Francis assisted her. Great-aunt liked Francis Julia felt. And as he held her arm her sacklike, yet stiff, ancient, puritan, body, that was suffering a sea-change across the generations seemed all at once, in Julia’s eyes, a safe paradox or depository of children lost and found, a rich part to play on the stage of the world.
“I shall live to a great age like you great-aunt,” said Julia impulsively. “Francis and I shall have a son and a daughter.”
Her great-aunt could not resist a smile as she leaned on Francis. Her sons and daughters were not of her flesh. Or perhaps they were, after all, in every crossing she had made of oceans, every absorption of unfathomable sorrows curiously rooted, she began to see, in deathless or unlived lives that accompany one back and forth as if to endorse the fascinations of their partial exile from the state of the womb, from the city of god.
She had never married nor borne children. Yet she was married, she did have territorial and oceanic children for whom she cared with the strictest diet of compassion.
Her children were creation’s deathless offspring, telephone voices sometimes in a strait jacket of despair, telephone annunciations at the other end of the rain on a misty afternoon, or telephone flesh-and-blood rags of ailing immortality when the postman rings the bell or taps on the door in Southampton Row.
“I shall be like you, great-aunt,” cried Julia. “I shall glue myself to the telephone. And when my children ring from a static sea or a static mountain I shall tell them to come home, I shall tell them that home is always another journey….”
The words had been written by her in one of her last letters to Francis. They were spoken now by the actress Eleanor (who had been schooled by Jen in one of da Silva’s canvases). The part of great-aunt was played by Rima, the part of Francis by da Silva. They stood in the West End on a stage called The Pleiades of The Tree of the Sun. The time of the performance was the first decade of the twenty-first century.
*
It was a newly-built theatre and the sound of the traffic had been stilled. A sea of faces pressed up from the stalls or pressed down from the balcony. Great-aunt was descending from the carriage on Francis’s arm. Time had itself stopped into an approximation to the genius of time within a minute’s breath that spanned years. There appeared, as if from the deck of an unseen ship, a doctor and a nurse who bent down to Julia where she lay on a bed that seemed part and parcel of the pier that jutted out from the land over the sea like the hand of a clock.
Julia was dying from cancer in a large room that was to become, years afterwards, an artist’s studio. She was forty years old.
Julia was leaving Zemi. She was nineteen years old.
Julia was the part Eleanor was playing in The Pleiades. “She would have been”—someone was saying—“I would hazard a guess, were she alive, eighty-four years old today, and there she is, in Eleanor’s shoes, young as a rose.”
“Mr Cortez,” said the nurse to Francis, “your wife is delirious. She believes she’s back in that afternoon in the harbour of Zemi when you left. She believes the telephone is ringing and you’re on the other end of the line. She believes her great-aunt is young as a rose.”
“Rigby,” said Francis. “Not Rose. Rigby. My name’s actually Rigby.”
“What did you say Mr Cortez? You are exhausted yourself, poor man, you’ve been up for ages without sleep. A century’s rolled past. Please do sleep, I shall be here to wake you if I must.”
“Sleep,” Francis thought. “What a miracle of grace is sleep. I write best after a long sleep.” The doctor and the nurse from the ship were bending over Julia. “My name’s Harlequin,” the doctor said. “Your name’s Leonard Harlequin,” Julia said to the captain of the ship. “A young captain. One day I shall have a son like you, a captain or doctor of ships. His father will be proud of him. Are you there Francis? Did you hear that? Are you still on the line?”
She continued—“A ship, a hospital, a pier, a studio, a market, a garden, a house, a factory, are stages-within-stages in which one stands at the gate, at the letter-box, and waits for a communication that’s subtle as truth.”
“What is she saying doctor?” asked the nurse.
“She’s telling us of the evolution of serenity….”
“Is that all? What’s serenity?” cried a voice from the audience.
“Creation’s news,” Julia said. “The sea, the land.”
Great-aunt stood by the carriage. In the corner of her eye she could see, through the open door, the tip of an envelope, in a pocket of the interior, in which Julia had deposited her first letter to Francis.
It was addressed to Francis.
It was written to a variety of spectral audiences whose questions sprang from her own needs.