It was in the crumbling ruins of a house that we found a fig tree, forgotten, covered in ripe fruit which we ate until the purple had run down our fingers and stained our wrists. What she gifted me then was the smell of the leaves. Pick one. Avoid the white latexy milk that spills out the bud where it broke. It’s not there at first, what you want, just the same green smell of every leaf, chlorophyll, verdant, volatile leaf aldehydes. Let it begin to dry, for the leaf to lose its firmness, the edges to curl up. This is enough time to walk down a street in the sun. You almost forget about it, until you smell it again. Which for a while, in the time when I met Caspar, I said was the most beautiful thing I’d ever smelt.

For Caspar, later, it was an island in the Mediterranean, where he’d gone to search for a family trace. The house was a ruin, or it was intact, or it was the wrong house, since no one spoke English. He felt a little lost, by the bright sun, unsure what he’d hoped he would find. He remembers how the cicadas screamed, all from the same tree, let’s say for this story, the only tree there, a fig tree, which had surpassed the little square where it had grown. How he had gone there looking for an identity, a Greek lineage, which he had hoped to place in his body if he could stand where it started, and yet, and yet. There was a tree that screamed, and he picked a leaf.

Which later you realise there isn’t such a thing as the most beautiful thing you’ve ever smelt. You can not remember smells, especially not a fig leaf, a smell that can’t be extracted. It’s too delicate, its essential components break down in suspension, and the green sweetness is gone. Perfumers who want to present a fig leaf have to synthesise it, which means, they have to build it out of other components, the green smell of tomato leaf, the sweetness of a synthetic ester. So how do I come to the tree on the island where Caspar stood? I can not. His tree in the gallery has been synthesised, from a thermoplastic, polylactic acid, from silica, a digital haze.

Conceptually, Caspar would say, the most stable part of the work is that it’s a tree, and he likes that. If in the last months you asked him what he’s been up to he would say that he took a semester off school to make a tree for a gallery. But in those days when I met him, he carried in his pocket, in zipped up pencases, in tin containers scattered around his workshop, a collection of plastic and metal and ceramic scraps. Little bits of flotsam he’d gathered on the street and the beach, wood chips, shattered shells, or conical aquamarine chunks of glass. Detritus, which really means, things that have worn away. Often this is what got to him first, the mystery of where they’d worn away from. Helical puzzle pieces, shot forth across his path. He cast what he found in plaster.

Somehow, after he abandoned sculpture, or sculpture abandoned him, he returned to his first practice, drawing. This was before the fig tree in Greece, though trees appeared in his drawings. Simplified, not so much the drawing of a tree as the drawing of the symbol of a drawing of a tree. Basically broccoli, three or four overlapped half-circles, and a thick stem. But the fig tree on the island made him want to make leaves, ones he could hold in his hands, so he started to draw them in his computer. Each leaf is a canvas for a drawing. Or how it turned out that sculpture had never left. Still gleaning, the leaves are modelled from symbols he finds, on the streets, in model libraries, words or edifices, logos and tokens.

But Caspar wouldn’t want me to say any of this. For him the tree is his first work, an anonymous tree, that isn’t him. Not a work of identity, but its opposite, a tree that erases him. It isn’t even the tree on the island, it is just here, in this room with you, artificial, erect, the leaves in soft curves warped around sand in the oven. Heat that softens, the opposite of the water that used to harden his plaster tablets. As though he wants to come at what he was from upside down.

Which, after we broke up, us with our stained wrists, the smell of fig leaves took on a new significance.

I’m writing to you from a village in Europe, because I wanted to give up everything I knew. That the fig trees I walk past here, with their green fruit already swelling here on the shoulder before summer, are the same common fig that grew in the back of the garden of the house I shared with her in Melbourne. Someone else said, you can eat them, fig leaves, and sunk them into the broth. You must try it. But I am too far away. I will not see Caspar’s tree, which isn’t his, as it stands in the gallery. I wonder, does it have an odor, the polylactic acid made from cornstarch, a delicately sweet smell?

By Trevor Louw