The Cherry Tree
I sometimes think that the main reason why I continue to write is, or above all should be, to gather the more or less luminous and convincing fragments of a joy thatso it would be tempting to believeexploded long ago inside us like an inner star, scattering its dust all around. Whenever a little of this dust twinkles in a gaze, this is probably what disturbs, enchants, or misleads us the most; yet after careful consideration, this is less strange than to chance upon the sparkle, or a mere reflection of this fragmented sparkle, in nature. In any event, such reflections have initiated many of my reveries, not all of which have been entirely fruitless.
This time it was a cherry tree; not a blossoming cherry tree, which always speaks clearly to us, but rather a fruit-laden one that I glimpsed one June evening on the far side of a big wheat field. Once again, it was as if someone had appeared over there and was speaking to you without actually doing so and without making the slightest sign; someone, or rather something, and indeed a “thing of beauty.” Had it been a human figure, indeed a woman walking there, a feeling of turmoil would have mingled with my joy, followed soon by the need to run over to her, to join her (at first remaining unable to speak, and not only because I had run too fast and too far), and then to listen to her, to respond, to capture her in the net of my words and let myself be caught in hersand with a little luck a completely new story would have begun, with more or less stable shares of light and shadow; that is, a new love story might have sprung up over there like a new stream flowing from a fresh source, in springtime. For the cherry tree, however, I felt no desire to join it, to win it over, to possess it; or rather, this had already happened: I had been joined, won over, and I had absolutely nothing more to expect or ask for; it was another kind of story, encounter, and speech. And thus was even more difficult to grasp.
What is certain is that this same cherry tree removed or abstracted from its spot would have meant little to me, or at least not the same thing. Nor if I had chanced upon it at another time of day. Perhaps, moreover, it would have remained silent if I had intentionally sought it out, questioned it. (Some people believe that “Heaven turns away” from those who tire it with their expectations and prayers. If these words were taken literally, what a creaking of door hinges would grate our ears. . .)
Let me try to remember as well as I can; first, that it was evening, even rather late, long after sunset, at that moment when the light has lingered longer than you had expected and the darkness has not definitively gotten the upper hand. In all cases, this is a moment of grace: a reprieve has been granted, a separation put off a little longer, a muted sense of loss attenuatedas when, now long in the past, someone would bring a lamp to your bedside to ward off ghosts. It is also a moment when this surviving light, its source no longer visible, seems to emanate from inside things and rise from the ground; and on that evening, rise from the dirt path on which we were walking or, rather, from the already tall wheat that was nonetheless still green and almost metallic in color, so that we momentarily imagined a blade, as if the field were the very scythe that would reap it.
A kind of metamorphosis was taking place: the ground was becoming light, the wheat was looking like steel. At the same time, it was as if these opposites were nearing each other, then coming together, at a moment that is itself a transition between day and night as the moon, like a vestal virgin, takes over from the athletic sun, as in a relay. We thus found ourselves led, not by an authoritative grip or the thunderous crack of a whip of lightning but rather by an almost imperceptible, tender, caress-like pressure, way back in time and deep inside ourselves, toward that imaginary age where what is nearest and what is farthest remained linked in a way that made the world reassuringly seem to be a house and even, sometimes, a temple, and life a kind of music. I believe that it was the faintest reflection of this that was still reaching me, even as what astronomers call ancient “fossil light” also reaches us. We were walking in a big house with open doors, dimly lit by an invisible lamp; the sky was like a glass wall that barely quivered whenever breaths of cooling wind blew by. The paths belonged to a house; the wheat and the scythe had become one; the silence was less broken than deepened by the barking of a dog and the last faint chirps of birds. A door panel plated with a thin film of silver had turned its shimmering mirror toward us. It was then, and there, that the big fruit-laden cherry tree had appeared fairly far away, just beyond the wheat field, among other trees that were getting darker and soon would be darker than the night sheltering their slumber of leaves and birds. Its cherries were like a long cluster of red, a flow of red, within dark green; cherries in a cradle or a basket of leaves; red within green at that moment when things slip into each other, when there is a slow and silent semblance of metamorphosis, when another world almost seems to appear. A moment when something seems to turn like a door on its hinges.
What was this red that startled and delighted me to this extent? Surely not blood; if the tree standing on the far side of the field had been wounded and its body bloodstained, I would have felt only fright. But I am no believer in trees that bleed, nor am as moved by a sawed-off branch as by a wounded man. This was more like fire. Yet nothing was burning. (I had always loved fires burning in gardens and fields: because fire brings light and heat all at once, but also because it darts about, rages, bites, acting like a sort of wild animal; and more deeply and inexplicably because it makes a kind of opening in the earth, a breach in the barriers of space, beckoning you along a path that is difficult to follow, as if the flames were no longer fully of this world: at one remove, restive, and thereby a source of joy. Those fires are still burning in my memory; I have the impression that I am walking past them at this very moment. It is as if someone had sown them at random around the countryside and, with winter, they had begun blooming all at once. I cannot take my eyes off them. Is it because I somehow know that crackling fires feed on dead leaves? They in turn become short-lived, wind-beaten trees. Or foxes, their tawny companions.)
But that red across the field was not burning, not crackling; it was not even like the embers that remain scattered in the distance, at the end of day. Instead of rising in flames, it flowed or hung; a cluster; red or crimson pendants; sheltered within very dark greenery. And yet, because the red was emitting light and warmth, and seemed to come from afar, should it be said that it was like fire hanging over there, neither tearing nor biting but rather blended with water, and that, now tame and softened, it was contained in moist globes? Like a flame in a glass nightlight? A cluster of tame fire wedded to the water of the night, to night in the process of forming, to night falling but not yet fallen?
There was a tremor of immeasurable mildness hovering over all this like a refreshing breath of wind at nightfall. I believe that our own bark-like surface, which gets rougher as the years go by, momentarily softened, even as soil thaws and lets fresh water well up to the surface.
The leaves were linked to the night and the river farther on, which could not be heard; and the cherries to fire, to light. What had stopped us and seemed to speak to us from the far side of a wheat field that was now ruffled into a pale river by the wind, somewhat resembledwithout ceasing to be a cherry tree laden with fruit of a variety that I could have identified as I approached, even as nothing in our midst ceased to be path, fields, and skya small natural monument whose center was suddenly brightened by the flame of burning votive oil, as well as looked like a sort of pillar nonetheless capable of trembling even if at that moment it seemed absolutely still and decorated, for some commemoration, with a cluster of fruit, with tame fire; so that, when we saw the cherry tree and although we had thought that we had been walking on paths that were more than familiar, everything changed, taking on meaning or a different meaning; as when a song rises in a concert hall or some simple wordsnot just any words, howeverare pronounced in a bedroom: the concert hall and the bedroom remain the same and you have not left them, no more than you have ceased being a victim of time and its meticulous destructiveness; nevertheless, something essential seems to have changed. That evening, perhaps I sensed unconsciously that some of the timethe hours, that is the days as well as the nightsduring which I had myself lived had slowly slipped into those cherries, rounding them out and finally turning them crimson; that inside them, all this was hanging in suspense, even as they were themselves hanging in their leafy shelter, as if brooded by green wings that would soon blacken, become blacker than the night sky beneath which they barely quivered in their sleep. . .
It would have been more sensible, you will say, for me to go and pick the cherries, rather than to make such a fuss about all this. I in fact know how to pick cherries, and I love their sheen in broad daylight, their plump healthy cheeks, their sometimes tart, sometimes watery taste, their scarlet hue. That is simply another story: how on a hot day, in blazing sunlight, you can suddenly feel the desire to bite into new fruit, and those ladders on which it is not angels climbing into the dazzling early-summer heavens, but rather something much better than angels . . .
One color within another, at a moment of transition, in a relay, as when the solar athlete is replaced by the vestal virgin who seems slower; or like a heart, like the Sacred Heart of Christ on holy images?
The burning bush.
A fire in the shelter of these leaves, themselves colored more like sleep. Peaceful, appeasing. The feathers of a mother bird.
Crimson eggs brooded by these dark feathers.
Distant festivities, beneath leafy arches. Remote, ever more remote.
Tantalus? Yes, if these cherries were breasts. Yet they do not even look like breasts.
Advice from the outside world: some places, some moments, “incline” us; you feel a slight pressure from a hand, an invisible hand, prompting you to shift the direction of your footsteps, your gaze, your thoughts; and this hand could also be a breath of wind, as when leaves, or clouds, or sailboats are gently pushed. A hint, in a very soft voice, like someone whispering “look,” or “listen,” or merely “ wait.” But do we still have the time to wait, the patience to wait? And is waiting really what is at stake?
Has nothing happened?
A flame cupped in the hands, lighting them, warming them. The dim glow of a lantern. What more beautiful sign, and for what better inn? Where you would not need to enter to sense that you are sheltered, nor drink to quench your thirst.
“At the Fruit-Laden Cherry Tree.” What a bizarre yet beautiful name for an inn, and what a strange traveler, guided and fed by mirages! Doesn’t he look a bit distraught and seem to have lost weight because of all this? If the wind blowing at the beginning of this summer night and reminding him of past caresses gets any stronger and unleashes itself, I fear that he will not be able to hold out against it much longer. You cannot protect yourself from age with memories and daydreams. Perhaps not even with prayers. But who has ever promised you anything? Anything more, at least, than these illusions, beautiful enough to lure away your sleep? Too beautiful indeed, he continues to muse almost maniacally, to be mere illusions.
Translated from the French by John Taylor
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