2
During the autumn two Indian carpets were laid in bedroom and studio. There was a tree design da Silva would walk upon until he came to the branches from which to paint a Mexican sky under his English roof or — as he revolved upon a branch, flew upon a carpet — an English sky under an alien roof; an inner flight through an outer branched ceiling into a stranger element.
A face stood on each branch as though seen, for the first time, within or through a curtain of stars that stood ajar in the ground of the world under the sky of the house.
Each face on its branch seemed at first wholly identical one with the other. Later however distinctions appeared. One seemed a subtle map, pleasure or pain, on brow, another on lips, a third along both cheeks like the wounds of a needle, a fourth was possessed of a hairline mirror stitched across one eye.
Da Silva saw himself as another face in the carpet on which he stood, another face in the mural he painted, as if he had been parachuted there into that tree by nature’s self, conjuring parachute of self, map of extremities, divisions, alliances between appearance and appearance, past and future.
It made him subtly aware of a network of influences, rivalries, hopes of supremacy, implicit tyrannies and subjections they all shared as the notion arose that each was identical in the other, each hung on the branching thread of the other’s dominant consciousness. A notion that set up a clamour of protest, like the illness of the living dead as they begin to change and acquire the strangest resurrected longing for a principle of justice one can endure, the therapeutic relief, rather than oppression, of otherness. Da Silva was rooted in that clamour or meaningful protest.
The carpet of the tree of the sun symbolised their joint root or tenancy or ownership (his and Jen’s) of the house in which they lived and in which others had lived since the turn of the century and long before.
He recalled many a subtle crack that rolled or secreted itself in wall or room at which he and antecedent tenants, over the generations, may have stared seeingly, unseeingly, within the life of the house of which he and Jen possessed, if that were the truth, but a spark. As though their existence hung from almost indecipherable influences he had partly discerned in the branch on which he stood under the sky he painted, varieties of canvas or painting in body-work or house. Varieties of profound malaise that conditioned them, even as it re-shaped them, to conceive a therapy of originality within the shell of time, its carpets or walls or beams that cohered nevertheless into patterns of relief or doors through the tree of the sun….
He slipped like a figure of paint himself, painter in sky, almost without realising it, through the door of the tree of the sun into the life of previous, long vanished, now suddenly recalled, tenants of the house.
Their names appeared to be Francis and Julia Cortez. (Long after he was to discover Francis had changed his name by deed poll and this had a bearing on the ramifications of a book he had written and on some of the curious deceptions imparted, wittingly or unwittingly, by Julia into a body of letters she had written.)
Francis was half-Spanish, half-black. There were fading photographs of himself and obscure antecedents pinned into his unfinished book. His body from neck to waist was white. His face was tanned or brown like a face to be worn or discarded under different skies and atmospheres.
Julia’s ancestry was difficult to determine despite photographs, one notably of her father. Her features were elusive though half-English, half-West Indian creole. She was very beautiful in spite of a long (apparently economic) fever/convalescence of history from which she suffered.
Da Silva had found (rummaging around one day during the conversion work of a bedroom into a studio) Julia’s letters and Francis’s book and from these Jen and he began to piece together a portrait of long vanished lovers. The letters and book were voluminous — they had slipped quite deep into the wall as into a couple of elongated safes — and Jen and da Silva were astonished, as they began to read, by developments they could not have foreseen, astonished by the way it gripped them (as if they too were related characters in a curious drama of creation); astonished at the blind man’s game the lovers played like two books that stood on the shelf of a library, in continuous communication with each other, though neither had been actually opened or read by the other.
He felt guilt and perturbation as he spied upon this curiously involved relationship — until the impression grew that there was an element of resurrected fate in it. He was himself being taken over by them page by page as he began to sketch or paint them; as he became immersed, sometimes apparently fleetingly, in expectations of painting them….
And in the midst of this paradox of visions — implicit and explicit creations — within a universe they traversed, the sensation arose of individual realness reflecting sometimes bearable, sometimes unbearable, degrees of otherness, mystery of otherness, outlasting time.
It was a face in the Indian carpet that brought Francis back into mind this morning, the lines like the palm of a hand along both cheeks, a map of pleasure and pain.
Less of a map and more of a nondescript blow, needle-straight lines within and upon each other that ran on either side of the face from the eyes down to the jaw. The rest of Francis’s face remained smooth as a dark marble. And that smoothness of taut skin highlighted a sense of containment, passion held in rein, remorseless care, restraint, flight. Were they the divided features of warrior and priest Francis wore under da Silva’s feet and in the sky overhead?
It was more difficult to enter Julia’s kingdom of the ruses of the imagination though sometimes at the stroke of a match some midnight mornings, against a canvas of dreams, da Silva saw her curiously walled and stark yet implicitly crowned and beautiful, one foot in a wedding, one foot in a funeral.
He lay then against or upon it, upon that beauty or ghostliness of form, held her like a painter of constellations who resurrects the mystery of undying symptoms of therapeutic masquerade, until she almost cut invisibly into his flesh and the child Jen conceived was the apparition of a child she (Julia) dreamed to conceive all her life in the letters she wrote….
They were laughing and joking together, Francis and Julia, as he came upon them through the tree of the sun this painted morning. They were talking about a grand costume ball they had attended, given by the Spanish embassy, when they were just married at which because of the conquistadorial associations of their name — Mr and Mrs Francis Cortez — he had dressed himself up as Francisco and she as a slim and elegant Atahualpa, a feminine Atahualpa, eyes flashing through her mask.
It caused a faint stir in the embassy’s ballroom, a whisper of distaste, even laughter. “Pure fact is a myth,” Julia wrote in one of her letters, “an invaluable myth, a useful myth, but a myth nevertheless since fact is susceptible to inevitable enlargement or atrophy in the climate of a particular day or age. Breath is sometimes the most subtle wreath of truth to tell of vanished faces in substantial masquerades. It links irrational laughter to intimate sorrow, taste to distaste….”
Wisps of smoke arose around Julia’s head as she smoked her only cigarette of the day. (Da Silva was painting breath into his mural.) The scent climbed into foodbearing tree, half-elusive, half-binding, suddenly acrid and disturbing, burning fruit or wood. Was it a new pollution he had begun to cook? FIRE. Now it seemed he had stumbled upon creation’s blaze in the walled face of Julia like the seed of Atahualpa plant in a madonna panel transported from an old Peruvian/Francisco Pizarro building or Spanish church or cannibal Carib library into this old London house.