Becoming a Tree Synopsis
Twenty-five years after Anna’s unexplained disappearance from his life, William, a middle-aged Englishman living in Italy, runs into her perfect look-alike, Karen. Quizzed, the young South African denies any knowledge of Anna, even though she is living in her former flat. Repeatedly rebuffed by Karen, William returns to his solitary ways and his home-based translation work. Yet the memories of Anna and her family continue to gnaw at him. In a clinic for a minor operation, he rereads old papers which describe his relationship with Anna and her trauma: sexual abuse, aged 13, by her older brother. As a result, she is unable to have fulfilling sexual relations with a man. William’s difficulties in dealing with this have led to his own problems with intimacy and consequently to a rather detached, disembodied view of life. Out of the blue, Karen calls and asks to meet. Visiting Anna’s old workplace and home together. William tells her a heavily censored version of Anna’s life, omitting the abuse and focusing instead on the death of her father after a bankruptcy provoked by the unruliness and delinquency of his son. The story he suppresses reawakens in him the feelings of bitterness and resentment towards Anna’s brother that have poisoned his life. At the end of the day, Karen shows William a photo of the woman (Susan) she had always believed to be her mother, now dead. Evidently Karen was adopted. She asks William to help her look for her birth mother. Reluctantly he agrees. Their search immediately appears destined to fail, as former friends of Anna’s prove unable or - he suspects - unwilling to help. The defensive smokescreen thrown up reshapes William’s thinking about the past and his own role in Anna’s still unexplained disappearance. One small clue finally leads to Anna, who invites Karen to stay with her and allows William to visit briefly. Married, with a son, she has endured and overcome hardships, but at a high price. After years in Africa as a lay missionary with experiences in conflict countries, she now lives humbly as a farmer in central Italy helping trafficked African women to new lives. To William she reveals the identity of Karen’s father: Anna’s brother, after a further episode of abuse. “You would have killed him,” she says. On the journey home, Karen tells William of her own troubled past. Unlike William, Karen appears able to cope with two rewritings of her own personal history. The meeting with Anna and relationship with Karen, both courageous survivors, encourage William to learn from them and to seek change in his life. He enrolls in a botany course and appears at long last to be returning to the present and the life of the body, not just the mind. In this, he is helped by one of the course participants, Elisabetta, to whom he is attracted, although it is unclear whether she will want - or he be able - to take the healing process further.
