Read Online The Tree of the Sun by Wilson Harris - Free Book Online Page B

to the apartment was slightly ajar. Leonard entered, stood on the thick carpet that led into the flat. He shut the door softly behind him. He knew Harlequin was away. But he was almost persuaded that a shot might ring out and he would fall by the side of the swimming pool he had passed or be trampled under a horse’s hoof.
    One area seemed drawn into the other, giant racecourse into guarded hallway, one fortress of chance or death into another, until a sprinkle of fate seemed as swift as a bullet. Until sprinkle and bullet, phallus and perfumed temple in which Eleanor sat, were an intimate paradox and brushstroke between one fortress and another.
    Francis stopped dead in Leonard’s fictional tracks in the hall of the apartment as da Silva unveiled another translation of the elements in his book. He was shocked anew to see the intimate thoughts of his body and mind painted into broad daylight, thoughts of Eleanor, of her absent “husband”, of the “fictional” Eleanor and the “real” Eleanor in bed, in his arms.
    It was the strangest climax or notion by which he (a secretive writer) was possessed to import black Leonard into his book.
    There , away on business in Liverpool, yet looming like the shadow of war over the flat—in da Silva’s translationof Francis’s book—stood the older jealous man with whom Eleanor lived and whose house this was.
    There stood also, with a finger on the trigger, the young revengeful Harlequin, of Leonard’s age, obsessed by thoughts of nondescript parentage in the miscarried foetus of the gods. Until he believed himself the older man’s son conceived, all the same, by Francis (or Leonard in bed with Eleanor at the heart of the book of fictional yet terrifyingly real inner life).
    And as Leonard waited for the young daemon of his own age to fire, on behalf of father time, he felt himself projected forwards into future wars and conflicts in which the “old” Harlequin had “unaged”, had shed half his years, in order to become Francis’s and Julia’s unborn son given fictional projection into cruel, half-incestuous, half-foreign, life. So that as the bullet sped, its material consequences seemed less overwhelming, almost as if it were tipped by ineffectuality to vanish into an apparition or creative paradox . Could Julia’s miscarriage of flesh-and-blood be converted into profound sensibility of apparitions of community (in resurrections of the unborn) one lives ahead of one’s time in order to be whole and to survive? Could a queen’s unborn son prove the trigger of fictional life, parable or strangest blessing or miscarriage of bullets by ageing/youthful jealous tides of populations? And it was as if a subtlety of shocking comprehension, that drove the creative imagination to run far deeper than moral convention or grave or cradle or appearance, led Francis into bed with another man’s wife in pursuit of a supreme fiction or book or treaty of sensibility between the born and the unborn ; led him into a voyage of affections, that appeared promiscuous, but was other than promiscuity within a design of unfathomable premises of imaginative unity as compensation for losses endured; led him into a conception of the miracle of survival, immunity from fire, immunity from water, immunity from bullets, as limbo complications in the dancing strangers in his book….
    As the threat of a gun—that mirrored the half-curse, thehalf-blessing, of unlived lives or dormant ages, lived lives or translated feuding ages—began to dissolve, Leonard moved forwards again along the hall until he came to Harlequin’s study or “holy of holies”.
    He poked his head in, fascinated all over again by a tiny model of a machine gun and by larger-than-life “percussion transitional revolvers”, on a wall of the room, like emblems of menace that could blow one to smithereens. They had been rifled with six chambers and there was a “sighting hole” in the bar hammer; a unique short-lived weapon