There had been a fire in the house long before he (da Silva) and Jen came into its occupancy. Julia herself was dead, childless and dead, when the fire happened. Francis too had vanished; new tenants were in occupation…. The fire happened ten years after their death; that was fifteen years before Jen and he bought the place and scraped a token of ash from an inner wall to unearth the letters and the book that had apparently escaped by the skin of their teeth; in truth the fire had obviously been put out quickly and a couple of minor scars had been plastered over by the occupying tenants. Nevertheless a spark had run across the divide between the living and the dead, a spark that touched Julia and Francis in their graves within the flesh of a page. Da Silva counted it a marvel that the book and letters had survived.
Perhaps that was why Francis’s resurrected breath-body leaned forward in room or canvas now and kissed Julia. Her lips opened to him, her teeth caught the spirit of his tongue as he held her close. She was the burning wall of the house he held in his arms long before the fire actually happened, as if it were still happening now, and their expedition through it into da Silva’s paintings was a miracle of transubstantial community.
Julia was convalescing when Francis held her to him, hardly fit to fly into or out of the mouth of space. Her thoughts were on the child she wanted to have on earth or in heaven. Youth (or was it divinity’s middle-age?) was still on her side. Francis knew that though she seemed well now she cried at nights and he soothed her hands when they began to burn. She was hardly conscious of this (or hardly recalled it when morning came) and this was a blessing in disguise, Francis reckoned, for on the following day, in broad daylight, he pretended he knew nothing of it at all, nothing of the food of pain, as if he courted a kingdom of oblivion, or release from torment for all animals, at the heart of the elements, with the cunning resources of apparently vanished, blanketed strokes, strokes of the subtlest, deeply penetrative, intercourse that befitted her condition.
*
The intensity of care that enveloped him when he held Julia — held all her pregnant dreams to him — became an obsession with him.
Perhaps he had been rough or even cruel, without intending it, and that was why she recalled nothing. This was an issue that tormented him.
It was a long convalescence. Sex between them had become the exception, not the rule, over the past year and a half, and when it happened a rose bloomed in a winter garden. She grew better each day and seemed to enjoy, without knowing she enjoyed it, his constructive mastery and self-control tinged by daemonic properties when she reached out and claimed him into herself; they drew into a tree of passion through which a psychical forest or creation grew and reached up, in its turn, into other forests or unknown creations.
Their bodies became a cradle of the future running hand in hand or mouth to mouth with a vision of nothingness so strong and secure it seemed other than nothingness and to abandon all straitjacketed proportions, to lie beyond discourse or memory; to happen, as it were, of its own volition in the wombed voices of space or time.
A cradled angel descended in the middle of the night. Or was it the sky of anima and animus, an ideological carpet laid out for a king and a queen, a queue of forces that drew her thighs apart into a branched living goddess in which faces were schooled like leaves when everything stood upon root and trunk?
Francis moved this morning, as da Silva inspected him through a branch of the sun, crushed his cigarette all at once into a tray like a venomous thread or fig tree of paradoxical war and peace between ancient enemies, victor and victim, man and woman, Christ and blasted nature. It was the dream of the perfect tyranny of love he sometimes entertained — as a misconception of the tree of passion — tree of great wonders into lightning paths of the body’s expectations.
“You’ve stopped smiling, dearest Francis, and grown serious,” Julia said all at once to Francis. She drew her fingers now along the needle-straight lines of his face.
“I love you,” she continued to write. “That is why I mail each letter to you in a hidden safe in the house. You may never see what I am writing. But one day a stranger I feel within my bones will find them and put his arms around me — as if I’m alive — and see and feel how much I knew, how much I valued your affection. All the world may come to know that I knew what you felt … what daemons you wrestled with … your own hell….”
*
The miracle of Francis’s and Julia’s resurrection upon the tree of the sun, at this moment of time, when da Silva learnt that his wife Jen was pregnant, hung upon a flash of consciousness.
Studio and house were addressed by a flash at the tips of one’s fingers and this was the flight of conception one nursed into being, as an artist or craftsman now, to match the blow of shape in a woman’s body.
Da Silva read in Francis’s book how Francis recalled the blow of Julia’s illness like a locked door between them.
“What room is there in the midst of illness for sensuous crafts, sensuous command, sensuous futures? And yet I must stand firm, care for you, attend to you through every fabric and circumstance, the tremor of a line, that makes me see the ordinary world we inhabit, built by me, built by you, as a new thing. And this brings home to me, against my own judgement, an imperishable bond I suppress but cannot entirely evade between creature and creature, creation and created, however apparently defeated, apparently overturned, one or the other may be. And, as a consequence,” he was smiling with an air of authority, “I shall address the world this very morning, invite all persons to read my book. As if nothing at all has happened except that it’s resurrection day.”
Julia was smiling ironically in the game they played as she replied to him in her theatre of a bed this morning. Francis had left for Shepherd’s Bush Green to buy a week’s fruit and vegetables as if nothing at all in the world had happened.
She half-reclined on a heap of pillows embroidered with spring flowers.
“Dear Francis,” she wrote, “How does one cultivate the dawn’s flowering when our time to leave each other, our time to return to each other, comes? Is everything the same or has everything changed beyond our wildest dreams as we slept? Is this the new thing of which you speak? Imagine the streetlamps on a crisp winter morning just before the sun rises.” She was staring into space. “Have they become a flowering garden or a callous artifice?”
She paused to sip from a glass of water. It sparkled like a bulb in its own right, the flicker of a letterhead, ghostly flowering or callous lips in touch with another’s glass lips in the tree of the sun.
“One nurses each electric signal as if a trial run commences of the resurrection of the body, petal, leaf, stem, one tastes as one drinks from a cup as bitter as hell or lightning body beyond a shadow of doubt like the lazy fig tree smitten by Christ before he came to the cross himself and the nails were driven into his hands.”
Perhaps she was herself on the edge of tears as if she wrestled with a confusing yet blessing shadow.
“Sometimes, in the wake of a rainy morning, as the streetlamps fade in the carpet of the earth, the sky descends and bandages each nail or wound until it glows through the very bandage of spirited circumstance like fruit or flower. The first signal of a pregnant rose brings a taste of wildness, visionary wildness, to each purchase of life.”
She stopped again and da Silva pondered taste of wildness (or was it wilderness?).